Lost Girls (10 page)

She thought
that once a book was done it would raise further funds to go into
the trust. It may even lead to other programs which would also
contribute financially and with publicity to keep the search
alive.

She said she
would not concede defeat that Susan was no more but, even if she
was, then at least telling her story would leave a footprint in the
world so others would know and remember her.

After two hours
of heated discussion and debate it was agreed. An allocation of
$100,000 was set aside for her to travel and gather any
information. It could also be used to pay her living expenses for
as much of the next year as was required while she wrote.

Anne promised
she would have a draft of the full story by the next Christmas and,
as she compiled it, she would make available any useful information
that came out to help others in the search.

Anne now had a
war chest of a hundred thousand dollars and set herself the task of
finding out the stories of all the lost girls and recording them,
along with Susan’s story. The money would fund her to go to the
countries of origin of all the girls to gather information about
their lives, and for any investigations that flowed from them,
along with multiple trips to Darwin to work with the NT police in
searching for clues.

She was
determined to take only minimal expenses for her own living costs.
David had offered to fully support her over the year but she did
not want that either. Time enough for that when they were married,
a plan that sat somewhere over the rainbow of when she had finished
this.

Alan and Sandy
cleaned out the spare bedroom at their Darwin flat for whenever she
was in town. She found this was helpful, it saved on hotel costs
and it gave her company and perspective. They were both the source
of innumerable good ideas for her journey of discovery. Plus Sandy
had a different and unique insight into Susan’s mind that even Anne
had not shared in talking to her friend.

She knew the
book would be a best seller; it was one of those stories that, even
if told badly, would be riveting. She intended to tell it well.

She had several
publishers beating a path to her door for publishing rights a year
from now. But she ignored these offers. In her mind any money the
book raised would firstly repay what the Trust had given her and,
after that, would go into funding the Trust’s ongoing activities.
There were even talks of film or documentary rights, perhaps a TV
mini-series. While she was willing to cooperate with this, it was
too soon to think of this before she had got the stories. If it
happened again it would be done through the Trust with the money
going there.

She wanted no
private benefit herself from this unfolding set of tragedies, for
her the motivation was to make a small step of reparation for her
failure to protect her friend.

She had met all
the parents in association with the police inquiry and the appeal.
All welcomed her offer to write the story and use it as a way to
try and find their daughters, or to raise funds to help others like
them.

Each promised
her free access to any material they held. They agreed she could do
with it as she chose, with them having no rights to censor what was
found unless it raised information about crimes which should be
referred to the police or it was very harmful to their girl’s own
reputation, in which case they would both try and work out an
acceptable way to tell these parts of the stories that was
sympathetic but truthful.

In giving this
undertaking Anne had a sense that they all trusted her motives and
understood her pain through their own. So she felt charged with a
great responsibility to be faithful to these girls’ lives and
stories, the good and the bad, but also to be kind in the
telling.

In addition,
from having seen Mark through Susan’s eyes as she had told her
story, she must be faithful to her friend. She must not to take the
easy way out and present Mark as a monster. Instead she must try to
see him from the inside, the good with the bad, to take the
insights from his diary and try to understand them. Then she must
truthfully reflect the character they showed. She suspected, from
the small amounts she had read, that understanding this man and his
motives was actually a very complex thing.

Thus far she
had deliberately refrained from a serious study of his dairy. It
was police evidence after all but, at the request of the lawyer
that David had retained to assist them, she had been provided with
a copy for her own private reading, not to be further copied. This
was on the basis that she would use this, in combination with
Susan’s story, to help her understand the full story of what had
happened and she would cooperate fully with the police in their own
investigation.

So the judge
had made a confidential order to this effect. In reality no order
was needed; both she and Alan, who was leading the police inquiry,
were driven by the same motivations, to discover the truth and to
find again her friend. They talked of minor details almost every
day.

Both Alan and
Anne had copies of the Susan tapes and transcripts. They had spent
two days locked in a room together listening to every detail and
cross checking the transcription for accuracy.

Now, even
though Anne had fully intended to start on reading and
understanding the diary almost a month ago, she had done little
more than skip here and there.

She now must
spend a couple solid weeks on the reading until she had fully
absorbed the contents. Then she would arrange to spend a couple
weeks in Darwin talking in detail to the police officer reporting
to Alan who was leading this component of the investigation.
Together they would work on the task of the trying to sort out the
people described in the diary, particularly these girls, and the
dates and places they had been. Then, while Anne went overseas to
try and gather the other story and understand about the girls, the
police would try to track Mark’s contacts, and corroborate dates
and places visited through other sources.

In her initial
look at the diary it had rapidly become apparent that it was not a
chronology, things were out of order, stray reflections, creative
pieces and factual descriptions were interspersed with their
margins often blurred. In many places the language was so cryptic
the separating fact from reflection was challenging, particularly
for earlier entries where there would be little ability to
corroborate from other sources.

Names were
another challenge; some were obviously these girls but did not
quite fit the passports.

There was an
Elfin whose story was told a bit later than when the Swedish girl
had disappeared whose name was Elin, but otherwise seemed to match
her description.

There was a BB
who maybe was Isabelle, once he had called her my beautiful B with
the beautiful mind and a few times there was a Belle or Bella who
also could be the same person.

