Perfect Victim (3 page)

So then, our Rachel had never intended to catch the tram home on Monday night. She had planned to go somewhere with
someone
who was going to provide clothing and pay her a lot of money. Perhaps she’d thought we’d understand and praise her for her initiative. Or perhaps – and this thought wasn’t very appealing to us – perhaps she didn’t care that we would be worried. But I think not. Perhaps she’d been told by this
someone
, on meeting her later in the day, that her parents had been contacted during the day. Perhaps Rachel thought we knew where she was going and that it had been arranged for us to pick her up later.

A lot of money
. To some, one would imagine thousands of dollars. To Rachel? She was planning to buy shoes, and it was also my fortieth birthday later that week. Mike remembered that he’d said to her not to forget it was Mum’s birthday and she had said she remembered.

We seemed to live from pay packet to pay packet and with dance fees there never seemed enough for luxuries. Rachel was on a strict budget and I was always going on about part-time work. I told her she could have money for tram fares and coffee and take a packed lunch each day. Any extras she would need to find the money for. This didn’t of course include clothing and everyday essentials. She had placed herself in an adult world and I believed we were doing the right thing by making her aware of where her own responsibilities were. I regret not paying her a weekly allowance. But the morning of the day she disappeared I had given her $10 – to buy two $5 tops.

Mike and I started a shop-to-shop walk with Rachel’s photographs, starting with Bridge Road because this was the direction Manni had last seen Rachel walking in.

‘Excuse me, could you please help us for a moment? Our fifteen-year-old daughter went missing last night. She was last seen at 5.45 near the corner of Swan and Church Streets, walking in the direction of Bridge Road.’ We would show them Rachel’s photo. A number of shopkeepers remembered seeing Rachel from time to time but not the previous day. They all sounded very much concerned for her welfare.

It began to sound like a stuck record after a while. Mike walked down one side of the street and I down the other.

There were some shop assistants in two girls’ clothing shops who thought they may have seen her. One at Pretty Girls thought she had bought two $5 tops from their sales bin at the front entrance. She said Rachel had been by herself.

Mike met me on the street. ‘I think I have something. Come and listen to this lady.’

This lady, a middle-aged shop manager, told us in detail about a report in Monday’s
Age
concerning a man who had been released from jail. He had been in prison for coercing under-age girls into an illegal brothel he supposedly owned in Fitzroy. The lady raised enough suspicion to suggest it may have been possible for Rachel, particularly with the tale Rachel had shared, to have been grabbed for this market.

We thanked her, left hurriedly and managed to purchase a copy of yesterday’s
Age
. We returned to Rachel’s dance school, expressing concerns about the article.

It was the middle of the afternoon and Rachel had made no contact with Manni, home or the dance school. I remember thinking, this
can’t
be happening. Where was Rachel? Had she been grabbed like the lady thought? Was she scared? Somewhere in Melbourne our Rachel was in trouble.

3

M
ISSING
P
ERSON

We climbed the few steps into the Richmond police station, an old and dusty-looking fortress, with the disturbing newspaper article in hand. We turned into the area in front of the dark wooden counter, a room I soon discovered was called the watchhouse. We sat and waited in the cramped space with just enough leg-room between a row of three or four chairs and the counter. There was a National Missing Persons poster plastered to the wall showing the faces of several missing people. I thought, our daughter is a missing person. Incredulous.

We explained our story again and our fears in connection to the article. Rachel’s dance school had contacted the Richmond police earlier to express their own fear but the police officer was unaware of this contact. The police officer asked us what we would like him to do. We were beginning to think we should have reported Rachel missing at the Richmond police station instead and shared this with him. He explained he couldn’t really do much as it needed to be investigated by the policeman it was first reported to, the sergeant at Box Hill. He also felt our fears relating to the newspaper article were unwarranted. Logically thinking, I believe his assumption was justified, but we were the parents of a newly missing person, with no leads.

