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

dread.
    Cindy had got through to 000 on her mobile and was rushing back and forth on the
bank in the dark, sobbing and shrieking directions to the operator, but she kept
calling it the Calder Highway instead of the Princes. She must have rung Stephen
Moules earlier. He was already there, stripping off to wade into the dam. The water
was black and terribly cold. Moules took a few steps in from the edge and the bottom
dropped away under his feet. Tony had to grab his arm to save him. This was the moment
they all realised how deep the dam was.
    But not until the police gave their evidence in court would its true dimensions become
clear. It was not an ordinary farm dam with sloping sides. It was the pit left behind
when the road-makers dug out the soil to build the overpass, and it went straight
down for seven metres.
    …
    Tony McClelland stalked past the Farquharson family to the witness stand with a self-possession
that looked like anger. He too had dressed in black. He was thin and tousled, with
sharp cheekbones and high eyes, a face of striking beauty. He had no memory of Shane
offering his mobile to Farquharson, but he recalled that, on the wild drive back
to Winch, Farquharson had mumbled, ‘My wife will kill me.’ When Farquharson announced
to Cindy that the boys were in the water, she cried, ‘Why didn’t you stay there?’
Farquharson replied, ‘They’ve already died.’
    At this, Farquharson lurched forward in the dock and covered his whole face with
his handkerchief.
    At the dam it was McClelland who enfolded the shrieking Cindy in a bear hug and grabbed
the phone from her hand. He gave the 000 operator coherent directions. It seemed
only moments then until the emergency services arrived. Shane moved his car to make
way for the ambulance. He and Tony gave the police their details.
    Then they sat in the car for a little while, Tony McClelland, twenty-three, apprentice
carpenter, and Shane Atkinson, twenty-two, new father, currently unemployed. They
had a smoke, and tried to talk. They told each other that they should have looked
for the car. They were distraught because the kids had died, and because they were
the ones who had taken Farquharson away.
    …
    A big plasma screen had been set up facing the jury, in the narrow space between
the press seats and the pews where the families were sitting. Displayed on this Smart
Board were digital photographs of the road, the paddock and the dam. Mr Morrissey,
cross-examining, asked Atkinson and McClelland to make marks on the images with a
special pen, to show the relative positions of various vehicles on that night of
the crash. Farquharson’s family continued to gaze faithfully at Mr Morrissey, but
the purpose of his complex manoeuvre was a mystery to me.
    The young men too looked baffled, but strove to cooperate. To sketch cars and trucks
and ambulances with their little markers, they had to leave the witness stand, edge
along the aisle, and reach up past the journalists’ heads to the screen. We could
see the gel that messed up their hair, the fineness of their skin, the tremors of
their facial muscles, the details of McClelland’s piercings. On the stand, inarticulate
and awkward, they could have been misread as off-hand. Up close, they radiated a
troubled solemnity, a jaw-grinding guilt and sorrow. When Atkinson was finally excused,
when he trudged out of the court followed by the glares of Farquharson’s sisters,
Louise, the gap-year girl, said to me in a shaky whisper, ‘You feel you should at
least be able to give him a hug.’
    Next morning I opened the Herald Sun and saw a photo of the young men crossing the
road outside the Supreme Court. Tony leads the way, scowling, gripping a bottle of
water in one hand, his knees flexed, his torso bending forward as if he is about
to break into a run. Behind him strides the taller Shane, with a wool beanie pulled
down to his brow, shoulders back, arms along his sides, his face broad and sombre.
They are thin,