Ghost Child

by Caroline Overington

  I said, ‘They’re all here. We’re going to have to talk to them.’

  She sat up straight and downright snarled at me. She said, ‘Who do you got to talk to? You talked to Harley already. Hayley’s a baby. And where’s Lauren? You don’t got to talk to Lauren. She weren’t even there.’

  I said, ‘Lauren was at home, wasn’t she?’

  She didn’t trip up. She said, ‘Jake wasn’t bashed at home.’

  I said, ‘Lisa, can I get you a coffee?’

  She said, ‘No, but I need the loo.’

  I thought, ‘I bet you do.’ Like I’ve said, a person under pressure will find themselves lightening their load, whether they realise it or not. I signalled to the guy working the tapes to shut them down. I said, ‘It’s at the end of the hall. I’ll come with you.’

  Lisa said, ‘I don’t need a chaperone. Why you gotta watch me take a piss?’ I followed her out anyway, and stood at the cubicle door. I listened for tinkling, but there was none.

  After a bit, I said, ‘Everything all right in there?’

  ‘Bloody hell,’ said Lisa. I heard the sounds of a woman pulling up her knickers and fastening her belt.

  ‘I’ve got to organise the funeral,’ she said upon exit. ‘We haven’t got no money. I want something special. He deserves it. Jacob’s a good kid.’

  I noticed that she was speaking in the present tense. Jacob’s death was barely a reality to her.

  ‘I want to talk to the priest,’ she said. ‘I want to get one of those headstones shaped like a teddy bear, one of those big ones, all marble.’

  We walked back to the interview room together. It was time to get serious. The reporters would have to file something soon and I didn’t want another round of newspapers going out with the same story on the front. I waited for the tape deck to start rolling. I made sure I could see the cogs turning, and then I got straight to it. I said, ‘Sit down, Lisa. For the record, I am Detective Senior Sergeant Brian Muggeridge, Barrett CIB. You do not have to answer any questions. Anything you do say may be used in court against you. Do you understand, Lisa?’

  She looked startled, and then it kind of dawned on her. All these formalities – I could see her thinking, ‘Shit, I’m a suspect.’

  ‘I got nothing else to tell you,’ she said.

  I said, ‘Do you understand, Lisa?’

  She nodded yes, but I had to make her say it out loud for the tape.

  ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Yeah, I get it.’

  I said, ‘There are a couple of things we need to go over. I’m going to tell you straight up, Lisa, we don’t believe that Jacob was set upon by a stranger. It’s not credible.’

  She said, ‘You’ve got no right holding me like this when I’ve got the funeral to do.’

  She opened her handbag, took out a cigarette. She said, ‘I can’t believe this.’ She was rolling her thumb over the ball of the lighter.

  I said, ‘Lisa, we’re talking here about a homicide.’

  It was the first time I had used the word. There are a couple of things that have to be in place before you can prove ‘murder’. There has to be intent, pre-meditation. I had no idea what happened to Jacob, beyond the fact that he was now dead and going cold in the hospital, and my patience with his mum was wearing thin. Maybe the boyfriend did it. Maybe it was an accident. Manslaughter was a possibility, but surely it was time to quit the bullshit about the stranger.

  I said again, ‘Homicide, Lisa. Serious business.’

  Her foot began to tap, rapidly, against the floor. Now was the time to make my move.

  I said, ‘Lisa, why was Jacob’s hair wet?’

  She looked up.

  ‘Wet?’

  ‘When Jacob went into the ambulance, his hair was wet. Why was that?’

  She said, ‘I don’t know.’ Then she said, ‘I think there was a puddle in the yard.’

  A puddle in the yard? Ladies and gentleman of the jury, the alarm bells should have rung right there. It was November. A total fire ban had been in place since September. The entire state of Victoria was tinder dry. A year from then, I’d be fighting the Ash Wednesday bushfires with the Barrett volunteer brigade. Seventy lives would be lost. That’s how hot, how dry, it was in Victoria in November 1982. And to explain why Jacob was wet, Lisa says, ‘There was a puddle in the yard.’

  I said, ‘No, there wasn’t.’

  ‘There might have been,’ she said.

  ‘No, Lisa, there wasn’t. Jacob’s clothes were dry. His clothes were dry, but his hair was wet. How do you explain that? How did Jacob’s hair get wet?’

