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

in the background, low and
persistent, runs the moronic gabbling of the television, its cries and splinterings,
and, once, the sharp blast of a whistle.
    King’s whole purpose, on this visit, was to betray. But there was something strategic,
even masterful, about Farquharson’s fast-rippling monologue, with its strange rhetorical
surges. He sounded like a man talking for his life.
    Yes, he was angry with Cindy when she threw up her nose at him. ‘I’m driving this
good car, and look at you ’—and now that other cunt was driving it. He was mad at
her because she wouldn’t sell the house so he could get a better car. His sisters
knew she used to treat him like shit. But what King didn’t realise, outside the fish-and-chip
shop, was that he and Cindy had sorted it all out, that they had become amicable.
He would never hurt her, and he definitely would never hurt his kids. Never. Why
would someone go from not smacking them to killing them? That’s a big gap. Not one
person thinks he would do that. It was never there—it’s what King has put there.
    King jacks up. ‘It wasn’t what I’ve put there! Come on! Don’t blame it all on bloody
me!’
    All right, Farquharson’s not blaming him. He sees now that he should have confided
in King, that night, about what he was really dreaming of—not revenge on Cindy, but
a whole new moneymaking scheme. He had been thinking for months about buying into
a business, a successful yogurt-importing concern worth $300,000 a year that his
friend Mark in Lorne might be going to cut him in on, but it was still a secret,
so he couldn’t talk about it. If King thinks Farquharson could look in the mother
of his kids’ eyes and tell her a lie and walk away, he’d be an animal. Cindy’s belief
in him, and his psychologist’s, too, is a hundred and fifty per cent. This is what’s
holding him together—this and his own honesty, his integrity to stand and tell. Tell
them the truth. Prove the truth to the end, because that is the truth. They’ve got
nothing on him. The police have already told his psychologist that he doesn’t fit
the profile. When people do things like that, it’s a very planned thing. Anyway,
when people are lying, they fuck up. That lady who poisoned her two kids. They broke
her in two and a half hours. Broke her. Because she couldn’t lie no more. He, on
the contrary, has told the truth from the start. He has been steadfast in the face
of police interrogation; he will not back down. His three interviews—with the paramedics
in the ambulance, with the police in Geelong Emergency, with the detectives at Homicide—were
all exactly the same. Again and again he tells King he has misinterpreted everything.
He is begging him not to mention any of that. He must wipe it clean out of his head.
Wipe it right out. Now.
    ‘I’m going to have to see a counsellor,’ says King, miserably. ‘Because I can’t sleep.
It’s visions. About what happened. What they had to—what they went through. I’ll
have to talk about it, mate.’
    ‘For God’s sake,’ says Farquharson, ‘please don’t mention that stuff. I’m fearing
you’re going to say something to incriminate me. The police’ll say, “We’ve interviewed
Greg King, he says you’re all right, but now he’s gone to a counsellor, and the counsellor’s
said this, and this, and this.” And that drags you into it. That’s what you don’t
want. I’d have to call Mark and say, “Remember I had a conversation about buying
a business?” It goes to another level that’s totally irrelevant.’
    King makes as if to leave, but Farquharson has him by the sleeve. He’s had a freak
accident, a tragic accident, and now he’s got to live with it. He’s not lying. What
happened to him is common. Plenty of people have blacked out at the wheel. The trauma
team at the hospital all told him there was nothing he could have done. He’s not
Superman. Even his counsellor’s said to him he’s got to stop blaming himself.