Ghost Child Read online

  The mother, Lisa, was in the kitchen with the young female police constable. Lisa was pale and extremely thin, a chain-smoker, with hair that had been frizzed and dyed red so many times you couldn’t tell what colour it originally was. She was twenty-six years old, but she had that worn-down look that women get when they’ve fallen pregnant for the first time at a young age. If I was to hold up a picture of her alongside pictures of today’s twenty-six-year-old girls, fresh from university and still giggly, you’d have said she was forty.

  Anyway, Lisa was standing in the kitchen when I arrived, holding herself up against the laminate bench and chewing the skin around her thumb. Like I say, I expected some kind of frenzy, but I got the feeling she was just plain irritated, like here was something she really didn’t need; all these people in uniform in her house, it pissed her off.

  In the lounge room a big bloke – a near-naked bloke – was holding this kid up under the arms like a puppet, trying to make his feet grip the carpet. It was hopeless. The kid’s legs kept buckling, and his head was lolling about on his neck.

  I could see what the big fella was trying to do. He was trying to make the boy stand up, but I could see that wasn’t going to happen. The kid was all floppy and he had those ‘sunset eyes’ you get when the brain is gone, with the eyeballs not focused and the lids half-closed. The paramedics were trying to intervene. They weren’t shouting at him, but they were talking loudly, saying, ‘Please, put the boy down.’

  There were other kids in the house: a boy of about three, and a girl who was still a toddler, both of them in the lounge room, all curious and afraid. And then there was Lauren. She’s wasn’t in the lounge room. She was in the hall. How did she look? Well, what can I say? In the looks department, she was blessed. She had buck teeth and freckles across her nose, and she was wearing a T-shirt that had some kind of cartoon animal on the front. She could have been anybody’s little Aussie rug rat except that, like all the other kids in the house, she had this extraordinary white hair. I don’t mean white-blonde, like some kids have, I mean white-white, like a Samoyed dog. It was curled all around her face and cascaded down her back, so long that she probably would have been able to sit on it. She had white eyelashes, and white eyebrows, too, but she wasn’t albino – that would be going too far. No, she was more like a ghost. And it wasn’t just the hair that made me think that. It was the way she was hovering in the hallway, like she was trying to decide whether it was all right to come and look at what was going on.

  The first words I heard out of Lisa’s mouth were: ‘Get up.’ I’ve got to say, it struck me as strange. The big bloke had let the boy fall to the floor and the paramedics were leaning over him, and I’d say it should have been obvious to anyone that the boy was in no position to stand up, but that’s what the mother said. She came out from the kitchen, broke into the huddle around him, and said, ‘Jacob, get up.’

  ‘Is he dead?’ Those were the first words I heard from Lauren. She’d come creeping down the hall, wanting to get a good look.

  ‘Don’t be stupid, Lauren,’ her mother said. ‘Go get the heater.’

  Again, it was such a strange thing to say. This was November, remember, so it was as good as summer in Melbourne. We’d been sweating out by the Cenotaph. Some of the school kids who’d been standing to attention while the band played, they’d actually fainted. Lauren didn’t argue with her mother, though. She went off down the hall and came back with a portable heater. It was three orange bars in an aluminium shell, and it was covered in dust, but Lisa took it from her and plugged it in, and within seconds the whole house was filled with smoke from the dust on the elements. That didn’t stop the mother, though. She put the thing close to Jacob’s head, and his white hair began to steam. I realised his hair must have been damp.

  The paramedics were working like crazy. One of the paramedics said, ‘Please, get it out of the way,’ and the other said, ‘What’s the boy’s name? How old is he?’

  ‘He’s five,’ said Lisa. ‘He’s Jake. Jacob.’

  The paramedic said, ‘We’re going to have to get him to hospital.’

  ‘Jesus,’ said Lisa. ‘I ain’t got ambulance cover.’

  I think that’s when I stepped in. I’m pretty sure my first words would have been, ‘Hello. I’m Detective Senior Sergeant Brian Muggeridge, Barrett CIB.’

