Joe Cinque's Consolation

by Helen Garner

  ‘Was death inevitable,’ asked Justice Crispin, ‘or was it dependent on the vomiting?’

  ‘We can never say death was inevitable,’ said the pharmacologist. But on an opiate-naïve person like Joe Cinque, any fair-sized dose of heroin would have a powerful effect – and combined with Rohypnol, it would be even more likely to kill him.

  At the morning break I went out into the fine air and sat gossiping under an elm tree with the spunky little dark-haired journalist who, with her blonde counterpart, was still on court rounds. She could not bear Anu Singh at any price, and expressed violent irritation against ‘Mad Harvey’, as she called her. She couldn’t understand why Rao ‘didn’t do anything’. I didn’t understand it either. It filled me with a sort of dizzy dread. But I had been thinking overnight about another murder trial I once covered for a magazine, the case of little Daniel Valerio, in which a man beat his girlfriend’s two-year-old son to death. To many people the most appalling and frightening part of the story was that Daniel’s mother seemed not to have noticed the slow torture her man was inflicting month after month on the toddler. With a selective blindness she had invented the most ingenious ‘reasons’ to explain his chronic injuries and bruises.

  Now, under the tree outside the Supreme Court, I tried to explain to the journalist my sense that a sick and sinister relationship can exude a sort of hex, a glassy spell that none of the people involved can break. Only a complete outsider who stumbles fresh into the situation can see its weirdness – a stranger who is immune to the spell, who says bluntly, ‘Something bad’s going on here. I’m going to call the cops.’ In the Valerio story this stranger was an electrician who visited the family’s house to fix the wiring. His warning came too late. In Joe Cinque’s story, Tanya Z— was the one who might have broken through, but her instinctive sense of danger was undermined by Anu’s forceful pleading, Mancini’s off-handedness, Rao’s reassurances. It wasn’t real, they told her. It was just how Anu talked. They’d worked it all out, they’d got it under control, nothing was going to happen, how could she think that such a thing would happen? If she spoke to Joe or went to the police she would wreck a love affair and blight people’s personal and professional futures. Thus Tanya Z— was made to feel uncool, insensitive, literal-minded, a busybody, a panic merchant, a dobber. Her faith in her own instincts was damaged. Against her better judgement, she turned away. The journalist listened to my theorising with her eyebrows up and her lips pursed.

  Maria and Nino Cinque came to sit with us on the shaded bench. I had not spoken with them for several days and I was glad to see them. We began to talk about gardening. Although his face was knotted with tension, Nino acted out in a self-mocking way his own tendency to be severe with errant plants. ‘If tree I put not grow straight,’ he said with a ruthless slicing gesture, ‘I pull ’im out.’ We all laughed. Then he said he had heard that the evidence would be finished before the end of the week.

  ‘What on earth is Lasry going to say?’ I said. ‘How’s he going to defend her?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Maria Cinque sarcastically. ‘She’s such an innocent little girl – so innocent. But if she’s so innocent, why didn’t she do something to stop my son being killed?’

  For the first time I drew back from her harsh tone. I realised with a jolt that my allegiance had shifted: I was so shocked that I had to look at the ground and compose myself. I remembered how maliciously cranky I had been when the psychiatrist, Dr Lowden, had spoken at Anu Singh’s sentencing hearing about her relationship with Singh: ‘I think she trusts me.’ At the time I had seen this as a professional’s boast. Now I found a similar fantasy in myself – that for Madhavi Rao to turn her head and meet my eye with a long ‘significant’ look meant I must be special, not square or old or boring, but a cool, mature journalist who with her little notebook could go among killers and their cohorts and be accepted by them – slumming without compromising my virtue. I couldn’t even look at Maria where she sat beside me with her bag on her knee, gazing out at the bright summer day.

  ‘I hate Indians now,’ she said, in a calmer voice. ‘I know it’s wrong – I’m not stupid. When I went back in Italy and we were watching TV, if we see an earthquake or something bad happen in India and a lot of people die, I say, “I wish the whole lotta them die.” My family give me a dirty look. They say, “Don’t talk like that.” ’

  We sat with her in silence.

  ‘Nino’s best friend’s son,’ she went on quietly, ‘is gonna marry an Indian. We can’t go to the wedding.’

