The next morning Louise presented herself early at the coffee cart, looking hangdog.
‘I have a confession,’ she said in the queue. ‘I didn’t really go to the orthodontist. I went to a movie. With some friends.’
I laughed. She blushed.
‘I just needed a break. What did I miss?’
‘Everything, smart-arse. Now you’ll never understand it.’
She gave me a pert look. ‘Also, I’ve got no money.’
I shouted her a coffee and we sat down on the concrete bench.
‘I realised yesterday,’ she said, ‘that I’m hooked. I started to rave about where I’d been, but they didn’t give a shit. The only thing they wanted to know was, “Well? Did he do it?” The least interesting question anyone could possibly ask.’
…
Nobody said that it was impossible for Farquharson to have coughed until he blacked out. The best anyone could say was that it was highly unlikely. But, as Mr Morrissey would point out, the statistical rarity of any adverse event is of little comfort to the person whose number has come up.
People who have blacked out are often referred to neurologists, since a common cause of syncope—a brief loss of consciousness—is a failure of circulation of blood to the brain. So the first of the Crown’s two medical expert witnesses was Dr John King, a lean, dry, intensely reserved gentleman in gold-rimmed spectacles, who had been practising as a consultant neurologist at the Royal Melbourne Hospital since 1975.
Dr King had seen many an individual with chronic obstructive airways disease go into a paroxysm of coughing, turn purple in the face, become distressed, and have to sit down; but not a single one of these had actually collapsed on the floor in front of him. He had seen it happen on a teaching video, but never in real life.
In fact, during thirty years in his specialty Dr King would have come across only about six cases of coughing followed by a blackout. In each of these, the patient had reported a blackout to a GP who, wanting to rule out serious conditions like epilepsy, had sent him along to Dr King for a neurological check-up. Off the top of his head, Dr King could not remember even one of these six cases who did not have lung disease. He had diagnosed cough syncope in them only after getting from the patient a credible history, particularly one corroborated by an eyewitness.
How brief was the loss of consciousness in cough syncope?
Oh, very brief, said Dr King. Unlike an epileptic fit, where the patient can be unconscious for up to three or four minutes and is often confused and without memory for half an hour or so, an episode of cough syncope lasts only five, ten, twenty seconds. Afterwards the patient is usually rapidly orientated, and can recall what happened just before he passed out. There exists, too, something called a pre-syncopal episode, where the paroxysm of coughing can lead to a feeling of being very unwell, light-headed, dizzy. The sufferer will perhaps sit down and try to control the cough. Vision may narrow. Stars may be seen. But a blackout can also occur suddenly, without warning.
Mr Morrissey asked whether cough syncope could be accompanied by compulsive activity. Was it beyond the realms of possibility that a person might maintain his grip on a steering wheel, or move a steering wheel to direct a vehicle in a certain direction?
Not in a purposeful sense, said Dr King. He may fall on the steering wheel and make some convulsive movements, but generally the movements seen in a person with cough syncope are merely ‘repetitive twitching of the limbs’.
Morrissey had dug deep and come up with some case studies from American medical journals. According to one of these, dated 1953, chronic pulmonary or respiratory diseases were associated with seventy-five per cent of cases of cough syncope—in other words, only three-quarters of them. In 1998, the Aviation, Space and Environmental Medicine journal had described the case of a forty-one-year-old US Army helicopter pilot who was driving home from training with his unit. He had a mild cold, with a cough. On the road he coughed forcefully, experienced tunnel vision and light-headedness, and passed out. His car hit a tree. He was unconscious only for seconds, and recalled the incident immediately. He reported no headaches, shortness of breath, loss of bowel or bladder control, chest pains, tremors, nausea, vomiting or amnesia. His medical history was notable only in that he was a smoker and overweight. He had no chronic airways disease. A third case involved a healthy forty-five-year-old with the flu who had suffered a cough syncope episode. Had the neurologist read all of these documents? Yes, he had, replied the impassive Dr King.
Morrissey was driving Dr King back against the wall, but there was a sense of strain in the cases he was quoting, a sort of thinness. They felt distant, sparse, dredged up. I looked at the jury. They were concentrating hard. The faces of most were unreadable. But one of the older women was listening with her head tilted back, the corners of her mouth pulled into her cheeks, her eyes narrowed to slits: the expression that in ordinary life prefaces a click of the tongue and a sharp ‘Come off it.’
Ms Forrester, re-examining, drew from these same case studies the fact that most of the subjects had identified themselves as heavy smokers. The American chopper pilot had recently been subjected to G-force in the course of his aviation training. Dr King shrugged calmly. He knew nothing about the effect of G-force on cough syncope. But he pointed out that most people who reported incidents of cough syncope were in their forties and fifties, so that thirty-six, Farquharson’s age at the time of the crash, was perhaps at the lower end of the range. The twitching seen during cough syncope, he repeated, was ‘involuntary and purposeless’. A person in such a state would not be capable of the purposeful steering of a car.
At this, the journalists en masse leaned forward to their notebooks, and the ABC television reporter sprang up and darted out of the court.
…
Professor Matthew Naughton, the Crown’s main expert medical witness, was the only man I had ever seen wear a pink tie with a tweed jacket. Rimless spectacles hung round his neck on a black cord. His turned-up nose made him look young, but he had a real mouthful of a title: Head of the General Respiratory and Sleep Medicine Service in the Department of Allergy and Respiratory Medicine at Melbourne’s Alfred Hospital. Mr Rapke led him through a CV of such vast scope and lavish detail that the journalists could hardly keep straight faces. The reporter beside me, stifling laughter, printed on my notebook, ‘Are you clever?’ But, as soon as Rapke’s examination began, Naughton showed himself to be soberingly quiet and modest.
