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

Author:Helen Garner [Garner, Helen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2014-08-19T14:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 10

Next morning, before the judge and jury entered, Morrissey got up from the bar table and turned his big body to the seats into which the journalists were filing.

‘I know what you want!’ he shouted with a challenging grin, hitching up the shoulders of his black robe. ‘But my client’s not going to be called to give evidence. Nope. Mr Farquharson will not be called to give evidence!’

He swept his eyes with satisfaction along the row of faces. It was a point of honour for us not to betray surprise or disappointment. We took our seats with decorum, and he plumped back into his swivel chair.

Everyone by now was very tired. The group dynamic of the jury seemed to have stabilised. They entered less formally, sometimes with the fading smiles of people who had been laughing, but they arranged themselves always in the same configuration. Was it a pecking order, or an urge to seek comfort in habit?

As he did every day, for the comfort of counsel, the tipstaff set out along the bar table several tall, clear plastic jugs of water. The eye rested with relief on those evenly spaced columns of purity.

…

The first defence witness was a big, smooth-headed, solemn man in his fifties, Dr Christopher Steinfort. He practised in Geelong as a consultant physician in thoracic and general medicine. He was the Director of the Geelong Hospital’s lung function laboratory, and of the Geelong Private Hospital sleep laboratory. Unlike the Crown’s medical experts, Dr Steinfort was across cough syncope in a hands-on way. He was here to challenge the accepted view of it as a condition of almost mythological rarity.

Since 1995 he had been keeping a documented database of everyone he saw in his private practice. A search of the 6500 patients currently on his database, he said, had turned up thirty-odd cases of syncope, and among those, about fifteen of cough syncope.

Already this year several cases of it had come to his attention.

A GP had rung him about a chap in Geelong who, while driving his kids to a football match, was overcome by coughing. His car ran off the road, turned over, flipped on to its side, then flipped back and finished up wedged against a fence post.

One woman was sitting having a cup of tea in front of her TV when she started to cough. Next thing she knew she was flat on the floor, with very nasty bruises to the face. Steinfort had admitted her to hospital. She did have pulmonary fibrosis, he added.

And since the Farquharson case became known, quite a few people had come forward to say they had been diagnosed with cough syncope over the last ten or fifteen years, often after a car accident. Legal Aid had passed them on to Steinfort, who had interviewed them at length. They had all been suffering from a flu-like illness.

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