by Helen Garner
The Raos were a rather unworldly family, the young man told me – a pious family. There was no smoking, no drinking, in their house. Madhavi herself, he said, had an endearingly formal way of speaking, ‘without contractions or slang – like she’ll say, “I was interested to hear the latest album by the Beastie Boys, so I approached the store with the intention of purchasing it”.’ He laughed affectionately.
Everything he said was suffused with a protective tenderness. ‘If your daughter was mixed up in a thing like this, would you want a book to be written about it?’
I said nothing. I dropped my pencil and listened to his version of another family distorted, shamed, brought low. I was affected by it. What further hurt might I inflict? What right did I have?
Yet surely if you kill someone – if you are intimately involved in a situation that ends in a death – you forfeit your right to a polite turning away. You have blazed your way into the collective awareness. The rest of us have to think about you. We need to work out what you mean, what should be done about you.
How could I unpick the ethics of it? It was a confused drive that had been firing me, so far – first, curiosity, then a repelled fascination – even an identification – with Anu Singh; then, as I came to know the Cinques, a contagion of horrified grief.
Now, though, while the winter afternoon faded outside and the clever young man’s voice murmured urgently on and on in my ear, the urge to witness and to understand drained sadly out of me. It was replaced by fear.
‘You think that book about sexual harassment got you into trouble?’ he said. ‘This would be much, much worse. The person who’s murdered stays the same, or even gets better – becomes a martyr. But the person who’s killed somebody goes on and on being speculated about.’
After we hung up, I went out into the cold kitchen. It was already dark. From the high window I could see the lights of a ship, way out at sea. While I washed and stripped a bunch of spinach, I tried to think with purpose. I had a stubborn attachment to the story. I did not want to put it down. I wondered if I could find ways to fictionalise the events, to disguise the characters and their ethnic groups, to break the whole mess of it down into a series of short –
But wait. Hang on a minute.
Joe Cinque was murdered. Justice Crispin in his judgement had declared it manslaughter, but in his slip of the tongue from the bench that day, and in the speech of any ordinary person, what Anu Singh had done was called murder. And not a spontaneous stroke of revenge for cruelty or betrayal or abuse, but a carefully planned killing. His family was smashed: his brother driven half mad, his parents’ hearts broken and trampled, their future hopes flung into outer darkness.
At the end of every argument, every doubt, stood the fundamental fact of the matter.
Joe Cinque is dead.
In the third week of July 1999 I went back to Canberra, to read the transcripts of the trials in the office of the Director of Public Prosecutions.
Australians used to love to joke about the awfulness of their capital city, its social bleakness, its provinciality, its grandiose, curvaceous street design in which the visitor strives in vain to orient himself. The jolly Croatian who drove me to Sydney airport that morning told me, when he heard my destination, that he and his wife had made a one-day visit to Canberra in the early 1960s, to contemplate it as a possible place to live: ‘But the streets were empty! Like there has been a war, but no bombs! Only the gas!’
Because I had spent many happy student holidays in Canberra in the 1960s, as the guest of a family I was deeply fond of, I had always loved the place, found it beautiful with its cloudless skies and dry air, and looked forward to every visit; but now, with my new sombre purpose, it seemed to change its nature. When I sprang into the back seat of a taxi, in my heavy overcoat and minus my suitcase which, on the short flight from Sydney, the airline had managed to mislay, the middle-aged driver ignored my greeting and barked at me, ‘Do up yer seatbelt!’
‘Oh!’ I said, flustered and complying at once. ‘Sorry!’
He took off towards the city. ‘If you’re caught,’ he said, ‘it’ll be an instant fine of $750.’
‘Yikes!’ I said. ‘You wouldn’t want that to happen!’
‘Don’t worry,’ he said in a sour, ominous tone. ‘It wouldn’t be me who’d have to pay. It’s not my responsibility. It’s yours. You’d have to pay the fine. And that’s only fair.’
