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

people grieving together for
their lost children, in an abyss of suffering where notions of guilt and innocence
have no purchase.
    …
    No sooner had we steadied ourselves after the spectacle of Cindy Gambino’s loyalty
to the husband she was no longer in love with, than the prosecution called to the
stand her new partner—and father of her eleven-month-old son, Hezekiah—Stephen Moules.
    He faced Rapke’s junior, Amanda Forrester, in a grey suit, lavender shirt, and white
tie. His hair was thick and fair. He had an upright posture, and a smooth, open face
with the all-seasons tan of the outdoor worker. I was not the only woman in the court
who shot at Farquharson a furtive glance of comparison. He sat with shoulders slumped
and eyes downcast.
    Moules described himself to the court as a former concreter turned full-time father.
The water in the glass he sipped from trembled; but still he gave off that little
buzz of glamour peculiar to the Australian tradie. Surely the month of September
2004, when the Farquharsons hired him to pour the slab of their new house, had marked
the beginning of a period of exhilaration and fantasy for Gambino, while to Farquharson
it must have brought nothing but suspicion, jealousy and pain.
    Everything Moules said about himself suggested a figure of resolute virtue. His own
family may have collapsed into chaos, but he seemed determined to haul it back to
the light, and to establish himself in full view as a decent citizen. When the Farquharsons
engaged him, he already knew their eldest, Jai, from the Cub Scout troupe he led.
He was an active member of the Bayside Christian Church, an evangelical outfit formerly
known as the Assemblies of God, and taught Sunday School there. The name of his concreting
company was God’s Creations.
    His initial dealings with the Farquharsons, he said, were only ‘a business relationship’.
But, having recently watched a bunch of blokes pour a concrete slab in my own backyard,
I was equipped to imagine the effect of this sight on a young woman in Cindy Farquharson’s
stifling situation. A concrete pour is a dramatic process. It demands skill, speed,
strength, and the confident handling of machinery; and it is so intensely, symbolically
masculine that every woman and boy in the vicinity is drawn to it in excited respect.
Spellbound on the back veranda between my two small grandsons, I remembered Camille Paglia’s coat-trailing remark that if women were running the world, we’d still be
living in grass huts. Could it be that Farquharson’s days as a husband were numbered
before that slab had set?
    …
    Late in 2004 Gambino offered, in a neighbourly spirit, to pick up Moules’ two boys
from school in the afternoons and look after them at her place until he finished
work. Moules saw no harm in it, and was grateful for the help. It made me flinch
to think of Farquharson stumping home sore-footed from his cleaning job, only to
find his house thundering with another man’s kids and his wife flushed and enlivened
by her new friendship with their father.
    Across the dying months of the marriage, though, Farquharson naively confided in
Moules his anxiety and distress. Even after his wife had called the whole thing off
and he had moved back to his father’s—which chanced to be only five doors along from
the house Moules was renting—Farquharson would often turn up at Moules’ place looking
for somebody to talk to. He took the break-up very hard. He was distraught when Cindy
did not want to reconcile. ‘He did not know what to do,’ said Moules, ‘in any way,
shape or form.’ Moules ran a Christian line with him. He ‘counselled’ him on how
to get his marriage back together. ‘I tried to sort of steer him,’ he said, miming
the two-handed motion of driving a car. He gave Farquharson advice both spiritual
and worldly, and recommended he see a counsellor from Bayside Christian Church. Finally
he realised his efforts were falling on deaf ears. He gave