Wheels leave different traces as they pass over the surface of the earth. A skid mark happens when all four wheels lock and are dragged along the ground by the vehicle’s momentum. A yaw mark occurs typically when a car is over-steered, and front and back tyres track separately, leaving four tyre marks instead of two. And a rolling print is simply the impression left by a cleanly rotating wheel: a raised pattern of tyre tread in gravel or dirt; grass pushed down in the direction of the vehicle’s travel. In the paddock between the road and the dam, Farquharson’s car had left rolling prints. This undisputed fact was something we—and no doubt the jury—had to hang on to grimly, during Mr Morrissey’s blistering cross-examinations of the police.
…
Mr Rapke began with Senior Constable Courtis of Major Collision. After the unsettling interview with Farquharson at Geelong Emergency, Courtis drove on to the dam. It was a clear night and the road was dry, but by the time Courtis came down the overpass at about 11 p.m., he noticed the odd patch of drifting fog. The murkily lit rescue attempt was spread out on the right-hand side of the road. He parked, and set about his task: to survey the scene and take photos of it.
The only tyre prints he found in the roadside gravel were the ones that Sergeant Exton, his boss, had already marked with the dashes of yellow paint. With his torch Courtis followed the pair of rolling prints that ran through the long grass down to the edge of the water. Only when he looked back up towards the road did he notice that the angle of Exton’s paint marks was not right: it did not match up precisely with the angle of the rolling prints.
Here Courtis struck a snag. While he was trying to set up a new piece of surveying equipment, a Riegl 3D laser scanner, he bent one of the fine prongs on its cable. Because he didn’t have a spare cable, he packed up the Riegl and used instead Major Collision’s older and more familiar device, the geodimeter, sometimes known as George.
On the stand, the young police officer battled to express in ordinary language the digital and mechanical capabilities of the Riegl scanner and the geodimeter. His testimony was studded with terms like infrared, dot-to-dot, prism, raw data and numerical codes. The jurors were given small bound books of photos that Rapke referred to by numbers, but in the press seats, lacking a clear view of the visual aids and having to follow by ear, we stumbled behind.
When Morrissey rose to cross-examine, the atmosphere of the court sagged again into a sort of irritable misery. No wonder Courtis’s notes had been quivering. He was grilled on why he had not measured the road’s camber and crossfall, on whether vehicles necessarily left tyre prints on bitumen or in gravel, on the accuracy of his coding of the marks he claimed to have seen in gravel and through grass. Morrissey suggested that Courtis was ill-trained and incompetent—‘You’re not a professional surveyor by any means, are you? You’re a professional policeman’—and hinted that this was why he had subsequently been transferred from Major Collision to the Child Sexual Offences and Child Abuse Unit. Pressed to agree that the path of the rolling prints was ‘a smooth arc without any noticeable wiggles in it—more or less a straight line but bending somewhat to the right’, Courtis would go no further than to say, ‘Yes, there was a curve in it.’
Morrissey’s aim seemed to be to establish that there was a lot of traffic in the area that night, that any one of those vehicles might have left the disputed tyre mark in the gravel, and that the police reconstruction of the scene, based on its admittedly imperfect paint marks, was worthless. But his cross-examination induced a crazed feeling of restlessness and frustration. Round and round it went, a flood of detail without graspable shape or direction, except in its constant return to the painfully familiar matter of Sergeant Exton’s yellow paint marks. Morrissey kept starting a sentence with the word ‘now’, as if about to bring his line of questioning around in a meaningful curve, but he never reached resolution. There was no relief. My mind lost its grip and slid away into reverie.
‘Maybe he thinks,’ whispered Louise, ‘that if he drags this out long enough the jury will forget that tape.’