  ‘If was just her,’ said Nino. ‘But it’s her father, mother, sister, brother – thirty, forty people.’

  ‘I don’t trust myself,’ said Maria, ‘not to make a scene. And they don’t want that.’

  She didn’t sound angry. She sounded unbearably weary and sad. I was ashamed of my private recoil. What she was expressing was not coarse racial hatred. She was telling two strangers, with a blistering candour, that her suffering had earned her the distaste of her siblings, exiled her from her social world, and estranged her from her beliefs, her intelligence, her generosity, her decency – from her own best self.

  The Crown’s final witness in its case against Madhavi Rao was Lauren Taylor, a welfare officer at Belconnen Remand Centre. She was a friendly-looking person of forty or so, in heels and a silky teal-coloured outfit of trousers and shirt. Her fringe had grown so long that in order to look under it she had to hold her chin very high, in a pugnacious posture that was belied by her good-tempered manner of speech. She appeared to have an array of lively opinions on this whole matter, and a clear view of who was the rotten egg. She also played her own variation on the theme that runs right through the story: women’s instinctive wariness of Singh, and protective sympathy for Rao. I remembered reading, in the transcript of the committal hearing, an exchange between Lauren Taylor and Mr Pappas. ‘Was Anu Singh often tearful?’ the barrister had asked, and the welfare officer replied tartly, ‘She could turn her tears on and off as suited.’

  Taylor first spoke to Madhavi Rao in D Yard of Belconnen Remand Centre on the morning of 30 October 1997, the Thursday after Joe Cinque died. Surprisingly – weren’t co-accused people kept separate in custody? – Anu Singh was also in D Yard that day, and Lauren Taylor quickly picked up the dangerous vibe that she was emitting: Singh kept butting into Taylor’s conversation with Rao, saying, ‘We’ve got to get our story straight – we’ve got to put this together.’ Taylor warned Rao to get her solicitor’s advice before she had any further conversation with Singh.

  Madhavi Rao was quite distressed and scared. Over the days she spent in Belconnen she began to confide in Taylor, who in her line of work did not wear any uniform or insignia, or carry anything, like keys or a radio, that would identify her as a correctional officer. ‘I mainly just let her talk,’ Taylor told the court. ‘It was such a bizarre story.

  ‘She talked about Anu, how she was very very intense, and very over the top. Anu would ring her constantly. Madhavi had actually missed classes – missed exams – while she was trying to help Anu with her, you know, “debilitating disease”, that Anu believed was caused by Joe giving her ipecac syrup. Madhavi said Anu wanted to kill herself, but that she was going to take Joe with her because he was responsible for her illness.

  ‘Every time Ms Rao tried to do some study, or to have some time for herself, Anu Singh would be either on the phone or at her place wanting assistance. Ms Rao was taking her to doctors, looking at alternative therapies. She actually gave Anu money and bought her food. It was general all-round assistance. Ms Rao was there for whatever Ms Singh wanted.’

  One of the reasons Rao had given Taylor for her continuing support of Anu Singh was that Rao herself had a sister with a disability. A lot of people had given up on Anu, and Rao’s friends had urged her to follow suit – but if it turned out there was actually something wrong with Anu, Madhavi knew she wouldn’t be able to forgive herself for abandoning her.

  ‘One day,’ Taylor told
the court, ‘when Anu was particularly stressed, they went for a drive. They had a script for Rohypnol, but Anu wouldn’t get out of the car at the chemist, so Ms Rao got out and filled the script.’

  When Rao mentioned heroin to her, Taylor commented that Rao and Singh certainly didn’t look like the heroin-users she came across in her day-to-day role at the remand centre. Rao said she wasn’t a user, but that she had got heroin from a man who had also taught her and Singh how to inject it.

  The account that Rao gave to Lauren Taylor of the Saturday night before Joe died shed new light on this puzzling corner of the story. Rao had been at home, perhaps studying for her exams, when Anu rang up and told her that Joe was hungry. So Madhavi obediently trotted off to the supermarket, bought some apples and took them over to Antill Street. Apples! Surely these were the Granny Smiths I had seen in the crime scene photos, glowing innocently green on the kitchen bench?

