The defence had one last arrow in its quiver: a social worker and grief counsellor from Geelong named Gregory Roberts.
As it happens, a close friend of mine worked for years as a grief counsellor at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre. She is a subtle and serious person, and the things she told me about her work made it clear to me that she and her colleagues performed an essential and deeply humane service. But Roberts, said Morrissey, was apparently something more than an intelligent comforter. He would testify that Farquharson’s unnatural-seeming conduct after he got out of the dam, his bizarre responses to the calamity, lay ‘within the normal grief/trauma reactions of a suddenly bereaved parent’.
The only witnesses who are permitted to express opinion before a jury are people acknowledged to be experts in their field. Before the jury entered the court that morning, and before Gregory Roberts was called, Justice Cummins questioned Morrissey on Roberts’ formal qualifications. They seemed, he said, rather sparse for an expert witness. What gave him more authority than an ordinary member of the community?
An ordinary person might find it surprising, argued Morrissey, that Farquharson had left the dam, declined an offer of help and kept asking people for cigarettes. An ordinary person might well be…put off by Farquharson’s insistence on being taken straight to his ex-wife. But Roberts, it seemed, had a breadth of experience with people in the grip of sudden bereavement, and he had two concepts—‘traumatic grief ’ and ‘hyper-focus’—that would sweep these odd behaviours back into the fold of the normal. ‘Traumatic grief ’ was a relatively recent concept, and only very limited research had been done on it, yet it was already listed as a diagnosable condition in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual–IV.
Justice Cummins looked askance. He allowed Morrissey to call Mr Roberts, but excluded a second grief counsellor, Leona Daniel, an older woman who had been summoned to Farquharson’s bed in Geelong Emergency at 10 p.m. on the night of the crash. Daniel had observed his terrible distress and done her best to console him.
‘The prosecution,’ said the judge, ‘has never suggested that your client hasn’t exhibited grief. What is said is that he killed his children. He’s not charged with not crying.’
Farquharson listened, his face darkening. He did not enjoy hearing his psychological state discussed. He looked older; his hair was longer, and turning grey. From time to time he would glance at his family with a crooked frown of indignation.
In came Roberts, a small, fragile-looking man with the bird-like head and dark, trimmed beard of a Renaissance courtier. He worked, he said, for Hope Bereavement Care, as well as SIDS and Kids in Geelong, a service that offered support for anyone affected by the sudden and unexpected death of a child. When Morrissey used the phrase ‘bereaved fathers’, Kerri Huntington began silently to cry, wiping her eyes with her fingertips. Her sister Carmen went pale and wept, and Farquharson himself pulled out his hanky, blinking and blinking, his mouth upside down. In full view of the sisters, one of the journalists folded her newspaper into a pad and started on a crossword.
Four days after the boys died in the dam, Gregory Roberts had been called to give support to Farquharson. Morrissey would ask the counsellor, now, to work his way through the events of the fatal night, starting with Farquharson’s escape from the dam and ending at the police interview in Emergency. Roberts would name and interpret each stage in the language of ‘traumatic grief ’, the emerging field in which he was researching his PhD.
Getting out of the dam, said Roberts, the person would be disoriented. There would be elements of shock, a high level of fear. His adrenal levels would be rising. The fight mode would be his efforts to get the children out of the car. When that was unsuccessful, the flight mode would have kicked in—he would seek to flee.
Though Rapke had shot down the phrase, Morrissey resurrected it: what did it mean that witnesses described him as ‘a babbling mess’?
That would be the effect of disorientation, especially when one remembers that he had been unconscious. When your adrenalin is surging, you don’t make a lot of sense. Even if you are able to give information, you can come across as robotic and emotionless. Workers experienced in this field, said the grief counsellor, do not find it at all strange for a person to make the blunt statement ‘I’ve just killed my kids’. It is part of the surrender mode, even though the reality of the statement might not have quite hit home.
His obsession with being taken to Cindy?