Indeed, the Emergency interview had made an impression so deeply disturbing that everything coming after it seemed to be beside the point. By now, close to the end of the third week of the trial, the very words ‘yellow paint marks’ provoked a Pavlovian response. The jurors glazed over and turned sullen. They rested their chins on their fists. Their eyelids drooped. Their necks grew loose with boredom; they were limp with it, barely able to hold themselves erect. Once I glanced over and saw four of them in a row, their heads dropped on the same protesting angle towards their left shoulders, like tulips dying in a vase.
And hour after hour, as he laboured, Morrissey was tormented by terrific bouts of dry coughing. He barked, he croaked, he sweated and turned pale. Long pauses fell while he composed himself. Justice Cummins coddled him affectionately, offered to adjourn at lunchtime on Friday so he could rest his voice for two and a half days, threatened trouble if he saw him at the football at the MCG. Morrissey was embarrassed. He grinned and ducked his head and said that he would soldier on till the end of the week.
Then, first thing on Friday morning, before the jury was called in, Morrissey told the judge that he had stayed up working half the night and would now be able to finish his cross-examination by lunchtime.
Justice Cummins’ brow came down. Overnight, he said sharply, inquiries had come from the jury: how much longer was this trial likely to go on? Some of these jurors were going to work before court, or during the lunch break. They were serious people, applying themselves to their task. They had made arrangements to cancel this afternoon’s work, and now they were to be told they would be released by lunchtime. They were not rag dolls to be thrown aside for the convenience of counsel. They had lives to lead. They should be treated properly.
Morrissey stood at the bar table staring down at his hands. He looked offended, even wounded. Why, yesterday the judge had practically tucked him up in bed with a hot-water bottle. Today, he was rapping Morrissey’s knuckles with a ruler.
But Farquharson’s supporters gazed loyally at their wigged champion. They believed in him. They urged him on. When Louise’s mother slipped into court one day to see what her daughter had been raving about, she looked around in surprise and said, ‘It feels like a family in here.’ The cramped court had become an intimate space, intimate enough for Morrissey—this decent, warm and very endearing man, perhaps sentimental, perhaps a little vain—to identify with his client to the point where, in its paroxysms of coughing, his own body was acting out Farquharson’s story. A story that was becoming more fantastical with every passing day.
…
On the Monday of the trial’s fourth week, the Crown introduced a crucial witness.
Hostility showed in the rigid shoulders of Farquharson’s sisters as the man climbed the steps to the stand. His dark hair was freshly cut. In his jeans, runners and striped short-sleeved shirt he affected a rockabilly jauntiness. But his crisp-featured face was expressionless, his posture tense and wary. His name was Greg King; he was a bus driver; and he was about to be dragged through the sort of public ordeal that most people face only in nightmares from which, gasping and sweating, they are grateful to wake.
‘Mr King,’ said Rapke. ‘Do you know a man by the name of Robert Farquharson?’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘How do you know him?’
‘We grew up together. He’s a friend of mine, a mate, a family friend.’
The two mates kept their faces turned in opposite directions. From my seat I could see them in profile, each resolutely avoiding the other’s eye.
They were Winch boys. They went to the local primary school a few years apart, and then to Geelong Tech. They did not really become friends until King at twenty and Farquharson at seventeen found jobs with the local shire council. Outside work they played football together, and hung out at the pub or at King’s house. By the time Farquharson and Cindy Gambino got serious, King and his wife, Mary, had already started their family, and the men’s friendship began to dwindle.
When Rapke asked him to describe the relationship between Farquharson and Gambino, King began to breathe audibly. His voice grew husky. They were always at each other, he said. He had urged them to see that as a couple you have to bond, but they kept on niggling and arguing. When they married, they already had two children. King went to their wedding. He and Mary would visit them for a barbecue, or the two couples would go down to the pub for tea. But, as the pressures of parenthood increased, Rob and Cindy argued all the time, particularly about money. Robbie was never happy in his job—not on the shire, not in the Jim’s Mowing franchise, not even at the Cumberland Resort. King seemed to be describing a pair of ill-matched malcontents: a grumbling husband, a demanding wife. In his opinion, they had got way ahead of themselves by trying to build a $300,000 house on one wage. They had a habit, he had said in his witness statement, of measuring themselves against what other people had. Farquharson complained to King that Cindy was always buying things they couldn’t afford.