I subsided in my seat, irritated, and looked out the window; but the driver, having crushed my fleeting joie de vivre, now took it on himself to play the tour guide. He ground out between his narrow lips a list of statistics, which continued all the way to town, to the effect that Canberra was cleaner, better policed, less polluted ‘in air or water’, culturally richer, and athletically better equipped ‘than any other capital city in Australia – in the world’. Long after I had ceased to make even the most perfunctory response he droned on and on, in an aggressive and huffy tone, as if defending his city against some disobliging remark I might be about to make. What on earth was biting the fellow? Was it because I had come from Sydney? Or because I had got into the back seat instead of taking the egalitarian spot up front? Sitting behind him with my arms folded, I grew more and more cranky. His litany, thickly studded with percentages of new house construction, kilometres of bike track and the like, was so endless, tedious and smug that I could barely control a desire to cut across it with my own catalogue of facts: ‘Listen, pal – Canberra is also the hard drug capital of Australia. Heroin is cheaper and more readily available here than in any other city. Its suburb of Fyshwick is the porn video supplier to the nation. There are more bored, under-occupied tertiary graduates here than anywhere else in the country. Plus, the people who empty the syringe disposal units have stated that the fullest ones are to be found in your famous Parliament House. So shut up and drive, you gormless provincial bore.’
I maintained an icy silence till we reached Civic, then said, ‘Drop me at the Department of Public Prosecutions, please. Do you know where it is?’
‘Not exactly, no.’
‘It’s near the Law Courts. In the Reserve Bank Building. Do you know where the Reserve Bank is?’
‘Of course I know where the Reserve Bank is,’ he said, scrambling to recover his advantage. ‘Huh. Funny place to have the Department of Public Prosecutions.’
We pulled up outside the Magistrates’ Court. I handed him the money, rounding it up twenty-five cents to the nearest dollar, and asked for a receipt. He inspected the coins in his palm, turned for the first time to look me in the eye, and whined in a wounded tone, ‘I was only trying to be helpful!’
But I had already lost interest in our petty struggle, for I had spotted three barristers charging across the road, headed for the Supreme Court. Jack Pappas stood out among them, with his anachronistic red cheeks and dark clipped beard. From behind, the queue of each man’s wig and the curve of his shoulders under the pleats of his black gown called irresistibly to mind a shark or a currawong – a creature highly evolved for attack, plunder and flight.
The people in the DPP set me up at a spare desk near a window in an outer office. A helpful young prosecutor dumped on to my table the material I would need to read: four coloured binders bursting with the typed records of the court proceedings. I had never laid eyes on a transcript before. There was so much of it, over a thousand pages: first, the 1998 jury trial of Singh and Rao together, which had been aborted; and then Singh’s solo trial – everything that had happened before I got there, and the official version of what I had seen. I lined up the binders with their spines towards me. Excited and hopeful, I opened volume one of the jury trial, took the lid off my pen and carefully labelled my brand-new exercise book.
I must have had a childish fantasy of the transcript as a text of wonderful clarity and simplicity, a coherent document in dialogue that would lay out the story from go to whoa. I thought it would answer the questions I was still too confused to formulate; and I hoped that so
mewhere in its pages I would find Joe Cinque. But it was a mess, full of senseless fast forwards and flashbacks. Just as a narrative got rolling, it would be cut short and abandoned, and the story taken up at a different point by a new speaker. People stammered and repeated themselves. Witnesses hesitated, got muddled, huffy, panicky, asked for a break. Barristers stood on their dignity, made pedantic interruptions and ponderous jests, launched themselves on bombastically long and archaically complex sentences. And what was a ‘voir dire’? A ‘Basha inquiry’? How the hell did one read this stuff?
As I thrashed along, unable to discern the overall shape of the story or grip with my memory the sequence of events, but continuing to take notes with a sort of helpless conscientiousness, the prosecutors strode in and out of their offices, calling to each other cheerfully, making efficient phone calls, donning and doffing robes and wigs. Occasionally one or two of them would stop by my desk to gossip. They spoke with irritation of the defence’s psychiatric experts, of what they saw as ‘the creation’ of Anu Singh’s borderline personality disorder and her ‘masked depression’. They were particularly annoyed by Justice Crispin’s manslaughter decision.
‘It was a wrong decision,’ said one of them.
‘And very bad for the victim’s parents,’ said another.
