Ghost Child (5 page)

I let them go at it. Probably, I was thinking, ‘How many times have I had to listen to a conversation like this? “They’re not my kids, they’re your kids.” “You don’t discipline ’em. You gotta smack ’em.” “You smack
them
and I’ll smack
you
and see how you like it … ” How many times have I been to a house on the Barrett Estate to find, for example, a man with a bloody nose, head-butted by the woman in some dispute over her kids gone wild?’ So I let them keep at it, and after a while, I said, ‘Where’s Jacob’s bedroom?’

This seemed to startle them, at least into silence. I wondered why.

‘What’s
that
got to do with it?’ Lisa said. ‘Why do you gotta see Jake’s bedroom? Why aren’tcha out lookin’ for where Jake got
bashed
?’

‘We’re doing that,’ I said. I would have kept my voice gentle. There was no need for Lisa to know, not yet, that uniformed police
had
walked the schoolyard where Lisa claimed to have found Jacob, and there was no flattened grass or scuffs in the dirt, no patch where a body might have fallen to earth. Also, why had the bloke in the shop said he’d have remembered two kids coming in to buy cigarettes, yet he couldn’t remember Jake, and he couldn’t remember Harley, not even when our uniformed guys had gone there and shown him a photograph of two of the most distinctive kids you’re likely to see?

Besides, if Lisa’s story was true, well, it would have been one out of the box. Kids just don’t get bashed by strangers, or at least they didn’t then, and certainly not at five years of age. You get your perverts flashing at kids in the park, you get your drug problems, but there isn’t any research anywhere that suggests that five-year-old white kids in the Australian suburbs get beaten by strangers. No, the data tells us this: when a person who is what we call ‘vulnerable’ – a homeless man, for example – gets hurt, there’s a real chance it’ll be at the hands of a stranger. A group of drunks might
lose their heads on the way home from the pub and give him a kick while he’s lying in the doorway. But when you’ve got a person who is not classified as vulnerable – that is, when they are a five-year-old kid, enrolled in the local school, living at home with their mother and their siblings – and
they
get hurt, well, it’s almost never a stranger. In almost every case, the perpetrator is somebody known to them.

I said, ‘I’d like to see the bedroom.’

I’d moved by now to the sofa opposite Lisa and, although it was sagging and my knees were up under my chin, I could see most of the house. Directly in front of me, there was the hall where I’d first seen Lauren. I knew enough about houses on the Barrett Estate to know that if I walked down that hall, I’d find a bathroom, a toilet and three bedrooms. Nobody had anything else: there were no studies, no sewing rooms, no indoor gyms, not then.

When I was a kid, there were no houses like the Cashman place on the Barrett Estate. Come to that, there were no houses at all on the Barrett Estate. It was just land, acres of land. We used to get told that it would never be developed, that it would always be there for kids to roam across, and in any case, there were rumours that the land was contaminated because they used to test munitions there. Nobody could be sure how much lead was in the soil. Then demand for housing skyrocketed and some time in the 1970s, the Commonwealth
released the land to developers who carved it up and built upon it. These developers stuck billboards on the freeway, advertising the place as a new ‘satellite city’ that would be perfect for young families. In those days, a perfect estate was one with straight roads and proper kerbing, and nobody cared much about the natural environment. When they cleared the joint, they left exactly six gum trees standing.

I got up – it wasn’t easy since I’m a big guy, and that sofa was collapsed – and walked down the hall. Lisa was right behind me. I did as I’d been taught to: I made mental notes of
everything
. On the left, behind the first door, there was the bathroom. It was nothing extraordinary, just pale pink tiles on the walls, shampoo bottles lined up on top of the shower cubicle. Behind the next door there was a toilet – a separate toilet, they call it now – with an empty Harpic Blu Loo hanging in the bowl. Next to that there was a pile of magazines in a basket:
TV Week, New Idea, Wheels
, that kind of thing, nothing that got me thinking anything was too weird. On the window ledge there was a can of air freshener. The smell was like lemons.

