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

drifting fog. The murkily lit rescue
attempt was spread out on the right-hand side of the road. He parked, and set about
his task: to survey the scene and take photos of it.
    The only tyre prints he found in the roadside gravel were the ones that Sergeant
Exton, his boss, had already marked with the dashes of yellow paint. With his torch
Courtis followed the pair of rolling prints that ran through the long grass down
to the edge of the water. Only when he looked back up towards the road did he notice
that the angle of Exton’s paint marks was not right: it did not match up precisely
with the angle of the rolling prints.
    Here Courtis struck a snag. While he was trying to set up a new piece of surveying
equipment, a Riegl 3D laser scanner, he bent one of the fine prongs on its cable.
Because he didn’t have a spare cable, he packed up the Riegl and used instead Major
Collision’s older and more familiar device, the geodimeter, sometimes known as George.
    On the stand, the young police officer battled to express in ordinary language the
digital and mechanical capabilities of the Riegl scanner and the geodimeter. His
testimony was studded with terms like infrared , dot-to-dot , prism , raw data and numerical
codes . The jurors were given small bound books of photos that Rapke referred to by
numbers, but in the press seats, lacking a clear view of the visual aids and having
to follow by ear, we stumbled behind.
    When Morrissey rose to cross-examine, the atmosphere of the court sagged again into
a sort of irritable misery. No wonder Courtis’s notes had been quivering. He was
grilled on why he had not measured the road’s camber and crossfall, on whether vehicles
necessarily left tyre prints on bitumen or in gravel, on the accuracy of his coding
of the marks he claimed to have seen in gravel and through grass. Morrissey suggested
that Courtis was ill-trained and incompetent—‘You’re not a professional surveyor
by any means, are you? You’re a professional policeman’—and hinted that this was
why he had subsequently been transferred from Major Collision to the Child Sexual
Offences and Child Abuse Unit. Pressed to agree that the path of the rolling prints
was ‘a smooth arc without any noticeable wiggles in it—more or less a straight line
but bending somewhat to the right’, Courtis would go no further than to say, ‘Yes,
there was a curve in it.’
    Morrissey’s aim seemed to be to establish that there was a lot of traffic in the
area that night, that any one of those vehicles might have left the disputed tyre
mark in the gravel, and that the police reconstruction of the scene, based on its
admittedly imperfect paint marks, was worthless. But his cross-examination induced
a crazed feeling of restlessness and frustration. Round and round it went, a flood
of detail without graspable shape or direction, except in its constant return to
the painfully familiar matter of Sergeant Exton’s yellow paint marks. Morrissey kept
starting a sentence with the word ‘now’, as if about to bring his line of questioning
around in a meaningful curve, but he never reached resolution. There was no relief.
My mind lost its grip and slid away into reverie.
    ‘Maybe he thinks,’ whispered Louise, ‘that if he drags this out long enough the jury
will forget that tape.’
    Indeed, the Emergency interview had made an impression so deeply disturbing that
everything coming after it seemed to be beside the point. By now, close to the end
of the third week of the trial, the very words ‘yellow paint marks’ provoked a Pavlovian
response. The jurors glazed over and turned sullen. They rested their chins on their
fists. Their eyelids drooped. Their necks grew loose with boredom; they were limp
with it, barely able to hold themselves erect. Once I glanced over and saw four of
them in a row, their heads dropped on the same protesting angle towards their left
shoulders, like tulips dying in a vase.
    And hour after hour, as he laboured,