Free This House of Grief: The Story of a Murder Trial by Helen Garner

detector test.
All they were permitted to hear from Popko on this matter, when he took the stand,
was that Farquharson feared the stress of the police investigation—that it might
push him over the edge into a nervous breakdown.
    Popko was excused from the court with this final remark still hovering in the air.
    …
    Out in the windy courtyard a bunch of journalists stood yarning.
    ‘What’s this about a lie detector test?’ asked a shy young man who said he had not
covered a murder trial before; his eye whites were as pure as a child’s.
    ‘They’re not admissible in Australian courts,’ said a TV reporter.
    ‘Did he have a brain snap?’ said one of the older tabloid blokes. ‘Of a thick, childish
kind?’
    ‘Cindy’s got a bit of style,’ said another. ‘She’s clearly not stupid. People must
have thought, shit, she’ll make mincemeat out of him. How come she had three kids
with a dumb-fuck?’
    ‘Rebound,’ said two of the women in chorus.
    ‘If you ask me,’ said a thoughtful young woman who usually only listened, ‘Cindy’s
testimony’s about the only thing Morrissey’s got going for him, so far.’

CHAPTER 4
    Towards ten o’clock on the night of the crash, two police officers from Major Collision
carried a handheld tape recorder through Emergency at Geelong Hospital and into a
cubicle where Farquharson lay under a sheet, taking the occasional suck of oxygen
through a mask. They introduced themselves—Senior Sergeant Jeffrey Smith, who was
head of Major Collision, and Senior Constable Rohan Courtis—and pressed the record
button.
    At last we were to hear Farquharson speak.
    The voice of the bereaved father is dull and muffled at first, but grows firmer as
he begins to answer the bite-sized questions: who he is, where he lives and works.
Then, when the officers ask him what happened on the road, his voice fills with energy,
gains clarity and strength. He sounds surprisingly young and eager, almost boyish
in his speech patterns.
    ‘I think I just went up the overpass, and I started coughing …then, I don’t remember anything , and then all of a sudden I was in this water , and me son screamed at me—he
opened up the door , and we nose -dived. I shut the door on him, and I tried to get
them out—I tried to get out and get help, thinking I was only just in off the road,
not realising I was…I was trying to get up near the road, get people to hear me,
to help, and people just drove past, I don’t know exactly whereabouts it was, and
it’s just a big blur, like, you know—it happened so quick.’
    ‘Mate.’ Smith, the senior officer, lays it down gently. ‘Do you realise that the
children didn’t—make it? Out of the car?’
    Farquharson expels a short breath, and says in a low, flat tone, ‘I gathered that.’
    His questioners do not pause. What speed was he doing?
    ‘Oh, it was under a hundred.’ His voice brightens again and becomes emphatic. He
offers his credentials as a father, poignantly still in the present tense: he never
drinks with the kids, he never goes over a hundred with them, he’s always very cautious,
he’s never had an accident before.
    Once the policemen twig that Farquharson and his wife have parted, and that he was
bringing the boys home from an access outing, their antennae begin to quiver. How
long has this been going on? Twelve months. What’s his ex-wife’s full name? He gets
it out—Cindy Louise Gambino—but with a heavy sigh. He produces her address and date
of birth, then, like a sick person reminding a visitor he has good reason to be horizontal,
he emits a muffled grunt of discomfort.
    ‘You realise we have to ask these questions,’ says Courtis, the younger officer,
politely, in his light, rapid voice. ‘Is everything sort of okay with you and your
wife? Any dramas?’
    ‘We’re building the house,’ says Farquharson, in a conversational tone. ‘There’s
a few hassles selling it, but other than that, I mean, look, how good does a