On the other side of the hall, to my right, there was the first of the three bedrooms. It was beige like all the rest, but still obviously a girl’s room. The bed was pink and the curtain was a purple sheet, and in amongst the toys, well, there was Lauren. She startled me, maybe because she’d been so quiet. I’d totally forgotten about
her, but there she was, sitting on her bed with a doll – a naked doll with close-cropped hair – both of them staring back at me. I didn’t speak to her. It wasn’t a good idea, not without a social worker, but I did catch her eye. Her expression was troubling. It was something like:
Am I in trouble now?
But you get that with kids who are always getting it in the neck from their parents, and I’d reckoned that these Cashman kids were always being told they were gonna get it. I didn’t think to stay there and tease a story out of her. As far as I knew, she hadn’t seen anything. I did think, ‘You poor kid. You’ve got the bum rap with this room.’ The door looked out across the hall to the toilet, and no doubt Lauren would have copped an eyeful of Peter whenever he sat there, flipping through
Wheels
and doing his business.

Two other bedrooms came off the end of the hall. One was obviously Lisa’s. There was an ashtray on the side table and a shawl over the lamp. It was a bit scorched, like it had caught fire more than once. There was a dressing table with a tin of Impulse body spray. Shoved between the wall and the queen-size bed there was an old cot with rumpled sheets, which must have been where Hayley slept.

On the left-hand side of the hall there was the third bedroom, the one the boys shared, and I remember it well because it reminded me of my own boys’ rooms. The Cashman kids had their precious things on display: there was a cardboard certificate from the Barrett Primary
School awarded to ‘Jacob Cashman’ (this, written in biro) for ‘helping classmates’ and ‘good story writing’, and there was a medal hanging from the chest of drawers on a stripy ribbon. Instead of beds, there were bunks. Jacob likely slept on the top, a privilege always granted to the older boy. It didn’t look much like the sheets got changed. There was a dark patch on the bottom bed – a smudge of sweat and grime and urine, about the size of a child’s body. There were figures from action cartoons and a model of a T-Rex. There was a book,
The Ancient World of the Dinosaurs
, borrowed, according to the sticker, from the Barrett Primary School.

From down the hall, Peter said, ‘The bloody press are here again.’

I walked back to join him in the lounge room. There were glass panels on both sides of the front door, and through them I could see cameramen setting up tripods and adjusting their lights.

Lisa said, ‘Can’t you tell them to piss off?’

‘I can,’ I said. ‘But they won’t. I don’t know if you’ve seen this morning’s newspapers, Lisa, but what happened to Jacob is news – big news – and that’s a
good
thing.’

She said, ‘A good thing! You reckon,
Detective
?’

Was she mocking me? Yes, in the midst of this tragedy, she was mocking me.

I said, ‘Well, Lisa, we’re going to need the public’s help …’ and then I paused, before adding, ‘You know, to find the man who did this to Jacob.’

I watched to see whether Lisa would exchange glances with Peter, and she did. A moment of silence settled upon all of us, and I suppose that was when it dawned on Lisa that I actually didn’t believe her. I didn’t want that idea taking hold too soon – I wanted her to be in cahoots with me, and not with Peter – so I continued, ‘Look, let’s make them welcome. Let’s go outside and tell them again what happened to Jacob and we’ll ask them once more to appeal for witnesses for us. I know most of these guys. I trust them. They’ll put it on the six o’clock news, and in the newspapers again tomorrow, and maybe somebody who has seen something will come forward.’

I wondered whether she’d have the guts to do it – to lie to the press and to the city of Melbourne, I mean. She could tell me her tall tales, but it’s not easy to stand in front of cameras and tell a lie like the one she was intent on telling. That said, I didn’t doubt that Lisa knew how to tell a lie. She would have spent years lying to the welfare department about where the fathers of her children were; to teachers, trying to explain why the kids weren’t at school; and to the boyfriends, because I’ve no doubt they overlapped. Lying like that, pretty much to everyone about everything, was probably second nature and came easier to her than the truth, which is harder. You can’t really tell the Salvos, ‘We’re out of money because I spent it all on booze.’ You’ve got to make something up. You’ve got to say, ‘The welfare cheque didn’t come.’
Or, ‘I lost my purse.’ You can’t really tell welfare, ‘No, there’s no bloke living in my house. I’m a single mum.’ You’ve got to say, ‘That guy? He’s my brother.’

