This House of Grief by Helen Garner
Author:Helen Garner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2014-08-26T16:00:00+00:00
CHAPTER 9
Seconds. That was all it took for Farquharson’s car to veer off the wrong side of the highway, flatten an old timber-and-wire fence, cross a stretch of paddock, clip a tree and plunge into the dam. What more could be said about that splinter of time?
The young reconstructionist, Acting Sergeant Glen Urquhart, took the stand equipped with a protractor and a calculator the size of a shoe. He was one of Major Collision’s civil engineers, tall, fair and broad-shouldered, with an almost comically noble head and reasonable expression.
‘He looks like Chris Grant,’ I whispered to Louise.
‘Who?’
‘Western Bulldogs.’
She shrugged. Like Jai, Tyler and Bailey, she followed the Bombers.
Urquhart had got to the dam just after midnight and, while the car was still submerged, had conducted his own torch-light walk-through of the scene. On the bitumen he found no marks of skidding or yawing that would indicate the path of a car that had been out of control. In the grass between the roadside and the dam he spotted the pair of tyre marks already familiar to us—rolling prints, with no sign of the churning or ploughing that emergency braking or loss of steering control would have caused. He traced the prints to the dam’s bank, where headlight debris and a broken branch showed him that the vehicle had clipped a tree on its way into the water.
Back up at the roadside he saw the famous yellow marks that Sergeant Exton had sprayed in the gravel at the point where the car was thought to have left the road. The angle of these marks struck Urquhart as too great, but he thought their position was correct, and concluded that the car must have veered off the road at a sharp angle.
He saw the car when it was hauled out of the water. He noted the positions and the condition of its various controls: ignition off, handbrake off, heater off, headlights off. His listing of these details, in the court’s deep silence, was like a series of calm blows.
He paused and let out a long breath through tubed lips.
He saw the three dead children. He described the postures in which they lay. The only sound, apart from his voice, was a terrible sob, almost a muffled scream, from Cindy Gambino. One of the women jurors glanced across at her, her face creased with distress. Kerri Huntington rubbed her eyes with the flat of her hand. Gambino, her mouth twisting, leaned towards Moules, rested against his shoulder, his chest. She was almost in his arms.
Next, with the aim of producing a three-dimensional scale plan of the scene, Urquhart instructed Senior Constable Courtis to set about measuring it, using a piece of equipment called a total survey station or geodimeter.
Three weeks later Urquhart drove down the overpass in a car of the same model as Farquharson’s—a 1990 VN Commodore, whose
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