  I waited. It was time for Lisa to admit one of the incontrovertible facts of the case: Jacob’s hair was wet because they’d put him in the bathtub, or doused him with water to try to bring him around. There was no other explanation. Jacob wasn’t marked. It wasn’t as if they were trying to wash away any blood, but for some reason, Jacob had been doused in water at some point before the ambulance arrived. Presumably he’d also been dressed in clean, dry clothes.

  Now, if Lisa had been a smart crook, an experienced crook, she could have handled that fact. She would have said, ‘Yeah, all right, we put him in the bath. He was so weak, or so hot, when we carried him home that we needed to cool him down.’ That would be plausible. That’s something you or I might do. But Lisa’s instinct, her habit of a lifetime, was to lie, to lie about everything, and so she did.

  I said, ‘Did you put Jacob in the bath?’

  She was on automatic pilot now. The automatic, knee-jerk, lie-to-the-cops pilot. She said, ‘No.’

  I said, ‘Lisa, when I’m done here, I’m going to speak to Harley. We are also talking to Peter. Do you think either of them will tell us that actually, yes, you did put Jacob in the bath?’

  She was worried. They probably hadn’t gone over that detail. They probably had no story to cover that. Peter might say anything. The kid would certainly own up to it, and why not? It seemed an easy enough question for a child: did Mummy put Jacob in the bath? Sure she did.

  So, Lisa now had a choice: she could either speak up and save herself, and give up Peter, or she could carry on with the charade. I was thinking, ‘Give him up, you stupid woman. He’s an arsehole.’ From the moment I’d seen him in Lisa’s house, not with his arms around her but reclined on the Jason, tapping away at a cigarette, I’d thought, ‘You’ve got nothing to lose by losing him.’ I was hoping she’d see things the way I saw them. She had a shallow, sexual bond with this guy. They were living together because it suited his animal instincts: he was getting a root. She was probably thinking, ‘Yeah, but I want to have a guy around, someone to party with; to drink UDL and smoke bongs and help keep the kids under control.’ But that wasn’t love. That wasn’t even the basis for any loyalty. Give him up.

  I said, ‘Lisa, did Peter do something to Jacob?’

  I said it in the voice I use when I’m trying to get a woman to crack. I like to think of it as my compassionate voice. It goes: confess to me! Own up now, say, ‘Okay, Jacob wasn’t bashed by a stranger. Peter kicked the shit out of my kid and the reason I’m covering up for him is because I’m bloody terrified!’

  I said, ‘Lisa, we know that Jacob has been injured before.’

  She didn’t say anything. Instead, she went through what I call the motions. She pushed back her chair. She dragged her decorated fingernails through the front of her hair and then threw her head back. She got to her feet and found she wanted to be sitting again, so sat down. I let her go; it was just stress playing out.

  ‘I want to see a lawyer,’ she said. ‘I’m gonna get him to ask you why you aren’t out there trying to find out who did this, why you’re in here, hasslin’ me.’

  So, she wasn’t ready. Not yet.

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Let’s call a halt to proceedings for a moment. For the benefit of the tape, we are suspending the interview.’

  I prepared to leave the room. Lisa was wide-eyed. She said, ‘Where you goin’?’

  I said, �
�I want to give you a bit of time to think.’

  ‘In case you forgot, I got a funeral to plan.’

  ‘I understand that. There will be time. There will be an autopsy. I’m really urging you to use this time to think hard about how you want us to proceed.’

  I left her alone – not strictly true, since a uniformed officer would have remained in the room – but essentially alone, to plan her next move. I walked down the corridor toward the staff canteen. I had the feeling, or maybe I’d been told, that Harley would be there. Now, as a rule, the courts don’t let cops like me interview little kids. You’ve got to have a specialist and the whole thing has to be strictly regulated. Kids have a tendency to tell adults what they think they want to hear and, besides that, who knows what goes on in the brain of a three-year-old? They can sense trouble as well as the older kids, and they’re keen to dodge it, like anyone is. Their Achilles heel – if you want to call it that – is that they don’t self-censor. They aren’t cautious. The other thing is, if they’re conditioned to lie – and a lot of kids we deal with are conditioned to lie – you can catch them out pretty quick. Their made-up stories have a fantastic quality. They keep adding details, stuff that doesn’t fit, and the whole thing soon unravels, and you think, ‘Bingo!’ And then the counsellors come in and say it’s all inadmissible because you tried to trick the kid or something.