When a child dies in the presence of only one parent, said Roberts, regardless of whether the parents are together or separated, there is very strong urge to contact the other parent. People in trauma often suffer from information overload. They can become what’s called hyper-focused. Very single-minded. They disregard any other information that is put to them. Trained people know that in such a situation someone has to take charge—to acknowledge what the hyper-focused person is saying, but guide him firmly towards what really needs to be done. Shane Atkinson and Tony McClelland, the two young men who stopped for Farquharson on the road, could not have been expected to know this. They succumbed to his hyper-focused demands.
The fact that Farquharson refused their offers to dive down after the car, and would not use their phone to call 000?
Farquharson’s system was already overloaded. He was unable to absorb or even register any extra inputs. By the time they had taken him to Cindy, when he appeared to her to be delirious, he had entered what was called in the literature the outcry phase. Some of the reality of what had happened was starting to become apparent. The presence of Cindy, ‘a key attachment figure’, was likely to bring up more emotion.
Farquharson’s failure to join in the rescue attempts at the dam showed that he was already quite exhausted. Adrenalin levels do not stay high for long. He had moved into dissociation, a state in which he started to block out what had happened, to become detached, and to step back.
His repeated demands for cigarettes, so enraging to the other men at the scene?
Trauma experts know that under stress the body craves stimulants. This is not rational or conscious. It is a physiological fact, and Roberts had witnessed it many times.
How was it that Farquharson had been seen in tears by two civilian witnesses, while various police officers, particularly the two who had interviewed him in Emergency, had been taken aback by his lack of distress?
This, too, was standard—well within the typical range of trauma and grief. Most civilians faced with a police officer, paramedic or doctor (figures Morrissey called men in uniform) will fall into a very respectful way of talking; and people dealing with an overload of information tend to resort to behaviours already ingrained in them. Plus, in a state of ‘traumatic grief ’, and in what Roberts further called ‘complicated grief ’, people go emotionally numb. Their moods fluctuate. There is a shrinkage in their ability to think rationally: a condition called ‘cognitive constriction’. Things they do can seem illogical to observers.
…
This testimony filled me with scepticism, yet I longed to be persuaded by it—to be relieved of the sick horror that overcame me whenever I thought of Farquharson at the dam, the weirdness of his demeanour, the way it violated what I believed or hoped was the vital link of loving duty between men and their children. And, as I listened, the phantom of failed suicide shimmered once more into view. Nobody in this whole five-week ordeal had yet said anything that could lay it to rest.
…
Perhaps Morrissey had warned his witness that the judge had been reluctant to acknowledge him as an expert in anything, for Roberts’ analyses were offered in the faintly piqued tone of someone whose amour-propre has been stung. When Rapke got to his feet, he did not temper the wind to the shorn lamb. Before the blast of his cross-examination, the witness’s spine seemed to ripple and his head to bob and tilt on the slim stalk of his neck.
Yes, Roberts was aware that Farquharson had a history of depression and that he had been taking anti-depressants for a time. Roberts’ impression was that the Farquharson marriage break-up had been ‘amicable’, and that their focus had been on the welfare and happiness of the children. Farquharson, he said, showed no animosity at all towards his former wife. Yes, Roberts had heard the allegation that Farquharson had made threats to kill his children in revenge against Gambino, but he had not taken this into consideration, because his opinion was ‘around traumatic grief ’, a condition that he had noted in Farquharson from their first contact. He had made no presumption of guilt or innocence.
It soon came to light that since 9 September 2005, Roberts, in his role as grief counsellor, had seen Farquharson, weekly or fortnightly, seventy times.
‘Did you say seventy?’ asked Rapke.
The judge leaned forward on both elbows: ‘Seven oh?’
Yes.
‘In those seventy counselling sessions,’ said Rapke, ‘you, for the purpose of requiring him to confront what had happened and deal with his grief and his bereavement and his “traumatic” grief and his “complicated” grief, had him talk about the events of the night?’
Well, no, said Roberts. If Farquharson had gone into detail, he would have steered the conversation away from it—in fact, he would have brought it to a halt. From the beginning he had had instructions from the victim liaison people in Victoria Police that his brief was to focus on grief and bereavement. He was to avoid any in-depth conversation about what had happened on the night.
In the wry silence of the court somebody clicked her tongue. A thought-bubble floated above the jurors’ heads: ‘What the hell did you talk about?’