Cough syncope, he said, is a recognised medical syndrome—a very brief loss of consciousness that follows an episode of intense coughing. The medical literature has described it for half a century in middle-aged, overweight males who are usually heavy smokers with underlying heart or lung disease. The mechanism most people accept as its cause is repetitive coughing that causes pressure within the chest. This pressure impairs the flow of blood on its way back to the heart from the lungs, so that the heart, when it contracts, has less blood to pump on its forward way.
‘I have trouble getting my head around this condition,’ said Naughton, ‘because it’s so nebulous. When I look through the literature on cough syncope, I find an absence of good quality scientific rationale to back up the validity of the condition. In twenty-five years as a medical practitioner I have never personally seen it.’
He had asked his respiratory colleagues at the Alfred Hospital ‘in a casual manner’ whether they had experience of cough syncope. They all knew of it as a condition, but there was only one case that any of them were personally acquainted with—a young man who suffered from the severe and chronic pulmonary condition cystic fibrosis and a neurological condition that impaired blood supply to his brain. The nurses on the respiratory ward were aware of his vulnerability to cough syncope and had to try to manage it.
Naughton had also consulted the physiotherapy staff at the Alfred. Part of their work is to test for the presence of a germ called pneumocystis that is common in the HIV population—people who, apart from their HIV-positive status and some breathlessness, are healthy. These patients are asked to inhale a hypotonic saline solution, which causes them to cough vigorously for up to thirty minutes. A physiotherapist who had administered this disagreeable-sounding treatment about once a week for ten years told Naughton she had not seen a single case of cough syncope in all that time.
‘Do people with normal lungs, hearts and brains,’ asked Rapke, ‘suffer cough syncope?’
‘I have never seen a case in which that has occurred,’ said Naughton. ‘Nor have I seen, in the modern medical literature, objective descriptions in which people have actually witnessed and monitored a person having cough syncope in which there has been normal heart, lung or neurological function.’
Now Rapke sharpened the focus. He asked Professor Naughton to imagine himself clinically faced with a man aged about thirty-seven, moderately overweight, a smoker who said he went through a packet roughly every three days. He was generally in robust health, but had been suffering for about three weeks from an infection which commenced in the upper respiratory tract, then developed lower down, and was being treated with antibiotics. An ECG taken ‘after a certain incident’ revealed no heart abnormality, a systolic reading of 140, and a rapid pulse. Seen immediately after the incident by paramedics and doctors at a hospital, he was not observed to be coughing. He had taken fluids within two hours of the incident. At the time of the incident, which he said occurred while he was driving, he was in a seated position. After the incident he was generally coherent and seemed to be lucid. He had been immersed in cold water, but had got himself out of the water, waved down a car and conversed with its occupants.
Morrissey jumped to his feet. To say that the man was coherent and lucid, but not that he was also delirious and a babbling mess, was misrepresenting the true situation!
‘I won’t intervene,’ said the judge. ‘Go on.’
No underlying medical illness was known or detected, Rapke continued smoothly. Blood tests showed no alcohol or drugs in his system. The patient claimed that as he was driving on a cool, even cold night, he had a coughing fit at the wheel of his car, and blacked out. Based on these facts, what was Professor Naughton’s professional opinion of the likelihood that the driver of that car had suffered an episode of cough syncope?
The professor hardly allowed a pause. ‘Extremely unlikely.’ From Rapke’s description, the man’s heart and lungs were in reasonably good health. He did not appear to be disabled by breathlessness. He was plainly not dehydrated. A dehydrated person who coughs would be more likely to experience changes in the pressure inside his chest—maybe not a blackout, but a dizziness that doctors call pre-syncopal.
Naughton was quiet and lucid. Rapke stood still and let him go on uninterrupted.
The interior of the car, said Naughton, where the hypothetical man said the coughing fit had overwhelmed him, would have been much warmer than the air outside. Cold can often trigger coughing, but this man did not cough after the event, although he was exposed to cold air and wearing wet clothing. Also, at the time he claimed he had started to cough, he was seated. A lot of our blood volume is in our abdomen and legs: cough syncope is more likely to occur if someone is fully upright.
Certainly he had a common-or-garden variety respiratory-tract infection. These happen every day in society, yet people with colds are not having cough syncope on a day-to-day basis. A single episode of cough syncope in a relatively warm environment, and one that was not replicated, struck the professor as highly unusual.
What if this hypothetical man, two days before the crash, asked Rapke, had been observed to have a severe coughing fit while on his feet? If he had gone red in the face, but had recovered once he was invited to sit down?
The fact that man had not passed out only consolidated the professor’s opinion. All of us in this room, he said, could cough to the point at which the colour of our facial skin changed.
He would expect a person with cough syncope to recover consciousness within seconds. He might feel confused for a few moments. Naughton had read reports of people becoming ‘flaccid’ when they lose consciousness: he let his head and shoulders droop forward, and flopped his hands apart, palms up, on the rail of the witness stand.
‘In that period,’ asked Rapke, ‘would the person be capable of any purposeful movement?’
‘Not if he was unconscious!’
What did it mean to say that the diagnosis—even a provisional one—of cough syncope is done ‘on history’?
‘We’re dealing,’ said Naughton, ‘with an extremely rare condition. Ideally we like to have a collateral history—at least one observer who witnessed the person cough and black out. But there is no definitive test that confirms or refutes cough syncope, apart from a classic description.’