‘Cindy always wanted the best of everything for the house,’ said King. ‘She wanted the best.’
Hearing this, Farquharson glanced at his sisters and executed a veritable dance of grinning and squinting and shoulder-squirming. Kerri Huntington returned a sardonic nod.
When the marriage ended, King went to see Farquharson at his dad’s place once a week or so, ‘to comfort him, because we were mates. He was down. He was gloomy. He was angry and upset of what had happened.’ One night Farquharson said to him, ‘Cindy’s seeing someone else, the bitch.’ King did not tell him that he already knew this from talk around town. Once, in a dark mood about the break-up, Farquharson spoke to King about driving off a cliff or running his car into a tree.
Again Farquharson swung his head towards his family in the public benches. He rolled his eyes and twisted his mouth into a bitter smile, as if at an outrageous lie.
‘What did you say to that?’ asked Rapke.
‘I said,’ muttered King between hard lips, ‘“Don’t be stupid.”’
A month or so after the Farquharsons parted, King was driving out of his street on to the highway, heading west to the Winchelsea shops, when he saw Robbie sitting in his white Commodore under a tree on the other side. He was looking straight ahead in an easterly direction, down the road to Geelong. King made eye contact on his way past, but kept going. Farquharson started his car and took off in the opposite direction.
When they ran into each other later that week, King asked him, ‘Was that you sitting under a tree? What were you doing?’
‘I was thinking,’ replied Farquharson, ‘about lining a truck up.’
King went home and reported this to his wife. They agreed that it was Robbie ‘talking shit again’, and swept it under the carpet.
…
One Friday evening in the winter of 2005, a few months before Father’s Day, Mary King asked her husband to drive to the fish-and-chip shop and bring home some hot chips for tea. Lucy and Lachlan, their two youngest kids, went along for the ride. King sent them into the shop to order, while he waited outside in the car.
As it happened, Farquharson was in the shop with his three boys. He wandered out and stood by King’s open window to chat. He seemed tired and down in the dumps. His mood did not improve when Cindy Gambino drove up and parked. She walked past and greeted the men by name. King spoke to her, but Farquharson would not. When Gambino disappeared into the shop, King rebuked him for his rudeness.
‘You have to say hello. Come on, Robbie. You have to move on a bit.’
‘No, you don’t,’ said Farquharson. He was very angry. ‘Nobody does that to me and gets away with it. That fucking car she’s driving, I paid $30,000 for it. She wanted it, and they’re fucking driving it. Look what I’m driving—the fucking shit one. And now it looks like she wants to marry that fucking dickhead. There’s no way I’m going to let him and her and the kids live together in my house, and I have to fucking pay for it and also pay maintenance for the kids—no way.’
‘You have to move on,’ insisted King.
Farquharson said, ‘How?’
In the court, a tense pause. Rapke waited, squinting, face upturned. King shifted from foot to foot. He stammered. With an effort of will, he kept going: ‘And then he said, “I’m going to take away the most important things that mean to her.” I asked him what that would be, and he nodded his head towards the fish-and-chip shop window.
‘I said, “What—the kids?”
‘He said, “Yes.”
‘I said, “What would you do? Take them away or something?”
‘He just stared at me in my eyes and said, “Kill them.”’
From the dock Farquharson looked across at his sisters and violently shook his head. He kept squinching up his eyes and tucking his chin into his collar, in a pantomime of incensed denial.
King stopped to collect himself. He picked up the glass with a shaking hand and took a great swig of water.
‘I said, “Bullshit. It’s your own flesh and blood, Robbie.”’
His voice was barely audible. Farquharson strained to hear, his eyebrows high in his forehead.
‘He said, “So? I hate them.”