‘Fair enough,’ said Rapke, pressing forward. ‘What did he tell you he did on the night?’
‘He told me he was driving home from Geelong, had a coughing fit and blacked out. He woke up, found himself in the dam. He tried to save the children several times. He got out of the dam, flagged down a car, got to Cindy, went back to the dam, then found himself in Geelong Hospital.’
‘What did he tell you he did, to try and save the children?’
‘Again, I would have stopped the conversation if it went into detail. But he said he made several attempts to save the children. It involved diving down.’
‘Did he tell you that he tried to get the boys together?’
‘No. I heard that on the taped interview with the police.’
‘He’s suggesting,’ said Rapke drily, ‘that as part of his rescue attempts he tried somehow to marshal the boys in the car for the purpose of getting them out?’
‘It appeared to be, yes.’
The journalists slid their eyes sideways in expressionless faces.
Rapke bounded on. Would Roberts expect Farquharson’s responses to trauma on the night to have been the same, whether he had killed his children deliberately or by accident?
In a person who had done such a thing on purpose, said Roberts, yes, the same trauma reactions would have been expected, but that person would also have shown more agitation, more angry outbursts, more allocating of blame to others—and perhaps a complete flight from the scene.
And what about the fact that at no stage did Farquharson ask what had happened to his children? If they had been found? If they were safe? Had they been rescued? Were they dead? And the fact that all he did ask about was himself? What’s my position? What’s going to happen to me? All that was normal too, was it?
It was.
The jury sat rigid. Nobody breathed.
Rapke spread his fingertips on the bar table. ‘I have to ask you this question, Mr Roberts, and I hope you’ll forgive me—but has there been any event in your life which has made you particularly empathetic towards Mr Farquharson?’
Roberts’ head wavered on his thin neck. ‘No.’
Rapke raised his chin, squinted his eyes, and said in a low, polite, clear voice, ‘Have you lost a child?’
‘I have.’
‘Thank you,’ said Rapke, and sat down.
Morrissey let the ghastly pause stretch out and out.
‘No questions arising, Your Honour,’ he said at last.
The defence case was over.
While the court’s attention swung to the judge, Roberts crouched down in the witness box to gather up his things. He walked out, holding his head high, a wounded, discarded, yet suddenly dignified figure.
…
‘How’d you like that last question?’ shouted Morrissey at the journalists, as we filed out for lunch. I did not hear anybody answer.
Louise and I darted across Lonsdale Street.
‘God,’ she said, ‘that was brutal.’
‘Yeah, but the guy had obviously taken everything Farquharson told him at face value. Rapke had to blow that open, surely?’
‘Couldn’t he have asked him, “Was there anything you saw in his post-offence conduct that struck you as indicative of innocence?”’
‘Oh, come on! They can’t ask a witness that, can they?’
But we were shaken. Rapke, our hovering falcon, had swooped into the muck with the rest, and savagely drawn blood.
From the queue at the coffee cart we saw Kerri Huntington walking down the Supreme Court steps with Gregory Roberts. Surely, I thought, a counsellor has to do more than feel empathy for a client and teach him ‘techniques’. Doesn’t a counsellor have to take it up to him? Tackle him right where he lives? Even across four lanes of traffic and a row of parked cars, we could see him nodding, the placating tilt of his small, fine head.
…
The ideal closing address, I imagine, is a brilliantly condensed recapitulation of the trial, a sparkling argument with a spin that clears the jurors’ heads and engages their hearts.
For that, you have to watch TV.
In this court, the exhausted jurors sat in their box for four more days, some still dutifully taking notes, while first Rapke, then Morrissey, ran a précis of the evidence past them.
Rapke addressed the jurors quietly, as if he considered them his intellectual equals. He proposed two possible views of the matter, both classed as murder: first, that the killings were the product of a sudden, aberrant impulse, perhaps triggered by a psychological disturbance and exacerbated by Farquharson’s despair, anger, frustration and loneliness; and second, that they were the culmination of a desire and a plot, hatched months earlier, to take revenge on the wife who had rejected him.
