Missing Pieces, page 2
Cass sipped the last of her coffee, keeping her eyes fixed on Drew.
‘The story was that she met Andrew Todd through the dance theatre. He was a lot older than her. She was about twenty-five when her daughter disappeared, but Todd would have been thirty years older, at least. And married. Supposedly they had an affair. He was very taken with her, she not so much with him. She was still living with Sep and, apparently, he didn’t know about Todd. So she got pregnant and had the baby—who was Yasmin.’
‘At which point it was clear to all that Yasmin was not Sep’s child?’ Cass ventured.
Drew nodded.
‘Correct. So they split. She was nevertheless a very good mother, as I understood it. Apparently Todd continued to see her around this period and also contributed to Yasmin’s upkeep, but never acknowledged that he was the father. Rumours swirled around. As they do.’
Drew stood up. ‘I’m getting another coffee,’ he said. ‘D’you want another?’
Cass nodded.
Returning with the two coffees, Drew launched straight back into the story.
‘In August ’92 when I was attached to the Cairns station, Delia and Yasmin were invited to a picnic—a birthday party for a member of the dance group. Delia still had a lot of friends there. There were family groups and lots of kids at that picnic ground at the bottom of Crystal Cascades. Balloons, barbecues, booze, weed, everyone eating and drinking and smoking. It would have been about two-thirty that afternoon when two things happened. A thirteen-year-old boy called Bobby, who was the son of people Delia was with and who’d been larking around and jumping into the water, fell off a rock and hit his head. He disappeared under the water. A sixteen-year-old, who was obviously one of the few people there not pissed or stoned, jumped in and grabbed him. So Bobby didn’t drown but he had a significant head injury. There was a lot of of screaming and general mayhem, and everyone ran towards the scene of the incident. And someone called an ambulance. At the same time, it began to rain heavily.’
Drew took a mouthful of coffee.
‘Yeah, I know those sudden downpours in the mountains,’ Cass nodded.
Drew continued his story.
‘Delia was sitting right next to Bobby’s mother who started screaming when it happened, so Delia tried to calm her down and said something like, “come on, we’ll go and see. He’s gonna be okay.” Delia’s later recollection was that someone she knew said to her, “I’ll look after Yasmin, Delia”. When she was questioned later, she stuck to the story of someone offering to look after her daughter, although she wasn’t sure if they had known her name or Yasmin’s.
‘On top of that, she couldn’t recall if that person was someone she knew or even if they were male or female. I don’t think anyone had any doubt later that Delia was pissed and had probably smoked quite a bit by that time.
‘Anyway, Delia ran up the side of that path at the Cascades with Ginny, Bobby’s mum. A whole lot of men were at the scene, some of them moderately pissed but most of them acting reasonably. Bobby was breathing and coughing up a lot of Freshwater Creek. He had a deep cut on the top of his head, which was bleeding everywhere. Someone, some kind of health worker, brought a towel and put pressure on the wound and stopped the bleeding. Bobby was woozy and scared but basically conscious. He definitely didn’t want his mum weeping over him and shied away to be with the men. So Delia stayed there a while comforting Ginny. A bunch of witnesses later recalled that.’
‘So was he taken to hospital?’ Cass asked.
‘Yeah, he was. Two young guys carried him down to a picnic shelter. By then it was absolutely teeming. When the ambos arrived and saw it was an Aboriginal kid, and that there were a lot of people who’d been partying, they weren’t particularly impressed by the scene. Anyhow, they put Bobby in the ambulance, put a better dressing on his head, and said that if he was thirteen his mother had to come, too, because he was still a minor.
‘So, then Delia realised that she wasn’t completely sure where her daughter was, especially as the rain was still pouring down, she knew she’d better find her quickly. When she went back to the spot where she’d been with Bobby’s extended family there was practically nobody around. They were either packing up or had already left to follow Bobby to the hospital. When she looked around she couldn’t see Yasmin or anyone she could recall leaving Yasmin with. That’s when she began to run from one group to another asking people, panicking. Everyone was trying to get out of the rain and no one remembered seeing Yasmin at all. An older woman said to her, “Love, probably she’s with Ginny’s mob and they’ve taken her with them into town. Go on down to the hospital and I’m sure you’ll find her there. She’s not lost, someone will have kept an eye on her.”’
