Ghost Child (22 page)

In the public gallery, Mrs Boyce had started to weep. Her husband held one of her hands; her mother held the other. The three of them, all in suits, had been sitting with eyes wide open, so that tears wouldn’t fall, but now Mrs Boyce was cracking.

Bateson tried another approach. ‘I wonder if we might turn again to what you
heard
as opposed to what you
saw
. Did the baby make a sound?’

Lauren said, ‘You mean, did the baby cry?’

The Coroner stepped in and said, ‘I don’t think that Mr Bateson is asking the witness whether she heard the baby cry. I think he’s asking whether the witness heard any sound, is that right, Mr Bateson?’

Bateson said, ‘Yes, Your Honour.’

The Coroner said, ‘Very well. You may answer, Miss Cameron. I’d like to know that, myself.’

But before Lauren could speak, Bateson said, ‘Miss
Cameron, what I am trying to determine is whether you heard any sounds that might indicate
life
? You understand that the hospital contends there were no signs of life. That would mean that there were no
sounds
of life.’

I was going to object, but Lauren interrupted. She said, ‘I know what you’re asking. There was a lot of noise in the room. Mrs Boyce was in a lot of pain. The father was distressed. There were a lot of sounds.’

Bateson said, ‘Yes, but the
baby
, Miss Cameron. You understand that the Boyce family believes that their baby made a sound. What do you say? Did you hear
a baby sound
?’

The room had gone very quiet. Mrs Boyce was looking up, through tears.

Lauren hesitated, and then said, ‘There
were
sounds … but the sound I heard … it was not of
life
. The sound I heard … it was more like
love
.’

Bateson said, ‘I beg your pardon?’

Lauren said, ‘There were sounds. The mother, the father, everybody was so upset. There were sounds, and that’s what was in the room, sounds like that. Sounds like hearts breaking. Sounds like love.’

Sounds like
love
.

It was a beautiful way to describe the events of the day, and so it did not surprise me when those words – not Lauren’s actual words, but a new and sexier formulation – became the headline in the next day’s newspapers.

‘Aide Heard the “Sound of Love”.’ That was how the
Telegraph
put it. The
Herald
went for a similar line, ‘Nurse in Baby Boyce Inquest Heard “Sound of Love”.’

After that, of course, journalists began referring to the ‘Sound of Love’ inquest; the ‘Sound of Love’ trial; and, finally, the ‘Sound of Love’ settlement.

Lauren, of course, became the ‘Sound of Love’ aide. There would be some sniggering about that, but not yet.

I was one of maybe fifteen reporters assigned to cover the Baby Boyce inquest. Some were from the
Telegraph
, some from the
Australian
, from Nine news and the ABC, plus there were the old hands from AAP and the wire services, guys who have been in the business since my father was a journo.

My dad, Frank Postle, was a reporter on the old Melbourne
Sun
. He was the one who told me, ‘Get into the business if you can. You’ll travel the world on somebody else’s dime; you’ll have a front-row seat into history. You’re not on the pitch, but by God, you are on the sidelines.’

He didn’t get me the job, though. I want to be clear about that. I got the job on my own. I don’t work for Dad’s old paper, the
Sun
. I’m at the
Herald
, in Sydney.
It’s a different stable. Dad wrote me a reference but I had to pass the cadet’s test, and I had to get the degree and in the end
I
had to get the job and work my way up from the bottom.

There hasn’t been much travelling the world. I’ve done stock markets. I’ve done football matches and I’ve done ‘death knocks’, where you have to bang on the door of the family of somebody who has died and say, ‘How do you feel?’ It’s not pleasant, but it’s what you have to do to get yourself graded, and now I’m graded. I’m a senior reporter. I do courts, and I do inquests. The dirty underbelly of Sydney society, the stuff that happens at the intersection of drugs, money and murder, that’s my beat.

The Baby Boyce inquest was obviously a bit different from the stuff we normally see in the Coroner’s Court: it was a right-to-life case. It had everybody talking. Should people abort their disabled foetuses? The data shows that almost everybody does, so is the world a less welcoming place these days, for the disabled kids who make it through? That kind of stuff gets people going. You get the right-to-lifers revved up, and then the women’s groups jump on, the academics, the churches. It was a case that seemed to interest people. It helped that Mrs Boyce was pretty and sweet; her husband handsome and stalwart; and the doctor, Stephen Bass, so establishment.

I didn’t expect to get much out of Lauren Cameron’s
testimony. She was listed among the witnesses because she’d been on duty the day the baby had died, but she was an aide, not a doctor, so I couldn’t see what she’d have to say. But then, of course, she turned out to be the one who gave the inquest its name. Because of her, we started calling it the ‘Sound of Love’ inquest. Sound of Love! We didn’t realise how funny that was, until later.

