Perfect Victim (13 page)

I told him that ‘Australia’s Most Wanted’ were interested in Rachel’s case. He told us they must be short for a story. He rang Victoria Police Media Liaison and repeated what he had just said to us.

In the late afternoon we were contacted again by David dePyle. The Missing Persons Unit was interested in hearing about Rachel’s disappearance.

The police complex in St Kilda Road is formidable. A pipe organ would not be out of place there. But when David dePyle appeared, he led us over to an easy chair, away from reception. Already I was feeling better. This man respected our privacy. He wasn’t intimidating. He said the Missing Persons Unit was not concerned with
why
a person goes missing. Their priority was to find the person. He repeated the all-too-familiar missing person statistics, but this time we found them reassuring.

It didn’t occur to me that the Missing Persons Unit would have also considered Rachel a runaway.

We gave David dePyle the website address Carlo had set up and before saying goodbye he asked us if we would just limit ourselves to being poster people. The police knew of all our ‘private’ investigations, particularly the one on Monday night. For the first time since Rachel’s disappearance we felt at ease, and agreed.

We went home for dinner. Can you believe it? A house full of people wanting to know everything. Mike was beginning to feel closed in, but even though he found himself in an immense tragedy, his attitude towards people had changed for the better. He was overwhelmed by support from family and friends, and total strangers.

He was surviving.

13

F
RONT-PAGE
N
EWS

Day 9: Wednesday, 10 March

Nine days after Rachel had waved happily from the door her disappearance made front-page news.

As day breaks I walk across to the petrol station to buy the papers. I am numb. The newspaper and media attention emphasises our loss. Will I ever see her again? You read the headlines ‘Family Fear on Missing Teen’, you read the story and make your judgement. Bad feeling about that girl. She’s dead. And you realise that the thing that always happens to someone else is happening to Rachel, to Mike and Elizabeth, to Ashleigh-Rose and Heather. Not strangers. Me. Us. Our family. The paper tells your own story. The paper makes it final … and life goes on.

More phone calls. More sorrys. More help offered. More food left. Radio calling. Television calling. Attention plus.

Drew drives to Healesville to pick up more recent photographs and a Christmas video.

Victoria Police Media Liaison arranges for all the television stations and press to visit our house together so that we need only tell our story once. ‘Australia’s Most Wanted’ will be coming after the news media. All other inquiries can be directed to Detective Senior Sergeant Steve Waddell at the Missing Persons Unit. There is a sense of protection. I vaguely remember the presence of a kindly policewoman.

Furniture is rearranged. Lights are glaring. Television cameras. Fluffy microphones. Sound technicians. Reporters. Our living room is transformed. It is a long morning. A blur. There is a video fiasco. Competition between channels or programs from the same channel, with Drew caught in the middle. Apologies given. Apologies accepted. I remember thinking,
why is this happening to our family
? Will they help us find our beautiful daughter?

The media people were caring. They wanted their story but they were compassionate. Though for us it was mentally exhausting. And after we had told our story, again, to ‘Australia’s Most Wanted’ we were so glad for the liaison part of Police Media Liaison because it meant with only two interview sessions we had covered most of the media. It was mid-afternoon before all the media left. ‘Australia’s Most Wanted’ had the video from the dance school, which made them happy. The woman interviewer was taken aback when she saw Rachel’s solo. ‘Is that Rachel? She really
can
dance. She’s so graceful.’

Before the team left they filmed us at the local railway station taping up posters, and they wanted us to travel with them to St Kilda to film us in the street. It was decided that we would do this at about 8 p.m. as we had been notified that the Missing Persons detectives were coming to the house at six. Thank God they were acting quickly.

We were signing a document for ‘Australia’s Most Wanted’ when I noticed the date: 10 March. ‘It’s our twentieth wedding anniversary today,’ I said.

‘So it is,’ said Mike.

‘Today?’ said the woman from ‘Australia’s Most Wanted’. ‘I thought you said you’ve just had your birthday.’