‘That calmed Delia down, so she got into her car and although she’d had a bit to drink she drove directly to the hospital where she found Ginny and her family all gathered around a cubicle. Bobby had been taken to X-ray, but nobody had Yasmin, or recalled seeing her at all after Delia had run up the side of the creek with Ginny.’
‘My God,’ Cass said, ‘that’s terrible. What happened then?’
‘Well, Delia became completely hysterical. Not surprisingly. There was already a general there taking notes about Bobby, so when he understood the situation, a small child lost, he immediately radioed headquarters who sent two constables back to the Cascades. About half an hour later I was asked to go and help with the search, with three others.’
Drew stood up. ‘We probably need to show up in the office,’ he said. ‘I’ll get out the old files and have a look at them with you. I’ve got a feeling that we’re going to be needing them anyway.’
5
Brisbane
1st August 2012
Pushing her way through the glass doors at the front of Arcadia House, Sonia Latimer ran down the corridor towards the Sunflower ward. It was already five past eight; she would be late clocking on for her day’s shift. Arriving at the ward she hastily rubbed antiseptic onto her hands and punched in the digital code for the buzzer that opened the door. It was not difficult to get into the Sunflower ward. Nor was it hard to get out, if you remembered the code was 1234. The staff operated on the premise that the residents were unable to do this.
Perched on the seat of her walker, gazing blankly towards the doorway as Sonia entered the communal living space, was Mrs Markham. Even now, thirty-seven years since the elderly woman had been her third-grade teacher, Sonia couldn’t bring herself to call Mrs Markham by her first name. ‘Heather’ was on her room door, and on all the items—flesh-coloured knickers and singlets—that were sent to the laundry, and on a big round badge with sunflowers on it that she wore when she went to exercise class. Still, for Sonia, she would always be the Mrs Markham who had taught her how to mix yellow and blue to make green and had the whole class chorusing their multiplication tables.
Sonia stopped and gave the elderly woman a hug. More than anything, she knew, her patients craved physical contact. ‘Lovely to see you, Mrs Markham,’ she said. ‘It’s nearly time to get ready for exercise class.’
‘No,’ replied Mrs Markham, ‘it’s not. I haven’t had my shower yet. Nobody’s looking after me.’
‘Oh, I’m sure they are. Look, you’ve got that lovely purple cardigan on, the one your granddaughter brought for you. You’re all dressed and ready for the day.’
‘Oh, I’m not wearing this old thing to go out in.’
‘Well, as soon as I’ve put down my bag I’ll come back and we’ll find something else. You know Hayley always has nice clothes there for you to wear.’
Sonia walked down to the staff kitchen where Mariam was getting ready to leave.
‘Heather Markham says she hasn’t been washed and dressed!’ she said.
‘Not true!’ laughed Mariam. ‘I even put that cardigan on her, myself. The one she likes so much. I’m off now, got to look after my own self.’
‘See you this evening.’
‘Have a great day,’ Mariam answered, still laughing.
Sonia had several other residents to shower and dress before she could get back to Heather Markham. Each one had to be extracted from their pull-ups, wiped clean, put into a bath chair and washed thoroughly under the shower, then dried, and somehow inserted into more or less normal daytime garments. Tracksuit bottoms, long-sleeved T-shirts and sensible slippers were the accepted mode among the Arcadia residents. Hard work, but Sonia was happy doing it. She’d always wanted to be a nurse, a proper nurse. Even before she’d got as far as Mrs Markham’s class.
