Seconds. That was all it took for Farquharson’s car to veer off the wrong side of the highway, flatten an old timber-and-wire fence, cross a stretch of paddock, clip a tree and plunge into the dam. What more could be said about that splinter of time?
The young reconstructionist, Acting Sergeant Glen Urquhart, took the stand equipped with a protractor and a calculator the size of a shoe. He was one of Major Collision’s civil engineers, tall, fair and broad-shouldered, with an almost comically noble head and reasonable expression.
‘He looks like Chris Grant,’ I whispered to Louise.
‘Who?’
‘Western Bulldogs.’
She shrugged. Like Jai, Tyler and Bailey, she followed the Bombers.
Urquhart had got to the dam just after midnight and, while the car was still submerged, had conducted his own torch-light walk-through of the scene. On the bitumen he found no marks of skidding or yawing that would indicate the path of a car that had been out of control. In the grass between the roadside and the dam he spotted the pair of tyre marks already familiar to us—rolling prints, with no sign of the churning or ploughing that emergency braking or loss of steering control would have caused. He traced the prints to the dam’s bank, where headlight debris and a broken branch showed him that the vehicle had clipped a tree on its way into the water.
Back up at the roadside he saw the famous yellow marks that Sergeant Exton had sprayed in the gravel at the point where the car was thought to have left the road. The angle of these marks struck Urquhart as too great, but he thought their position was correct, and concluded that the car must have veered off the road at a sharp angle.
He saw the car when it was hauled out of the water. He noted the positions and the condition of its various controls: ignition off, handbrake off, heater off, headlights off. His listing of these details, in the court’s deep silence, was like a series of calm blows.
He paused and let out a long breath through tubed lips.
He saw the three dead children. He described the postures in which they lay. The only sound, apart from his voice, was a terrible sob, almost a muffled scream, from Cindy Gambino. One of the women jurors glanced across at her, her face creased with distress. Kerri Huntington rubbed her eyes with the flat of her hand. Gambino, her mouth twisting, leaned towards Moules, rested against his shoulder, his chest. She was almost in his arms.
Next, with the aim of producing a three-dimensional scale plan of the scene, Urquhart instructed Senior Constable Courtis to set about measuring it, using a piece of equipment called a total survey station or geodimeter.
Three weeks later Urquhart drove down the overpass in a car of the same model as Farquharson’s—a 1990 VN Commodore, whose wheel alignment was within Holden specifications—to video what the vehicle would do if he raised his hands from the steering wheel at the point where Farquharson’s car was believed to have swerved off the road. These tests, he said, showed that nothing in the camber of the highway would have caused a car with an unconscious driver to veer towards the dam. Farquharson’s car could have diverged sharply to the right only if he had steered it.
Wait, said Rapke. Hadn’t the Winchelsea mechanic noted, when test-driving Farquharson’s car down the overpass, that at this point of the road the car had a tendency to ‘move gently across to the right’? Yes, said Urquhart, but there was an enormous difference between a tendency to drift to the right and the sharp angle off the road that he had measured at roughly thirty degrees. For the car to have left the road at such an angle, the steering wheel would have had to be turned two hundred and twenty degrees.
With a magician’s flourish, at which people could not help smiling, Rapke produced from under the bar table a steering wheel mounted on a three-dimensional metal frame and marked at certain points with strips of black gaffer tape. Urquhart set it up on the rail of the witness stand, and demonstrated that to turn it two hundred and twenty degrees, ‘either your arms are going to cross, or you have to release one or both hands.’
Urquhart had used an ‘internationally accepted’ computer software program called PC Crash to create six cartoon-like simulations of how the car would have behaved at three different speeds—sixty, eighty and a hundred kilometres per hour—and with different steering inputs. The court lights were dimmed, and like kids at a matinee we watched the little car zoom down the overpass, swerve to the right across the oncoming lane, and dash across the paddock to the dam, leaving, according to its speed, a simple set of rolling prints, or an extended yaw, or a dramatic sideways skid.
For the car to have travelled between road and dam along the path that the rolling prints showed, said Urquhart, three distinct steering inputs would have been required: the initial sharp one to the right, to take the car off the bitumen; then a brief straightening; then a second input to the right.
If the first sharp input had remained constant, he said, the car could not possibly have left the tracks that the police had found.
Obviously, said Urquhart, because the car had hit water it had left no landing marks that would have allowed a precise calculation of its speed. But before its wheels lost contact with the bank it had left no evidence of high speed: no skid marks, no sign that it had gone into a yaw. It did not bounce. It did not bottom out. It did not gouge the grass. There was no break in the rolling prints. They were continuous all the way to the dam. Thus Urquhart believed that the car had been travelling at between sixty and eighty kilometres per hour, probably closer to sixty.
…
‘Herman the German,’ I heard one of the tabloid reporters mutter as we shuffled out for lunch. ‘Could there be a bigger calculator?’
‘I hate a bloke who thinks he knows his job,’ said Bob Gambino, across the street at the coffee cart.
Was this some sort of country workingman’s joke? Louise and I laughed nervously.
