Perfect Victim (14 page)

‘I was apologising to the escort agency.’

David dePyle smiled. I’m sure I blushed. We really had got ourselves involved in some silly activities.

‘Do you recognise her?’ I asked Mike.

He came up with one name because of the hair. But I disagreed. Again the eyes and chin. Mike knew them but couldn’t think of a name.

We went home for lunch to say farewell and thank you to Drew, who was returning, exhausted, to Harmers Haven. He said he needed a break from
us
because
we
wouldn’t rest. But we couldn’t just sit at home. We’d drive ourselves crazy. So we were driving everyone else crazy instead.

Ashleigh-Rose had started cutting roses. Dad and Susan had a rose garden the size of a tennis court out at Healesville, a beautiful bushy area east of Melbourne, past the suburban sprawl. Their roses were in full bloom. Normally they would probably have stopped her, but she filled all of Susan’s vases with the roses. When the vases were filled she went around the garden collecting the fallen heads and placing them in shallow dishes. The house smelt like a florist’s.

Missing Persons contacted us at the dance school in the late afternoon. Had we thought about the list?

We had, but could not come up with any new names.

My friend Chris felt positive that we could. She opened our exercise book of ‘ideas’ and divided a page up into groups: school, church, dance, Princess Theatre.

No new names.

‘
Anyone
else, Elizabeth. Come on, Mike.’

‘There were a couple of mystery names we found on loose pieces of paper in Rachel’s room,’ said Mike.

She wrote down the mystery names.

‘Neighbours,’ she said.

‘Oh, I don’t know, Chris.’

She looked at me in a ‘come off it’ Chris manner.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Neighbours, from Mont Albert?’

‘No, why would they?’

‘Names!’ she demanded.

‘The Reids, but they lived two houses away,’ I said.

‘Don’t be so literal.’

‘Okay then, Caroline Reid and her middle sister. The youngest is a friend of Ashleigh-Rose’s so she wouldn’t be old enough.’

Chris wrote them down in our ideas exercise book, and then faxed the list to Missing Persons.

It was almost five and I needed to get to the dress shop in Bridge Road before it closed. Might they have a blue top like Rachel’s? We hurried to the store and parked outside. They had sold out. While the sales assistant was on the phone to their factory, I saw a traffic warden writing us a ticket. I rushed out.

‘Please!’ I begged, ‘I’ve only been here five minutes. Our daughter’s gone missing and the police asked me if I could find clothing similar to what she was last seen in …’

‘That’s not my problem. It’s yours,’ he said, and slapped the ticket on the windscreen.

‘One hundred dollars,’ I said. ‘Since when is a parking ticket a
hundred
dollars?’

‘Clearway,’ he said. ‘If you don’t move it by five it’ll be towed away,’ and he left.

I stood in the street, crying.

‘Don’t you worry about him,’ said Chris. ‘We’ll sort it later. Good news, we can go to their factory tomorrow and they’ll let us look on their racks.’ I’m sure that if she’d had a handkerchief she would have been dabbing my tears and wiping my nose. It was good to have her around.

It was night and we were in St Kilda with Chris, in the red-light district again. We spoke to a young prostitute in Grey Street. She didn’t look older than fifteen. I showed her Rachel’s photograph. She shook her head. ‘She wouldn’t be fool enough to get mixed up in anything like this.’

‘I know …’ I began, but cut myself short. I didn’t want this girl to feel I thought ill of her. ‘If you do see her though?’ She nodded her head and smiled.

Chris said, ‘Let’s try the backpackers’ hostel. Good place for a poster.’ Again I felt like I was stepping over bodies. This place seemed so alien. I had never backpacked anywhere.

We walked into a Salvation Army refuge centre where wasted-looking beings sat waiting for help. A strong smell of recent vomit permeated the building. Internet cafés, vegetarian eating houses, trendy restaurants. Everyone willing to display posters.

Chris was high spirited, and she renewed our fervour. She ran up to a police van stopped at traffic lights and handed the officer a poster through his half-open window.

‘Can you put this up at your station?’ she asked.

‘Sure,’ he said. The lights changed and they moved on.