  Madhavi, said Taylor, thought this would be her chance to warn Joe about what Anu was planning to do to him. But when she arrived at Antill Street with the fruit, when they were all downstairs in the kitchen, Anu started talking about how she ‘couldn’t go on, the way she was’. At last, Madhavi thought, Anu was about to reveal to Joe how suicidal she was feeling – something she had apparently taken great pains, till then, to keep hidden from him.

  While the three of them were sitting in the kitchen, however, Joe appeared to get ‘very, very sleepy’. He went upstairs. At this, Anu suddenly turned ‘really strange’, and started to abuse Madhavi, accusing her of having spiked Joe’s drink. Madhavi was upset and vigorously denied it, but the two women quarrelled, and Anu told Madhavi to leave. Madhavi tried to go upstairs and talk to Joe before she left, but Anu, she said, prevented her. Madhavi left the house, but came back, knocked on the door, and had another argument with Singh on the doorstep.

  Then, she told Taylor, she went to the ball with her other friends. Soon after Rao got home next morning, she was woken by Anu Singh knocking at her door, ‘really really distressed, saying that Joe was not well, that she couldn’t get him breathing, and that she needed money to buy some more heroin, so she could use it on herself – to kill herself.’

  Rao told Taylor that she went with Singh to an ATM, withdrew a couple of hundred dollars, and gave her the money – to make her go away. ‘She didn’t go with Anu. Anu didn’t drop her home. Anu went wherever she went. And Madhavi walked home because she didn’t have the money for a taxi.

  ‘Madhavi had had enough of Anu. She just wanted Anu to go away. She was very, very tired. She was distressed. She’d just had enough.

  ‘I asked her, just out of curiosity, “Why didn’t you call an ambulance?” She said it was because Anu had told her that Joe was all right.’

  The day after she had this conversation with Taylor, Madhavi Rao was released from Belconnen on bail. Her father was on his way to pick her up. ‘She was getting distressed,’ said Taylor, ‘about what she was going to tell him. I said, “Tell him the truth. Have you told me the truth?” And she said Yes.’

  But Madhavi Rao had not told her the whole truth. She had left out the terrible part, the nub of the matter: the fact that she had gone to Antill Street with Anu that morning, and seen Joe lying unconscious on the bed. She walked up the stairs and into the bedroom. She looked at him lying there, and then she turned around and went away.

  I have written ‘terrible’, but the word the Crown used was ‘wicked’. Wicked. That awkward, helplessly old-fashioned, almost comical word, hung about with cobwebs, junking up the attic: how could such a bedraggled relic survive the modern light of day?

  Madhavi Rao, argued the prosecutor Mr Golding that afternoon, had never completely withdrawn from the common purpose with Singh – the plan to kill Joe Cinque. Nor was she a mere innocent bystander who couldn’t be held responsible. For several months before he died, she had played an active role in the welfare of both Anu Singh and Joe Cinque.

  She was a close friend of Singh’s who not only knew that she wanted to commit suicide, but actually helped her make plans to kill herself.

  She knew what Singh’s motive was for wanting to kill Joe Cinque; she knew that Singh intended to kill him.

  She knew that Singh had in her possession the Rohypnol and the heroin that she planned to kill him with.

  On the Saturday morning Rao tried to calm the concerns of people who might otherwise have interceded. By doing this, she was secluding Joe Cinque from people who might have come to his aid.

  On the Sunday morning, when she saw Joe Cinque in distress, she knew how he had got into such a state; she knew this was not Singh’s first attempt to kill him; and because she herself had contributed to the danger he was in, she had a positive duty to try to save him.

  In other words, the Crown was arguing that Madhavi Rao had had a duty of care towards Joe Cinque – a duty that could be discerned from the very wickedness of its breach.

  ‘The question of a duty of care. These are very difficult aspects of the law,’ said Justice Crispin thoughtfully, and stood the matter over till Wednesday.

  Difficult? I thought. Rao should have done something. She did nothing. What’s difficult about that?

  Court watchers seek drama. It is easier to understand than the law’s intricacies. An extrovert like Jack Pappas, Anu Singh’s counsel, knows how to gratify this craving with a pacy, adrenalin-producing performance. When Mr Lasry got to his feet and began to speak, on that bright Wednesday morning in November, I was so busy making unfavourable comparisons between my memory of Pappas’s flashy style and the flat, conversational manner of Lasry that I failed at first to notice what he was doing. He wasn’t defending Madhavi Rao. He was contending that he didn’t need to. He was urging Justice Crispin to dismiss the charges straight away, without further ado. He was arguing that Madhavi Rao had no case to answer.