He laid out the evidence in categories, with a level efficiency. He gave full weight to Farquharson’s anger, his humiliation and depression after the breakdown of his marriage, but then turned them to his own purpose: the darkening of the accused man’s thinking. He pointed out the lack of fit between Farquharson’s differing accounts of the events to different people, his calculated embroideries with their wonky hems and ragged edges.
He made the excruciating suggestion that, while Farquharson was refusing offers of help from the two young men on the road, his children might still have been fighting to unbuckle their seatbelts in the sinking car, surviving for brief moments in an air lock. At this, Farquharson covered his face with his handkerchief and sobbed.
Rapke read out passages from the Homicide interview. Even in the barrister’s unhistrionic rendition, Farquharson sounded flustered, hollow, terribly evasive and woolly. He kept glancing across the court at his sisters. He shook his head. He scowled. Kerri Huntington’s sharp profile, under the fleece of curls, remained attentive and still.
But not even Rapke, with his sinewy syntax and his steel core of logic, could inject adrenalin into the most soporific material of all: the engineering evidence, the physics of the way the car had left the bitumen and gone into the dam. It had been worked to death. While he reasserted with vigorous clarity the propriety and competence of the Major Collision investigation, the jury sagged and flagged. Some of them blatantly yawned, as did Morrissey once or twice, leaning back in his leather chair.
During the summary of the medical evidence, a dark-haired young juror in the front row of the box rested her head, in a posture of unendurable fatigue, on the shoulder of the woman beside her. Just when I thought she had fallen asleep, she roused herself, and exchanged a tiny private smile with the other woman. It shocked me. They looked like people who no longer needed to put on a show of concentrating, people who had already made up their minds.
But when Rapke turned to the testimony of Farquharson’s mate Greg King, when he defended that witness’s integrity, his mental stability and his motives, the whole jury snapped back to life. Plainly they cared about King, or, at the very least, found in him a crucial strand of the story. Rapke took apart the material in King’s secretly recorded conversations; he guided the jury through the escalating urgency of Farquharson’s utterances with a psychological sophistication that made the heart quail.
And when he surged into the final curve of his argument—the sheer statistical improbability of the defence version of events—the jury sat engrossed. What were the odds, asked Rapke, that a man without lung disease would suffer an attack of cough syncope, this condition so rare and so unprovable? That a paroxysm would overcome him at the one spot, on that thirty-seven-kilometre journey, where a car could leave the highway, slip neatly past the end of the guard rail, and travel across almost flat terrain into one of the only two dams in the immediate area? Then, that a car with an unconscious driver could miraculously maintain a steady arc, flatten without changing course a fence strong enough to rip its front panel, and swerve to clip a tree? And most extraordinary of all, ladies and gentlemen, what were the odds that these things could happen to a man who, only two months earlier, had confided in his mate that he had dreamed of having an accident that involved a dam?
…
Next morning I was sitting in the front row of the media seats when Farquharson was brought past me into the dock. He glanced up. Our eyes met. Startled, I smiled. He tried to return the greeting, but managed only a teeth-baring grimace that did not reach his eyes. I remembered the day at the Geelong committal hearing, a year earlier, when he had held open the heavy court door for me. The smile he had offered me that day was awkward and shy. Now he was a man accustomed to being stared at, and sketched by court artists, and hustled along in handcuffs. I was shocked to catch myself thinking: You poor bastard. Was there something about him that called up the maternal in women, our tendency to cosset, to infantilise? Perhaps he had made use of this all his life. Or perhaps he was trapped in it, helplessly addicted to being coddled. A tough American public defender I know, a woman, on first hearing the charges against Farquharson, had said to me, ‘If I was appearing for him, I’d try to make his family see that loving him doesn’t mean they have to believe he’s innocent.’ As he shuffled past me into the dock and sat down with a guard on either side, a wild thought came to me. What if he could turn to his sisters, right here in front of everybody, and shout to them across the court, ‘Okay. I did it. Now can you love me?’
…
While the Crown in its closing had taken a dry, intellectual approach, the defence lunged straight for the heart. For two whole days, with his back to the press seats, Morrissey yarned to the jury in his warm, matey way, like a man buttonholing a stranger in a pub. Throughout this loosely constructed address, Farquharson gripped a big blue hanky in his hand. At direct mentions of his boys he covered his distorted face with it, and shed bitter tears.