I still can’t believe it, but we walked into a sex shop to ask if we could display Rachel’s poster in the front window. A middle-aged man, with his beachball-sized beer belly sitting on the counter, looked up from his
Age
crossword. ‘Sure,’ he said as well.

I’d never been in a sex shop before. I was amazed at the variety of sex toys; vibrators and dildos and unimaginables. What did people use
those
for? If Rachel would cringe at having a poster displayed in her old dance school, she’d pass out if she knew we were here.

We drove through Elsternwick on the way home, mainly because we got lost leaving St Kilda. There was already a poster up at the station. We were getting reckless with posters now and were sticking them everywhere.

We sat watching a large building for a while from our car. Young party-going men arrived. Maybe a bucks’ night? Everybody appeared to be screened at the door by bouncers. Most men went in together. A car stopped near us and a retirement-aged man and another, looking like his son, locked the car and walked across to the brothel. What night was it? Thursday night. Perhaps the women were at bingo, perhaps they were home with pots and pans and baby’s nappies. I’m sounding sexist. Perhaps the women were out with their toy boys or down at the local strip club. Perhaps they didn’t care, or didn’t know, where their men were going.

Chris suggested we drive through Brighton in case Rachel had indeed caught the number 602 bus from the corner of Williams Road and High Street. We drove aimlessly through the suburban streets, just looking, and thinking we were wasting our time. Somehow we ended up on Kooyong Road and went home.

There was a note from Mum when we got back. Carlo had rung to say that someone had contacted him through the website to report a girl answering Rachel’s description being seen in St Kilda a week before her disappearance. I remembered the girl Mike had chased on the bus down Orrong Road, and how like Rachel she appeared. I wondered how many other girls answering Rachel’s description must be out there.

15

‘D
O
W
E
K
NOW
A
C
AROLINE
R
OBERTSON
?’

Day 11: Friday, 12 March

Missing Persons called again on Friday morning to see how we were getting on with the sample of Rachel’s clothes for the new media release.

There were so many clothing racks at the factory outlet that I thought we would be there for hours, but they had their system worked out.

‘This is all we have left in the range.’

It’s surprising how, when faced with a rack of similar colours and designs, how confusing it could be. We offered to pay but they refused. Rachel would have been in a seventh heaven here.

On our way to the police with our clothing samples we drove up to a set of lights that were changing to red and were confronted by the faces of two determined windscreen-washers.

‘I’m sorry, I haven’t any small change,’ I said, as their squeegees hovered over our front and back windows.

‘No change at all?’ They sounded surprised.

‘No,’ said Chris. ‘Really. We’re on our way to police headquarters with …’ and on she went with our life story. The lights changed to green, back to red, to green and back to red again. Fortunately there were no other cars behind us.

‘Jeez, man,’ one of them said. ‘Have you got any spare posters and we’ll hand them out to the cars whose windows we wash.’

‘Thank you … so much,’ said Mike, sounding slightly overcome, and shaking their hands through the window. Even small offers of help meant a great deal.

A short while later we received another call on the mobile from Missing Persons.

‘Do we know a Caroline Robertson?’ Mike asked me.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Why?’

Mike asked. Apparently telephone records indicated that a Caroline Robertson had rung our house before Rachel went missing.

‘The only Caroline we know,’ said Mike, ‘is a Caroline Reid.’

The police wanted to know where we were and what we were doing.

Mike said we had samples of Rachel’s clothes and were on our way to meet them.

I remembered that I had thought it wasn’t technically possible to get a list of incoming calls. But it must have been. Why had I got the impression that it wasn’t possible when I asked last week? Perhaps it wasn’t within the other detective’s jurisdiction or something.

At the St Kilda Road complex the three of us waited a short while with our visitor passes pinned to our fronts, before David dePyle came through. I had thought the Richmond police station was like a stronghold, but this police complex was an acropolis by comparison. A haven of security. You needed a pass to get through every department door. I was amazed the toilets were not security-locked.

We were so many floors up in the lift when David said he would just leave us here for a minute.

I panicked. ‘What? Here? Locked in this lift?’

Everybody laughed. ‘No,’ said David. ‘At the cafeteria.’ I had been so preoccupied with the security arrangements that I had not heard him say he was going to take us to the cafeteria while he delivered the clothes.