  I figured it would be all right to have an informal chat, though. Harley had a social worker with him. I’d make like I was gathering information about the attacker, and nothing to use in court.

  The moment I entered the canteen, the counsellor said, ‘This isn’t official, right?’

  ‘Right,’ I said. ‘I’m just up for a chat.’

  Harley was like every three-year-old you’ve ever seen. He was moving around the unfamiliar room, examining coffee cups and reaching for the sugar spoon so he could stick it in his mouth.

  I said, ‘Harley, can you sit here?’ I held a chair out for him. He wandered over, climbed up on it and sat down, his feet swinging.

  I said, ‘Harley, we need to ask you about what happened yesterday.’

  He didn’t say anything. I continued, ‘Harley, your mum has told us that a man bashed you and your brother.’

  ‘Jacob was bashed by a man,’ he said, happily enough. He wasn’t being flippant – what does a three-year-old know of flippant? – he was merely uninterested. He’d answered these questions before. He couldn’t see why it was important. He was looking at the ceiling, looking at the walls, wondering when he might be able to get up and resume exploring the room.

  I said, ‘Harley, did somebody hurt Jacob?’

  He said, ‘No.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘Jacob got bashed by a man.’

  He inched forward in the plastic chair, moving on his buttocks, the way kids do, shuffling until his feet touched the floor. Then, before I could stop him, he was out of the chair and making his way toward some new object of interest. Technically, I wasn’t allowed to touch him, but I couldn’t help myself. I rose and ruffled his hair – I swear, it was irresistible, that hair – and left the room.

  I saw no value in tracking down Hayley. How old was she? Eighteen months? She couldn’t even talk. But I did want to give Lisa more time to come to her senses. So, rather than go back to the interview room, I tracked down Lauren. After all, she was six years old. If something had happened in the house on DeCastella Drive, as opposed to in the school, she would have to know about it.

  Almost by accident, I found her in the corridor. She was in the company of another counsellor. What can I say about how she appeared? I’ve thought about that so many times. Was she distraught? I don’t think she was, not then, anyway. She was quite interested in what was going on around her. The events of the previous day – the police and the ambulance – would have been pretty exciting, and now she was being treated the way kids are treated when there’s a tragedy of some kind: she was being spoiled. She’d been offered a Happy Meal from McDonald’s and now she and the social worker were off to the Coke machine. She was being allowed to handle the change. Probably, she’d be allowed to feed the coin slot, choose her drink, press the buttons, and make the can fall. If she was anything like any other kid in the world, she would have been thinking, ‘Wait until I tell Jake. Oh wait, Jake’s gone. Do I want Coke, or something else?’

  In saying that, I don’t mean to imply that she was a callous child. Let me stress that, actually: I don’t believe for a minute that Lauren Cashman, or Cameron, or whatever she now calls herself, was a callous or uncaring child. In my experience, you can tell a six-year-old that their parent has died and they’ll go straight back to the TV, and look at it blankly. Ten minutes later, they’ll be giggling or fighting with a sibling over what to watch.

  It will come for them – the grief, I mean – but it takes years, not hours.

  Anyway, what happened in the corridor shocked us all. I was standing there, and Lauren was maybe two metres away, coming toward me. She was shaking the change in her hand, in step with the social worker, and then, suddenly, out of the blue, her mother was there. Now, let me assure you, that wasn’t supposed to happen. We were trying hard to keep them apart. They may well have been mother and daughter, and they may well have needed to be together right then, but the mum was linked to a serious crime, and there was no way we were going to let them collude, not once it became clear that the story was bogus.

  Anyway, for some reason they let Lisa out of the interview room at the same minute that Lauren was being escorted down the hall, and they ran right into each other.

  Now, in the twenty years since then, I’ve thought a lot about what should have happened in that moment. Had Lisa’s account been true – if Jacob truly had been set upon by a stranger – then mother and daughter would have run toward each other, surely? Lisa would have bolted down the hall and taken her surviving child in her arms, and they would have sobbed together, grieved together, held each other up. Lauren would have run to her mother, confused and afraid, and seeking comfort.