The officer rang the Box Hill police to discover the sergeant’s name and said we must contact him. I thought how useful it would have been if we had been made aware that the police officer we made the initial report to was also the same officer responsible for the continuing investigation. It isn’t something one thinks of when, as distressed parents of a missing child, you go to the police. It seemed natural, now that we believed Rachel did not catch the tram to Wattle Park, that the investigation should be handled by the Richmond police.

We left the station feeling confused and at a loss to understand the apparent lack of co-operation on behalf of the police, and continued our shop-walking in Swan Street. Mike was told a disturbing story by a young woman who worked at the dress shop beneath the dance school. She recognised Rachel as one of the dance students who browsed in the store.

She told Mike a woman who had been in the shop on Monday had followed her onto the same carriage at Richmond railway station in the evening. She hadn’t thought too much of this until the woman followed her off at her home station, Elsternwick, a bustling and cosmopolitan suburb within easy distance of the city and the bay. After walking behind her for a short while the woman spoke to her. She told her she was a very pretty girl and offered her a chance to make a lot of money by working at the Daily Planet. The girl refused but thought there may be a possible connection because of the story Rachel had told Manni – about clothing being provided and making a lot of money. She gave Mike a description of the woman: about twenty-eight, large and with shoulder-length blonde hair. She was wearing a pink top.

Mike shared this story with me and concerned dance teachers. ‘Isn’t the Daily Planet a newspaper?’ I quizzed.

There was spontaneous laughter from the dance school teachers. ‘No,’ it was a legal brothel in Elsternwick.

Could Rachel have been approached by the same lady when she’d been having lunch by herself? Could Rachel have thought the Daily Planet was a newspaper too, or perhaps a magazine? Could Rachel have thought she was being offered a modelling job? After all, she had just modelled for the March edition of
Women’s Fitness
Australia
, through the modelling agency where Rachel had completed a full-time course the previous year.

I was urged to ring the Daily Planet. The people I spoke to were appalled by the story, assuring me they did not operate this way. It wouldn’t be worth their while. They thanked me for bringing it to their attention and suggested I ring the Victorian Prostitutes Collective and gave me their phone number.

‘Oh, this is ridiculous,’ I said. ‘Rachel would have a fit if she knew we were even considering she was silly enough to get caught out with such a tall story.’

‘Why not?’ answered one of the teachers. ‘You thought the Daily Planet was a newspaper.’

I rang the Prostitutes Collective, not even sure what I was going to ask. I was regretting that Mike had spoken to the lady in Bridge Road who had pointed out the original
Age
newspaper article. Coupled with the story of the Daily Planet, everything was beginning to sound just a bit too serious.

The lady I spoke to at the Prostitutes Collective could understand our concerns. She suggested that if Rachel had not been found by the end of the week then we should call back with a full description of her. They had ‘staff’ who went around the streets looking after the welfare of their sex workers. They’d be happy to keep an eye out for Rachel. I thanked her for her concern and said goodbye.

We spoke to tram travellers and pedestrians from about 5.30 p.m. in the vicinity of the dance school, showing them Rachel’s photograph in the hope someone remembered something. We stayed hovering at the intersection of Church and Swan Streets, assuming that if Rachel had caught the tram it would have been from this corner.

No one saw anything. The ‘nothing’ people saw confirmed Rachel never caught the tram as expected. A young girl who happened to be a student at the dance school remembered how odd it seemed that Rachel was not on the tram. They had recently begun to sit together until Camberwell.

I went into the Café Montague beneath the dance school and the owner asked me to wait a moment. He said he knew Rachel and Manni as they often came in with a group of students to drink coffee or occasionally, when they were out of cash, jugs of ice-cold water. He was really concerned for Rachel because, like everybody else who knew her, this disappearance felt terribly wrong. He gave me the mobile number of a mate of his, Neil Paterson, who happened to be a detective in the Missing Persons Unit.