‘The accuracy of the diagnosis is, then, solely dependent on the history?’
‘A hundred per cent,’ said Naughton.
‘But,’ said Rapke, ‘if you’ve got only the patient saying it happened, how does one test the diagnosis?’
‘It’s impossible to test. It relies on the individual providing an accurate history of what went on.’
…
Mr Morrissey himself was still struggling with spasms of harsh, dry barking that threatened to overwhelm him, but he was soon roughing up Professor Naughton with skill and gusto.
‘You’re not an expert in cough syncope? Did you tell the prosecutors, when they came to you for an opinion, that you’ve never seen it, never written about it, never diagnosed it, and didn’t know the way an episode would unfold if it happened? Yet they still called you as a witness?’
Naughton protested. ‘I’ve completed a training in respiratory disease where these conditions are discussed.’
But Morrissey made him out to have swotted up on cough syncope very recently and shallowly. Had he not read only one textbook and one article on the condition? Did he even know how to take a history of a cough syncope episode?
Naughton bristled. ‘I am educated about cough syncope,’ he snapped. ‘I do take a history of cough syncope when it’s presented to me. Because of its rarity, I don’t profess to be an expert in it.’
Well, had he read the list of cough syncope case studies that the defence had provided him with?
‘I did my best,’ said Naughton, ‘but they’re often not electronically available, and they take some time to locate. A lot of that data is many, many years old.’
Even so, said Morrissey, didn’t the data contain case histories of people without chronic airways disease who had been diagnosed with cough syncope while driving cars? Didn’t Naughton read the study of the four heavy-goods-vehicle drivers who had been involved in fatal crashes? They didn’t have chronic airways disease, but doctors were prepared to diagnose cough syncope on the histories they had provided. Didn’t this show that it was possible for a man without such a disease to have a coughing fit while driving and black out?
Naughton was beginning to gnaw and purse his lips, but he maintained steady eye contact with Morrissey. ‘I would rephrase that,’ he said. ‘I would say it is possible for someone to provide a history of having had cough syncope in the absence of chronic lung disease.’
What about the provisional diagnosis of cough syncope made by the Emergency Staff Specialist at Geelong hospital on the night of the crash? Wasn’t Dr Bartley, who unlike Professor Naughton had the benefit of being on the spot and taking a history from Farquharson face to face, fully entitled to make that diagnosis?
‘That’s his call,’ said Naughton.
What if a bloke came to Naughton and said, ‘Look, I’m twenty-eight. I don’t smoke. I play football. I’m a legend. But I’ve had an attack of coughing and blacked out’?
Naughton shrugged. He couldn’t exclude the possibility, but he would be very surprised indeed to hear of such an unlikely thing.
But Morrissey ushered Naughton down a fire escape of unlikelihood, step by step. ‘Since it could be possible, though extremely unlikely, with a person who’s twenty-eight and has no health problems, you’d agree with me that it’s less unlikely if he were a smoker? Even less unlikely if he were thirty-seven rather than twenty-eight? Even less unlikely if he’d had an acute respiratory-tract illness for three weeks? Even less unlikely if he’d suffered from paroxysms of coughing during those three weeks? And less unlikely still if he’d been witnessed to have a bad gripping coughing attack where the watcher thought he was going to have a stroke and told him to sit down?’
Naughton assented in a wary, affectless tone to each step.
But then Morrissey got down to what he riskily called ‘an actual episode’. On the Thursday before the crash, Farquharson had reported to his friend Darren Bushell, a Winchelsea shearer known to everyone as DB, that he had had a coughing fit in his car a few days earlier. He told DB he had blacked out at the wheel of his car outside the Winchelsea roadhouse; when he came to, he found his car had driven twenty metres further towards some rocks.
Mr Rapke sprang to his feet. ‘That is based on an assertion, not a witnessed event!’
Morrissey pulled his horns in. Had Naughton not noticed this report of Mr Bushell’s in the documentation he had been provided with? No? Still, if this incident were accepted as a proved fact, wouldn’t it have a massive impact on Naughton’s opinion?
‘It would have an impact,’ said Naughton.
And had the prosecution told the professor that, three weeks after Farquharson’s car went into the dam, a man called Zane Lewis had come forward saying, ‘I had one of these’?
‘Bloke down our way,’ whispered the reporter from the Geelong Advertiser. ‘Ran his car into a fence and said he’d had a coughing fit.’
‘I object!’ said Rapke. ‘That’s not fact at all. There’s no evidentiary basis for that whatsoever.’
‘Had one of these?’ said Justice Cummins, picking up the words in tweezers. ‘It’s not something you get off the supermarket counter. Is he an expert in neurology? Or an expert like this professor? Or is he a layperson? Is he expressing a medical diagnosis? What are you talking about?’
‘Would it have been of interest to you, Professor,’ said Morrissey, corrected, ‘in your consideration of the nature and scope and existence of cough syncope, to meet someone who said he had a coughing fit and drove off the road after blacking out?’
‘Yes,’ said Naughton politely. ‘That would be of interest.’
…
Court rose for a short break. Some of us stayed in our places, updating our notes. Mr Morrissey’s junior, Con Mylonas, got out of his chair and wandered along the bar table towards the press box. He was a small, dark man with pouty lips, who wore his wig low on his forehead. The word among the journalists was that he had been a brain surgeon before he came to the law, and had been taken under Morrissey’s wing. He stopped in front of me. I looked up nervously.
‘What’s your take on this guy?’ he said in a confidential tone.