A benign light bathed the world that Morrissey conjured up: Winchelsea, a sun-splashed hamlet whose residents were focused on family and work, on sport, on the schooling of their kids. It was a nice community, populated by decent, law-abiding folk who loved their children and shared an attitude of respect for authority. Sometimes ‘a circle of pals’ drank together quietly in one of the town’s few pubs, or at a makeshift bar in a neighbour’s back shed. Farquharson, he said, was one such Winchelsea bloke—‘an Anglo-Saxon country-town man’.
Anglo-Saxon? Surely the name Farquharson could only be Scottish. Then it dawned on me. Anglo-Saxon is code for stiff upper lip. An Anglo-Saxon bloke might well appear emotionally repressed at a time of great trauma.
Morrissey complimented the jury on their deep knowledge of the case. They were now equipped, he said, to understand details that the ignorant newspaper reader out there would find ‘a bit funny’—the car’s ignition and headlights being turned off, Farquharson leaving the dam and going to his wife. In a clever rhetorical move he praised the police for the ‘hardness’, the ‘toughness’ of their interview with Farquharson. They were experienced officers. They had brought psychological pressure of a perfectly legitimate kind to bear on Farquharson. The defence was glad they had pushed him, because look at the answers he so honestly and cooperatively provided! Those answers had completely undermined the case against him—and now the Crown was stuck with them.
Marital separations are always difficult but, as separations go, he said, the Farquharsons’ was ‘the least aggressive and nasty ever on record’. Cindy Gambino, though she had lost her love for her husband and left him, was ‘magnificent at all times’. Never once did she use the kids against him.
He brushed aside the import of depression. To distinguish Farquharson’s sadness at his mother’s death in 2002 from the genesis of blacker moods, he called sentimentally upon the jurors’ own experience of family loss: ‘Everyone’s got a mum and all of those mums are going to die one day. And anyone who’s lost a mum knows that it will be a sad day when it happens.’
Thus Morrissey drained the darkness from the background of the story. All its mythic shadows were dispelled. He airbrushed out Farquharson’s anguish and humiliation, his wounded jealousy, his angry fear that he would be ousted as a father by Stephen Moules. Farquharson’s sadness was real, sure—but it was the sort of sadness that Avanza could help with. Everybody around him saw that he was coming good. The man with real mental problems was that tormented soul Greg King, who at the behest of the police had so appallingly manipulated and betrayed his friend.
Time and again, to describe what he called the Crown’s ‘theories’ as distinct from the defence’s ‘facts’, Morrissey used the word weird. This weird, nasty theory that Farquharson could have pre-planned the crash—it was ludicrous, ‘a crock’. All Farquharson’s actions with his boys implied a future. Two nights before Father’s Day, at the footy awards, didn’t King see Farquharson cuddling little Bailey in his arms? This doomed baby he was supposedly going to drown in a dam? And Mr Rapke’s horrible picture of the children fighting for breath in an air pocket as the car sank? It was a fantasy. There were no air bubbles. The rear window popped out. That car went down like a stone.
As for Professor Naughton, the Crown’s medical expert—he was so ignorant of the reality of cough syncope that it was incredible he had ever been called as a witness! In a sinister macho voice Morrissey mocked the Crown’s claim that Farquharson was in a seething rage about getting ‘the shit car’: ‘A man can only take so much. Now I am going to murder three children.’ The threat that Greg King heard Farquharson make, in the ‘innocuous’ fish-and-chip-shop conversation, he parodied in a gangster snarl: ‘No one does that to me and gets away with it.’ The investigation on the night was a farce. He pilloried the Major Collision officers by adopting a Mr Plod the Policeman voice when he quoted them or summarised their evidence. Acting Sergeant Urquhart was Buzz Lightyear, a nice sort of bloke who had no idea. Sergeant Peters had lied through his teeth. There was absolutely no evidence of conscious steering. Indeed, there was every chance that ten-year-old Jai might have grabbed the wheel—he was a responsible, alert kid, capable of reacting to a crisis by trying to help.
