A True Story of Death, Grief and the Law

Joe Cinque is dead.

It was his girlfriend, Anu Singh, a pretty and bright law student at ANU who injected him first with Rohypnol (the "date-rape" drug) and then an overdose of heroin; and did nothing during the several hours it took him to die. Her confused and desperate call to the ambulance was too little, too late.

It was a bizarre killing: made even more so by the revelations that Singh had held a dinner party in the days before at which she had made no secret of her intent to carry out a murder-suicide. But then, our newspapers are full of bizarre killings. So what drove Helen Garner to write about this case?

Garner can't quite explain it. As she tell it, she happened across the story at a moment of personal crisis for her:

" I had recently been forced to acknowledge that I was a woman at the end of my tether. I was fifty-five. My third marriage had just collapsed in a welter of desolation. I was living alone in Sydney, in a rented flat, on the fifth floor of a building on the top of a hill. I had no job, and lacked the heart to look for one. I knew I had to get out of my own head, to find some work to do. (p.13)
Garner admits that her interest in the crime was at least at first because she wanted to look at a woman tried with murder. Feeling pain, anger and humiliation, she wanted to know "if anything made them different from me". (p.25) There is no illusion of mere objectivity in Garner's non-fiction: that of an absent, disinterested observer. Garner is as much a character in the narrative as Anu Singh and Joe Cinque's mother. And it is the rawness of Garner's hurt spirit that gives her the ability to record so sensitively the pain, bewilderment and grief of others.

The narrative of the book begins in the court case against Anu Singh. Garner is able to reflect on her own petty snap judgments and bitchiness as she finds herself intuitively disliking Anu Singh. But her intuitions haven't let her down: though she is unable to interview the young woman and her accomplice, she speaks to acquaintances, to her father and combs over the court documents.

Singh does not come over well (unsurprisingly): she is obsessive and manipulative, on Garner's account; she shirks the responsibility of her actions by pleading psychiatric illness. Her father, a Dr Singh, appears likewise appallingly self-centred and greedy, oblivious to the real pain in Cinque's family. Under cross-examination Dr Singh, asked about his religious beliefs and those of his daughter, replies "She is too young to have any beliefs." (p.29) The reader is left to infer that such beliefs may have saved Anu from herself. The psychiatric evidence seems unable to explain the "simple wickedness" at the heart of the story.

Garner finds herself dismayed by the short sentence handed out to Singh. And so the focus of her story turns to Joe's mother, Maria. Striking up a real friendship with Maria and her family, she finds that the justice system has not mollified their grief and anger. Through these interviews, Garner finds herself compelled to keep on with the project of the book because something remains deeply unsatisfied and unsatisfying in the story. Joe Cinque's blood, we might say, is crying out from the ground.

Towards the end of the book, Garner seeks out the judge in the case, Justice Ken Crispin. This is a telling conversation. Crispin, an active Christian, is convincing in word and person, and does not resile from the moral difficulties of the case. He admits that Madhavi Rao, Singh's friend, failed in her duty of care to Joe Cinque " knowing what was happening but doing little to intervene - but that the law does not make this criminal. 

But deep questions remain. As Garner puts it:

I listened to him without arguing. But I was thinking, Where does all the woundedness, the hatred go? What becomes of the desire for vengeance, for a settling of the score? (p.318)

But though she suspects how the Christian Crispin might answer - that this is the province of the Almighty " she holds the question back because "we weren't in a church. We were in the Supreme Court, the temple of reason." (p.320) I think this was a pity: while I respect Helen Garner's amazing courage in her quest, I think that this bracketing of religious discussion out of the public forum leaves a vacuum that Garner struggles to fill. I suspect that she herself knows this.

What she discovers is that human justice struggles at the point of atonement. As Justice Crispin says, very rarely in the sentencing process is satisfaction achieved. So we cry out again and again with Garner, "Where does it go? Where, O God, does it go?"

At the sentencing of Anu Singh, Joe Cinque's parents had made a speech to the waiting media in front of the court saying that they hoped that somebody would kill one of the judge's children so that he would understand. What they didn't know, at that stage, is that this judge had indeed lost a child. He knew something of their grief; he was not unlike them in their suffering.

In the end, Garner offers the book to the Cinques as their "consolation" " a word evoking the momentous declaration of Isaiah 40:1. And what is their consolation? The book remembers Joe, and defends him. In the end Anu Singh and her calamitous behaviour fade: and what Garner leaves us with is a celebration of the life of this ordinary, dearly loved boy.

But I wonder whether Helen Garner has herself found consolation of the kind she offers for Joe?

Michael Jensen lectures in Church History and Theology at Moore Theological College in Sydney.