‘I said, “You’d go to gaol.”
‘He said, “No I won’t. I’ll kill myself before it gets to that.”
‘I asked him how. He said it would be close by. I said, “What?”
‘He said, “There’d be an accident involved where I survive and the kids don’t. It’d be on a special day.”
‘I said, “What kind of day?”
‘He said, “Something like Father’s Day, so everyone would remember it. Father’s Day, and I was the one to have them for the last time—not her. Then she suffers for the rest of her life every Father’s Day.”
‘I said, “You don’t even dream of that stuff, Robbie!”’
At that moment Lucy and Lachlan ran out of the shop with the chips. King drove them home. His wife was busy cooking the evening meal. She was cross with him for having taken so long. The TV was on, the family room full of the teatime racket of four young children. King told Mary about the conversation. They disregarded it as another bout of Robbie’s shit. For several months they thought no more about it.
Then came Father’s Day. At eleven o’clock that night the Kings got a phone call from some friends in the town. Robbie had had an accident and the boys had drowned in a dam.
‘It all come back to me, the conversation,’ said King. He swallowed hard. ‘I asked how Robbie was. They said “Robbie’s well. He’s in hospital.” I was speechless. I was—shattered.’ Muscles stood out in his jaw and neck. He gripped the rail of the witness stand.
Rapke peered up at him from the bar table. For the next chapter of the story he needed his witness to stay in one piece.
‘We’ll do this,’ he said, ‘step by step.’
King’s boss at the bus company noticed the wrecked state his employee was in, and started asking questions. King broke down and spilt the beans. The boss, who was a former member of the police force, made some calls. Eleven days later, on the morning after Jai, Tyler and Bailey were buried, two detectives from the Homicide Squad drove from Melbourne to King’s house in Winchelsea. When they had listened to his story, they asked King if he would go to visit Farquharson at his father’s place, raise the subject of the fish-and-chip-shop conversation and tape his mate’s responses on a hidden recorder.
That same evening, after dark, the devastated King met the detectives at the Modewarre boat ramp, a drought-stricken launching place at the end of an unsealed road a few kilometres east of Winchelsea. In this obscure and tree-sheltered spot, the detectives set him up with a wire. King drove away from the shrunken lake and headed back to the town, with microphones stuck to his torso and a recorder down the front of his pants.
…
The tape that King came away with that night, which the Crown now proposed to play to the jury, was an hour and forty minutes long. The subject of the fish-and-chip-shop conversation was not raised until forty-seven pages into the transcript. Rapke, the prosecutor, had little interest in what he called ‘banter between men about football’. He asked Justice Cummins’ leave to edit the tape down to the ten pages that he considered relevant—a mere twenty minutes’ worth. But Morrissey leapt to his feet. No! The whole tape must be played, for what it revealed about Farquharson’s mental state, and about the relationship between the two friends.
Justice Cummins ruled in Morrissey’s favour. While everyone moved and stretched, preparing for another bout of intense concentration, Cummins reminded the jury that the evidence was not the typed transcript they had been given to follow. The transcript was only a guide. The evidence was the sounds on the tape. He urged them to pay attention to pauses, to emphasis and tone.
…
The King we hear greet his friends—he is taken aback to find another mate, Mick Stocks, already ensconced with Farquharson—is at first hardly recognisable as the choked figure on the witness stand. His voice is expressive to the point of being musical. We, he says, like a social worker or a doctor. How are we? How are we going, mate? All right? He apologises for ‘yesterday’ but says he has been ‘up there’ this morning, to pay respect.
‘Yesterday=funeral,’ scrawled Louise. ‘He didn’t go?’ We sat forward.
