Ghost Child (2 page)

When I first met Lauren Cameron her name was not Lauren Cameron, it was Lauren Cashman. I don’t know when she changed it, although I’ve got a pretty good idea why.

Lauren likes to tell people that she has no parents and no siblings. It isn’t true. When I first met her she had a mother, a sister, and not one but two brothers, and all of them were called Cashman.

I met them on the evening of 11 November 1982. I remember the date because it was Remembrance Day and I’d been on parade since dawn with the old Diggers at the Cenotaph on the Barrett Estate. I was hoping to knock off early, but then I got a call to go out to the Cashman place on DeCastella Drive. A mum had called triple-O, screaming that her kid had been bashed, and
although a young constable was on her way to the scene, a more senior police officer was going to be needed.

The Cashmans lived in a Commission house – quite a few of the neighbours later made a point of telling me that when I went around taking statements from them. They said, ‘Those people, they don’t own here. It’s Housing Commission. They’re just renting.’

What did they mean by that? Not that the family was poor. There were plenty of poor people on the Barrett Estate. I don’t mean down-and-outs. We had quite a few old-age pensioners and a few single mums on the estate, but in those days, most people worked. We had labourers, hairdressers, panel beaters, and a good bunch of guys down at Barrett Glass. Nobody was flush. At a guess, the highest earner on the estate would have been the school principal, on something like $45,000 a year. It was a ‘working-class’ estate in the proper sense of the word: people worked, although not for much.

So no, the neighbours didn’t mean ‘poor’. They meant something else, something that in those days was harder to define. These days, we wouldn’t hesitate. We’d say the mother was a bludger with four kids under six to three different blokes, none of whom were on the scene.

Anyway, I drove up to the house as fast as I could. I was in one of those white Commodores they gave coppers in those days. The idea was to give us the speed and the muscle we’d need to catch the crooks. Trouble
was, every bloke under thirty on the Barrett Estate had a white Commodore, and they souped them up to make them go faster. There were a couple of Commodores already parked in the driveway of the Cashman house when I got there. At first I thought they were both police cars, but on second glance it was pretty obvious that one of them wasn’t. The suspension had been lowered – in those days we used a beer can to check, and there was no way you’d get a VB under this car – plus the windows had been tinted. No, this one wasn’t a police car. This car belonged either to a man who lived in the house, or to a man who at least visited often enough to feel comfortable parking in the drive.

The ambulance was already there and I saw the paramedics leap from it and move like lightning across the lawn, the white soles of their shoes flashing. I got out of the car and made my way up the path, expecting to find the house in a state of chaos. I mean, that’s quite normal, isn’t it? If a kid has come a cropper and the parents have had to call an ambulance, well, you can expect a lot of noise. The parents will be screaming and crying and it’s my job to get them to settle down, so we can start figuring out what happened. But there was no panic in Lauren’s house.

The mother, Lisa, was in the kitchen with the young female police constable. Lisa was pale and extremely thin, a chain-smoker, with hair that had been frizzed and dyed red so many times you couldn’t tell what colour it
originally was. She was twenty-six years old, but she had that worn-down look that women get when they’ve fallen pregnant for the first time at a young age. If I was to hold up a picture of her alongside pictures of today’s twenty-six-year-old girls, fresh from university and still giggly, you’d have said she was forty.

Anyway, Lisa was standing in the kitchen when I arrived, holding herself up against the laminate bench and chewing the skin around her thumb. Like I say, I expected some kind of frenzy, but I got the feeling she was just plain irritated, like here was something she really didn’t need; all these people in uniform in her house, it pissed her off.

In the lounge room a big bloke – a near-naked bloke – was holding this kid up under the arms like a puppet, trying to make his feet grip the carpet. It was hopeless. The kid’s legs kept buckling, and his head was lolling about on his neck.

I could see what the big fella was trying to do. He was trying to make the boy stand up, but I could see that wasn’t going to happen. The kid was all floppy and he had those ‘sunset eyes’ you get when the brain is gone, with the eyeballs not focused and the lids half-closed. The paramedics were trying to intervene. They weren’t shouting at him, but they were talking loudly, saying, ‘Please, put the boy down.’