Did he mean Farquharson? Why the hell was he asking me? I stared at him in alarm. But he jerked his head at the witness stand that Professor Naughton had just vacated.
‘I don’t know.’ I blurted out the first thing that came into my head. ‘He’s biting his lips a lot. What do you think?’
He smiled genially, and strolled away. Baffled, I turned to Louise; but she and the young journalist from Geelong were doubled over like schoolgirls in a fit of silent hysterics.
…
For the rest of that afternoon Morrissey hammered away at Naughton. Hadn’t he jumped too early? Offered his opinion before he had properly informed himself? Wasn’t he now too proud or vain to admit he had been wrong?
Naughton rolled with the punches, continuing to work his lips and teeth. Eventually he got a grip. For twenty years, he said, he had regularly attended conferences. Some of these were focused purely on cough. Cough syncope had not been included as a condition that respiratory physicians should be routinely aware of. He kept a close eye on the medical literature as it came through. In the last fifteen or twenty years he hadn’t seen anything on cough syncope. References he had found were from the 1980s. He was yet to be convinced that there were physiological reasons to explain cough syncope in an otherwise healthy person who does not have any chronic lung, heart or brain disorder.
He offered a brief, clear lecture on the four levels of evidence in medicine. ‘As I read the data here,’ he said, ‘we’re running on the lowest, most anecdotal level to support a diagnosis of cough syncope. I’m not saying it doesn’t exist. I’m just saying it’s rare, it’s poorly defined, and most of the time the episodes are not witnessed.’
‘So in short,’ said Morrissey with a light scorn, ‘you’ll believe it when you see it? You’re as good as the scenario you’re given?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘Rare conditions do happen, though? It’s not much use to a person when they get a rare form of cancer to be told, “It’s all right—it’s rare”? The fact that it’s rare doesn’t tell you it can’t happen? Just that it’s unlikely to happen?’
Louise, who had been studying the jurors with a pale concentration, leaned over and whispered, ‘Even when he wins a point, he does it in such a way that the jury doesn’t seem to notice.’
There was no imaginable resolution. Barrister and witness would prowl on forever, in this debate. Neither would be able to land a knockout blow. Again, in the dying fall of the cross-examination, the glaring fact presented itself: no one but Farquharson knew what had happened in the car that night, and, by now, perhaps not even he knew.
…
In a few deft strokes Rapke drew everything back into shape. While the bruised Naughton reasserted his professional integrity, Morrissey swung sideways in his chair and turned his face towards the jury, histrionically suppressing a sceptical smile.
Morrissey set great store by the vivid phrase ‘babbling mess’, describing Farquharson’s state when he flagged down the two young men on the roadside and begged them to take him to his ex-wife, but Rapke drained it of power: when it was traced back through the transcript, it was found to have originated not from the mouths of Shane Atkinson or Tony McClelland, but in a question that had been put to them by Farquharson’s counsel at the committal hearing in Geelong.
Lastly, Rapke dispatched the defence’s case study of four heavy-goods-vehicle drivers who were on the record as having experienced cough syncope immediately before they were involved in fatal smashes. Naughton pointed out that the truckies had each given ‘a classic description’ of cough syncope; that none of them had had prior episodes of it; and that all four episodes were unwitnessed.
And were those four fatal smashes the subject of police investigation?
They were.
‘Thank you,’ said the prosecutor, and sat down.
These casual coups that Rapke pulled off made the spectator in me want to stand up and cheer. At the same time a chill ran over me. While Morrissey slugged away with a big heart on his sleeve, Rapke sat hunched in his chair, unruffled, peering up at an angle into an invisible light that seemed too strong for his eyes.
…
I went to my local shopping centre to buy some vegetables. The friendly woman who ran the greengrocery asked me what I was working on. My answer upset her. She covered her mouth and her eyes filled with tears. I stood at the counter while she wiped them away. Then she told me something that surprised me.
‘My husband,’ she said, ‘had a coughing fit once and went off the road.’
She called his name and he emerged from the storage area. He was the sort of man Morrissey might have described as ‘a barrel-chested individual’: in his forties, thickset, carrying a bit of weight, used to long days of physical labour. His wife told him what I wanted to know. He looked at me narrowly.
‘Come out the back. We can sit down.’
We picked our way between crates and bags to a battered formica table. He listened while I outlined, in the most neutral terms possible, Farquharson’s account of his crash.
‘I can tell you what happened to me,’ he said. ‘It was about four years ago. I was driving my HiAce van—it’s a manual—along the south-eastern freeway in the middle of the afternoon. My daughter was with me. She was about thirteen. Quiet time of day. Not much traffic. Four lanes going each way.
‘I remember starting to cough. I remember slowing down to about sixty or seventy. I cut left across two lanes, to pull into the emergency lane, and I blacked out before the impact. After that I don’t remember anything till I heard my daughter saying, “Dad!” I came to slumped over to my left side, towards her. I only knew there’d been an impact because she was saying, “You hit the rails!” She’d grabbed the wheel and the car had swerved back to the right, across four lanes, and ended up in the median strip.
‘As I was coming to, I could hear sounds but I couldn’t see. You know when you’re on top of a hill and you can hear traffic far away? It was like that. I reckon I would have blacked out for about a minute. The vehicle would have been out of control. I wouldn’t have been able to brake or accelerate. And I came out of it slowly. My daughter shook me. I could hear her voice, miles away. It got clearer and clearer. She was saying, “We hit the rail!” and I was saying, “No, no, we couldn’t have.” Then I got out on to the median strip and had a look. I saw the damage. That’s the first time I believed what she was telling me. The front left indicator had got sideswiped against the guardrail of the emergency lane.’