But after these awkward greetings, the three men subside into an hour of rambling, murmuring talk. Football, cars, more football. Is it cheaper to drive or fly to Queensland? Football again. The beauty of Las Vegas rising out of the desert: they dream of seeing it. A new cure for snoring, the price of firewood, King’s damaged knee and imminent arthroscopy, yet more football. Somehow Farquharson keeps his end up while the others tactlessly compare notes on the sporting and educational progress of local children. On and on it winds, the droning of nasal voices, this visit by men helpless to address the reason for their call: their mate’s appalling loss. And all the while in the background, faithful to its task of relieving social anxiety, the television pours out manic energy: screeching tyres, a gunshot, a woman’s scream, a police siren, a booming American voice-over.
Farquharson, like the jury, had been provided with headphones, which made him look oddly more adult. The transcript lay open on the chair beside him and he stooped over it, his only expression one of distant scepticism. Some of the journalists seemed to be already writing their pieces. In the family seats the women held themselves erect. Kerri Huntington played a little private game with the cuffs of her cardigan, making them dance and do silent claps. But the dark-jacketed shoulders of Farquharson’s brothers-in-law were bowed forward, their elbows braced against their knees and their hands clasped in the churchgoer’s posture: the endurance of tedium. I noticed a small, silky brown head between Stephen Moules and Bev Gambino. It was Cindy. She was rocking gently back and forth in her seat.
After a hundred minutes of laborious talk, the good-humoured Mick takes his leave. King and Farquharson are at last alone.
‘Hey,’ says King in a hoarse whisper. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘I know.’ Farquharson’s voice is drab, distant. He sounds weary, forcing himself to be hostly. The TV for a moment goes silent. ‘A lot of people didn’t come. I understand that. It’s a million times harder for me, so you don’t have to say nothing. I know.’
The hidden microphone is picking up King’s nervous breathing. He seizes the nettle. ‘But something’s been bugging me, though. Remember? Down at the fish shop? Out the front? That discussion.’
‘Discussion? About what?’
‘This is what’s been eating me up,’ says King. He sounds on the verge of tears. ‘When Cindy pulled up and you said you’d pay her back big-time. I hope it’s got nothing to do with that.’
‘No. No way,’ says Farquharson. ‘No, no, no, no, no. You know I would never—’
‘Because listen,’ whispers King. ‘They’re coming to interview me. Tomorrow. I’m freaking out.’
And this—King’s first straight-out lie—was the moment at which Morrissey’s insistence on playing the whole tape seemed fated to backfire. For the preceding hour and a half Farquharson has come across as dully slumped, battling to be sociable, barely able to inject expression into his speech: a man who has lost his reason to live. But now a shot of adrenalin galvanises him. He shows no surprise at what King has said. Immediately he takes command.
‘Right,’ he says, his voice at confidential volume but very firm. ‘I can tell you. Don’t stress. Don’t freak out. Just tell who I am, what I represent and all that, I never, ever would do anything like that.’
‘I’ve been off work,’ murmurs King miserably. ‘I shook, and all.’
Farquharson canters straight over him. ‘All you have to say to them is who I am. As far as you know, we got along. She’s told them that we got along. It was just a figure of speech of me being angry. But I would never do anything like that. I’ve got to live with this for the rest of my life, and it kills me.’
‘Oh,’ stammers King, ‘but that’s what’s been killing me.’
Their voices are low and tense. They must be sitting facing each other, leaning in.
‘I’ve been up there,’ says Farquharson, with a muffled force. ‘I went through four and a half hours of hell. I looked everyone in the eye and I’ve told the truth. I’m not lying to anyone. All you’ve got to do is say, “He’s a good bloke. I’ve known him for a long time. He’s always been good with his kids.” And if they ask about us, say, “As far as I know, they got along.” Or if you don’t know something, say, “I don’t know that.”’
‘I’m scared, mate,’ says King, dry-mouthed, his voice full of darkness.
