by Helen Garner
‘Listen,’ said Hains. ‘There’s only one thing that’d change anything – if we could get Joe back. We all know that can’t happen. So you gotta keep cool in there. It’s what Joe would’ve wanted.’
‘I’ll keep cool,’ muttered the young man.
‘I know you will, mate. I know you will.’
I moved away, to let them talk in private. As I shifted my feminine sensibilities out of range, the detective’s language coarsened. The boy stood nodding, nodding, twisting his mouth, tearing the smoke from his cigarette in great gulps.
What Joe would have wanted. It was only rhetoric. No one can know what punishment Joe would have thought fitting – the man who more than anyone, except her parents, had felt for his killer and pitied her, as she thrashed about in the cage of her own nature.
With what an urgent rush Anu Singh and her guard entered the court! They moved differently from ordinary people – a disturbance, a commotion in the air, and suddenly they were there. Behind me one of her family sighed as she whisked past them and seated herself. She was dressed in a charcoal trouser suit with a fitted jacket. Her toes, their nails glowing with dark red polish, peeped out of her high, strappy black sandals. Her hair in its thick club was banded in black. In one hand she held a dark blue handkerchief. Despite her sophisticated heels, her feet were placed neatly side by side, like a good little girl’s.
The prosecutor who had conducted the Crown case, Terry Golding, was absent today. His job would be done by the Director of Public Prosecutions himself, Richard Refshauge, a tall, slender man in his forties with fair curly hair and long patrician cheeks.
I could not imagine what further material might be dredged up, but it turned out that three more people had something to say. As soon as Justice Crispin took his place, the Crown called the first of them, a man called Michael Ryan, a custodial officer at the Belconnen Remand Centre.
It appeared that Mr Ryan had ‘come to know’ Anu Singh at Belconnen.
‘You see them every day,’ he said. ‘You wake ’em, you put ’em to bed, you feed ’em, you talk to ’em . . .’
One day Anu Singh had handed him a letter in the yard. He skimmed the first few lines and stuck it in his pocket, then later transferred it to his locker without reading it. From his locker it went, still unread, with other unsorted stuff to his garage, until a domestic clean-up in April 1999, when he had found it and read it properly at last. The next day he handed it to the police.
The five large, closely-written sheets were handed up to Justice Crispin. While he perused them, leaning his head on his hand, I glanced behind me and noticed that Anthony Cinque, instead of sitting beside his parents, was occupying the very end seat of the back row of the gallery, right next to Anu Singh’s mother. I flinched at the thought of the psychic charge that must be zinging between them.
Justice Crispin explained that the letter was one Anu Singh had written, in some distress, shortly after certain other letters had been seized from her Belconnen locker and admitted as evidence in her trial. She believed that without the seized letters, which were damning, the Crown would not have had a case; in the letter now in the judge’s hands, she had asked Custodial Officer Ryan to help her commit suicide.
This letter, said Mr Refshauge, was relevant to her sentencing in that it showed such a striking absence of remorse. Mr Pappas claimed rather wildly that just because no remorse was expressed didn’t mean that no remorse was felt. ‘A young woman,’ insisted Refshauge, ‘who has graduated Bachelor of Economics, who has arrived at final year in law, who has been highly successful in her academic and social studies, but who suffers from a personality disorder and a depressive illness, and who writes that letter, is not remorseful.’
The judge, with his head in his hands, pored over the letter. Anu Singh’s mother sat in the back row beside the murdered man’s brother. One would have described her as elegant had she not looked so traumatised. Her eyes were closed. Her tired face was tilted back on an angle of dumb endurance. The only sound in the room was the low roar of the air-conditioning. At last Crispin spoke. Nothing was said in the letter about remorse, and its contents were relevant – but it was not dated, and since he had admitted the earlier letters, written closer to the time of the offence, out it went, and out of the court went Custodial Officer Ryan.