He stared past me.
‘I’m trying,’ he said, ‘to picture this bloke shutting his kid’s door. Saying, “We’ll be right, mate”. Jumping out. Nah. This guy should’ve drowned. No way could he have got out, if he’d just been unconscious. I remember waking up and needing a few minutes to focus. To be in a mental state to make a decision—like with this bloke, to pull the door shut—I dunno—and I had my daughter shaking me.’
I asked him what his state of health had been. He said he had had flu in the preceding week. He had no lung disease and had not smoked for eighteen years.
‘One thing I remember clearly,’ he said, ‘is that when I started coughing and couldn’t stop, my very first thought was to get off the road—because of my daughter. My utmost concern was my daughter beside me. That’s why I pulled to the left—to get off the road.’
He expressed incredulity that Farquharson had got out of the car and left his boys in it. ‘You’d stay with them, wouldn’t you? You’d fight to get them out? You’d go down fighting to get them out?’
I told him about the police evidence that there had been a thirty-degree turn of the steering wheel. He pulled towards him a crushed sheet of paper with a list scribbled on it: chillies, cucumber. Impatiently he turned it sideways. He drew a rough circle and marked ninety degrees at three o’clock.
‘He couldn’t have been doing a hundred,’ he said. ‘In a turn that sharp, the tail would swing out. It would have skidded, or even rolled, when it hit the drain. He must have been going much slower than a hundred when he turned the wheel.’
He drew a diagram of his own vehicle’s progress, circled the point in the emergency lane where it had struck the guardrail, and said firmly, ‘I have no recollection whatsoever of this. The GP told me the coughing puts pressure on the blood vessels in your chest, and that cuts off the oxygen to your brain.’
We sat in silence, looking at his sketch on the scarred tabletop.
‘The insurance paid up,’ he said.
Then he breathed out sharply through his nose, and threw down his pencil.
‘One thing I know for sure,’ he said, getting to his feet. ‘My van slowed down. The van. Slowed. Down.’
…
At my early morning Pilates class someone asked me how the trial was going. I said it was swinging this way and that. I told them about the fathers I had met who stated categorically that in Farquharson’s position they would have gone to the bottom and drowned with their kids. The four of us agreed in very low voices that this could only be a fantasy. As we worked with our pink and yellow weights, an unpleasant forty-year-old memory came to me. I was walking along a street in Werribee with one of my year-twelve students when a savage dog leapt over a gate and rushed at us. Next thing I knew, I was standing behind my student, clinging to her back, while the owner dragged the dog away. In a second of primal terror, of which I have no memory, I must have pushed the girl between me and the danger.
‘A teacher wouldn’t get away with that these days,’ someone said. We laughed.
Then the youngest woman present told a story. One Easter, on a family camping trip, she was wading into a calm lake with her three-year-old son on her hip and his six-year-old brother paddling alongside them on a boogie board. The bigger boy screamed, ‘Mum! A snake!’ He turned his board and thrashed for the bank. The mother, waist-deep and hampered by the heavy toddler, saw the snake’s tiny head rippling towards her. Drop the kid, she thought, and get out of here. She struck at the snake with a foam floatie and it veered away, but fifteen years later, confessing the blind urge to save herself, she lay on the Pilates reformer with her feet in straps, trembling with shame.
…
‘To know a man’s car,’ according to the American novelist E. L. Doctorow, ‘is to know him. It is not useless knowledge.’ And surely, to see your wife and her lover flying around in the newish car you had paid for, while you had to clunk along in front of the whole town at the wheel of an ’89 VN Commodore Berlina with 387,000 on the clock, second-hand tyres, a faulty rear-door latch, rust in the back window seal, and an infuriating habit of cutting out on hills would be mortifying to many a man. ‘The car,’ said James Jacobs, the Winchelsea mechanic who had struggled to keep the vehicle roadworthy, ‘was not a shining example of its model.’
Who knows what midnight doubts had assailed Jacobs over the past two years? He was a skinny, dark man, whose eyebrows arched high into his forehead, giving him a bright, bird-like aspect. He spoke softly and very fast, all on one note and without expression, but he was extremely, almost anxiously articulate, and precise to the point of being pedantic. He had first met Farquharson about a year before the crash. ‘Acquaintance through mutual friends,’ he said, ‘would be the best way to describe our connection.’
The Commodore did not impress him. ‘It was in a fairly worn state, quite a high mileage vehicle, typical with the age of the car. I would suggest it had maybe sporadic maintenance. The main thrust of my work was to try and rectify its cutting-out and driveability issues.’ Farquharson was ‘frustrated’ that his wife had ended up with the newer car while he had to persist with the old one until he could afford to replace it. He did not want to spend money on the ‘shit’ car. Once or twice he had paid Jacobs in kind, by mowing his lawn. Jacobs had done his level best with the Commodore. Over several months he had worked on its brakes, fitted the roadworthy but mismatched front tyres that Farquharson turned up with, and installed a new crank angle sensor (the part that stops the motor from cutting out, commonly a source of bother in this model). The driver’s side rear-door mechanism, which had been giving trouble, he found to be worn and rusty. He lubricated it; it left his premises working.
In late July 2005, about six weeks before Father’s Day, Jacobs test-drove Farquharson’s car, with Farquharson beside him. He took it five or six kilometres eastbound out of Winchelsea towards Geelong, past the dam, up the overpass and down the other side, then did a U-turn and drove back into town. This was the route Jacobs habitually took on test-drives. It was ‘a very standard piece of road’, and he knew it well. On the way back up the overpass, westbound, doing about ninety, Jacobs noticed that the motor was still misfiring. He had to slacken speed to stop it from cutting out.