‘That’s right. My fortieth on the 7th and our twentieth wedding anniversary on the 10th. Mike wouldn’t marry me until I was twenty because he was nearly thirteen years older. So we married three days after my birthday.’

‘There’s no way Rachel would have run away,’ said Mike.

‘I believe you,’ said the woman.

Drew was still answering the phone for us. Mum’s sandwich and coffee-making hands were in retirement. Mike and I sat staring into space, wondering what we could do next. Mike stood up and started to gather posters.

‘What do you think you’re doing?’ asked Drew.

‘We just can’t sit here,’ said Mike.

‘Yes. Yes, you can,’ said Drew. ‘I know the police said you could be the poster people but …’

‘I don’t need the police to tell me anything,’ answered Mike, slightly ruffled.

‘Yeah, I know, mate,’ said Drew. ‘But not now, hey. Just think how many more people have heard about Rachel today through the press coverage. No, you two go to bed.’

‘Drew …’

‘No, I don’t want to hear any more. You’re so tired you didn’t even remember your wedding anniversary. Go to bed.’

Big brother had said his piece. We went to bed.

Ten days since Rachel disappeared, and maybe we had only slept ten hours each. Now we were in bed, awake, fatigued, unable to sleep in the daylight. I rolled on my side and cried. ‘Tell me this isn’t happening.’

‘I can’t tell you that,’ said Mike, and held me close.

‘Tell me you think she’s alive.’

‘I can’t tell you that,’ said Mike, and held me closer.

There was a softness in the room. A haze. This was a dream. Have you ever had the feeling that you are on the outside looking in? I was outside looking in. We were living in the wrong people’s lives. The two people in our bed couldn’t possibly be us. But they looked like us. Their names were our names, but how could their sorrow be ours?

Mike moved closer. He was aroused. Oh no, I thought. He nuzzled his head into the corner of my neck. I lay there and the words, ‘oh think of England’, immediately went through my head. I could not believe I’d thought it. It wasn’t that I didn’t need this comfort. It was guilt. A form of indecency I had never experienced.

What would Rachel think?

Michael’s hand came round and squeezed my nipple.

I was so weary. Mike was weary. Too tired for sleep.

Oh, Rachel, I thought, as her father gently entered me.

‘This will relax you,’ whispered Mike.

He rocked with me gently.

We curled up together in a foetal position. Paused, and cried together.

‘Our baby’s gone,’ I cried.

‘I can’t tell you that,’ said Mike, and held me closer still.

There was a quiet tapping at the door. ‘Would you two like a cup of tea?’ asked Drew.

‘Thank you,’ said Mike.

We pulled ourselves together and a few moments later Drew opened the door and left two cups of tea on my bedside table.

My bedside table drawer was partly open, and when I picked up Mike’s tea I noticed my contraceptive packet.

‘Oh no,’ I said. ‘Since Rachel’s disappearance I’ve completely forgotten to take these.’

Mike laughed.

‘It’s not funny, Michael, I’m in the middle of my cycle.’

‘What will be will be,’ he answered.

I started to cry again, and he cuddled me.

We didn’t share this intimacy again for another four months.

At six o’clock that evening we shook hands with the police officers greeting us at our front door. Introductions and good evenings. Detective Senior Sergeant Steve Waddell and Detective Senior Constable Neil Paterson. Two officers sitting, facing two parents sitting.

Lengthy discussions. A story without an ending, repeated. Again the mention of a list of friends.

‘We’ve already made two lists.’

‘Make another.’

The phone rang.

Drew interrupted us. ‘Your friend Chris, do you want to speak to her, Elizabeth? She rang earlier.’

‘I must,’ I said, and excused myself.

I hadn’t heard from Chris for almost a year but I considered her, along with Elaine, to be my best friend. Time had simply parted us.

‘I’ve just heard.’ Chris started to cry. ‘Oh, Elizabeth, I can’t believe it.’

‘She hasn’t run away.’

‘I know she hasn’t.’

‘Chris.’

‘Elizabeth.’

Silence.