The second person to give evidence was a Senior Parole Officer called Naomi Buick, a slender, fragile-looking blonde in her forties. She read aloud her report, which was based on over five hours of interviews with Anu Singh, and sketched briefly a fresh version of Singh’s life story, adding a sprinkling of emotional details: during her affair with Simon Walsh, for example, she had become pregnant and had a termination, which had been ‘traumatic’ for her. ‘Joe Cinque understood the cultural situation with her parents. She “misses him like crazy”. He was possessive, constantly checking her whereabouts; she did not find this intrusive.’ I remembered Mrs Cinque’s complaints about the constant, driven, almost fanatical use of the telephone that had characterised their relationship right from the start. Perhaps they had been mutually obsessed, mutually anxious and distrustful; perhaps this was what they had thought of as love.
The account of her drug history that Anu Singh had given the parole officer was alarming. She had started in year ten with cannabis and alcohol, then at university moved on to acid, cocaine and speed. By June 1995, when she ended her relationship with Simon Walsh, she was taking drugs daily. She also used ecstasy and crystal meth, which caused hallucinations. Whenever she visited her parents (and Joe’s parents too, I thought, recalling the twitchy scene on the verandah that Mrs Cinque had described to me) she ceased to use drugs; withdrawing had brought on depression – and perhaps, I wondered, also the behaviour that her father had found disturbing on her visits home: the pacing, the crying, the skin-pulling, the sleeplessness).
In 1996 she had entered a cycle of bingeing and purging. This was when she had started taking the ipecac. She had been ‘too headstrong’ to accept her parents’ advice about getting psychiatric treatment. In custody, though, she had been taking a daily dose of Zoloft, and, in the words of the parole officer, ‘she feels freer now between four walls than she ever has before’. Her family had been visiting her in Belconnen every second weekend, and she spoke to her mother every day on the phone.
‘She says,’ continued the parole officer, ‘that she will still need to grieve for Mr Cinque.’
At this Mrs Cinque uttered a short sound of protest.
‘She misses the victim and says that if this hadn’t happened she would be married to him.
‘She wants to write to Joe’s parents.’
During her eighteen months in Belconnen Remand Centre, where male and female detainees are permitted social contact, Anu Singh had had ‘three romantic attachments’. Only one of these, she told the parole officer, was ‘of any significance’. The officer found Singh to be ‘an engaging, talkative, highly intelligent, educated young woman, but narcissistic. It is difficult to evaluate her expressions of remorse. She is self-absorbed and shows a paucity of personal resources.’
The Crown tendered a Victim Impact Statement written by Mrs Cinque. Mr Pappas, with a thoroughness that struck me as hard-boiled, objected to ‘a large portion of that document’. Justice Crispin scanned it in silence, and admitted the document in its entirety, but I felt cheated by the fact that it was not read out loud. Journalists would not be able to quote from it as they would, if they chose, from the parole officer’s potted history of Anu Singh’s hard times. Oh, if only Maria Cinque could read out the statement in her beautiful accent, to show her strength of character, to give voice to her family’s sorrow and rage in a public forum. I glanced at her. She sat silenced in the front row.
Now the defence called Dr Fatma Hadiye Lowden, a consultant psychiatrist whose qualifications were gained in Turkey and Australia. She was a blonde in her forties, pleasant-faced, broad in the beam, wearing a tailored jacket and calf-length skirt. The Canberra winter was chilly, yet under h
er high-heeled black sandals her legs and feet, like the prisoner’s, were bare.
She had made nineteen professional visits to Anu Singh in Belconnen Remand Centre, she said, flashing her a smile across the court. At their first meeting, Singh had presented as superficial, with great difficulty in expressing emotion. Since then, however, Dr Lowden had established greater trust with her patient, who had what was called ‘an as if personality’: she was able to put up a good facade. Dr Lowden had diagnosed ‘a borderline personality disorder which was complicated by either an eating disorder, or depression, or substance abuse, and maybe brief psychotic episodes’.
The psychiatrist, too, depicted Singh as ‘very upset’ about Joe Cinque, full of loss and remorse, and sure that if only she had accepted treatment earlier, she would now be ‘happily married’ and getting on with her life. Dr Lowden had asked her, as part of her treatment, to keep a diary. Often Anu Singh was so intensely emotionally distressed that she could barely read aloud to the doctor from this journal. The parts of it that made her ‘choke up’ were those to do with her pain, guilt and remorse ‘about what happened’.