So, anyway, I was covering the Baby Boyce inquest for the
Herald
and we’d put a photograph of Lauren in the paper, and that was when Dad called me up, said he had this nagging feeling that he’d seen Lauren somewhere before. He said, ‘Can you look in the files? I’m sure I’ve done a story about her.’

I was almost certain he was mistaken. According to her statement, Lauren Cameron was twenty-seven years old, and Dad was claiming to remember her from his days on the
Sun
, so we’re talking about a time when Lauren would have been a child.

But there you go. I hate to say it, but Dad was right.

The way the filing system at the
Herald
works is this: every story ever written is stored in a system we call NewsText, and reporters can search the database by using key words, pretty much like Google. If the story was written any time after 1996, you can actually read it on your computer screen and even cut and paste from it. If it pre-dates 1996, the NewsText system will alert you to its existence by giving you the headline and the date it was published, and then, if you want to see more, you
can go down to the library in the bowels of the building, and ask the librarians to get out the old, leather-bound newspaper files, and see a copy of the actual page for yourself.

I’d already Googled Lauren and nothing had come up. She had no MySpace page and she wasn’t on Facebook, which is unusual these days. Anyway, I typed the words ‘Lauren’ and ‘Cameron’ into the NewsText system and I got nothing. Then I remembered that she’d told the inquiry she had two names, ‘Lauren Cameron’ and ‘Lauren Cashman’.

I put in ‘Lauren’ and ‘Cashman’ and … bingo!

There were quite a few stories with those words. The first one that grabbed me was dated November 1982. The headline was ‘MAN BASHES BOY’. There were some other headlines: ‘Tiny Jake on Life Support’ and ‘Jake Outrage: Mother Charged’ and ‘Little Boy Lost: Funeral for Little Jake’, and according to NewsText, Lauren Cashman’s name was in all of these stories. I jotted down the dates of the stories and went to the library, which is something I enjoy doing but don’t do often enough. Old newspapers have context, they’re better than Google. From the ads and the photographs, you can see how people looked and how they lived. You can see how a story was treated, too: did it get splashed all over the front page, or was it buried on page 10? Did they have a cartoon, a photograph, a commentary piece, as well as the news story?

As soon as I found the page with ‘MAN BASHES BOY’ across the front, I could see why Dad remembered Lauren. She was in the photograph on the front page, sitting with what seemed to be other members of her family – her brothers and sisters – and they all had this pale, haunted look about them. Also, this had been a big story, and Dad was one of the few reporters to actually get it in the paper the day after it happened. He’d stayed with it for a week. It seemed to have got people quite worked up.

I read through the copy: a little boy, Jacob Cashman, aged five, had been beaten to death on a housing estate west of Melbourne. In the first story, Jacob’s mother was saying Jacob had been set upon by a man while walking home from the shops, but it turned out she made that up. I was actually surprised that Dad had printed that rubbish. It came out that she and the boyfriend had done it. She went to prison for manslaughter and, from what I could see, she died there, some ten years later. There was no record of what happened to him, and no clue as to what had happened to the other kids. Still, there was no doubt in my mind that the Lauren Cameron I’d seen at the Sound of Love inquest was the same Lauren Cashman in this story. It also seemed obvious to me that people would be interested in the fact that the aide for the ‘Sound of Love’ inquest had a tragic background of her own.

I looked at the photograph of her, and thought,
‘Poor kid.’ But, on the other hand, I thought, ‘Good story,’ and headed to my desk, with photocopies of the original articles under my arm. And then something really strange happened. The telephone rang and it was a guy saying, ‘Did you write that story about Lauren Cashman? Because I’m her brother.’

I thought, ‘This is too weird.’

He said, ‘We’ve kind of lost touch and I’m looking for her.’

I didn’t tell him that I’d already figured out for myself that Lauren had a family. I just thought, ‘Well, that all fits. They would have been split up after the mother went to jail.’ I didn’t let on to the brother, though. Instead, I thought, ‘How good is this? If I can get the brother on the scene, if we can get a reunion going, this will be great.’

I told the brother that Lauren was due back in the witness box and if he came down to the Coroner’s Court he’d definitely see her there – I’d even point her out if he looked me up, and he promised he would. I took down his mobile phone number and alerted the photographer. ‘We may have a bit of a scoop here,’ I told him. ‘Stick with me at the court today. Something might happen.’ Little did I know! I went to court that day, ready to write the reunion story, when the legal team for the Boyce family got up and dropped a bombshell.

