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

idea it was deep enough for a car to vanish into it without
leaving so much as a bubble. He stood up in the doorframe of his Commodore and strained
for a better view of the water. He and Tony walked off the road as far as the fence.
The night was very dark, but dry and clear. Every time a truck roared down the overpass,
they followed the sweep of its headlights to scan the dam’s surface. The water looked
like glass. Surely nothing had happened here.
    Shane had credit on his mobile. He tried to give it to the man so he could ring the
ambulance, the police. The man refused. Again and again he begged them to take him
to Cindy’s.
    ‘I’m not going anywhere,’ said Shane, ‘if you’ve just killed your kids! We’re two
skinny little cunts—we can get in the water and try to swim down!’
    But the man kept saying, ‘probably a hundred times, “No, don’t go down there. It’s
too late. They’re already gone. I’ll just have to go back and tell Cindy.”’
    Farquharson, who had wept helplessly right through the terrible accusations of the
prosecutor’s opening address—‘a shockingly wicked and callous act’—listened to all
this in the dock with his head tilted and his small eyes narrowed in a sceptical
expression.
    ‘And,’ said Ms Forrester gently, ‘did you take him back to Cindy?’
    In the front row of the public seats, accompanied by their quiet husbands, Farquharson’s
sisters sat still, their mouths stiffly downturned.
    Shane Atkinson hung his head. ‘Yes,’ he said, in a low, miserable voice. ‘I done
the stupidest thing of my whole life, and I did.’
    Shane made the sodden man sit beside him in the front, with Tony in the back ‘so
he could punch him in the head if he went nuts’. He spun the car round and headed
back to Winchelsea. Just as they reached the outskirts of the town, Shane flicked
on the interior light and took a proper look at their passenger. The penny dropped.
It was Robbie Farquharson. Since Shane was a little fellow, he had seen Robbie mowing
people’s grass and driving the same sort of Commodore as Shane had now, except that
Shane’s had mag wheels. And suddenly he twigged which Cindy he was raving about,
this wife he was so keen to see—Cindy Farquharson, his ex, who everyone in Winch
knew was on with another bloke, Stephen Moules.
    They pulled into Cindy’s drive, all three men panicking and yelling. Farquharson
and Shane ran to the back doorstep and shouted for Cindy. One of Stephen Moules’
kids came to the screen door. Cindy followed him. Where was Rob’s car? Where were
the kids?
    Farquharson gave it to her straight. There’d been an accident. He’d killed the kids.
Drowned them. He’d tried to get them out, but he couldn’t. Cindy started to scream.
She called him ‘a fucking cunt’. She went to hit him. Shane stepped between her and
Farquharson and tried to take her in his arms. Then he leapt back into his car and
drove so fast to the police station that when he pulled up outside he did a doughnut.
    The station was locked. He ran to the sergeant’s house next door. Nobody home.
    By now every man and his dog was out on the street. Somebody dialled 000 and Shane
told the ambulance where the car had gone into the water. A bloke called Speedy from
the State Emergency Service rushed off to get his truck. Shane got into his car with
Tony and a couple of strangers who had jumped in. He drove back to Cindy’s but her
car was gone, and so was she, with Farquharson and the kid from the kitchen door.
Shane roared out on to the highway.
    He pulled up near the overpass. Farquharson was standing against the fence, nodding,
lurching, wheezing. He was ‘smoking cigarette after cigarette’, and begged the new
arrivals for another. Tony McClelland threw a whole packet at him, climbed through
the fence and ran stumbling across the dark paddock. Shane hung back. ‘I didn’t wanna
go near the dam,’ he told the court, hanging his head as if ashamed of his