It was a while since our last encounter with Bob. He told us that a special ceremony had been held in Winch the previous weekend, at which Cindy had formally inaugurated an annual football trophy called the JTB Award: Jai, Tyler, Bailey. Coffee in hand, Bob settled in for one of his drawling ruminations. ‘Cindy and Rob always had the child locks on,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t done on purpose…Yeah…I was surprised Morrissey didn’t go in harder with Kingy. Rob’s lawyer at the committal went through Greg. He was cryin’ and that. But Morrissey said he didn’t want to go in any harder, because Greg was so delicate.’ He touched thumb and forefinger together in a zero. ‘He thought he might snap. He didn’t want to be responsible if Greg, um…’
‘Went into meltdown?’ I said.
‘Yeah. If Rob really said, “I hate ’em, I’m gonna kill ’em,” well, those are hard words. Why would he need to be wired? How could you misinterpret those words?’
He scanned the street, at his leisure. We waited.
‘They’ll appeal,’ he said at last. ‘If there’s a guilty verdict they’ll appeal. They need a good reason. More evidence turnin’ up. Or the sev—the severity of the sentence.’
We looked at him, confused. He stood with his hands in his pockets and his feet wide apart, like a farmer.
‘Couple o’ people on that jury,’ he said, with his vague, beneficent smile, ‘look like people we know!’
‘Hard to tell what they’re thinking,’ I said. But I was only trying to make conversation.
…
For two whole days Acting Sergeant Urquhart was mauled on the stand. Morrissey blazed away at him, shouting, whispering, sledging, sometimes merely arguing in an ordinary tone of voice, working to wring some shred of reasonable doubt from the mass of technical information that Urquhart had laid down.
What on earth was the point of surveying the crime scene—sorry, Morrissey meant the potential crime scene—if the scanner Major Collision used was not capable of computing the slope of the terrain? What use were its measurements if all it could do was calculate the terrain as if it were flat? Why didn’t Urquhart measure the camber of the road? Why didn’t he collect the wire or the posts from the flattened fence? Why had he changed his tune about which of the famous Exton marks he had used as a starting point for his calculations? First he said he used the left one, then later he said he’d used the right one. He was incompetent, wasn’t he? Negligent? Wasn’t he supposed to have an honours degree? And how ridiculous and outrageous was it that he had stopped the traffic in both directions on the Princes Highway for—how long? Fifteen minutes? Did he mean to say that the whole of Victoria was held up while he shot his pointless, meaningless steering-test videos? He took his hands off the wheel, yes, but what was to show he hadn’t been steering with his knees? And why didn’t he conduct his steering tests on Farquharson’s actual car? He didn’t drive Mr Farquharson’s car, did he?
‘No,’ said Urquhart. ‘It wasn’t driveable. It was caked in mud and water. It was beyond salvage.’
‘Being caked in mud and water,’ snapped Morrissey, ‘doesn’t set it apart from many vehicles in the city of Melbourne.’
The court rocked with laughter. Men in the jury lowered their grinning faces. It was impossible to tell if their masculine empathy was directed at Morrissey, or Urquhart, or Farquharson himself.
Urquhart was obliged to acknowledge various police mistakes. Not only were the Exton paint marks on the wrong angle, but they were not even parallel. The wheelbase of Farquharson’s car was too wide to have left both tyre marks in the gravel. Only one of them could be correct. Urquhart dug in, though, when Morrissey urged him to agree that Farquharson’s vehicle could have left the road at ‘a much gentler angle’ than the one he had calculated. On this point he would not give way.
‘What about a series of tiny little steering inputs?’ said Morrissey.
Urquhart smiled wearily and shook his head.
Figures were scattered about like confetti: angles, arcs, radii. The word infinity was mentioned. Every now and then Justice Cummins would protest: ‘We did all of that this morning, Mr Morrissey. Let’s not start again. We’ve gone over this, Mr Morrissey, for a day and a half.’
Then Morrissey screened a five-second segment from Channel Nine news of the roadside gravel, shot in daylight on the Tuesday after the crash, which showed the yellow paint marks clearly present. He compared this footage with the Peters and Courtis photos of the gravel that were taken on the Tuesday, in which the marks appeared smudged, and forcefully alleged that one of the police officers, in an attempt to conceal Exton’s mistake, must have scuffed out the paint with his boot.
The jury was sent out.
‘From the Sunday night to the Tuesday,’ said Justice Cummins, ‘it was not a controlled scene. Paint can disappear for a hundred reasons, but the TV on the Tuesday, on a clear calm day, showing the lines of paint, and then the photograph not showing them, clearly ups the ante. An allegation has been put that needs to be met.’
‘What is shown in number one of the Peters photos,’ said Rapke, ‘is a photographic distortion of what you see in the Channel Nine footage. There has been degradation in the two days since the night of the crash, but there has been no interference.’
‘It’s not merely a matter of police corruption for the sheer joy of doing so!’ cried Morrissey. ‘It’s—’
‘No,’ said the judge sarcastically, ‘it’s just police corruption to frame a man wrongly for the murder of his three children.’