‘Detective Senior Sergeant Steve Waddell will be with us shortly. He is organising the media release. They will be dressing a mannequin and setting a caravan up at the corner of Williams Road and High Street.’

He left us with coffee and a magnificent view across South Yarra and Richmond. The building looked into the green grounds of Melbourne Grammar School, our landmark for our first directions to the complex. We were so high that the windows appeared to ripple in the wind. I walked to the edge and thought, looking down at the concrete path, how desperate people must be to hurl themselves from rooftops.

I went back to Chris and Mike. ‘It’s a beautiful green city,’ I said, ‘and yet somewhere beneath those rooftops, somewhere in those tree-lined streets Rachel is …’

‘Elizabeth, don’t,’ said Chris putting her arm around me.

‘No, no, it’s all right,’ I answered, looking at the expanse of sky. ‘You know, if the Missing Persons detectives don’t come up with anything, maybe our skywriting idea isn’t such a bad one after all. Can you imagine Rachel’s name spanning the breadth of Melbourne’s skyline?’

Mike and Chris were smiling and their faces had the ‘oh, Elizabeth’s dreaming big again’ look.

Shortly, David dePyle returned and brought us some sandwiches and more cups of tea and coffee.

‘Tell me about Caroline,’ he asked, and opened his notebook.

‘Caroline Robertson?’ said Mike. ‘You mean Caroline Reid.’

David dePyle nodded in a laid-back manner. ‘We’re just making some inquiries.’

Why didn’t we jump up and demand to know more? What inquiries, and why? What possible connection could Caroline Reid have with Rachel? But we didn’t ask. We sat casually and chatted, in a relaxed atmosphere, while he jotted down notes.

‘We haven’t seen her since December 1997,’ I said, ‘when we moved from Mont Albert.’

‘We were friends with her mother,’ said Mike.

‘And Ashleigh-Rose, our middle daughter, was friends with her youngest sister. Rachel was more a friend of the middle sister.’

‘Why Caroline?’ asked Mike. ‘She was always very much in the background. The eldest daughter … the older sister.’

‘Would you know why she rang your house on the 28th of February late in the afternoon?’

‘I didn’t know she had until today.’

‘She rang twice.’

‘I thought Rachel was on the phone to Emmanuel. She didn’t say.’

‘Caroline kept to herself,’ said Mike. ‘She struck me as an unhappy girl.’

‘What about their father?’

‘David. I didn’t really know him,’ I answered. ‘I only met him a couple of times, if that. We hadn’t been in Mont Albert long before David left Gail and applied for a divorce. We were a shoulder for Gail to cry on. Became good friends … I don’t see what any of this has to do with Rachel.’

‘I saw Caroline recently,’ said Mike, becoming animated. ‘I remember now! Ashleigh-Rose had been invited to her younger sister’s birthday at the Dunloe Avenue swimming pool. They’d gone ten pin bowling. It’s in the same centre.’

‘Would you like some more tea?’ asked Chris, taking our cups and, not waiting for our answer, she went to get some.

‘When I went to collect Ashleigh-Rose I was speaking to Gail, and Caroline was speaking to Rachel through the car window. Rachel didn’t get out. I didn’t hear what they were talking about … She’s got something to do with all this, hasn’t she?’

‘What else can you tell me about her?’

‘Gail told me she won a scholarship to Camberwell Girls Grammar,’ I said. ‘They were really disappointed because she had done so well, and then she became really unsettled. Always staying away from school. Didn’t seem to have any direction or friends.’

‘Caroline liked to think she dominated the household when her father left,’ said Mike. ‘If Gail came over to our place for a cup of tea Caroline would phone to check up on her.’

‘Caroline has epilepsy,’ I said. ‘She was really down. Gail was concerned because when she left school in Year 9 she would stay in her room for long periods. Gail used to say she stayed there for almost a year.’

‘But she went back to school,’ said Mike. ‘She did her last year of school at Box Hill Secondary Senior Campus. Her computer broke down when she was doing her final assessments, so we let her use ours. She stayed in the house all day while we were at work.’