Night Games Read online

  It was a strange thing to watch. It was as if the defence counsel, the prosecutor and the judge were getting their story straight before presenting it to the jury. I couldn’t quite go along with them. How could they unravel the sequence of events without losing the complexity of what was being assessed? Or was that the point – to keep it simple for a jury? Were they hollowing out the truth by excising a part of the night, or making the truth sharper, easier to see?

  ‘… 303 Dorcas Street, a place which I do not wish to go,’ said Chris Ryan SC, the Crown prosecutor, referring to the events in the bedroom. Judge Mark Taft agreed, and so for the most part did defence counsel Thomas.

  Judge: It will … mean that the forensic evidence may have no carriage … I was quite unsure that admission of that evidence would do anything whatsoever except damage forensically the accused and no doubt blacken the complainant in the process.

  Prosecutor: … That may or may not be good enough, but it was the way in which I intended to proceed with it because so far as the complainant is concerned, on any view of it, she was the subject of the most appalling of conduct in that house.

  Judge: Very ugly happenings.

  Prosecutor: Indeed, and so far as Mr Dyer is concerned I would have thought the last thing he would want would be to have been the person in the room watching that, because that allows me to do all manner of things to Mr Dyer. So hence –

  Judge: This would be a much more confined trial and have less problematic issues attached to it if the issues were narrowed …

  I looked at Justin to gauge how he felt about his memory of the evening being erased and shrunk, but his face was devoid of expression. His suit hung box-like over his stocky body. I thought of Meursault, the protagonist in Albert Camus’ The Outsider, who said that he felt like an intruder at his own trial.

  ‘I noticed that almost all the people in the courtroom were greeting each other,’ Meursault observed, ‘exchanging remarks and forming groups – behaving, in fact, as in a club where the company of others of one’s own tastes and standing makes one feel at ease. That, no doubt, explained the odd impression I had of being de trop here, a sort of gate-crasher.’

  *

  ‘If I could get my hands on that girl,’ said Justin’s mother, Carol, while we waited at the pedestrian lights outside the County Court. I had introduced myself in the morning break and now we were going for a coffee nearby.

  ‘Do you know somewhere?’ Carol asked me, being the only local among them. I didn’t. I knew this only as the ‘grey’ part of town, where even the corresponding piece of sky above seemed to be permanently ashen. It was the city’s legal district, and the stairs leading into the Magistrates’ Court were blotted with smokers, bit player crims and media scrums, while lawyers, solicitors and barristers walked along the footpath, heads down and trailing black suitcases on wheels, or for those behind the times clutching at bloated manila folders. Their horsehair wigs and black cloaks blustered as the wind, forever trapped in these streets, whipped around them like a Chinese dragon.

  We walked past Petty Sessions Café. I asked after Justin’s father – having seen him at the committal. Carol looked at me tearfully. ‘He’s been diagnosed with cancer.’

  ‘It’s the stress,’ said Justin’s younger brother.

  ‘The doctor says it’s not stress,’ said Carol.

  ‘But it is stress,’ finished Justin.

  And Galbally, I enquired, what had happened to him?

  Back in the courtroom, despite his absence, Galbally’s handiwork had come up: the police had been told that the Collingwood players would not make a statement once it was recognised that they would not be the subjects of a prosecution.

  Judge Taft, it seemed, had no time for the football lawyers’ antics.

  Thomas: Obviously the issue as to whether the witness Beams is to be called is a very significant one … He is an eyewitness. He is a material witness and it’s not just a question of credit.

  Taft: Yes … It may be that despite his reluctance he is going to have to give evidence as to that matter … I would hate to interrupt his training schedule but it may be necessary.