‘They’re not gonna ask ya. Don’t be scared. Look at the positive things.’ Farquharson’s voice rises a few tones, and starts to flow. ‘They’ve interviewed her. They’ve said she said, “No way known would he do anything like that.” What—I’m not a mongrel, I’m not a bastard, I’m not an arsehole, I’m not a cunt. I would never, ever, ever. That has never entered my mind. What I meant by paying her back was “One day I’ll stand here with a woman in front of you and see how you like it.” Say you know me. “He’s always spoilt his kids. Taking them to the footy, playing footy with them.” All the times you’d be going for a walk and you’d see us going for a bike ride. Heavily involved with the kids and their sport. Look at all the good things you saw that I done. Always say the positive things.’
‘Rob, it’s driving me crazy, mate.’
‘You can’t say something like that, because then they’ll get thinking…’ He trails off, then rallies. ‘We did get along. We did, in the end. Look, she doesn’t blame me. I tell you right now, if I did that on purpose I would’ve killed myself. I’ve looked everyone in the eye. I’ve told the truth. I’ve had this flu. I had a coughing fit. I’ve blacked out. That is no bullshit. I’ve got to live with myself. I’ve got to.’
‘Oh Jesus, mate!’ King bursts out.
‘And,’ says Farquharson, ‘I loved them more than life itself.’
Without using the word, he slides into the subject of suicide. ‘That’s why Cindy’s telling me to be strong. I wanted to go. No one will let me. She’s told me I’m backing down if I do. I’ve had extensive counselling. I still am. I was over-protective. Very over-protective. And I still am. I feel I can’t protect them here. I asked her permission and her blessing, and she said no.’
Cindy Gambino listened, leaning forward, her eyes raised to a point on the wall above the jury’s heads. Their faces were inscrutable.
The exhausted King is backing away from this fire hydrant he has set off. ‘Righto mate,’ he says faintly. ‘I’m going. I want to go and sleep. I’m bloody…’
‘Go and sleep,’ says Farquharson. ‘Why are they interviewing you? Just for a character?’
‘Just a character thing, I suppose.’
‘They’re only going to ask you what I was like as a person. All you have to do is say, “I’ve known him for a long time. He’s great with the kids, he done this, he done that.”’
‘All right,’ says King. ‘I better get home.’
He jingles his car keys, he must be edging towards the door, but Farquharson bores on.
‘Look, you can say what you want. That’s your business. But if you think negative, you’re going to come across negative.’ He runs King through it one more time: the sports, the karate, the bike rides, kicking the footy, what a good bloke he is. ‘The cops know all that. You’ll be right. Just settle. That’s all they want.’
‘Righto,’ says King. ‘I’ll catch you. See you, Rob.’
A car door slams. A motor turns over.
‘Just leaving now,’ murmurs King. He is already addressing the detectives, waiting for him back at the dark boat ramp.
…
‘My God,’ I whispered to Louise. ‘Is this like something out of Shakespeare? Double falseness?’
‘Not Shakespeare,’ she hissed. ‘The Sopranos.’
…
King’s recording did not satisfy the Homicide detectives. A month later, on the evening of 13 October 2005, they persuaded him to make a second visit to Farquharson, once again wearing a wire, and press him harder on the details of the fish-and-chip-shop conversation. King, dark-faced with strain, sat next to Detective Sergeant Clanchy behind the bar table while the second tape rolled.
The crunch of boots on gravel announces King’s arrival at Kerri Huntington’s Mount Moriac house, in which Farquharson, after the funeral, had taken refuge from the ravening attention of the media. But when King presents himself at the front door, a little dog explodes into such wild territorial yapping and growling that, in court, Farquharson and his entire family had to smother their fits of laughter. Kerri Huntington heard herself on the tape: ‘Get out, Fox. Get out now!’ She went bright pink and bowed forward in a convulsion. The rest of the court, reminded of the likeable ordinariness of this family, could not help joining in.
‘He’s a fiery little thing!’ says King.
‘Doesn’t bite,’ says Farquharson. ‘Just bloody barks. Let’s sit in here.’
Family and dog withdraw. Farquharson tells King about his disturbed nights. His sleep is so broken that he gives up and just sits watching TV. King sees his opening.