‘He could have called it murder –’
‘– Which it was –’
‘– And then talked about diminished responsibility – and given her the same sentence.’
By lunchtime I no longer had a handle on the rightness or wrongness of anything. I kept nodding off over the folders. I went outside for a sandwich and a walk in the cold air. Far below Canberra’s high, clear sky, along its de Chirico colonnades and across its open plazas, moved a host of fast-walking bureaucrats whose long black coats, unbuttoned, flew out behind them. On my way back to the DPP I passed a splendid modern legal chambers whose frontage was cheekily emblazoned with the name ‘pappas, j’. A sign on a window advertised Legal advice on most contentious matters. As I picked up speed to walk on by, an insignia on the glass door caught my eye: a fighting cock armed with spurs, and underneath it, elegantly lettered in a curve, the legend, Every knot was once straight rope.
It wasn’t till my third day among the documents that I came upon the crime scene photos.
I found them pushed into one of the folders I had been given: there was no reason why I shouldn’t look at them. But furtively, hunching my shoulders and keeping my back to the room, I flipped open the cheap little plastic album. The police photographer was uninterested in argument and immune to ideas of art. He had roamed through the house and into the mortuary, brooding on detail. I followed his eye, and this is what I saw.
A colour snap, propped on a shelf against a little wooden jewel box, of a merry young man standing in front of the Trevi fountain. He is wearing a dark bomber jacket unzipped over a very white T-shirt, and a dark peaked cap. He is grinning, gesturing dramatically with one hand: Look! It’s me! I’m in Rome!
A black briefcase stuffed with prescription drugs still in their packets: Capadex, Tilade, Becloforte, Zantac, Fybogel, Imodium.
The bar of a mechanised treadmill.
A window shielded by diaphanous net curtains.
A pink leather lounge suite. A dining table with six chairs. Another chair made of white plastic.
On the table a single plate of food, a glass of wine.
And on the kitchen bench, half a dozen Granny Smith apples: it was jarring to see their intense, gleaming green, the fresh green of childhood – as if these people, with their poisoned ‘dinner parties’, their horrid dramas, could never have performed an act as ordinary as cutting, peeling and eating an apple.
A framed print, hung high on a bedroom wall: Van Gogh’s starry sky above the terrace of a lamplit cafe.
Two tan suede men’s workboots, carelessly dropped on the carpet.
A pair of dark green corduroy men’s trousers slung over a cast-iron chair, with a tan leather belt still threaded through the loops.
A young man stretched out on his back, naked, on the bedroom floor. He is as relaxed as a sunbaker. His body is healthy, smooth and strong. His uncircumcised penis lolls to one side. His arms lie loose against the carpet. But he is already livid: blood is pooling in his thigh muscles, a dark, uneven flush. And behind him the sheets of a double bed are wrenched askew, dragged halfway to the floor, and stained with streaks of black fluid.
On the floor beside the wrecked bed, a mug half full of pale milky liquid – instant coffee? – with two cigarette butts floating in it, part-submerged.
A bare left arm on the metal surface of a mortuary table, its elbow crook showing the discoloured, swollen entry mark of a needle.
A bare right arm, similarly punctured.
And another shot in the bedroom, a close-up of the young man’s face taken from directly above, as if the photographer were standing straddled over him. Yes, it is the young traveller from the Trevi fountain. The youth and tenderness of his face, with its smooth curves. His thick, dark, curly hair, not harshly shorn as in the wedding video. The springy hair. The beauty and freshness of the hair. The only sign that he is not simply dozing on a beach is a thin trickle of black muck running from one corner of his gently closed mouth and disappearing under his left earlobe into the dark.
This is Joe Cinque.
Joe Cinque is dead.
After wandering for days along the forking, criss-crossing paths of the transcripts, I started to piece together a narrative of the week that ended with Joe Cinque’s death on Sunday 26 October 1997.