But
this
lie – a man attacked my kid and left him close to death on the ground – well, that was a biggie, and it meant getting the kids to lie, too. I didn’t imagine Lisa would have too many problems with that. How many times had I seen it? A mother will tell the kids, ‘If you say Daddy hit me, the cops are going to put him in prison and you’ll go to the orphanage.’ It scares the life out of them. I mean, Lauren was only six and Harley was three, and you don’t need a psychology degree to know that kids of that age will lie for their parents if they’re told that’s what they’ve got to do. Who does a kid love, more than anybody else? Their mum. What does a kid want, more than anything else? The approval of their mum. And in a house like this one on DeCastella Drive, what would the kids most fear? Two things. Mum, and not having a mum.

Still, I said to Lisa, ‘I think we’ll have to get the kids involved.’

She said, ‘What kids? Not Lauren.’

Not Lauren
.

I said, ‘No, not Lauren. Lauren wasn’t there, was she?’

Lisa said, ‘No, she weren’t.’

‘Okay then, no, not Lauren, but Harley. He was there, right?’

‘He was where?’

‘At the school?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Okay, well then, if it’s okay with you, I’d like to get Harley out in front of the press because somebody might remember seeing him with Jacob.’

Lisa said, ‘All right,’ and I thought, ‘She’s got more balls than I thought.’

She was a better actress than I’d figured on, too. I could actually see her, there in the house, working into the role she’d have to play. She’d started to tremble with indignation. I wondered about the psychology. Had she got to the stage where she was starting to believe her own story? Or was she still hoping that she could get others to believe it? Another part of me was thinking, ‘I wonder how long she can keep this up?’ I didn’t want to have to go through the whole ordeal: crying Mum on TV one day, and then the boyfriend led up to the court in handcuffs the next, because when that happens it’s the quickest possible way for a jury to lose any sympathy they might have for you when the trial gets underway.

I signalled to one of the blokes on the front porch. He wasn’t a copper. Don’t tell me how, but I can spot a copper. He might be wearing scuba gear, he might be in the middle of a fishing holiday, he might be up to his neck in waders, and I can tell he’s a cop. This bloke wasn’t a cop. He was the media-liaison guy, a graduate, probably from RMIT, trained to handle the press.
I was a bit suspicious of these guys when they first came into the force – you like your coppers to be coppers, if you know what I mean, you don’t want too many outsiders around – but they’d proved themselves reliable and pretty handy at keeping the press behind the barriers.

The media guy opened the front door and I told him to tell the press to get ready because Lisa was about to come out and make a short statement. I said, ‘Tell ’em, “Sorry, we can’t have any questions. The mother is distressed, obviously. This will be an appeal for witnesses and you can take some photographs, and then we’ll be getting Mrs Cashman out of here, to the hospital.”’

The guy nodded and I closed the door to give him a minute to pass the message back to the press. Through the glass panels, I saw a young woman in a suit and a white shirt – no doubt she wanted to be the next Jana Wendt – get up out of the gutter and use a pocket mirror to check her make-up. When, I wondered, did reporters start to look less like cops than like bankers? When did so many of them become
women?

To Lisa, I said, ‘I’ve let them know that they’ll have a few minutes and then you want to leave here and get to the hospital to see Jacob. I’ve told them that there won’t be any questions, but believe me, they’ll try to ask questions anyway.’

I warned her, ‘It’s important that you don’t say anything we don’t agree to say. Some of the information – what Jacob was wearing when he went out to
the shops, for example – we need to keep to ourselves because we might need it, to verify the accuracy of a witness report.’

‘What?’

That came from Peter. I didn’t feel much like talking to him, but I suppose I had to explain, so I said, ‘Let’s say somebody comes forward and says, yes, I saw those two boys walking back from the shops.

‘We can say, okay, what was Jacob wearing? Now, if we know that Jacob was wearing a white T-shirt, and that hasn’t already been all over the news, the witness might say, ‘He was wearing a black T-shirt,’ and then, well, we’ll know that’s not the witness we’re looking for.’

Peter seemed impressed. He said, ‘You think of that yourself?’

I told him, ‘That’s fairly standard.’

To Lisa, I said, ‘Now, the important thing is to decide what we
will
say. The time, the details, who Jacob was with, that’s all okay. And if you think Harley is up to it, if you think Harley can speak about what happened, we’ll get him to speak, too. Harley can talk?’