‘I left a message earlier,’ she said, ‘but you were resting in bed.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry, I haven’t caught up with messages yet. We’ve had the media here.’

‘I want to help you look for her. I’ve taken time off work.’

‘I need you with us.’

‘Yes, yes,’ she said, ‘anything.’

My cousin Michele drove us to the bayside suburb of St Kilda. People wound down their windows at traffic lights and pointed to the posters on her car. ‘Hope you find her. My oath.’ Thumbs-up signs. Many good wishes. ‘Hope you find the bastard.’ And, ‘Needs his balls ripping off.’

We met the team from ‘Australia’s Most Wanted’. They had spent the latter part of the day filming in Richmond and Prahran. I was particularly taken with the cameraman. I know one could say, ‘Elizabeth, they wanted your story.’ But the team of three were also especially caring, gently helping us to perform for their camera. It was an awkward situation, like starring in a role which is just a little too real for comfort.

Microphones were clipped to our clothes. Instructions given. Three times we walked down the same street. ‘Make sure you stay on the same side … No, you were holding the posters in the other hand before.’ Their car moved at walking pace alongside us until the scene was shot.

The cameraman wrote a week later, ‘Of all the horrible crimes I have had to cover in my time I have never been so affected as by what has happened to your family. I have two little girls – I feel I never want to let them out of my sight …’

Family and friends were continuing to distribute posters, long into the night. A volunteer from a food van for street kids in Brighton contacted us. The van would put Rachel’s poster up. Rachel’s Grade 4 teacher from Mont Albert Primary School rang to distribute posters, and parents from the school rang, too. They organised a casserole round-up, and by the end of the week they wheeled into our house a freezer full of food.

14

T
HE
L
IST

Day 10: Thursday, 11 March

Mike and my friend Chris went to Prahran to speak to people whose businesses were closed on the Monday night, and ask permission to hang posters on windows and leave small handfuls at counters. While Chris was busy speaking to businesses on the south side of the road Mike decided to go and apologise to the escort agency. I didn’t go with them. I was scared of being recognised from the Monday night. I stayed at the dance school.

There were two doors to the escort agency, one leading straight upstairs. Mike walked up to the shopfront door with his posters in hand and pushed the buzzer. There was a long silence before a voice came through the intercom. ‘Who’s there?’

Mike had the feeling he was being observed, and was prepared to deal with whatever reception he received because he had gone to apologise. A hostile one was a possibility.

‘It’s Mike Barber.’

Not long after that the door opened and an attractive woman came into the street.

‘I’d like to apologise,’ Mike said. ‘I was part of the chaos you suffered the other night. I also wondered if you could put a poster in your window.’

‘All you had to do was knock on the door and ask,’ she said kindly.

The woman spoke to Mike for some time. They had been annoyed by our behaviour Monday night because it was obvious we were targeting their business. But now the woman understood, and told Mike she probably would have done the same had their teenage daughter been missing.

There had been a lot of fuss on Tuesday because detectives had questioned the agency throughout the day. But they were one of the top two legal escort agencies and had been in business for eighteen years.

The woman invited Mike in for a cup of coffee and he met her husband, who had been the driver of the black car. They had already started to carry out some investigations of their own. It was highly unlikely that anyone would have taken Rachel into the business because the escort industry preferred experienced women. Unless it was an illegal business: they knew some of these and had checked them out. Their girls would continue to ask about.

They sat around the table together, sharing coffee, being chatty. How normal they are, Mike thought. They had children themselves. They’d been shocked by the whole affair, too; it was a parent’s worst nightmare.

And the stories of young women being drugged for an overseas market were not just movie material. And yes, there really were date-rape drugs.

Meanwhile, at the dance school, I received a phone call from David dePyle. He wanted to show me a photofit image of the girl who’d been seen with Rachel. When I saw it I broke down.

The girl in the picture didn’t mean anything to me. I felt so angry. Who
was
she?

Instinct was telling me I would never see Rachel again.

‘The eyes, and the chin,’ I said. ‘I recognise those.’

Then Mike returned from Prahran.

‘You’ve been a long time.’