  What actually happened was the opposite. They stepped back. They looked startled to see each other. Lisa, in particular, got a fright. And then, get this, Lisa hissed. She raised her voice and said, ‘I hope you’re not telling any lies in there, Lauren.’

  Lauren didn’t bat an eyelid. In a voice just like her mother’s, a lazy, husky, adult drawl, she said, ‘I ain’t said nothin’.’

  She was speaking the truth. Lauren hadn’t told us what happened on DeCastella Drive, not yet, anyway. Her mother hadn’t told us anything, either. And yet, the look they gave each other, it was like: Can I trust you?

  We didn’t know it, not then, but they had an agreement. How it was reached, I can’t tell you. Maybe, in the moments before the ambulance arrived, Lisa sat her little girl down and spoke to her calmly, saying, ‘This is what we are going to do …’

  Maybe the opposite is true. Maybe she took her by the shoulders and shook her until her eyes rattled and said, ‘If you so much as whisper a word about this …’

  I don’t know how it happened or even, really, whose idea it was. What I do know is that they entered into a pact, and sealed it, before any of us arrived. They concocted the story about the attack. They went over the details, as best they could, and as far as I can tell, they all agreed, ‘If we stick to this, nothing can happen to any of us.’

  It didn’t last, though. One of them reneged.

  The Reverend John Ball, Anglican Priest

  I must admit I was surprised when the police told me that Jacob Cashman’s mother wanted to have the funeral for her young son at my church, St John’s Anglican Church, on the Barrett Estate. It wasn’t so much that she wanted a church service that surprised me. It’s quite normal for people to seek out the priest when it comes time to bury someone, even on an estate where nobody under the age of seventy goes to church. No, what surprised me was that Mrs Cashman wanted an Anglican service for her son. I’d been following the case in the
newspapers, and I knew for certain that the Cashman family had never set foot in my church. I’d also assumed that they were Catholic. The boy’s name – Jacob – seemed to suggest it. In my experience, when you’re dealing with a family that has named their child Jacob – or, for that matter, Joseph or Sarah or Rebecca – you’re normally dealing with Catholics, but no, the police told me that the mother said they were Church of England, and so the Anglican Church was where the funeral would be.

  I don’t kid myself that Lisa Cashman was making any kind of political or theological statement in saying that she was Church of England. I don’t imagine that she had any idea about the Reformation or the history of schism in the Christian churches. No, Church of England is simply what so many Anglo-Saxon Australian families that aren’t Catholic claim to be, when pushed on the question of religion. Come to that, I don’t believe that Lisa Cashman knew, not in any spiritual sense, that she had endowed Jacob with a truly Christian name. It’s entirely possible – quite common, actually – to find people who have no idea that Jake is a short form of Jacob, and that Jacob comes from the Bible. Parents these days present their children to be christened because they want to have a nice party with some formalities, they want to celebrate the baby and have photographs taken. It’s become something of a sad joke in the Church, though, that they don’t actually know why they are doing it. They don’t understand that a child when baptised is entering into a life of Christ. They don’t understand the significance of the names they give their children. At a conference on faith, I heard about a baby girl who the parents wanted to call Jezebel. Thank heavens, their priest managed to talk them out of it. ‘But it’s so pretty!’ they said.

  There is no point complaining, I suppose. Just as there’s no point complaining about the church building we had on Barrett. There might well have been a time – indeed, there was a time – when the tallest building in any Australian town would have been the church. A time when the steeple would have risen higher than any other structure on the landscape, when the church would have provided a focal point for the community. Those days are gone. Churches now are dwarfed by office blocks. On new estates – places like Barrett – well, they’re often out on the industrial estate. If we hadn’t taken the lease, the building might have ended up a branch headquarters for Medicare. St John’s was visible to no one but the staff at Barrett Glass who had to walk past to get a sandwich from the milk bar next door. It was neither the biggest nor the most impressive structure on the estate – that would be the shopping centre – and from one Sunday to the next, the pews – the plastic chairs – were mostly empty. There was no shame in Barrett in skipping church. In fact, young people felt quite embarrassed if they did want to go to church. It was daggy. That’s what the kids told me, ‘Church is daggy.’ Their parents thought the same. They filled their lives with work and sport and barbecues, and if they ever did feel empty, they’d buy some new possessions. If they yearned for a spiritual experience, they’d get out the Tarot cards or scented candles, or have a séance. They would not turn to Christ.