The Crown case was ‘a fairy story—the myth of the bad daddy who killed his kids’. It was ‘glib, glib, glib’. Farquharson was not some monster. He was not an iceman, not a brooding, angry, rage-filled person at all. He was a traumatised Anglo-Saxon guy. He was just—Rob. He had been dealt a hard hit. The time had come to find him not guilty—to let him go on with whatever life he had.
I scanned the jury. They were wide awake, sharp-eyed and concentrating, but their faces were blank. Louise studied them too. She scrawled on my notebook, ‘I don’t think this is working.’
In the lobby, when court rose, I pushed open the door of the ladies’ toilets and found Farquharson’s sisters in there with the younger women of their party, crowding together at the hand basins and the mirror. Someone was saying, ‘He was a prince.’ ‘Yes,’ said Carmen tartly, ‘but princes can turn into frogs, you know.’ They all burst out laughing. I ducked behind them into a cubicle, and waited there while they merrily refreshed their make-up and bouffed up their hair. I wished I could stand close to them. They sounded so confident. Were they cracking hardy, working to keep each other’s spirits up, or was I the one with the wrong end of the stick?
…
Late that afternoon my old barrister friend and I met on the steps of Parliament House, and spent an hour drinking gin and tonic in the Regency-striped armchairs of the lounge at the Windsor Hotel.
‘You’ve heard the closing addresses,’ he said, neatly arranging his feet in their polished brogues. ‘Which way would you jump?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘What if there’s doubt, but only a cigarette paper thick? Is that reasonable?’
He closed his eyes. ‘What kind of answer’s that, woman? This is real life. Hard decisions have to be made.’
I drank in glum silence. Why did lawyers always make me feel so stupid? I wanted to ask him about gut feeling. I knew he would say it had no place in a court. But what was it? Wasn’t it really a kind of semi-conscious reasoning, shaped by the many weeks of evidence? A lightning-fast, instinctual matching up of the phenomenon in question against every similar one you had ever come across, in all your life’s dealings with other people?
…
Everyone could see that the jurors liked Justice Cummins. He had a way of acknowledging their fear, and soothing it. Whenever he spoke directly to them, their weary faces would soften. Even the usually expressionless men would turn to him, smiling, like students of a teacher who had earned their trust. Their duty, now, was to deliberate on the facts of the case and arrive at a verdict; but first the judge would give them careful instructions about the law as it applied to the facts. This address is called the charge, and it is the part of a trial most vulnerable to the critical eye of the Court of Appeal.
Cummins launched his charge on the final Monday morning. He spoke with energetic expression, moving and swaying on his throne-like chair, leaning forward, rearing back. He inhabited rhetorically, one by one, the conflicting testimonies, the competing submissions the jury had heard over the long weeks of the trial. Once or twice he had to pause, as if to control emotion.
Soon Louise nudged me. ‘Look at Rapke.’ The prosecutor’s glasses were folded on the table in front of him and his cheek rested on a hand that threatened to go limp and drop his head among his papers with a crash. As we watched, he settled back into his leather swivel chair with his chin tucked into his collar and his starched white jabot poking up in a curve, and sank into a frank slumber. His junior, Amanda Forrester, swung to him, to whisper a comment. She froze, then quietly turned away. Soon she too closed her eyes and sat with head on hand, her face in repose younger and sweeter.
Cindy Gambino sat between her parents. Since the last time I had talked with them at the coffee cart, Bob and Bev Gambino had faded further into their quiet country selves, coming and going with a nod or a smile. I admired their reserve, their composure. What did they hope for in secret? How deep did it run, their fidelity to their daughter’s support of her ex-husband, in the bereavement they all shared? Farquharson listened keenly to the judge’s long address. At the mention of his son’s names he flinched, and his jaw swelled with stifled tears. At times he would pull an angry face, or jerk about indignantly in his chair. Meanwhile, Gambino sat in the shelter of her parents. She leaned her elbows on the rail and held a white hanky to her nose and mouth, as if her tears would never stop leaking. At painful moments of the story her face went into spasm and she put her hands over her eyes. Finally the three Gambinos got up and discreetly left the court.