Anu Singh would benefit, said Dr Lowden, from extended and intensive psychotherapy. Three to five years was the period over which she would require medication for her depression, that is, the biological part of her condition; and alongside that, she needed at least seven years, maybe more, of psychotherapy.
‘The core of the whole tragedy,’ said Dr Lowden, ‘is that due to her mental state she was not able to accept treatment. She is now ready. Given what happened to her, I suggest three to six months of hospital treatment. I believe she will recover from her condition.’ She would not, the doctor said, be a danger to herself or others in the future.
Maria Cinque, filing up the carpeted stairs for the lunch break, muttered to me, ‘Another one, eh. Another big pay cheque. This is all an act. The judge has already made his decision.’
D-C Hains pulled papers and tobacco from a pouch as he walked out the glass front doors of the building. He grinned at me. ‘What do you reckon?’
‘I don’t know how the Cinques can sit there and take it.’
‘Yes, there’s certainly something wrong with her,’ he said, skilfully composing a cigarette. ‘I’d be the first to admit that.’ He stopped on the path, took a big, grateful drag on his rolly, and laughed, emitting a column of smoke. ‘I understand that the Cinques want revenge. I don’t believe in it, of course. I know you can’t get it. But still – if anyone hurt my son . . .’
While we were talking, Anthony Cinque in his sunglasses was sitting on the ground with his knees bent to his chest and his shoulders pressed against the pale grey outer wall of the Supreme Court. He too was smoking, desperately, as if his life depended on it. What was he to do? Where was he to put himself? His pain and loneliness were terrible to see.
In a cafe at lunchtime I ran into one of the young journalists. We compared notes. Her sympathy for Anu Singh had lessened further, if that were possible. ‘What she needs is a good kick up the arse. And her silly friends. It was all a big game.’ She put on a thrilled, girlish, singsong voice: ‘Anu’s having a muuuurder party! Oooooh!’
‘I might write a book about it.’
‘You’re going to write a book? About that?’ She jerked her thumb at the court across the road. I nodded. She laughed scornfully. ‘Huh. Anu’ll love that.’
Under cross-examination by Mr Refshauge, Dr Lowden continued to avoid using the simple expression ‘what she did’. Again and again, with a spontaneous discretion, she dodged it.
‘She has never had time,’ said the psychiatrist, ‘to deal with what happened. Once the legal part is over, that will be the hardest time for her – coming to terms with what happened in her life. Exactly what happened on that day in 1997 she described to me as “a blur”. The bit she could remember was Joe gasping for air and she was trying to do CPR and there was blood everywhere, and eventually she rang an ambulance and –’
Mrs Cinque made a wordless sound of contempt.
‘At that session she was in tears, telling me how much she misses Joe – how much she wished this didn’t happen in her life. She told me about her constant thoughts of him, her sense of guilt and self-deprecation.’
Justice Crispin listened faithfully, his wigged head leaning low on his hand, his face solemn and thought-worn.
Anu Singh had not yet acknowledged to her psychiatrist that she had injected Joe Cinque with heroin and killed him. ‘There’s a difference,’ said Dr Lowden, ‘between logically accepting what happened and emotionally coming to terms with it. I expect to work on that a lot more, to get to the core of what happened.’ She made a delicate gesture, touching the pads of her thumb and forefinger together, as if deftly taking hold of a tiny, elusive thing.
The psychiatrist was warm, she was motherly, she was professional. The way she spoke about her patient was tinged with possessiveness. ‘I think she trusts me,’ she said earnestly, and a little flicker of spite ran through me: So you have gained the trust of this ‘witch’. You have tamed a wild, glamorous creature whom others fear and see as evil. You are not afraid of her. She will peck grain from your hand.
She told the court about a ‘love poem’ that Anu Singh had written about ‘very tender important moments’ with Joe, her love and longing for him, and the meaning of their relationship to her. ‘She couldn’t read it. She asked me to read it out. As soon as we scratch the surface, great emotional distress is underneath. She talked about her nightmares. Joe is always there. In one dream she found out that Joe was married to another girl – major distress and sense of loss, and then tears again.’