Heather Markham had been in Arcadia House two years now. Initially she’d had a small stroke that had led to a fall and she’d been put in the medical ward. After another fall that caused a fractured ankle, she was moved to rehab. Within a few weeks it was clear she was suffering from dementia. Safe for a while in the unlocked wards, she began to wander. The day she got as far as McDonalds, without shoes, was the day she’d come to Sunflower. She’d been there ever since. She was Sonia’s favourite resident.
Mrs Markham had never had favourites in any of her classes. She just made every one of ‘her’ children feel special. Her daughter, Rachel, was three years behind Sonia, and everyone in Mrs Markham’s class would tell Rachel how lucky she was to have a mother like that. Rachel didn’t think so. She told all the kids that she hated having her mother as a teacher in her school. That Rachel Markham was always trouble, Sonia thought now as she worked away. Wild and disobedient she was, always answering back to other teachers and picking fights with kids.
Sonia remembered that when Rachel got to Grade Five her parents decided she’d be better off at a school where her mother didn’t teach, so she was sent to St Catherine’s. Sonia would see her sometimes outside of school, hanging around the train station or the shopping mall, smoking or just playing hookey.
She would see much more of Rachel a few years later. By then Sonia was a nursing student and volunteering on a food van for the homeless in the Valley on Friday nights. Rachel looked awful: dirty, with straggling hair and a missing front tooth. Once, Sonia saw her being picked up by an older guy in a car on Kent Street, back before working on the street was banned in Queensland. One night at the food van, Sonia tried to talk to her, but no way did Rachel want to be making a connection.
Now Sonia made her way down the hall to Mrs Markham’s room, thinking how incredibly sad it would have been to have a daughter who became hooked on drugs and died so young. But her granddaughter, Hayley, must have been an enormous compensation for her loss. Hayley visited her Nan almost every day and was clearly devoted to her.
6
Cairns
Wednesday 1st August 2012
Detective Senior Constable Troy Barwon was already at his desk when Cass and Drew reached the fourth floor. He, too, had the newspaper spread in front of him.
‘Morning, Troy.’
‘Morning. Have you seen this? We might be opening that cold case again. The kid who disappeared. That dancer’s daughter.’
‘We were just talking about it downstairs,’ Drew answered. ‘We’re going to have to be involved, whatever Todd’s lawyers might be doing. So we’ll send for the old files and later this morning you and Troy can look through them.’
‘You haven’t finished your part of the story yet,’ Cass reminded him. ‘You’d only just arrived at Crystal Cascades.’
‘Right,’ said Drew. He shoved a pile of papers aside and sat down opposite Cass at her desk. Troy lounged against the window. Outside was a sharp blue sky and a jade-green sea. Beyond the Port Authority buildings on the edge of the Inlet, a white launch was heading for a day at the Reef, tourists lining the rails. In the distance the thickly forested mountains towards Yarrabah were ribboned in mist.
‘By the time our lot got to the Cascades, the other two blokes had been searching for about an hour,’ Drew began. ‘They’d figured it was probably at least three hours since anyone had reliably seen the little girl, judging from the time the ambulance was called.
‘Even when those first two arrived, the whole place was completely deserted. It was still pouring. There was rubbish from the picnic and straggling balloons, I remember, but any trace there might have been of where Yasmin Munoz might have wandered or been led away was completely washed out.
‘The first thing the others had done was climb up to the end of the public path beside the creek. It’s a bit more than a kilometre to the top there. They were watching the creek as they went. It was filling up rapidly, rushing down over the rocks and past all the signs warning about the dangers of entering the water and so on. Then they began to work back methodically. That was when we arrived and began to do the same. Some of us also fanned out into the bush.’
Drew sat for a moment, remembering the scene.
‘We saw that some very large overhanging branches were being swept down by the current and the depth of the water,’ he said, shaking his head.
‘There was only a couple of hours of daylight left and the rain wasn’t letting up so our sarge decided to get two divers in. It wasn’t that easy, as you can imagine. They were roped to pickets in the banks and in every one of those deep pools they had to work against the current. Nothing was found between the top of the Cascades and the point where the creek enters the flat ground on its way into the Barron. Once it got really dark the search at the Cascades itself was stopped but for another three hours we all worked through the rainforest around the area with torches.