There were other kids in the house: a boy of about three, and a girl who was still a toddler, both of them in
the lounge room, all curious and afraid. And then there was Lauren. She’s wasn’t in the lounge room. She was in the hall. How did she look? Well, what can I say? In the looks department, she was blessed. She had buck teeth and freckles across her nose, and she was wearing a T-shirt that had some kind of cartoon animal on the front. She could have been anybody’s little Aussie rug rat except that, like all the other kids in the house, she had this extraordinary white hair. I don’t mean white-blonde, like some kids have, I mean white-white, like a Samoyed dog. It was curled all around her face and cascaded down her back, so long that she probably would have been able to sit on it. She had white eyelashes, and white eyebrows, too, but she wasn’t albino – that would be going too far. No, she was more like a ghost. And it wasn’t just the hair that made me think that. It was the way she was hovering in the hallway, like she was trying to decide whether it was all right to come and look at what was going on.

The first words I heard out of Lisa’s mouth were: ‘Get up.’ I’ve got to say, it struck me as strange. The big bloke had let the boy fall to the floor and the paramedics were leaning over him, and I’d say it should have been obvious to anyone that the boy was in no position to stand up, but that’s what the mother said. She came out from the kitchen, broke into the huddle around him, and said, ‘Jacob, get up.’

‘Is he dead?’ Those were the first words I heard from
Lauren. She’d come creeping down the hall, wanting to get a good look.

‘Don’t be stupid, Lauren,’ her mother said. ‘Go get the heater.’

Again, it was such a strange thing to say. This was November, remember, so it was as good as summer in Melbourne. We’d been sweating out by the Cenotaph. Some of the school kids who’d been standing to attention while the band played, they’d actually fainted. Lauren didn’t argue with her mother, though. She went off down the hall and came back with a portable heater. It was three orange bars in an aluminium shell, and it was covered in dust, but Lisa took it from her and plugged it in, and within seconds the whole house was filled with smoke from the dust on the elements. That didn’t stop the mother, though. She put the thing close to Jacob’s head, and his white hair began to steam. I realised his hair must have been damp.

The paramedics were working like crazy. One of the paramedics said, ‘Please, get it out of the way,’ and the other said, ‘What’s the boy’s name? How old is he?’

‘He’s five,’ said Lisa. ‘He’s Jake. Jacob.’

The paramedic said, ‘We’re going to have to get him to hospital.’

‘Jesus,’ said Lisa. ‘I ain’t got ambulance cover.’

I think that’s when I stepped in. I’m pretty sure my first words would have been, ‘Hello. I’m Detective Senior Sergeant Brian Muggeridge, Barrett CIB.’

Nobody paid any attention. One of the paramedics was trying to fit an oxygen mask over the boy’s face, and the other was kicking the heater out of the way while trying to get the wheels out from under a stretcher, so they could get Jake off the floor and out the door.

‘You won’t need cover,’ said the paramedic.

‘You’ll need to come with us,’ said the other.

I said, ‘Hang on, I’m just going to need a few seconds here.’

Lisa glared at me and then turned her back, so I went over to the copper in the kitchen and said, ‘What you got?’

The young constable must have been a new recruit because her shirt was still sharp across the creases. By that time I’d been a copper for about eight years, I suppose, and maybe it was starting to show. My father had been in the force and he’d told me, ‘The pay’s lousy but at least you get to retire at fifty-five.’ That appealed to me. All I could see myself doing as a young fella was working long enough to buy a boat and spend my retirement fishing. What I didn’t know then was what I’d have to go through to get to retirement age. The human misery, it was already wearing me down.

The new recruit told me the mother had sent her boys to the shops for cigarettes. Jacob, who was five, and Harley, who was three, were on their way home when a man came up and told them to hand over the
change. They refused, and so the man started roughing them up, knocking them to the ground and kicking them. The younger boy, Harley, managed to break away, run home and raise the alarm. Lisa had followed him back to the school grounds and found Jacob lying there, unconscious. She carried him home in her arms.

I thought, ‘No.’