Lauren got into the witness stand. This was the day
after the ‘Sound of Love’ speech, remember, so the press gallery was packed with reporters all interested in what she might say on her second day in the box. The counsel assisting the Coroner, Mr Bateson, stood up and said, ‘Miss Cameron, where were you the evening before your shift started?’

I couldn’t immediately see the relevance of the question and my first thought was, ‘Uh oh, don’t tell me she was drunk? Maybe there’s going to be a twist in the story.’

Lauren said, ‘I was out.’

Bateson said, ‘Out where? Out on the town? Where did you spend the evening?’

The hospital’s lawyer, whose name I now forget, was going absolutely nuts, saying ‘Objection’, but it was overruled, and Bateson was allowed to continue. He said, ‘Where were you, Miss Cameron?’

Lauren’s face went red. She kept looking over at the hospital’s barrister. Then she said, ‘I was in a city hotel.’

I thought, ‘
In
a city hotel. Not
at
a city hotel? What’s this all this about?’

Bateson said, ‘In a hotel … you mean a bar?’

A bar! So they
were
drunk. But Lauren said, ‘No.’

Bateson said, ‘Well then, where? In a restaurant?’

Again, Lauren said, ‘No.’

I was thinking, ‘Where are they going with this?’

The hospital’s barrister was on his feet again. He
knew what was coming. We in the media had no idea. And then there it was, before us.
She’d been with Bass
. At the very moment that Mrs Boyce was in labour, when he really should have had his high-paid arse on the maternity ward, he’d been in the cot with an aide who later turned up to work alongside him! Excellent! Oh, I can see how it wasn’t technically relevant to the inquest, that it probably had nothing to do with whether the baby lived or died, but still, that kind of thing, it just blows a case wide open. Lauren must have known it was coming – I mean, surely she knew it was going to come out? – but still, she looked absolutely horrified.

‘You were with Stephen Bass in a hotel room, here in Sydney?’ said Bateson. And then, quietly, he added, ‘I take it his wife was not present?’

There was pandemonium, obviously. The Coroner had to call a recess. Lauren took off, out of the courtroom. I thought she’d head for the toilets. That’s what witnesses normally do. They think they’re safe in there but actually, it’s always a bonus for us journos if they head to the loo, because once they’re in there, there’s only one way out, and we’re there waiting for them. But she didn’t go to the loo. She flew out of the courtroom and into the foyer and stood there, like a stunned mullet, looking this way and that, and then right into the face of a tall guy – a pale, freckly,
white-haired
guy, and I suppose I should have realised at the
time it must have been the brother, but I was so caught up in what had just happened inside the court that I’d totally forgotten about Harley Cashman. She quickly took off again, and left him standing there, looking very confused.

The next day, the
Telegraph
had a headline that I won’t forget for a while: ‘Love Me Do!’ They had all the scandalous details: Bass, a fifty-one-year-old married father, had been alone at a city hotel with the twenty-seven-year-old blonde nursing aide, while Elizabeth Boyce was labouring a baby with serious deformities who died in Bass’s hands some hours later. It was a perfect story for the tabloids, the kind of thing everybody wants to read. We at the
Herald
wrote it up, too. Naturally, we all sent photographers to Lauren’s house – you wouldn’t believe how hard she was to find, living on the back of somebody else’s property – but soon enough, the nature strip was packed with reporters and photographers. Lauren wouldn’t come out, and the lady who lived in the main house kept chasing us off the lawn. My editor kept saying to me, ‘We’ve got to get some quotes from her,’ and I was saying, ‘What am I supposed to do, break the door down?’

But I was thinking, ‘Even if she doesn’t come out, I still have the Barrett angle,’ something nobody else had. I called my dad, brought him up-to-date, and told him he was quite right, she had been in the newspaper before, and rang off, so I could meet the deadline.

‘Love Aide in Family Tragedy.’ That was the headline we put on the story. I wrote:

I went through the events that had occurred in the house on DeCastella Drive as best I could. There was a hint in one of the stories that was published at the time that the real details of the case would never be known. The judge had sealed everybody’s testimony, so I had a few difficulties putting it all together, but I did manage to make the point that the Lauren who people had been reading about in the ‘Sound of Love’ inquest was the same Lauren who was on the front page of the
Sun
all those years ago.

Did I think about how Lauren might react to her history being re-told in the newspaper? Not really. The
story about Jacob was a matter of public record. It had been reported at the time. We were hardly broadcasting a state secret. True, it was locked in the archives, and yeah, I guess she had changed her name, but she was the one who volunteered to the court that she’d once been somebody else. And anyway, I like to think that my story might have softened her image in the eyes of some people who thought she was just a home-wrecker.