He also observed, when they reached the top of the overpass and headed down the Winchelsea side, that Farquharson’s car had a tendency to want to wander to the right—an easily correctable but palpable rightward urge towards the middle of the road. ‘I took my hands off the wheel because I could feel that I was having to keep some left-hand pressure on it. I could feel the car start to gently move across—it would not have crossed the white line before I corrected it, but it certainly would have got close to the centre of the line.’ The vehicle had shown no signs of correcting itself before Jacobs put his hand back on the wheel.
Jacobs put this down to ‘minimal road camber’—the left lane of the road at that point tilted slightly towards the dam, he estimated, instead of the other way as it should—but he also suggested that Farquharson ought to have the Commodore’s wheels aligned, a process Jacobs did not have the equipment to perform. Farquharson had the common misconception that wheel alignment was the same as wheel balancing, which Jacobs had already had done when the tyres were replaced. The mechanic was too diplomatic to correct him on the point: ‘I do not recall that I elaborated on it,’ he said.
Now Mr Morrissey launched a slow, laborious, energy-thieving cross-examination of two police officers, Senior Sergeant Robert Leguier of the Mechanical Investigation Unit, and Senior Constable Wayne Kohlmann of the Forensic Services Department in Macleod, about the pre- and post-crash condition of the car in all its scrupulous detail. We heard again that the keys had been found in the ignition, that the ignition was off. The headlight switch was off. The heater was off. Because the car had been submerged, the investigators could not say for certain whether or not the headlights and tail-lights had been on at impact, or had been turned off in the water. This much was clear; but to anyone ignorant of automotive terminology, the mechanical evidence was almost as taxing as the yellow paint marks. The sheer bulk of technical minutiae induced a hopeless stupefaction. I had to flail at myself to stay alert. Some of the jurors appeared to be nodding off. Even the judge looked blank and stunned; he took off his glasses and fiercely polished them. One journalist near me skimmed the Age television guide. Another was doing Sudoku under the desk. The hands of the high clock seemed to slow and stop.
…
Then, on the Friday morning of the fourth week, just as our concentration seemed to have flagged past the point of no return, a short, quiet, terrier-eyed man in a dark suit stepped into the witness stand—Detective Sergeant Gerard Clanchy from Homicide, the officer in charge of the investigation. The evidence that the Crown was about to present through him would drag the story away from tail-light filaments and side-mirror housings, and thrust it back into excruciating realms of human behaviour, where reason fights to gain a purchase, and everyone feels entitled to an opinion.
Major Collision formally handed over the Farquharson investigation to Homicide early on the Tuesday morning after the crash. By lunchtime, Clanchy and his partner, Detective Senior Constable Andrew Stamper, were knocking at the front door of Farquharson’s father’s house in Winchelsea. A media pack swarmed outside the front gate. Farquharson was not arrested; he was asked to accompany the detectives back to Homicide headquarters in St Kilda Road, to be formally interviewed about the deaths of his children. He got into the back seat of the unmarked car. His sisters’ forceful and repeated offers to travel in the police car with him, or to drive him to Melbourne themselves, had been firmly repulsed by Clanchy: this we know because Stamper, who sat in the back seat beside Farquharson, was wearing a covert recording device.
I heard Louise expostulate under her breath, ‘How dare they?’ I too felt a shudder: so there was nowhere to hide.
In the dock Farquharson bowed over the transcript. His sister Kerri kept shaking her head with a small, contemptuous smile, which faded as the tape rolled on.
Once they have cautioned their passenger, Clanchy at the wheel rarely speaks, but Stamper rambles on in a sprawling, blokey style. He questions Farquharson casually, empathises with him about marriage break-ups—he’s been there himself and it takes a lot of getting used to. It’s tough, isn’t it, when you turn that light off at the end of the night, mate, and the kids aren’t there? Specially, says Farquharson, when he’s never had an accident or never been in trouble before or anything. Did they blue? asks Stamper idly. Did it ever get…untidy, or was it just verbal? Peeling off huge, unabashed yawns, he asks Farquharson if he’s eaten, had any sleep. Farquharson volunteers that he has had to ask people what day it was. Does he realise there’s a media car right behind them? says Stamper. The whole circumstance of what’s happened is why the media’s jumped on it, chimes in Clanchy from the front; all they’re after is the truth. Farquharson speaks in sporadic bursts. His voice is muffled, and faint. He’s never been in trouble before and it’s daunting. He doesn’t think he’s gonna like all this questioning. He doesn’t think what? He said he doesn’t think he’s gonna like all this questioning. He’s got nothing to hide. He loves his kids. He would never do anything to hurt them. He’s just so upset he couldn’t get them—he tried. He’s only got two arms, two legs. If anyone’s tryin’ to make out it was intentional, that wasn’t the case at all. Sorry? says Stamper. If anyone’s tryin’ to make out it was intentional, that’s not the case at all. For long periods in the ninety-minute drive there is no sound but the engine’s smooth hum, a steady rushing, like a river pouring towards the edge of a cliff. Is Farquharson looking out at the flat landscape sliding past the window, the tired mounds of the You Yangs? His children have been dead for barely forty-eight hours. They are not yet in their graves.