‘I’ve been the same, mate. I’m struggling real bad. That conversation, mate. It’s killing me.’
This time Farquharson is on the front foot. ‘No,’ he says, ‘but it was never like that. That’s what I keep telling ya.’
‘Not just “pay her back big-time,”’ says King. ‘You said to me about taking away what was the most important thing to her. And you nodded your head towards that window in the fish-and-chip shop, mate. I want to get my head clear, because it’s fuckin’ wreckin’ me. I said, “You don’t even dream of doing things like that,” and Rob, you said to me, “Funny you should say about dreams—I have an accident and survive it, and they don’t.” That’s what you said to me. I want all this stuff off my chest! It’s eating me inside like a cancer!’
‘I never, never said that,’ says Farquharson. ‘You’re getting it all wrong, all twisted. I meant one day she’s going to wake up that I’m not as weak as piss as what she thought—I’m going to accomplish something.’
And once more he launches his harangue. His voice is affectless, but still intimate and persuasive, rising at the end of every phrase and sentence, as if listing a series of points in an argument that is laid out coherently in his head. Several times King tries to speak, but Farquharson rolls over him. On and on he goes, tireless, pouring out his explanations, introducing new themes, while King keeps drawing in great, painful sighs that are more like groans; and constantly, in the background, low and persistent, runs the moronic gabbling of the television, its cries and splinterings, and, once, the sharp blast of a whistle.
King’s whole purpose, on this visit, was to betray. But there was something strategic, even masterful, about Farquharson’s fast-rippling monologue, with its strange rhetorical surges. He sounded like a man talking for his life.
Yes, he was angry with Cindy when she threw up her nose at him. ‘I’m driving this good car, and look at you’—and now that other cunt was driving it. He was mad at her because she wouldn’t sell the house so he could get a better car. His sisters knew she used to treat him like shit. But what King didn’t realise, outside the fish-and-chip shop, was that he and Cindy had sorted it all out, that they had become amicable. He would never hurt her, and he definitely would never hurt his kids. Never. Why would someone go from not smacking them to killing them? That’s a big gap. Not one person thinks he would do that. It was never there—it’s what King has put there.
King jacks up. ‘It wasn’t what I’ve put there! Come on! Don’t blame it all on bloody me!’
All right, Farquharson’s not blaming him. He sees now that he should have confided in King, that night, about what he was really dreaming of—not revenge on Cindy, but a whole new moneymaking scheme. He had been thinking for months about buying into a business, a successful yogurt-importing concern worth $300,000 a year that his friend Mark in Lorne might be going to cut him in on, but it was still a secret, so he couldn’t talk about it. If King thinks Farquharson could look in the mother of his kids’ eyes and tell her a lie and walk away, he’d be an animal. Cindy’s belief in him, and his psychologist’s, too, is a hundred and fifty per cent. This is what’s holding him together—this and his own honesty, his integrity to stand and tell. Tell them the truth. Prove the truth to the end, because that is the truth. They’ve got nothing on him. The police have already told his psychologist that he doesn’t fit the profile. When people do things like that, it’s a very planned thing. Anyway, when people are lying, they fuck up. That lady who poisoned her two kids. They broke her in two and a half hours. Broke her. Because she couldn’t lie no more. He, on the contrary, has told the truth from the start. He has been steadfast in the face of police interrogation; he will not back down. His three interviews—with the paramedics in the ambulance, with the police in Geelong Emergency, with the detectives at Homicide—were all exactly the same. Again and again he tells King he has misinterpreted everything. He is begging him not to mention any of that. He must wipe it clean out of his head. Wipe it right out. Now.
‘I’m going to have to see a counsellor,’ says King, miserably. ‘Because I can’t sleep. It’s visions. About what happened. What they had to—what they went through. I’ll have to talk about it, mate.’
