This House of Grief: The Story of a Murder Trial Read Online Free

detectives with their sinister black folders;
road police in bomber jackets; constables in caps and tunics; irritable tipstaffs
smoking over the turf guide; all the way down to the lowly drifters from the Magistrates’
Court in William Street with spider webs tattooed on their necks and hinges in their
elbow crooks. Even the occasional judge has been seen to throw back a short black
at that democratic counter.
    On the Monday morning of the trial’s second week, a couple in the coffee queue struck
up a conversation with the gap-year student and me. Hadn’t they seen us in court,
with our notebooks? They introduced themselves: Bob and Bev Gambino, the parents
of Cindy, Farquharson’s former wife—the drowned boys’ grandparents. We looked at
them in awe, but they chatted on in their unguarded country way, drinking the good
coffee, watching the lawyers come and go. Bob was short and round-faced and solid,
Bev slender with fine-rimmed glasses and straight, greying hair. They told us they
lived near Winchelsea, in the town of Birregurra. Since Bob was a CFA volunteer and
one of their three sons a full-time firey, the firefighters’ union had offered them
free use of a flat above the Fire Services Museum for the duration of the trial.
Everything about the city seemed to please them: the hospitals, the trams, the fresh
food you could buy at the Victoria Market. Bob rambled on unprompted, in his drawling
voice.
    ‘The court people kept asking us “Which side are you on?” First I didn’t know what
they meant. Then I realised they didn’t want to make us sit with Rob’s family if
we didn’t want to. So I said to the bloke, “Listen, mate, there aren’t two sides.”
    ‘Rob and I used to work together on the shire,’ he went on, jerking his head in the
direction of the Supreme Court. ‘He was a lazy little bugger. If he didn’t want to
do something, well, he didn’t. Not motivated. He was—you know—a sook.’
    These unflattering estimations he delivered with an indulgent grin, as if teasing
someone he was fond of or had at least learnt to put up with. His wife made little
contribution, apart from her friendly attention.
    It was nearly 10 a.m. On the other side of the road I spotted Farquharson’s sisters
and their husbands heading for the Supreme Court entrance in a phalanx: ordinary,
reputable working people, self-effacing in their comportment. The woman I picked
as the elder sister, identified by the Gambinos as Carmen Ross, had a soft, intelligent
face and a serious demeanour. Kerri Huntington, the younger, more flamboyant one,
wore her hair in a big bleached perm that flowed back over her shoulders. On my fridge
door at home I had a newspaper photo of Farquharson leaving the court with the curly-headed
blonde on the summer day he got bail after his arrest. What made me clip the photo
and keep it was the way she is hauling Farquharson across the pavement. He trots
beside her. She has an impatient, double-fisted hold on his left wrist that yanks
his hand like a toddler’s across the front of her hips. As the eldest of six children
I recognised that hold: it was a bossy big-sister grip. Now I watched her charge
up the steps into the court, her hair bright as a banner in the grey street.
    ‘Today,’ said Bob, draining his paper cup and chucking it into the bin, ‘it’ll be
the cops.’
    …
    Victoria Police contains a highly respected outfit called the Major Collision Investigation
Unit. Its officers drive out at all hours from their bases in Brunswick and Glen
Waverley to attend traffic accidents in which people have been killed or suffered
life-threatening injuries. These are the cops we see on the TV news, standing pensively
on the freeway edge around a pile of gashed and smoking metal.
    Sergeant Geoffrey Exton was the MCIU officer who had first taken command of the chaos
on the night of the crash. He was a tough-looking fellow in his late fifties, with
a thick moustache and a cannon ball of a skull that