As they approach Homicide in St Kilda Road, with the media still in pursuit, traffic holds them up. In the idling car the two detectives begin to close in on him. ‘If something horrible’s happened, if you’ve done something horrible, you can tell us.’ Their voices, quiet but urgent, overlap Farquharson’s low, nervous gabble like the intensifying chorus of a song. ‘All we want is the truth. However horrible or bad that might be. All we want is the truth. If there’s a secret there, Robert, tell us. Tell us. Please tell us.’ Why isn’t he screaming? Women in the public row of the court softly moaned and shifted in their seats.
A handbrake creaks. Breathing. Car doors slam in a void. Men’s shoes thud on concrete stairs. The whine and clash of a heavy door. Does he want a drink of water, a cup of coffee, tea? Take a seat. It’s quarter past two.
…
I looked at Louise. She was as white as the wall.
‘This is so over,’ she whispered. ‘I can’t stand what it’ll do to his sisters.’
But just as the video of the official interview was about to be played, I saw the two sisters get up and march out of the court with slow, formal steps that indicated a protest.
…
The bare, fluoro-lit room is empty but for a small, stocky man in a lime-green Adidas T-shirt. He sits sideways on a chair with his back slumped against the wall and one forearm resting on the table. His short brown hair is wavy, thinning and going grey. His eyes are set in deep, fatty sockets. He appears not to have shaved. His head is bowed. The slack curve of his spine gives prominence to the plumpness of his belly and chest. There is something piteous about his deflated posture. But when the door opens he straightens up and turns to face the two detectives, who enter briskly with notebooks, pens and paper cups of coffee, and sit with their backs to the camera.
Clanchy is a neatly built man in a pink shirt, with thick, prematurely grey hair in a pelt-like buzz cut. Stamper is taller, shambling, with rounded shoulders and dark hair. Farquharson says he does not drink tea or coffee. He accepts only water. On the table stands a flat box of tissues. One of them is sprouting from the slot.
At the first mention of the fact that his boys died on Sunday night, Farquharson closes his eyes for a second, in a moment of private pain. Then he sighs, and launches once more on his story.
When he speaks he keeps his eyes on the melamine tabletop. He has an anxious, hangdog look, like a schoolboy. Now and then he flicks a glance at his questioners from under his brow. When he relates the events, he illustrates his account with eager movements of his small, well-shaped, very clean hands. Sometimes he rubs one bare forearm, or audibly scratches his thigh or his armpit. At certain moments, when the questions come in a rush, he blinks rapidly, or licks his lips. He whisks his fingertips across his face, and glances at them. Once he presses his palms together, then wipes them on his trousers. When he speaks of his love for his sons, his over-protective attitude towards them, he shakes his head and clasps his hands. When he explains that his marriage ended because his wife, though she still loved him, was no longer in love with him, he distinguishes between these two states by flexing his bent wrists and knotted fingers to left and right. At the mention of his ex-wife’s new man, his jaw takes on a grey, tense look. The anti-depressant he has been on for twelve months, he says, has put everything in his brain back into perspective: he makes a delicate bridging gesture with the fingertips of both hands. When he refers to his cough, he taps his chest with one palm. Asked again if he had ever thought about hurting himself, he says, with a bitter smile, that he had a little glimpse of that at the start, but it passed. Several times he places his clenched fists on the table. His knuckles are white.
The questions in the interview transcript are numbered from 1 to 613. At number 323 they put it to him squarely: did he deliberately drive off the highway into the dam? No, he says, very quiet and firm. He did not. He had a coughing fit, blacked out, and found himself in water. Did he help with the boys’ seatbelts? He doesn’t know. It’s all just a big blur. He’s got nothing to hide.
Clanchy and Stamper swerve away to his mortgage, his maintenance payments, his medication, never raising their voices, always polite, always thoughtful and patient, always looping back to the question of what happened in the water. Under their sustained pressure, Farquharson flares out into passages of rhetoric. He feels pretty shithouse. The boys were his life. His world. He throws up his hands and lowers his head. His chin stiffens and goes grey; his mouth turns upside down and his voice trembles. He wouldn’t even go to Queensland for a holiday because they would miss him and he would miss them. They were his world, his whole life. Even his counsellor will tell them that. He never went and bothered meeting any other women because he wanted his kids for himself. Everything he did was for them, his whole life. And he had two arms and two legs and he couldn’t save ’em. He always wanted to protect them. Cindy always told him he was over-protective. Watching them like a hawk ’cause there could be cars on the road. If they stood up on the slide, he would bolt over. Sit down, sit down! Come down properly—don’t fall—flying underneath with his hands out to stop them so they didn’t hurt themselves—but he couldn’t save ’em. He blacked out. That’s the honest truth. He’s got no lies—no reason to lie. He’d do anything to have them back—he’s got to live with this for the rest of his life, that he couldn’t save his kids. His voice thickens. He is on the verge of tears. He looks up under his brow, angry, hurt, unfairly accused. He gabbles out again his mantra of helplessness—he had two arms, two legs and he couldn’t save the three of them. How was he supposed to do it? He tried and tried and tried.
A pause.
Clanchy takes his chin out of his palm. How did he try, though?
Farquharson waves both arms at shoulder level. Well, he went around and he—he went and swam to the road to get people to help him, ’cause he—he just can’t recall everything—everything just went like that. He snaps his fingers fast, three times.
Mm, says Clanchy.
He wouldn’t lie, ’cause if he lies, what’s he gonna do, live a life of guilt?
Does he feel guilty?