  Nobody paid any attention. One of the paramedics was trying to fit an oxygen mask over the boy’s face, and the other was kicking the heater out of the way while trying to get the wheels out from under a stretcher, so they could get Jake off the floor and out the door.

  ‘You won’t need cover,’ said the paramedic.

  ‘You’ll need to come with us,’ said the other.

  I said, ‘Hang on, I’m just going to need a few seconds here.’

  Lisa glared at me and then turned her back, so I went over to the copper in the kitchen and said, ‘What you got?’

  The young constable must have been a new recruit because her shirt was still sharp across the creases. By that time I’d been a copper for about eight years, I suppose, and maybe it was starting to show. My father had been in the force and he’d told me, ‘The pay’s lousy but at least you get to retire at fifty-five.’ That appealed to me. All I could see myself doing as a young fella was working long enough to buy a boat and spend my retirement fishing. What I didn’t know then was what I’d have to go through to get to retirement age. The human misery, it was already wearing me down.

  The new recruit told me the mother had sent her boys to the shops for cigarettes. Jacob, who was five, and Harley, who was three, were on their way home when a man came up and told them to hand over the change. They refused, and so the man started roughing them up, knocking them to the ground and kicking them. The younger boy, Harley, managed to break away, run home and raise the alarm. Lisa had followed him back to the school grounds and found Jacob lying there, unconscious. She carried him home in her arms.

  I thought, ‘No.’

  I can’t tell you exactly how or why I knew the story wasn’t true. Instinct, maybe. I’ll admit that I was swayed by the condition of the house. It was slumped on its foundations as if the burden of housing so many fractured families had taken a toll on the frame.

  I don’t know whether Lisa had been listening to the constable who gave me these details, but when I moved again towards her, to try to ask a few questions, she got pretty agitated. She said, ‘I gotta go with Jake,’ and she came into the kitchen and started gathering cigarettes and other things off the kitchen bench. She had a Glo-mesh purse and a set of house keys with a plastic tag hanging off the ring that said ‘Never Mind The Dog, Beware the Bitch Who Lives Here!’ She stuffed those things into her handbag, and then she opened the fridge and took out a baby’s bottle filled with orange cordial, which she gave to her boyfriend, saying, ‘Make sure you give this to Hayley.’

  The boyfriend said, ‘Do you want me to come?’

  She said, ‘You stay here.’

  I noticed straightaway that there was no tenderness in the exchange. I mean, you might expect this guy to be comforting Lisa a bit at this stage, or at least to be saying, ‘Don’t worry, he’ll be fine,’ or something, given that they were obviously an item, but that wasn’t what was happening. It made me wonder how long they’d actually been together, or even known each other. Later, we’d find out they’d been together six weeks.

  I thought to myself, ‘Did he do it?’ Look, I know that sounds biased against blokes, but how many times had I been to a situation where a kid was out cold and the de facto was the one who’d done it?

  The paramedics looked ready to leave and were starting to push Jake out toward the ambulance. Lisa was obviously going to have to go with them, but getting her out the door was going to be no simple matter because by now the media was all over the lawn. In those days, reporters had access to police scanners. They can’t do it any more, not with mobile phones and scrambled messages and so forth, but in those days we basically had CB radios
, and it wasn’t illegal, not then, to intercept what you heard on the two-way system. So they would have heard the call – a child had been beaten on the Barrett Estate; paramedics required – and they’d have followed the ambulance to the house, and now they were outside, waiting to hear what had gone on so they could write it up for the next day’s papers.

  They wouldn’t interfere with the paramedics. They’d be allowed to make their way to the ambulance, to get the boy inside, but Lisa … well, she wasn’t injured, so they’d see her as fair game.

  I said to Lisa, ‘I’m going to have to help you get past the press. They’ll be shouting questions at you but you just stick with me and I’ll get you though.’

  She was nodding her head and gripping her bag. We went out the front door and I tried to help her into the back of the ambulance, but she tripped and we had to make a second go of it, which gave the snappers plenty of time to get a picture. I thought she’d immediately fuss over the boy when she got inside, but she didn’t. Instead, she looked out through the glass doors of the ambulance, towards the flashes from the cameras and the bobbing, fuzzy microphones, and she was wearing a very strange expression. If I had to put a name to it, I’d say she was thrilled.