  The spin Mr Lasry put on the events of Joe Cinque’s last days was breathtaking in its gall.

  The Crown case against Rao, he began, depended on the doctrine of incomplete withdrawal from a common purpose. But the common purpose she was supposed to have been part of – the plan to kill Joe Cinque – had come to an end on the Saturday.

  Remember the conversation Rao had in her bedroom with Tanya Z—, early on the Saturday morning? Tanya Z— had asked Rao, ‘Are you going to try and kill Joe, or is this all over with?’ And Rao had replied, ‘I’m not going to have anything more to do with it. Anu doesn’t want me to. Anu said, “No offence, Madhavi, but I’m going to have to do this alone. It’s just not working.” ’

  This showed, said Lasry, that the original enterprise was at an end. Whatever else happened after that was not a continuation of the common purpose. It was a whole new enterprise by Anu Singh, and Madhavi Rao had nothing to do with it.

  The hide of this, its cool, hair-splitting audacity, made my head spin. Could anyone really believe in such a mechanistic model of human behaviour? Can intention be flicked on and off like a switch?

  But Lasry picked up two more familiar pieces of evidence, turned them upside down, and calmly juggled them into a new arrangement. First, the four-way phone call on the Saturday morning, when Tanya Z— had desperately asked Len Mancini for reassurance about Joe’s safety. Anu had taken the phone out of Len’s hand: she had screamed and wept and begged Tanya not to go to the police. After Tanya had abandoned her attempt to intervene and hung up in frustration, Mancini said to Singh, ‘What are you going to do now?’

  Singh replied, in the presence of Madhavi Rao, ‘I’m going home to tell Joe.’

  And she did. There was documentary evidence that she did. At ten-thirty that same night, Singh rang Len Mancini. Mancini’s answering machine accidentally recorded the conversation. On the tape Singh can be heard telling Mancini she is worried about the sleeping pills she had given Joe the night before; then Joe himself comes on the line, assuring Mancini cheerfully, if rather fuzzily, that though he is tired and wants to sleep, his head is fine. Anu, says Joe, is worrying for no
good reason.

  This could only mean, said Lasry, that Anu had told Joe – at least about the Rohypnol she had given him the night before. In her anxiety about its effect on him, she was expressing ‘at least overt remorse’ for what she had done on the Friday night.

  In other words, there was by then no common purpose from which Rao could withdraw or be dismissed. Whatever earlier purpose had existed was already terminated.

  While I was reeling from the nerve of this, Justice Crispin unpropped his head from his hand and spoke. But hadn’t Joe supposedly told Singh, in the middle of the Saturday night, that he was going to leave her? Let’s imagine, said Crispin, that Singh had gone home and confessed to Joe that she’d given him Rohypnol the night before. Let’s say that when the phone call was accidentally recorded, Joe was still too doped to grasp what she was telling him. What if he recovered fully, later that night, and the penny dropped? What if he said to her then, ‘That’s it. I’m fed up with you. That’s the last straw – drugging me. I’m leaving.’ And what if Singh made up her mind again, at that moment, to kill him? Would that be a fresh criminal enterprise? Or would it be a revival of the old one?

  Oh, a fresh one, said Lasry. And anyway, since it would have taken place in the mind of Anu Singh, how could Madhavi Rao have been aware of it? Rao was entitled to conclude, on the Saturday, that the enterprise was ended.

  Fresh? Revived? How could anyone know? My mind revved pointlessly, forced to acknowledge the pull of Lasry’s logic, but resisting the direction it wanted to take me in.

  Now, as he began to argue Madhavi Rao back into the status of an innocent bystander, his detachment became positively frigid. Early on the Sunday morning, he said, when she saw Joe Cinque lying on the bed, Madhavi Rao had no duty of care. She was part of no special relationship, in a legal sense, from which such a duty might have arisen. The history of her friendship with Singh and Cinque did not change this. Friendship of itself doesn’t create a duty of care. For that to exist, the law requires a relationship of some status – marriage, or family, or a contract; or else one person has to have assumed the care of another. And anyway, even if Rao had adopted more than a casual role in the welfare of Anu Singh, how could that mean she had a duty of care for Joe Cinque?