At every break, Farquharson’s family would throng into the paved courtyard, chattering and smoking, bringing take-away coffee and standing about in the patches of sunlight that narrowed as the day dragged on and shadows formed in the colonnaded corners. The journalists politely left the open spaces to them, and clustered murmuring in more remote spots. The girl from the Herald Sun, in her little black ballet slippers, opined that the verdict would come fast, and would be not guilty. A cold shudder ran through me: oh, wait! I haven’t worked it all out yet, and I don’t know how I’m going to! I shifted away from her certainty, and hid in an alcove pretending to read a magazine. When I looked up, the others had gone back in. I ran across the flagstones in my soft-soled shoes, past a woman standing near the only bench still flooded with afternoon light. It was Farquharson’s sister, Carmen Ross. Her weary husband, slumped on the bench with his arms folded on his chest, had fallen asleep in the remaining warmth. She stood facing him, watching over his rest. She raised one hand against the sun, to cast a small patch of shade on to his bare, greying head. He did not stir. As I crept by, she put out a forefinger and delicately touched his brow.
…
At the end of the second day, when Justice Cummins had concluded his charge and painstakingly fine-tuned it, the jury of fourteen was whittled back to the requisite dozen by means of a random ballot. The judge’s associate drew numbers out of a wooden box: two of the women were liberated. The judge expressed his regrets to them, but they hardly bothered to conceal their elation. In its final configuration, the group looked compact, business-like—a twelve-person outfit, stripped back and ready to rock.
How terrible it must be for counsel to see the jurors’ backs as they retire. Morrissey’s lips were white. Seven weeks of struggle, and now these twelve strangers of unknown sympathies and reasoning power would take the reins.
‘The wait for the verdict,’ said Justice Cummins gently to Farquharson, who sprang to his feet, ‘is the hardest part of the trial. I suggest you try to bear up.’
Farquharson nodded to him, courteous and present. For the first time I saw him as he might have been in ordinary life, at work, at school. It touched me. Again I felt shocked, as if this response were somehow illegitimate.
…
All Thursday we waited.
Families and journalists drifted around the echoing corridors, staying well within call. Carmen Ross sat at the long table in the hall and laid out games of patience. Another woman worked quietly at her crochet. The word among the journalists now was acquittal, though no one could quite articulate a reason. I was glad that nobody asked for my opinion. The responsibility of making a decision seemed beyond me.
Mid-morning the sun came over the roof of the building and we headed for the fresh air. But a door burst open on the other side of the courtyard and disgorged a bunch of people in bright casual clothes, dressed for spring. It was the jury. The frowning tipstaff shouted to us, ‘You can’t come through here!’ We withdrew to the corridor and gazed at them through the glass-paned door. They milled about in the sun, laughing, shifting from foot to foot like guests at a barbecue. Many of them were smoking. They seemed cheerful, and free. They did not look like people who might be about to send a man to prison for the rest of his life.
Halfway through the afternoon a passing man called to us over his shoulder, ‘They’ve sent out some dry-cleaning.’
The day ended without result.
On the train home I texted my scornful barrister friend. ‘The jury were laughing. What’s that mean?’
He replied at once. ‘Their laughing is unnerving. But in the end their decision is a purely rational one, devoid of sympathy and emotion. Rather like solving a maths problem. At least so they are told by the judge. And that is how it should be. In other words, the decision is made without ANY consideration of the consequences for Farquharson.’
‘Big ask.’
‘In no other way can I explain the levity of which you speak.’
…
On the Friday I took to the courtyard some unfinished knitting, an old green scarf, and tried to get it moving again. My hands were sweating and my tension was uneven, but it helped to have something to do. The journalists drew together, looking each other in the face more openly. There was a comradeliness. They shared food, brought each other coffees without being asked. Someone reported that Rapke was not here: it was the festival of Simchat Torah; he had to go to shul. We kicked the Farquharson story this way and that. Had Rapke made a big enough hole in the defence’s medical evidence? Would the jury give a shit about the mistakes in the yellow paint marks? We wondered about Farquharson’s mother, what kind of woman she had been, whether it was the loss of her presence alone that made Cindy Gambino call that house ‘the morgue’. Strange hours, with no end in sight, analysing and speculating in the sun, feeling our hearts beat faster than usual.
