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

steering-wheel
turns, on terrain, on tussocks. And always, always, Morrissey dragged their attention
back to the burden of his song: the mistakenly angled yellow paint marks that Exton
had sprayed that night on the verge of the road.
    Morrissey’s labour was tremendous. Soon, though, I began to suspect that it was also
counter-productive. No matter how earnestly I strove to grasp it, his cross-examination
felt cloudy and insubstantial. The material itself was intractable. It was fiddly,
maniacally detailed, and catastrophically lacking in narrative. It made me—and, by
the looks of them, also the jury—feel panicky and stupid. By the end of the week
Justice Cummins would refer, with a desperate sympathy, to ‘three days talking about
tufts of grass’. Worst of all, Morrissey’s style of cross-examination on this technical
evidence was jerky and parenthetical. He was forever rephrasing things, backing and
filling, apologising, changing tack. He could not make the torrent of measurements
run clear. With the best will in the world, I could not follow it or see what he
was trying to do. To add to his troubles, he had developed a dry, barking cough that
rivalled the one he argued had sent his client’s car into the dam.
    As the hours and days ground on, the air in the court became a jelly of confusion
and boredom. The judge took off his spectacles and violently rubbed his eyes. Journalists
sucked lollies to stay awake. Jurors’ mouths went square with the effort to control
their gaping yawns. Their heads swayed, or dropped forward on to their chests. But
Morrissey, oblivious to the fact that he had lost his audience, fought doggedly on,
his forehead gleaming, his gown trailing floorwards off his shoulders. Once, when
he suggested to a witness that some vehicle other than Farquharson’s might have left
the disputed tyre track in the roadside gravel, when he seemed about to return for
the hundredth time to the torture of what he called ‘the Exton marks’, I saw Rapke’s
junior, Amanda Forrester, close her eyes, twist her long legs round each other, and
beat, beat, beat the knuckles of her fist against her forehead.
    Was it some sort of barrister’s technique, to fill the courtroom with a soporific
gas? One lunchtime I consulted an old friend of mine, long retired from the bar.
His wife had died, and he spent his lonely days at home in a bayside suburb: I imagined
him standing at his lounge room window with a pair of binoculars, critically inspecting
passing vessels. His sole concession to the modern world was a mobile phone. He loved
to be asked for advice.
    ‘Farquharson’s counsel,’ I texted, ‘is killing us with boredom.’
    He replied at once: ‘A time-honoured approach, when no feather to fly with. Still,
one has heard it said that the fear of boring oneself or one’s listeners is a great
enemy of truth.’
    …
    The only thing that woke the jury from its stupor was the Homeric clash between Morrissey
and Sergeant Exton. Under his brow Exton fixed the barrister with a level, burning
gaze. The two men lowered their big heads and went at each other like heavyweights.
Exton seemed galvanised by a rage that only his elaborate sarcasm could control.
He spoke with a droll punctilio, decorating every sentence with the word ‘Sir’. When
a pretty woman in a tightly belted white coat tiptoed out of the court, he paused
mid-sentence to appreciate her all the way to the door. His demeanour was so powerfully
wrought and outrageously complex, so glowering with dark energy, that I kept wanting
to break into anxious laughter. Louise, the teenager, contemplated him with alarm.
She passed me a note: ‘Imagine having him for a father.’ I did not reply; but I thought,
‘A bloke like that would take a bullet for his daughter.’
    When Morrissey took it right up to him about the faults in the yellow paint marks,
suggesting sloppiness, wilful interference, or even conspiracy—when the lawyer seemed
for a few moments to