‘For God’s sake,’ says Farquharson, ‘please don’t mention that stuff. I’m fearing you’re going to say something to incriminate me. The police’ll say, “We’ve interviewed Greg King, he says you’re all right, but now he’s gone to a counsellor, and the counsellor’s said this, and this, and this.” And that drags you into it. That’s what you don’t want. I’d have to call Mark and say, “Remember I had a conversation about buying a business?” It goes to another level that’s totally irrelevant.’
King makes as if to leave, but Farquharson has him by the sleeve. He’s had a freak accident, a tragic accident, and now he’s got to live with it. He’s not lying. What happened to him is common. Plenty of people have blacked out at the wheel. The trauma team at the hospital all told him there was nothing he could have done. He’s not Superman. Even his counsellor’s said to him he’s got to stop blaming himself. Every day he asks the question, why did this have to happen to me? What have I done?
He ushers King to the door, still talking hard. Remember how he never used to get in fights down the pub when King and the others did? He is upset, he’s disappointed, it cuts deep that King should think he’d do such a thing. It’s not in his nature. He doesn’t want there to be any ramifications.
‘All right,’ says King. ‘I know you were angry that night. And I misinterpreted.’
Farquharson urges King to calm himself by means of the relaxation techniques that his psychologist has taught him to use when he’s driving the car. He demonstrates, in a whisper. ‘You count. You say, The tension’s gone. The tension’s gone. The tension’s gone. Let it flow out.’
Are they already outside in the yard? Night birds pass, with faint, melancholy cries. The chink of keys. A car starts up. But Farquharson talks on and on. He must be leaning down to King’s open window, as he did outside the fish-and-chip shop.
‘When you drive off from here, you should be able to say, “It’s off my chest. He’s telling the truth. He’s been truthful to everyone, truthful to me.” I mean, I’m an honest person. Put it aside. Let it flow out. It’s gone. You’ll feel so much better. As far as I’m concerned, that’s the end of the topic. And it should be for you. You’ll sleep a lot better. But if there’s any problems, give me a bell before you do any counselling.’
…
People filed out of the court, subdued. Louise and I walked all the way down to Tattersalls Lane with our eyes on the ground.
‘I’ve just lost my doubt,’ she said, at the shabby door of the Shanghai Dumpling. ‘But not my pity.’
‘He wasn’t very surprised, was he,’ I said. ‘You’d almost think he was expecting it.’
She mimicked Farquharson’s histrionic trope: ‘And I loved them more than life itself.’
Students around us were yelling and laughing. We sat in silence. I could hardly meet her eye. To have my residual fantasies of his innocence dismantled, blow by blow, and out of his own mouth, filled me with an emotion I had no name for, though it felt weirdly like shame. Our plates were thumped on to the laminex.
‘I’m coming round to that journalist’s way of thinking,’ said Louise, picking up her chopsticks. ‘That he’s a selfish, cold-hearted bastard. Who betrayed his children’s love and trust in the most horrible way.’
I was straining to hold it at bay. I wanted to think like a juror, to wait for all the evidence, to hold myself in a state where I could still be persuaded by argument.
‘Journalists have to work very fast,’ I said. ‘That must be why they form a detached view so early. We’re dilettantes. We’ve got time to wallow.’
She gave me a wry look. Without another word, we polished off the vegetable dumplings.
…
Was there a form of madness called court fatigue? It would have mortified me to tell Louise about the crazy magical thinking that filled my waking mind and, at night, my dreams: if only Farquharson could be found not guilty, then the boys would not be dead. Cindy would drive home from the court and find them playing kick-to-kick in the yard, or sprawled in their socks on the couch, absorbed in the cartoon channel. Bailey would run to her with his arms out. They would call for something to eat. She would open the fridge and cheerfully start rattling the pots and pans. I could not wait to get home, to haul my grandsons away from their Lego and their light sabres, to squeeze them in my arms until they squirmed. Young boys! How can such wild, vital creatures die? How can this hilarious sweetness be snuffed out forever?