Morrissey raised his voice. ‘I’m not going to back away from putting to them that somebody’s interfered with it! I’ll be putting it very strongly!’
‘You’ve already put it,’ said Justice Cummins. ‘You’ve had a long, hard day. There’s a nice old saying—“Appeal judges are men who in the cool of the evening undo work that better men do in the heat of the day.” Let’s have the cool of the evening to think. Let’s do it tomorrow.’
…
As the Crown case worked its way into the home straight, some of Farquharson’s supporters seemed possessed by a cheerful confidence that verged on the manic. After lunch one day, when Morrissey swept past her through the narrow glass-paned doors, heading back into the fray, Kerri Huntington sang out after him, ‘Go, tiger!’ She turned to the rest of us with a cheeky giggle. ‘That man,’ she said, ‘makes me laugh.’
On and on went the gargantuan struggle between the two big men. Morrissey accused Urquhart and his fellow officers of all manner of trickery and dishonesty. He challenged him on complicated slabs of what he had said in earlier evidence. He dragged him back and forth across fields of minuscule detail. Hour after hour, while cop and counsel danced like medieval angels upon the head of a pin, I grew stupider and stupider. Surely one did not need a science degree to understand how the car had gone into the dam? I kept glancing at the older men in the jury, the ones who looked like retired tradies or maths teachers in their loose, comfortable T-shirts or plain zipper jackets. Did they too feel this thickening of the brain, this blunting and blurring of mental capacity? Could it be that some atavistic force in me was trying to sabotage my intellect, to block its access to calculations that might demonstrate Farquharson’s innocence? What on earth could one take seriously here? Did a modest manner, an air of patient seriousness, the ability to crack a gentle joke, mean that a witness was trustworthy? What if I were one of those tired, frightened jurors, sequestered by an oath from the comfort of work and family, browbeaten by oratory, craving the release of laughter or tears? Would I be dreading the moment when this tinnitus-like racket would have to be disentangled, unpicked, coaxed into a pattern of meaning, so that we could see what was really there, weigh it up, and arrive at a judgment on a fellow human being? What if Farquharson’s guilt or innocence was a mystery beyond reckoning? Was anyone going to explain the meaning of the words ‘beyond reasonable doubt’? And, if they did, would I still have the nous to grasp it? Or had these five gruelling weeks stripped me of every vestige of native wit?
Calm down. I was not on the jury. I had made no vows. I was only an observer. Nothing life-altering would be required of me. If sitting here became completely intolerable I could pack away my notebook and pen, make my bow at the door, and rush back into the world, where it was spring, where the sun was mild, and the plane trees on Lonsdale Street were putting out their pale fuzz of green.
…
Indeed, as soon as Rapke rose to re-examine Urquhart, a window seemed to open in the courtroom and a stream of fresh air to pass through. I could not tell if it was the simple clarity of what he was saying or the light, dry timbre of his voice, but things flung about in disarray by Morrissey’s mighty blitzkrieg quietly resumed their proper places in the landscape. A calm settled, a sense of proportion. No, I did not need to be a scientist in order to picture what had happened between the road and the dam that night.
…
Near the very end of the Crown case, while Detective Sergeant Clanchy was still on the stand, Morrissey screened again the passage from the formal interview at Homicide in which Farquharson, in a voice thickened by tears, denied the detectives’ direct accusation and gave his finger-snapping account of how he ‘tried and tried and tried’ to save his boys. ‘I believe I’m a very good citizen in life. I’m a family man who looked after his kids and everything like that. I’m not lying to you. I’ve got no reason to.’ For a second time we saw his indignant tears, his protestations, his strange, emphatic hand gestures on the tabletop. Could Morrissey possibly think this looked good? Yet women in the family seats were crying. Noses were blown, quivering breaths drawn.
Years later, when I read Marilynne Robinson’s novel Home, I found a description of that moment: ‘It was the sad privilege of blood relations to love him despite all.’
…
The jury left the court, and Mr Morrissey made a second no-case submission: he argued that the Crown case was so weak and so circumstantial that it was incapable of reaching the standard of proof required. While he argued on in a low voice, murmuring, sometimes almost whispering, Justice Cummins listened with his head propped on one fist at a dreamy, attentive angle. When he reasoned with Morrissey, his voice too was very soft. Farquharson strained forward to hear, his face dark and clenched above his neatly knotted tie. Kerri Huntington kept changing position in her seat, irritable and frustrated. At the other end of the bar table, Mr Rapke lay back in his tilting swivel chair, one hand clasped around his jaw, watching and waiting.
Justice Cummins spread in front of him several sheets of paper, from which he read a summary of the evidence so far. He brought out of it a narrative that turned the blood to ice. As a matter of law, he ruled, there was sufficient evidence to make a case.
Mr Morrissey would have to gird his loins and launch his defence.
The Crown, in its duty to lay all relevant facts before the court, had called forty witnesses. Its case, swollen by Morrissey’s exhaustive cross-examinations, had stretched out over five whole weeks. Morrissey must have done the bulk of his work in those marathon sessions; the defence, he said, had a mere five witnesses lined up. He would lay out its case in two and a half days.