  Beams, it appeared, had seen something that conflicted with Sarah’s statement, evidence that could be helpful to Justin’s case. But strangely, the defence was reluctant to call him as a witness, perhaps afraid that the presence of the AFL footballer on Justin’s side of the court would be construed by a jury as ‘footy mates’ sticking together, or wary of what a cross-examination of the star player could reveal. In the end, though, Taft ordered that Beams be sought to give evidence. With his spectacles studiously perched on the end of his nose and a sense of fairness that cut through the lawyers’ strategising, Taft had an Atticus Finch air about him.

  Now, walking with the Dyer family, I learned that a month before the trial, they had had to scramble for new lawyers after receiving a bill that only a QC can send and only the likes of a top football club can pay. Justin’s parents sold their house to raise funds and Carol went to work in a womenswear chain store. Stunned, they weren’t even sure how they had found themselves in this mess.

  ‘Justin was told to go talk to Galbally, that he’d look after him,’ Carol said. ‘We were so far away and didn’t know anyone in Melbourne, so when he told us he had a lawyer, we just went along with it.’

  We found a café and sat down at a large table. On either side of me, Justin’s younger brother and Carol were talkative, eager to chat about how upset they were and how unfair the charges were, each wanting to know what I thought. As I juggled their questions, I glanced at Justin, trying to get a sense of him. He was reserved, reticent. He felt very faraway, distant. He turned his head to talk to his girlfriend and I took in the back of his neck, the trim lines where a clipper had snipped at his dark, almost black, hair.

  Later, when I met his older brother, I could see that Justin was the quiet one of his siblings, passive and content not to get a word in edgeways while the rest of his family filled the silence around him – the kind of child a mother might worry she is not giving enough attention to. ‘He’s never been in trouble,’ exclaimed Carol. ‘Of all my boys, he’s the one I’ve worried least about.’ In a family that loved their footy, Justin was their star. But as I watched him across the table, I sensed he might not have shone brightly enough. He had inherited his talent for the game from his father, who still went on footy trips with his mates, trips from which stories trickled down into family folklore, like the time one of them lay down on a golf course, holding a tee between his teeth while the team lined up to hit off.

  Justin’s girlfriend, Vanessa, sat with her hands in his and her green eyes constantly searching his face for signs of how he was coping. She had met him after the charges were laid. I instinctively raised an eyebrow at her and she smiled. ‘I know, my friends think I’m crazy. But …’ she trailed off, looking at him. Now that Justin had moved back home to Queensland, the two spent as many weekends together as they could afford.

  I told the family that I was writing about footy culture and the increasingly scrutinised off-field behaviour of footballers, and asked Justin if he thought the world of football had anything to do with the situation he was in.

  Justin considered for a moment before answering. ‘It’s got me here, that’s true, but it’s also getting me through this.’

  He explained that after Coburg dropped him from the state league, a regional team picked him up. At the end of the season he was awarded Best and Fairest, keeping his cool even as spectators sledged him. ‘The whole season people were leaning over the railing yelling, “Rapist, they’re gunna get you inside, pretty boy.”’ But his new team had embraced him, Justin said, and playing football was the only time when he stopped thinking about the rape charges.

  Justin was good at football. Playing at top state level in Queensland, he was regularly noted as one of the
best on ground, a talented midfielder, able to read the play and move the ball forward. I asked if he’d moved south two years ago with a couple of his teammates to see if they could get into the AFL. ‘No,’ he said. They’d just wanted to play footy ‘somewhere different.’

  Vanessa interrupted. ‘That’s not really true,’ she said.

  He looked at her and shrugged. ‘Well, yeah, maybe there was a hope that we’d be noticed, but …’ He trailed off before finishing his sentence. ‘But that won’t happen now.’

  I asked Justin how he felt about the decision to excise the bedroom events from his trial. He grimaced. ‘It seems strange, sort of like lying, but my lawyer thinks it’s better for me that it’s not included. That it would reflect badly on me.’

  In the morning’s deliberations, the legal triangle had kept referring to an ‘utterance’ made by Justin that would have to be carved out. ‘What are they talking about?’ I asked him.