I can’t tell you exactly how or why I knew the story wasn’t true. Instinct, maybe. I’ll admit that I was swayed by the condition of the house. It was slumped on its foundations as if the burden of housing so many fractured families had taken a toll on the frame.

I don’t know whether Lisa had been listening to the constable who gave me these details, but when I moved again towards her, to try to ask a few questions, she got pretty agitated. She said, ‘I gotta go with Jake,’ and she came into the kitchen and started gathering cigarettes and other things off the kitchen bench. She had a Glo-mesh purse and a set of house keys with a plastic tag hanging off the ring that said ‘Never Mind The Dog, Beware the Bitch Who Lives Here!’ She stuffed those things into her handbag, and then she opened the fridge and took out a baby’s bottle filled with orange cordial, which she gave to her boyfriend, saying, ‘Make sure you give this to Hayley.’

The boyfriend said, ‘Do you want me to come?’

She said, ‘You stay here.’

I noticed straightaway that there was no tenderness
in the exchange. I mean, you might expect this guy to be comforting Lisa a bit at this stage, or at least to be saying, ‘Don’t worry, he’ll be fine,’ or something, given that they were obviously an item, but that wasn’t what was happening. It made me wonder how long they’d actually been together, or even known each other. Later, we’d find out they’d been together six weeks.

I thought to myself, ‘Did he do it?’ Look, I know that sounds biased against blokes, but how many times had I been to a situation where a kid was out cold and the de facto was the one who’d done it?

The paramedics looked ready to leave and were starting to push Jake out toward the ambulance. Lisa was obviously going to have to go with them, but getting her out the door was going to be no simple matter because by now the media was all over the lawn. In those days, reporters had access to police scanners. They can’t do it any more, not with mobile phones and scrambled messages and so forth, but in those days we basically had CB radios, and it wasn’t illegal, not then, to intercept what you heard on the two-way system. So they would have heard the call – a child had been beaten on the Barrett Estate; paramedics required – and they’d have followed the ambulance to the house, and now they were outside, waiting to hear what had gone on so they could write it up for the next day’s papers.

They wouldn’t interfere with the paramedics. They’d be allowed to make their way to the ambulance, to get
the boy inside, but Lisa … well, she wasn’t injured, so they’d see her as fair game.

I said to Lisa, ‘I’m going to have to help you get past the press. They’ll be shouting questions at you but you just stick with me and I’ll get you though.’

She was nodding her head and gripping her bag. We went out the front door and I tried to help her into the back of the ambulance, but she tripped and we had to make a second go of it, which gave the snappers plenty of time to get a picture. I thought she’d immediately fuss over the boy when she got inside, but she didn’t. Instead, she looked out through the glass doors of the ambulance, towards the flashes from the cameras and the bobbing, fuzzy microphones, and she was wearing a very strange expression. If I had to put a name to it, I’d say she was thrilled.

I made a note of the time. The call to triple-O had been placed at around 5.40 p.m. and now it was getting toward 7 p.m. The deadline for the newspaper reporters was 10 p.m., at the absolute latest, and the photographers were at least an hour from their darkrooms in Melbourne’s CBD, so it was clear that they’d soon have to get moving if they were going to get this story in the paper. I knew from experience, though, that they’d probably wait for a statement from the cops before they’d move. Lisa was shouting things at them through the glass doors of the ambulance, things like: ‘They ought to lock ’em up and throw away the key!’
They knew they had a story – a good story – and now it was up to me to give the thing some context.

The other thing they’d want, of course, was a picture of Jake, not only of him going into the ambulance but a nice portrait, something good and clear, that they could whack on the front page. I scanned the pack, looking for somebody I recognised, and straightaway saw a guy from
The Sun
I remembered from some other job. I signalled to him to come forward, into the house, telling him I’d give him a photograph that he could share with the others. We stepped through the front door and walked straight into the boyfriend. He was standing in the lounge room, his massive legs and chest still bare, just looking like a stunned mullet, taking up all the space.

I said, ‘I’m Detective Muggeridge. You’re …?

He said, ‘Peter Tabone.’

I said, ‘Right, Mr Tabone, can you help me here? I need a photograph of Jacob that I can give to the press, something we can copy for the newspapers.’