Apart from an occasional cough, the court was silent and tense, writes Ruadhán Mac Cormaicat the Central Criminal Court
THERE WASN'T so much as a whisper in court as the eight women and four men of the jury filed in just after 11.30am, and not a person in the room who didn't follow their progress to their seats.
Until now, with the courtroom's gaze trained so intensely on the witness box, the judge and the families McLaughlin and Kearney, the jurors have seemed like any other onlookers, absorbed but never quite fully involved. Yesterday, as Dominic McGinn told them, they moved centre stage.
With every witness questioned and every exhibit admitted, what remained was for the legal teams to give their closing speeches to the jury and to try to pull together the strands of cases they have been assembling over the past two weeks.
It was a more subdued, more ordered day than usual, as if the default mode of the court was reasserting itself after the stubbornly high-charged, emotional days of the past fortnight.
There were no witnesses shuffling nervously towards the box, no need for interjections from the bench, and no smiles to be drawn from the barbed exchanges between barristers. Apart from an occasional cough and, at midday, the pealing bells of nearby Christ Church, the court was silent and tense.
Addressing the jury, the legal teams abandoned jargon for the plain and the direct. Brian Kearney didn't blink as Dominic McGinn, for the prosecution, used the words "murder" and "motive" for the first time.
McGinn spent the morning slotting the threads of the prosecution case into a single narrative building to what he called the "one inescapable conclusion". Kearney had the motive and the opportunity to kill his wife, he said. He was overstretched on borrowing, and Hotel Salvia in Majorca was refusing to sell. The logical course was to sell the family home and move into the newly built one next door. But letters from Siobhán's solicitor indicated she planned to move into that house. "The difficulty was, the separation wouldn't fit in," McGinn said.
Because there was no sign of a break-in at Carnroe, the inference was that nobody from outside was involved in her death, he said. And Kearney admitted to gardaí that it was only himself, Siobhán and their son in the house when she died.
Therefore, two options presented themselves, McGinn contended: either Siobhán killed herself or she was murdered by her husband.
But her behaviour in the days and weeks before her death was not that of someone who planned to kill herself. And why, if she was going to kill herself, would she lock the bedroom door, take the key out and throw it on the floor?
There was ample room to slip it underneath from outside, he added.
He also cited scientific evidence which he argued ruled out both a low-level hanging or a high-level suspension hanging, as well as State Pathologist Prof Marie Cassidy's belief that some of the injuries were consistent with manual strangulation.
The scientific evidence, McGinn contended, showed Siobhán Kearney did not take her own life. "If it wasn't suicide, the only rational explanation that fits in with all the evidence is that Mr Kearney killed Siobhán."
It was his closing sentence, and the first to refer to the deceased by her first name alone, leaving an intimate note to trail in the brief silence that followed his speech.
In the afternoon, it was the turn of defence counsel Patrick Gageby to close his case. First off, he urged caution in taking a decision they could never go back on.
While there was evidence of marriage difficulties, he told them, there was no evidence of a history of violence, no history of threats, drunkenness, jealousy or a bitter custody battle.
While the prosecution put forward financial evidence in suggesting a motive, Gageby said the accused man had access to ample funds. And if Kearney had faked a suicide, "why isn't he on the day and the days after spinning a story about suicide?"
On the DNA evidence, he said a second test showed the second, minor element found on the vacuum cleaner flex was not Kearney's. "It seems to me this is a huge area where you should be extremely careful."
He also raised questions about the evidence of retired forensic scientist Dr Michael Norton and argued that Prof Cassidy's findings were "not inconsistent" with low-level hanging, followed by a break in the flex caused by the full weight of the body coming down on it.
When Gageby took his seat at 3.30pm, Mr Justice Barry White told the jury he would make his charge to them today before they retire to consider their verdict.
There will be no time limit to their deliberations, he said.
They should bring overnight bags.