  ‘It was a stupid off-the-cuff remark,’ he said. ‘After we left the alleyway, on the way to get a taxi, I’d said to her, “You’re not going to tell the police Collingwood raped you, are you?” And she said, “No, of course not, I’m not that sort of girl.” It was a dumb thing to say. I wish I’d never said it. But the next day, when I texted her, I asked if she was going to hold to her promise.’

  The text, I found out later, had read, ‘Hey, how you feeling this morning. Are you going to hold to your promise? LOL.’

  The prosecution was going to link the text message to Justin’s earlier ‘utterance.’ ‘But it wasn’t about that at all. She had promised me in the cab that she’d come over to my place that afternoon.’

  ‘She slept with four others that night!’ Carol cut in, looking at me for some kind of affirmation.

  I kept my eyes on Justin. ‘I don’t know if that’s accurate,’ I replied, ‘but even if it is, I think the issue is whether she consented to every person that night.’

  A confused silence fell over the table, until Vanessa said, ‘Well, she doesn’t seem that traumatised,’ explaining that she’d seen Sarah out nightclubbing a few times.

  ‘People react in different ways,’ I said, and thought again of Meursault, whose trial became less about the murder he had committed than about his improper response to his mother’s recent death. (He went swimming with a girl and to the movies after the funeral.)

  Ironically, though, it was Justin who had reacted in the way that people might have expected of Sarah. Since the police investigation, he hadn’t been to clubs or parties, and for the most part didn’t go out at night except to a mate’s place. Even then he was not always at ease. Carol confided in a low voice that they had been really worried about him, but, ‘Things improved since he met Vanessa.’

  Everyone beamed at Vanessa – ‘She’s been wonderful.’ I liked Vanessa. But it was also clear that in the eyes of this family she was a ‘good girl,’ not like the liar who had gotten Justin into this mess. I was growing aware that, at this table, there were ‘types’ of women. Not sure how to take Carol’s attention, Vanessa laughed, shyly moving closer to Justin.

  As we walked back to court, the hot dry wind tailed us. It was February and summer clung to the city. On the footpath, people stuck to the cool strips of shade alongside the tall grey buildings. Walking together, the Dyer family looked strong. But as Carol kept checking her phone for chemo updates and Justin tried not to think about the debt his family was in, I could see the chinks. I was reminded of footballers who, in spite of their injuries, play on, looking like beige mummies, their bodies held together with Elastoplast strapping.

  Taking our seats in the courtroom, I watched as the Dyer family moved to sit on the far left of the room and Justin went back to the dock. I looked at the empty seats behind the prosecution and had no one with whom to compare the Dyer family’s suffering.

  At the committal hearing, Sarah had given her evidence in closed court, as she would during the trial. The room was cleared except for the magistrate, lawyers, Justin and his parents, who sought permission to sit in, as long as they sat out of the camera’s view.

  *

  Later I found some of Sarah’s photos on the internet. They were of her and her friends in their final year at an all-girls high school. The photos made me smile and reminded me of my own four years at a girls-only school – something I had never fully appreciated until now. The friendships and constant hugging, all over each other like puppies, the jokes that weren’t funny which made us laugh even harder. Even the viciousness of girls that I’d experienced in a previous co-educational school seemed less prevalent. The girls in the photos were pulling faces, mucking around, dressing up for laughs. In one photo, four girls grinned as they posed comically in some seriously garish tracksuits.

  The smiles were genuine, faces healthy, sun-kissed and pink-cheeked. There was no pouting, unless it was in jest, no make-up, no ‘tilt your head down, then look up with your eyes’ modelling moves for the camera. I remembered running around, brown legs always bruised from sport poking out of a school dress. I remembered not thinking. Not in a careless way, but in a way that I now realised was free of being watched, of being appraised.