Two dinner parties, not the single one of glamorous rumour, had been held that week at the young couple’s rented townhouse, 79 Antill Street, Downer. The first took place on the evening of Monday 20 October. Maria and Nino Cinque, in their interview with me, had railed bitterly against the court for letting slide the evidence of a failed murder attempt that night. The Crown, I now learnt from the record, had certainly had its suspicions. According to the Prosecutor, Terry Golding, there may have been ‘preparatory conduct’ on the Monday evening. Someone had certainly given evidence about a syringe in which heroin had congealed, rendering it unusable. But, said Golding, ‘because it cannot prove it’, the Crown did not press its claim that an attempt had been made that night to kill Joe Cinque.
The very next morning, however, on the Tuesday, Madhavi Rao went to work and spoke provocatively to two puzzled colleagues about a party she had been to the night before. She told them that ‘the worst thing in the Crimes Act’ had been tried, and would be tried again the following weekend.
On the Friday evening, 24 October, a second set of guests was assembled for dinner at the Antill Street townhouse. Those of them who gave evidence described it as a pleasant enough evening. Anu Singh was ‘acting bubbly and vivacious’. She and Joe Cinque were seen to behave affectionately towards each other. But at some stage during the meal, Anu Singh had laced Joe Cinque’s coffee with Rohypnol and, after all the guests but Madhavi Rao had taken their leave, she tried – and failed – to inject him with heroin.
One young woman who was present at the Friday dinner, a student friend of Madhavi Rao’s who lived out of town, had left the party early, soon after midnight, and gone back to Rao’s share house where she was to stay the night. Rao returned at dawn and related to her bewildered visitor the events of the night. Astonished and frightened, the visitor went home, but later that Saturday morning she made a phone call of protest to Rao and Singh. She threatened to go to the police unless she was assured that no harm would come to Joe Cinque. Anu Singh got angry, then burst into tears on the phone. She told the worried girl that she had sat watching Joe for two hours while he slept; she had realised that she loved him and would never do anything to hurt him. She begged the protesting guest not to interfere – not to ruin her relationship with Joe.
Joe Cinque did not wake from his Rohypnol sleep till early evening that Saturday, the day before he died. He was still very groggy. Susp
ecting that something weird was going on, he stumbled around the house throwing out all the drugs he could lay hands on. When Madhavi Rao came over to Antill Street that evening, bringing food as requested by Anu Singh, and intending to do some study with her friend – these people were bright students about to sit their final exams – Anu Singh accused her of having spiked Joe’s drink. Rao got upset and went off to spend the rest of the night with a bunch of her other friends at the Art School Ball.
Meanwhile, back at Antill Street, Anu Singh once more spiked Joe Cinque’s coffee, this time with a massive dose of Rohypnol. When he passed out, she got the needle into his arm.
By dawn on Sunday 26 October, he was deeply unconscious. At about eight a.m. Singh drove round to Rao’s place, woke her, and hauled her back to Antill Street. Rao went into the bedroom and saw Joe lying on the bed, slightly blue, but breathing. Singh pressured Rao to drive with her to an ATM, where Rao withdrew $250 from her account and handed over the money. Then the two women quarrelled. Rao got out of Singh’s car at the lights and walked home alone.
It was now just after nine-thirty on the Sunday morning. Anu Singh drove on to the house of the law student who had previously scored heroin for her and taught her how to inject it. The police had given this witness indemnity from prosecution, and his name had been suppressed, in order to spare his ill, widowed mother, who was unaware of his addiction: in court he was referred to as ‘Mr T’. (He had told Anu Singh’s trial that Singh had been in the class ahead of him at their Newcastle secondary school; she had stuck in his mind because she wore shoulder pads under her uniform shirt, and came to school in high heels.)
When an agitated Anu Singh presented herself at the front door of his Canberra flat in a long white flowery dress and brandishing a fistful of cash, Mr T was already up and dressed, waiting for his mate to call for him, so they could go together to their appointments at the Woden methadone clinic. Anu Singh had several times in the past confided to Mr T that she wanted to kill herself with a heroin overdose. She had also told him that ‘someone else’ was coming with her. Still, on this unseasonably warm Sunday morning in October, Mr T took the cash from her and went out to score, leaving his mate, when he turned up, to ‘make small talk’ with her. Singh was restless. She came and went several times while they waited for Mr T. She said to his friend, ‘I’ve done something I shouldn’t have.’