There was an M
and sometimes A, whose stories seemed to run together. She could be
Mandy and Amanda. Some of what Mark said about her was not nice,
“scheming conniving bitch” seemed to refer to her in one place. But
other times he was quite tender about her describing her as another
piece of damaged goods that her felt soft about. Anne thought this
was the girl Susan described who had come at Mark with a knife and,
at that point he had killed her, but it was far from clear.

Then there was
a J and once Josie who matched none of the names and dates in the
passports. Josephine was Amanda’s middle name, but the dates and
places seemed wrong. In the end it sounded like he had hunted and
shot this girl from behind like a wild animal, it was a very
disturbing sequence but also filled with parts of remorse and
tenderness.

It seemed like,
over time, the diary morphed from something with parts of light and
fun in earlier places, to something with overwhelming darkness at
its core near the end. Several times he talked of the “crocodile
within which is driving me effin crazy”, but he also seemed to take
a dark and perverse joy in communing with crocodiles, feeding them
and drawing sustenance from his interactions with them.

The only girl
whose identity seemed clear was Kate, also often called Cathy. She
seemed to fit with Cathy Rodgers, the Fiona of the passport. She
initially emerged as someone with a light shining within after some
very dark parts of the diary, where Mark had seemed to become quite
crazy. But even here it was cryptic. He described meeting her in
Adelaide, saying that when she smiled at him it was like someone
turned on a light in her face and that turned on a light in his
brain and made him feel good. He also said she was one of those
rare kind and generous souls who really tried to do good, but this
goodness was her undoing. He reflected on what seemed like some
very dark and disturbing secrets that Kate had told him as they
travelled together, being raped as child by an uncle. He said that
because of this Kate was broken and damaged inside, like
himself.

It was an
endless jigsaw of puzzles within puzzles.

What Anne
really must do was read it fully two or three times from start to
finish and through this try and place herself inside Mark’s mind,
absorb his idioms, see the world as he saw it. Then perhaps it
would start to make sense. But that was a job for another day.

Meanwhile Anne
tried to keep herself busy and think of nothing but the work in
progress, next steps and more next steps. Her legal secretarial
training proved useful, giving her a task by task focus and an
organising mind and good systems.

But lurking
behind it all was a fear of what she might find at the end, or
worse, what she might not find, an inchoate fear of nothingness as
the ending to a year or her life, a year of toil, labour and
searching, where the only output was a book of stories in which
life was absent. One life would be enough, even if not Susan’s. She
was not very religious but she would still pray, nightly before she
drifted off to sleep, that at least one girl could be found
alive.

A fortnight
later she found herself in Darwin sitting with the detective who
was trying to unscramble the diary. In the meantime she had fully
read it, then gone through a second time and made notes in the
margins about the things that seemed significant.

Now she and
Detective John Arthur were working together off large photocopied
pages, with a whiteboard to one side trying to make a chronology of
events. She was beginning to see an overall pattern that Mark was
damaged goods and understand he was drawn to others similarly
damaged. None of the girls had what one would describe as full and
happy childhoods except Susan and maybe Belle. Even for Susan there
was a way in which the loss of her Aunt had caused her great
distress and split her personality. Belle was less clear cut but
even for her there was a sense that she was searching for something
or someone. Amanda, Cathy and Elin had all had very difficult times
in childhood as had the phantom J. So all were vulnerable and
searching for new identities; this dangerous sense of wildness and
brokenness in Mark’s character seemed to connect deeply with
each.

With this
understanding Anne now felt she was ready to begin. The first
significant event in the diary, which seemed to predate the first
diary entries by some months, was the story of Elin, Mark’s
Elfin.

Elin remembered
winters best as a little girl. She lived in a town in the far north
of Sweden, a place where for the summer the sun barely set. In the
winter the sun barely rose, making a low circle about the white
covered hills and, for a month, never rising at all. Then it was
just a glow appearing on the southern horizon around the time they
ate their family lunch for an hour or two. In this chill winter
half-light her father would take her out to walk across the snow on
days when the cold was not extreme and a winter blizzard did not
blow.

There was
something magical in the half light, a place of imagined beings
which lived in the half shadows, glimpsed but never quite seen. At
these times he would tell her stories of her Nordic ancestry, of
gods and warriors, indomitable spirits who could survive in this
land and, when the winter ice was gone from the fiords, these brave
souls would sail out in their ships to raid and gather resources
for their families, sometimes they would discover new and unknown
places, even whole new worlds. These legends lived on in her mind
far beyond her childhood. They gave her a soul filled with
wanderlust and, as she grew from a child to a woman, that restless
soul ate at her.

In the rest of
Elin’s life things changed too as she grew, though these memories
had blurred edges. Around when she was ten her mother got really
sick. They tried treating her and all her hair fell out. She got
better for a while but got sick again. This time she never got
better.

Elin remembered
that awful cold day, coming into winter, when they stood around the
hole in icy ground, throwing in gifts and bouquets of flowers. Her
mother’s body was wrapped and placed in a small boat, the boat her
mother and father had sailed in together around the lakes and
fiords of Sweden and Norway, from when they had first met as two
children in the local village school. Then the boat and her mother
were covered in icy dirt. Her father spoke of how her mother could
sail the boat over wide oceans, a new warrior queen.

Her mother,
Elle, was the love of her father’s life. Their family was her, a
brother and a little sister, along with her parents. They had all
been very happy until her mother got sick.