I went out onto the street holding this number in my hand.
Missing person, missing person
. Yes, ‘missing person’ because she was missing. I couldn’t reach Neil Paterson so I left a message on his answering service.

Another shop-owner remembered seeing Rachel on occasion and offered to make a poster. She scanned Rachel’s photograph onto her computer and made the first poster for us. We photocopied these at the dance school and then Mike and I, Manni’s family and dance students started putting them up in Richmond and the city.

We continued to search the back streets of Richmond in a systematic order.

On the way home we called into the Camberwell tram depot because two tram inspectors we’d spoken to earlier had suggested we drop a poster off. Perhaps a driver had noticed her. We did this, but the person in charge was not so co-operative, saying that drivers were too busy to notice who gets on and off their trams. After gentle persuasion he did take a few posters and said he’d put them up in the canteen. We left, feeling like scolded children.

When we arrived home I rang my father Ivan Southall and my stepmother Susan, and told them Rachel was missing. They could come up with no answers either. But we discovered that while we had begun our first day’s search, they had been hanging an exhibition of Susan’s at the Centre for Contemporary Photography in Collingwood, close to the centre of Melbourne.

I had forgotten all about this. Rachel was at the heart of the whole exhibition. Susan, a contemporary artist, assembles photographic images within a collage to create her works, and Rachel was her muse. Susan paid her a modelling fee for each sitting. Rachel had, for years, been portrayed in Susan’s artwork as Viking slave girls, sea captains’ wives, dancing maidens, heroines and sacrificial ‘lambs’, the Madonna and a host of angels from ancient, medieval and Renaissance literature.

This exhibition was on show throughout March. Susan was worried someone in the Richmond area may have recognised Rachel from the thousands of pamphlets distributed beforehand across Melbourne, possibly attracting unwanted attention. I didn’t think this was likely but was prepared, as the week advanced, to accept all possibilities. So Dad and Susan hung a sign telling the public that the girl featured in the artwork had since disappeared and that if anyone had seen her they should inform the assistant at the desk.

Later that evening, at home, we rang the numbers given in several ‘dancing girls required’ ads in the local papers, on the off-chance that Rachel had naively rung them for part-time work. But applicants needed to be eighteen plus, as we had already assumed. And they had to provide proof of age, so it was highly unlikely she would have even been interviewed. Nevertheless, they did inquire for us, to see if there were any new girls with the name of Rachel. No Rachel.

We went through Rachel’s address books and school diaries looking for names of old friends. When she was thirteen I sheepishly read some extracts of her diary. This was the age she discovered she was a teenager with developing boobs. It was the age when she and her girlfriends would sit in huddles giggling about boys. I didn’t find anything I wouldn’t have expected, apart from a few swear words, and I’d felt so bad that I never did it again. My own mother said she once read my elder sister’s diary when my sister had been sixteen and vowed she’d never do it again.

Well, now I was doing it again. I still felt as though we were invading her privacy. We began to make a search of Rachel’s room, finally going to bed about 4 a.m.

For the second night in a row Rachel had failed to contact Manni.

Since her birth we had known where she slept every one of those nights, for fifteen and a half years. This night our daughter was sleeping elsewhere.

4

M
AKING
S
OMEONE
N
OTICE

Day 2: Wednesday, 3 March

We didn’t sleep on Tuesday night. It seemed disrespectful to sleep. It would be dishonouring our daughter to sleep. I was already feeling guilty for sleeping some of Monday night.

How could we sleep when Rachel might have been huddled somewhere so scared she perhaps feared for her life? Was she crying? Had she been raped? Had she been grabbed off Church Street and housed in an illegal brothel? Had some sleaze been watching her on the corner of Church and Swan Streets, while she cuddled Manni on the bench? Sometimes I would drive round the corner to see Rachel and Manni kissing their farewells and think, don’t they realise someone could be watching? Had this sleaze dragged her off the streets, fondled his way through our daughter’s clothing, stripped and raped her? Had he beaten and killed her, dumping her body somewhere in the bush? Was she dead?