‘Huh,’ said Mrs Cinque loudly.
When Mr Refshauge pressed her for examples of remorse, however, Dr Lowden was obliged to paint with a very broad brush. She interpreted as remorse the fact that Anu Singh missed Joe very much, that ‘never a minute passes without her thinking of him’, that she wished she had had psychiatric treatment before ‘all these things got out of hand’.
‘“Remorse”?’ said Mr Refshauge. ‘In that she regrets that he is no longer here? Has she ever indicated what she might do as a result of these expressions of loss, guilt or remorse?’
‘She discussed with me writing a letter to Joe’s parents,’ said Dr Lowden. ‘ I supported her in this. I don’t know if she’s actually written it.’
Mrs Cinque shook her head.
‘She felt that Joe’s parents were so angry with her that they would tear it up or not even read it. But she was really aware of the pain caused to the family.’
When Mr Refshauge asked Dr Lowden to explain how Anu Singh’s mental abnormality had caused the offence she was guilty of, the psychiatrist shifted up a gear. ‘If she didn’t have this disorder,’ she declared, ‘she wouldn’t have ended up in this predicament. It’s well known that ten to fifteen per cent of people who suffer from this condition end up killing themselves. I don’t think anyone else in this room’ – the pretty doctor turned her head and cast a glance at the people in the public gallery – ‘would like to be in her shoes.’
Mrs Cinque uttered a loud, guttural scoffing sound.
‘Is there a risk,’ asked Refshauge, ‘that she will reoffend?’
Dr Lowden turned her torso forty-five degrees clockwise, and addressed her fervent argument not only to the judge but to everyone in the court. ‘Let’s say she gets into drugs again,’ she said, ‘and if she’s suffering from severe depression – there’s always a ten per cent risk. But anyone in this room, if they suffered from borderline personality disorder, if they had episodes of depression, if they had substance abuse – every single one of us would have that risk! We all carry that risk, if we’re suffering from that condition!’
The psychiatrist had picked up the antagonistic vibe. She was challenging our hostility, trying to crack us open: she was fighting to keep her patient out of prison. But people in the gallery sank lower in their seats. Some folded their arms across their chests a
nd scowled at her under their brows. Mrs Cinque jutted her jaw. Her cheeks went hollow, and her face took on a bitter stubbornness.
The pitch of Dr Lowden’s voice rose. She sounded almost tearful. ‘This person is very severely ill. Being in gaol is like being constantly punished for being ill. Remand is not a therapeutic environment. If she’d come to me as a patient before these things happened, I would certainly have admitted her. I’m telling you!’ She swung back to the judge and threw out both hands to him, arms wide, in a passionate gesture of supplication. ‘She is severely ill! She needs treatment in the structured environment that a hospital provides – not a gaol! She was physically attacked at the Remand Centre, but she wouldn’t tell anyone about it – because in that culture –’
‘Objection!’ cried Mr Refshauge.
Dr Lowden sat back, flushed and unhappy. Again I thought how lucky Anu Singh was in not being at the mercy of a jury. If the body language of the listeners in the gallery was anything to go by, the psychiatrist’s ardent plea might have fallen on deaf ears; perhaps it would even have further hardened hearts already closed and locked against her.
Mr Pappas argued vigorously for a minimum sentence that would allow rehabilitation. ‘She accepts the tragedy of what she has done. This was not a man she disliked. This was a man whom she had planned to marry.’
Mr Refshauge invited Justice Crispin to impose a severe penalty. He asked the judge not to throw up his hands – not to decide that because nothing would bring back Joe Cinque, he would focus on rehabilitation. Hospitalisation, as proposed by Dr Lowden, would not do. The outrage of the community must be expressed. The taking of a human life, he said, was the ultimate crime, and there must be denunciation of it in the sentence.
By now Mr Cinque’s head was down on his arms, which were outstretched over the fence of the gallery. Beside him his wife was weeping.