  I made a note of the time. The call to triple-O had been placed at around 5.40 p.m. and now it was getting toward 7 p.m. The deadline for the newspaper reporters was 10 p.m., at the absolute latest, and the photographers were at least an hour from their darkrooms in Melbourne’s CBD, so it was clear that they’d soon have to get moving if they were going to get this story in the paper. I knew from experience, though, that they’d probably wait for a statement from the cops before they’d move. Lisa was shouting things at them through the glass doors of the ambulance, things like: ‘They ought to lock ’em up and throw away the key!’ They knew they had a story – a good story – and now it was up to me to give the thing some context.

  The other thing they’d want, of course, was a picture of Jake, not only of him going into the ambulance but a nice portrait, something good and clear, that they could whack on the front page. I scanned the pack, looking for somebody I recognised, and straightaway saw a guy from The Sun I remembered from some other job. I signalled to him to come forward, into the house, telling him I’d give him a photograph that he could share with the others. We stepped through the front door and walked straight into the boyfriend. He was standing in the lounge room, his massive legs and chest still bare, just looking like a stunned mullet, taking up all the space.

  I said, ‘I’m Detective Muggeridge. You’re …?

  He said, ‘Peter Tabone.’

  I said, ‘Right, Mr Tabone, can you help me here? I need a photograph of Jacob that I can give to the press, something we can copy for the newspapers.’

  By way of an answer, he said, ‘He’s not my kid.’

  I’d already figured that for myself, so I let it go and scanned the room, and immediately saw a portrait – a bright, white-and-blue portrait of four children – in a cardboard frame on the mantelpiece. I picked it up and said, ‘Are these the children? Which one is Jake?’

  Unaccountably, Peter brightened.

  ‘I paid for that,’ he said. ‘Pretty all right, isn’t it? Pretty good, actually.’

  He seemed not to understand the seriousness of the situation. We weren’t here to admire the photo; we were here to find Jake’s attacker. Again, I said, ‘Which one is Jake?’

  Peter considered the photograph for a moment, then pointed and said, ‘That one.’

  Jake was seated in the middle of the group. Like all of them, he was wearing blue jeans and a white T-shirt, and he was flanked on both sides by siblings. Behind them was a cloudy background: not dull-cloudy, but a bright blue background with white clouds. I handed the photograph to the Sun photographer, who laid it down on the kitchen bench and said, ‘Thanks, mate. We appreciate this.’ He lifted up his camera and began photographing it. That was the easiest way to get a copy in those days, before digital prints and email, you’d just copy a photograph with your own camera, develop it in the darkroom, and send it by courier to colleagues from rival papers. The copies would be in colour, but in the newspaper they’d turn out black and white, which was a pity, because the thing that was most striking about the kids, the thing that any witness was likely to remember, was the hair.

  Peter seemed very interested in the photographer and his gear, but he didn’t seem too happy about his portrait being copied. He said, ‘Why do they need a picture?’

  I said, ‘If anybody sees this picture, they might remember seeing Jake on the way to the shops and they might remember something suspicious, and that’s going to help us catch the culprit.’

  Peter said, ‘Yeah, okay, but remember, I paid for that picture.’

  The photographer looked up, surprised. Was Peter suggesting that he should pay for the right to copy it? The photographer let it go. I remember thinking, ‘These guys aren’t bad. The press gets a bad rap but they’ve got a job to do and, on this occasion, that meant getting a picture, any picture of the kid, so people could look at it and say, “What a cute kid! How could anybody hurt a child like that? What’s the world coming to?”’

  When the Sun guy was done, I put the portrait back on the mantelpiece and went outside. The press was waiting for me, waiting for some kind of official comment to go with their stories. I stood in the forest of microphones and said, ‘As you have no doubt gathered, we have a serious incident on our hands here.’

  They nodded and waited.