Yeah, well anyone would. He feels bad. The counsellors he’s seen have told him he shouldn’t feel guilty, that it’s a freakish accident. He’s very concerned about what’s gonna happen. He’s never been in trouble before. He’s never done anything—anything. He throws out both arms in a large, heart-exposing gesture, then brings his palms together and makes a series of rhythmic, double-handed thrusting movements as if thumping down facts on the tabletop: he believes he’s a very good citizen in life; he’s a family man who’s looked after his kids and everything like that. So it’s pretty bloody hard and he doesn’t know what he’s thinking and what he’s not thinking, at the moment. But he’s telling them the truth. He’s not lying to them. He’s got no reason to.
What did he have on, in the car?
Just lights. The radio, it could have been music, he doesn’t know. The boys were wearing T-shirts so he turned the heater round to where it’s red, where it’s warm.
When his son opened the door, asks Stamper, did Robert see water come in?
Yeah, he thinks so.
Where was it?
Um, on the floor. He won’t say too much about that, ’cause he can’t ’pecifically—
Why did he close Jai’s door?
Farquharson pauses, looks at the detective with an expression that could mean either Why do you reckon? or Is this a trap? Because water, he says, was getting in.
How hard was it to close the door?
It could have been really hard, but he can’t say, because it was just all so quick. Again he snaps his fingers.
When he got out of the car, did he have to swim up through water, or how was it?
He thinks so, but he can’t recall. He thought for some stupid reason that they might have only been in a little bit of water, or rocking on a ledge, and he managed to get out but it was going down before that—he doesn’t even know how, he doesn’t know.
Did he see the car go down?
Yeah, he was trying to swim round the other side. He thinks he was under water when it went down, he remembers being under water, he remembers that. He thinks he remembers it nosediving. He got out and he looked to try and see what he could do, and he knew he couldn’t do anything.
After the car went down, did he dive to try and find the car, at all?
He tried, it was, he thinks it was really black and—
Stamper presses him, quiet and patient. Did he dive down to try and find the car?
Farquharson thinks he did, he can’t tell ’pecifically. He knows he went down somewhere but he can’t recall where, it was all so quick.
But didn’t he tell the other police, earlier, that he dived down?
Yeah, he went down to try and look and try and find it. He couldn’t do anything so he went back up.
Why couldn’t he do anything?
Because of the pressure.
What does he mean, the pressure?
Well, it was all under water. He knows he went to try and do something. What he doesn’t know is if he succeeded, or seen the car or not.
He’s said something about the pressure. It’s a word he’s used several times, the pressure.
Well, says Farquharson, that’s what the counsellor at Geelong Emergency said—that he wouldn’t have been able to do nothing because of water pressure and everything.
Stamper doesn’t want to hear what someone else suggested might have happened. He’s asking if Farquharson himself remembers whether he dived down.
Yeah, he did go down, because he remembers swallowing a little bit of water. He had a jumper on, and—
Does he remember finding the car underwater?
Farquharson stammers, he jabbers. He doesn’t think he did. Then he thinks he did. Then he doesn’t think he did. He’s sorry, it’s not a question he can really answer.
Clanchy wonders, casually, about the date of the anniversary of his separation from Cindy.
It’s coming up, but it’s totally irrelevant. Farquharson’s happy with the fact that Cindy doesn’t want to be with him. He’s accepted all that. All he knows is that they were his kids—
So it’s not quite twelve months, is that what he’s saying?
Pretty close. She’s moved on; he’s moved on.
When’s the divorce going to be finalised?
In about a week.
So. His divorce is pending? And the anniversary of the separation’s also very soon?
He’s not even sure of the date.
Did he give the boys any drugs at all?
No. He did not.
Who’s his mortgage with?
Westpac.
All right. Does he need a drink? Go to the toilet?
He shakes his head.
Now they suspend the interview. The little room, with its garish white light, becomes calm. They ask him to sign authorities for the release of his records from the Geelong Hospital, from his GP and his counsellor. It can be seen that all three of the men at the table are left-handed. Farquharson grips the pen as a boy might, awkwardly, between forefinger and middle finger. They point to the correct spots, and he signs.
…
Before court rose, Farquharson’s sister Carmen returned. She slid back into her seat and established commanding eye contact with him in the dock. She mouthed instructions, perhaps about his clothes; she made stabbing downward gestures with one forefinger. Oh, I thought, he could never have pleaded guilty, not against this tide of relentless loyalty. My own brother has four elder sisters and one younger; all his life I have watched him deal with this. If he doesn’t fight back, a treasured boy can wind up as a man with women in his face.
Louise and I bolted out the side door of the building and down Lonsdale Street. I believe I’m a very good citizen in life. We could hardly look at each other. At the lights she peeled off to the station. I kept going to a bar at the top of Bourke Street. I ordered a shot of vodka. Strangers near me were gossiping loosely about the trial.
‘I heard he’s got a girlfriend,’ said a young woman in a suit.
I was thunderstruck. Had I missed something that obvious?
‘A blonde,’ said the woman, in an authoritative tone. ‘She accompanies him to court each day.’
A blonde. It could only be his sister Kerri. What idiot had twisted up that piece of nonsense? I leaned rudely into their conversation. ‘“Accompanies him to court”? He’s in custody, for God’s sake. They bring him up from the cells every morning in handcuffs.’ I thrust out both arms, elbows stiff, wrists in shackled position. Offended, the woman and her companions moved away.
Why on earth was I angry? Did I think I owned this story?
It was a fresh spring evening, but in spite of the vodka I walked home from the train in a stupor of cold and horror. How could he have seen the water coming in? Wasn’t it pitch dark? In the kitchen I stumbled about trying to cook. I kept making mistakes and dropping things. Nothing I made resembled food. I gave up, wrapped myself in a blanket and lay on the couch. Night fell. How much longer would this go on?