‘Meanwhile, back in town other generals were organising a list of everyone who was known to have attended the party. Then they started to make their way through it, ringing any family members who remotely, possibly, might have taken Yasmin home with them and not realised she was now officially missing. Many people remembered seeing the little girl and remembered what she was wearing at the party, but no one remembered seeing her with anyone except her mother; and no one came forward to say they were the person Delia had left Yasmin with.’
‘Was, whatisname, Sep, at the party?’ asked Cass.
‘Ah!’ answered Drew. ‘Good question. And, yeah, Sep was questioned as soon as the story of bad blood between him and Delia was uncovered. But he had a really perfect alibi. He spent the whole afternoon in the labour ward of the hospital just above Emergency, where his new partner was giving birth to a son. And I think that news, about the new baby, was partly why Delia broke down so completely when her own child wasn’t found.’
‘Poor thing,’ said Cass. ‘So, what about Andrew Todd? Did he turn up to support Delia?’
‘Not in person. Not that I know of. But after it was all over the evening news, Todd rang the Chief Super saying he wanted every effort be made to find the child, or figure out what had happened to her. And he made a public statement to the effect that Delia Munoz was a great asset to the Cairns cultural scene and a personal friend.
‘Of course, he was asked discreetly about his own whereabouts for the afternoon. He’d been at lunch or golf or both with friends, who swore to it. I forget the details, but there was never any question of him being involved in it at all.
‘The search went on for weeks,’ Drew continued, ‘but much more low key. There was extensive searching along the Barron and on the beaches. Crocodiles that were big enough to have eaten a two-year-old were seen but there was no evidence to justify capturing or killing any of them. Delia’s baby bag of nappies and clothes for Yasmin was found in the picnic ground under the table where they’d all been sitting. Along with her teddy bear, soaking wet. When you look at the files, Cass, you’ll see that bear in dozens of photos. It really pulled at people’s heartstrings. Every time the case has been recalled. Every time Delia Munoz herself was in the news.’
‘I’m in,’ Cass said. ‘I really want to have a look at it!’
7
Brisbane
Wednesday 11th July 2012
It was raining hard in town as Jock Starling finished his shift in the Emergency Department and set off for home on the other side of the city. Changing trains at Central, he found the station packed with rain-soaked commuters and dripping umbrellas. There was a train on the Ferny Grove line in three minutes so he ducked and wove among the crowd to reach his platform, arriving just in time to squeeze into a packed carriage. The air was thick with vapour rising from sodden shoes and clothing as passengers pressed together, bracing themselves for the intimacy of the journey before them.
Jock manoeuvred himself past the knees of a couple of people lucky enough to be sitting. Grabbing onto an overhead rail with one hand, he took out his iPod and stuffed the earphones into his ears, then selected AC/DC’s Black Ice. Around him ninety-five percent of his fellow passengers were similarly engaged, oblivious to anything except their music. The remaining five percent were reading the daily paper, a tabloid Jock considered far worse than anything he’d ever seen in Scotland.
Well not quite five percent. Just to Jock’s left was sitting a young man who was sketching in a child’s sketchbook. As Jock watched, now forgetting Anything Goes, he realised that the artist was sketching the head of a young woman; Jock could see the drawing reflected in the window beside him.
The sketch showed a woman with dark curly, shoulder-length hair tied back behind her head, and although it was in pencil, Jock had the impression that her skin was dark too, olive at least, and her facial features looked part-African. Or perhaps Aboriginal, Jock thought. Her eyes were remarkable, glowing in her face, and Jock wondered what colour the artist had in mind when he drew them. It was hard to say that the woman was beautiful, but she was attractive, and her expression was warm and intelligent. Jock watched, fascinated, as the artist pencilled in a small spotted scarf around her neck.
