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

dark-clad figures with haunted eyes: two souls fleeing before the
blast.
    …
    Farquharson may not have plunged into the water to search for his boys, but other
men did.
    One of the Winchelsea SES members who headed for the dam as soon as Shane Atkinson
raised the alarm had rushed out the door barefoot in track pants and a singlet. His
level-headed wife gathered up an armload of dry clothes and towels, and drove out the highway after him. She told the court that she pulled up beside the dam and saw
Farquharson standing on his own, soaking wet, with a blanket round him. ‘Robbie!’
she said. ‘It’s not you?’ She threw her arms around him and he began to sob. Then
he stepped back and looked her in the eye. He said, ‘I’ve had this flu. I had a coughing
fit and blacked out. Next thing I knew, the car was filling up with water.’ He told
her he had tried and failed to get the kids out. Then he said, ‘How can I live with
this? It should have been me.’
    Two volunteer fire-fighters from the Country Fire Authority, one of them a high-school
student of sixteen, took the stand. They had arrived at the dam towards 8 p.m. and
heard a woman sobbing somewhere in the dark, crying out that she would not be able
to bury her children. They stumbled round with their torches, following tyre marks
in the grass, looking for the spot where the car had gone in. Was it here, where
a piece of a tree had been snapped off and broken glass was scattered on the ground?
By then a police chopper was hovering over the dam, shining a spotlight on to its
surface. There was no sign of the car. Someone would have to get into the water.
    Tethered by ropes to other firemen, the two CFA volunteers and the owner of the property
waded into the dam. Not far from the edge, the bottom drastically dropped away. They
began to swim. The water was shockingly cold. They put their heads under and were
blinded by murk. They could not feel the bottom with their feet. Had the car floated
before it sank? Had it drifted sideways? Without equipment, shallow diving was the
best they could do. They floundered about in the water for fifteen minutes, gasping
and shivering, until the paramedics shouted at them to get out. Of the car they found
no trace.
    …
    When the paramedics had pulled up on the shoulder of the road, they found Farquharson
standing near the fence, wet through, with a blanket round his shoulders. His skin
was cold and he was shivering. His pulse rate was up, his blood pressure normal.
Neither of his lungs was wheezing or crackling. They asked him to cough. He brought
up no phlegm. Breathalysed, he blew zero. He had no history of blackouts, he said,
but had had a dry cough for the past few days.
    He told the paramedics that his oldest son had opened the door, causing the car to
fill up with water and sink; that he himself had got out, flagged down a vehicle,
and gone to Winch to tell the police and his ex-wife what had happened.
    On the drive to Geelong Hospital the paramedics considered that their patient was
more stunned than in shock. They heard him give vent to several more unproductive
coughs. As the ambulance sped along the dark road, Farquharson, from his stretcher
in the back, asked one of the paramedics, ‘Did I do the right thing? How am I going
to live with myself after all this has happened?’ Perhaps these questions were merely
philosophical. Perhaps Farquharson was murmuring to himself. Either way, the paramedic
in the witness box, badged and epauletted in his dark blue uniform, did not say whether
he had replied or tried to offer comfort. He told the court only that Farquharson
then fell silent, and lay in the ambulance shaking his head.
    …
    Just across Lonsdale Street from the Supreme Court, outside the glass façade of the
County Court, stands a shiny metal caravan that houses an espresso machine and a
pair of gun baristas. Everyone from the world of the law seems to patronise it: the
loftiest silk in wig and rosette; Homicide