  ‘We’ve got a five-year-old boy who was sent to the shops with his brother, and it appears that they’ve been set upon by a man who has bashed him, possibly for the change they were carrying.’

  I paused to give them time to write this down.

  ‘I think you’ll agree that’s a cowardly crime, to beat an innocent boy, a five-year-old boy,’ I continued.

  ‘We are appealing for witnesses to come forward. We ask anyone who might have seen anything suspicious to please call Crime Stoppers. I think you’ve all got the number.’

  One reporter said, ‘Can we speak to the parents?’ and I said no. Another reporter wanted to know what kind of injury the boy had suffered. I said, ‘That’s obviously a matter for the specialists. At this stage it’s unclear, but I think I’m safe in saying that the young lad is in quite a bad way.’

  They wanted to know the boy’s name and I told them: Jacob Cashman. They wanted to know how to spell Jacob – was it Jakob or Jacob or, who knows these days, Jaycub? – and I confirmed it: It was J-A-C-O-B, Jacob. Jacob John Cashman. Referring to notes taken by the new recruit, I added: ‘Born 1 August, 1977. He’s five.’

  ‘He’s what?’ The reporters hadn’t heard me. Daylight was fading and the cockatoos that made their nests in Barrett’s gum trees had taken flight. They were swooping and screaming, apparently furious.

  I repeated myself, louder this time. I said, ‘Five. The young boy, the victim, he’s five.’ And somehow, those words brought silence upon all of us.

  I turned and went back through the front door. The boyfriend, Peter, had turned on the TV and the children were watching, of all things, The Love Boat. They didn’t turn to look at me. There was a day coming when they’d have to face up to what happened in that house on DeCastella Drive, but it wouldn’t be that day and, likely, not for years, so I let them go on watching.

  Frank Postle, Reporter

  The minute I saw the photographs of Lauren Cameron in the newspaper, I thought to myself, ‘I know that girl.’ I couldn’t remember the details at first so I got onto my daughter, who’s a reporter herself these days, and asked her to have a bit of a search around the archives, and then I pulled out my own files to refresh my memory. I’ve still got a few of the old scrapbooks I used to keep, with my articles cut out and pasted in, from before the whole world went electronic.

  It was a bloody horrible story, and I suppose it’s reasonable to ask, ‘A story like that, how do you forget it?’ But, I mean, I’ve
worked for newspapers for twenty-seven years and I can tell you now, I’ve seen plenty of bloody horrible stories. Kids getting beaten, kids getting dumped, kids getting raped, if you can believe that, and I learnt pretty quick that if you spend too much time thinking about it, you’ll go out of your mind.

  The Cashman story, well, it wasn’t in the worst category of crimes I’ve had to cover for the papers. I know that sounds rotten, but as far as I could tell, it wasn’t a savage beating, and not systematic abuse, like you see these days, with kids starved to death and kids hog-tied face down on the bed with rags. This wasn’t one of those. There was barely a mark on the boy. I got a glimpse of him when they were putting him in the ambulance and he looked like he’d been knocked out. I remember thinking, ‘What’s happened here?’ Maybe it was an accident, or maybe they’d just gone too far.

  Look, don’t get me wrong. I would have been affected by it. I’m not made of marble. I’ve got kids of my own. But the thing is, I was working for The Sun, and we had a couple of editions to fill every day, and news moves pretty quickly. We might have had a horse race one day – the Melbourne Cup, right? – and then a bashed kid the next day, and after that, an election, and then it’s Christmas and it’s time to do the cricket stories, and, well, life goes on, doesn’t it?

  By rights, I shouldn’t have been out on the road the day that Jake Cashman got bashed. I was the news editor. That means I was supposed to sit at the desk at The Sun’s old headquarters in Flinders Street, ashtray to my left, keeping track of the stories coming in. On November 11, we wouldn’t have had anything much, just the usual pictures from the Remembrance Day ceremony, standard fare that nobody much cares about any more. We covered it because we at the Sun had respect for the diggers. Then the call came through from the bloke on police rounds, saying, ‘We’ve got something.’