Just after two o’clock, one of the Herald-Sun journalists beckoned wildly from across the courtyard. We ran down the hall in a pack and jostled into our seats. Morrissey forged in. He went straight to Farquharson in the dock, and high-fived him. Police officers slid into the pew behind the bar table. People we knew and others we had never seen before sat tightly crammed, upstairs and down. The judge strode to the bench. We bowed. He said, in a low voice, ‘I urge people, whichever way the verdict goes, to try to contain their emotion.’ A sickening hush. The jury entered. Their faces were grey. One woman was squeezing a fistful of soaked tissues. Another had a hand over her eyes. The foreman worked his mouth, chewing the insides of his cheeks.
Each dead child was named and the charge of murder read. At the first ‘guilty’, Cindy Gambino let out a piercing, animal wail. Guilty. Guilty. Court officers rushed to her aid. Beside her a pale face swayed and dropped: her mother had fainted. Bev’s sons carried her to the door. The court swarmed with people turning and gasping and pressing. Screams and sobs echoed in its high white ceilings. Farquharson must have been whisked away to the cells: the dock was empty. In the uproar, Morrissey turned towards the media seats and faced us in silence. He stood like a beaten warrior, feet together, shoulders stooping, hands clasped in front of his genitals. His face was chalk, and on it was a tiny, rigid smile.
The judge cleared the court. The tipstaff pushed the journalists out the door. In the courtyard, paramedics trundled Bev Gambino past us on a gurney, flat on her back, her face a greenish white. Gambino was already in an ambulance. Kerri Huntington crouched on a bench, elbows on her thighs, smoking hard and staring up at the crowd with loathing. I veered close to her and muttered a clumsy word. She scorched me with a look. In a corner of the yard, beside the men from Major Collision, Amanda Forrester fumbled for a cigarette. The cops, in their paratroopers’ loose pants and heavy black boots, were a study in self-command. If they were triumphant they declined to show it. But Forrester’s vivid, white-toothed face, gushing smoke, shone with a fiercely suppressed satisfaction. A man behind me said, ‘What a courageous jury!’ A prosecutor I knew squeezed past. He too was restraining jubilation, but he said to me, ‘You don’t know how much shit we cop, as prosecutors. Having to cut a path through all that lying.’
The journalists were reluctant to part. ‘Oh,’ they cried, ‘that was the worst I’ve seen. It doesn’t get any worse than that.’ They hugged each other and rushed away. One of the young women was six months pregnant; her face had turned yellow, and she stood still with one hand pressed against her belly. The boy who was covering his first murder trial touched my arm and stared at me, white-eyed, unable to speak.
At my elbow Louise the gap-year girl had been observing the pandemonium with her customary dry reserve, though her cheeks were faintly flushed. ‘I’m out of here,’ she said.
‘What? You’re leaving?’
‘Text you later.’ She hugged me, slid into the crowd and vanished. She knew when she had had enough.
I found the veteran journalist, and put out my hand to say goodbye. My face must have been a sight, burning red. She looked at me hard, with an ironic smile.
‘You didn’t see this coming, did you. You’re shocked, aren’t you.’
‘Yes. I’m shocked.’
She drew me away from the others. ‘When I first came into court today,’ she said, ‘I was filled with wave after wave of rage. You see this is what these men do. This is the most appalling, savage, cruel revenge a man can take on a woman—to make out it was all her fault.’
From the train home I sent Louise an over-emotional text: ‘Don’t be alone today after what we just saw.’
She made no reply. I felt foolish, but not surprised. I saw that unlike Morrissey, unlike me, she was a person with sturdy boundaries. I tried to imagine what she would have said, had she answered. Probably something philosophical. Something hard-nosed, in Latin. Dura lex sed lex. The law is hard, but it is the law.
That night, at bedtime, I found the unfinished green wool scarf on the floor where I had dropped my bag. I picked it up and saw that, when the call for the verdict had come, I had stopped halfway along a row. It occurred to me to preserve in some way the moment of decision. I marked it with one red stitch. Then I knitted to the end of the row, and cast off.