  Sarah was lovely. She was tall with a sprinkle of light freckles across her nose, pale-skinned, with small white teeth, sandy long hair and blue eyes. Her arms were draped around her friends. In one picture, in sports uniform, she hugged two girlfriends and they all looked relaxed, incredibly young and honest. In another photo, she was caught mid-movement, her hand confidently on her hip, lips clamped shut in a stifled grin, a picture of fun and sass. At the end-of-school shenanigans Sarah had dressed in fake leopard-print fur, her hand curled like a claw in the air, and you could almost hear her growl like a cat before dissolving into laughter.

  Sarah already looked older than her friends. Not quite fully engaged in the wildness, the innocent freedom of her peers, she had a touch more confidence and wariness. It was her beauty, that’s for sure. She was more than that, I found out – an athlete, a leader at school, with a final-year result that put her in the top 5 per cent of the state – but it can be beauty that brings a separation from a flock of girlfriends, that forces a young woman to be that little bit more self-aware; a power, yes, something that unlocks doors to rooms you’re not sure you want, or are ready, to enter.

  CHAPTER 4

  On 30 September 2012, tens of thousands of people marched down Sydney Road, in Melbourne’s inner northern suburbs, to honour Jill Meagher, a 29-year-old woman who had disappeared a week earlier. Holding placards calling for unity and an end to violence against women, the solemn crowd stretched for over a kilometre along the busy street, swelling around trams and breathing in the sweet syrupy smell of baklava and hookah pipe cafés. Just two days before the march, her body had been found in a shallow grave in country Victoria – she had been raped and murdered.

  Outside a bridal shop, the marchers paused to lay flowers and tributes at the door. Here, CCTV footage had provided a crucial piece of the puzzle that led police to find Jill Meagher’s body. The footage makes for eerie viewing. After visiting two local bars with friends, Meagher had opted to walk home by herself in the early hours of the morning. Her apartment was less than 800 metres away. In the surveillance footage, a lanky man in a blue hoodie, light denim jeans and white sneakers walks past the bridal shop. Then, less than a minute later, the same man doubles back. Another minute passes before he returns, this time talking to a woman, Jill Meagher. His body turns to the side as he walks, attempting to draw her into a conversation. Meagher stops, steps back and wavers a little on her heels, as if waiting for him to leave her alone and walk ahead. It’s the last known image of her alive.

  When Meagher’s body was found, the journalists Chip Le Grand and Sophie Gosper wrote in the Australian:

  Of all the possibilities that confronted police when Ms Meagher first went missing early last Saturday morning,
this was the least likely; a genuinely random, opportunistic attack.

  Opportunistic. It’s the same word that haunted me when watching the footage – and at Justin’s trial. And no – it is not the same thing. Jill Meagher was raped and murdered, and it is unlikely that the trial arising out of her killing will revolve around establishing whether she consented or not. And yet the word lingers in my mouth. Opportunistic. To exploit a chance offered by immediate circumstances, without a general plan or moral principle.

  *

  ‘Guilty is guilty,’ the policeman had said. But the Dyer family felt a great injustice had been done to their son. In a month the trial would provide a verdict on what had happened in the alley that night, but if Justin was the fall guy, then the backstory needed to be understood. What had happened in the townhouse? Sarah Wesley was at the centre of numerous opportunistic manoeuvres on the night of the grand final, but was this because she was vulnerable? Or was she ‘up for it’?

  Repeatedly, to anyone who would listen, I relayed the vague details I’d gleaned about the night Sarah Wesley went home with Nate Cooper. She’d met him once before, I’d begin. They’d been messaging each other and caught up again at a nightclub. Around 4 a.m., the two walked back to his house, where some of his friends were sitting around and drinking, including his cousin and housemate, John McCarthy, and Dayne Beams, both Collingwood footballers. They were celebrating their grand final win. After saying hello, Sarah and Nate went to his bedroom. Then, when they were close to having sex, the door opened and a few of the other guys came in.

  At this point, my listeners would shake their heads in horror. ‘How could she even begin to consent to that?’ said one friend. ‘How’d she even have time to consider what she wanted?’