Ghost Child

by Caroline Overington

  I was almost certain he was mistaken. According to her statement, Lauren Cameron was twenty-seven years old, and Dad was claiming to remember her from his days on the Sun, so we’re talking about a time when Lauren would have been a child.

  But there you go. I hate to say it, but Dad was right.

  The way the filing system at the Herald works is this: every story ever written is stored in a system we call NewsText, and reporters can search the database by using key words, pretty much like Google. If the story was written any time after 1996, you can actually read it on your computer screen and even cut and paste from it. If it pre-dates 1996, the NewsText system will alert you to its existence by giving you the headline and the date it was published, and then, if you want to see more, you can go down to the library in the bowels of the building, and ask the librarians to get out the old, leather-bound newspaper files, and see a copy of the actual page for yourself.

  I’d already Googled Lauren and nothing had come up. She had no MySpace page and she wasn’t on Facebook, which is unusual these days. Anyway, I typed the words ‘Lauren’ and ‘Cameron’ into the NewsText system and I got nothing. Then I remembered that she’d told the inquiry she had two names, ‘Lauren Cameron’ and ‘Lauren Cashman’.

  I put in ‘Lauren’ and ‘Cashman’ and … bingo!

  There were quite a few stories with those words. The first one that grabbed me was dated November 1982. The headline was ‘MAN BASHES BOY’. There were some other headlines: ‘Tiny Jake on Life Support’ and ‘Jake Outrage: Mother Charged’ and ‘Little Boy Lost: Funeral for Little Jake’, and according to NewsText, Lauren Cashman’s name was in all of these stories. I jotted down the dates of the stories and went to the library, which is something I enjoy doing but don’t do often enough. Old newspapers have context, they’re better than Google. From the ads and the photographs, you can see how people looked and how they lived. You can see how a story was treated, too: did it get splashed all over the front page, or was it buried on page 10? Did they have a cartoon, a photograph, a commentary piece, as well as the news story?

  As soon as I found the page with ‘MAN BASHES BOY’ across the front, I could see why Dad remembered Lauren. She was in the photograph on the front page, sitting with what seemed to be other members of her family – her brothers and sisters – and they all had this pale, haunted look about them. Also, this had been a big story, and Dad was one of the few reporters to actually get it in the paper the day after it happened. He’d stayed with it for a week. It seemed to have got people quite worked up.

  I read through the copy: a little boy, Jacob Cashman, aged five, had been beaten to death on a housing estate west of Melbourne. In the first story, Jacob’s mother was saying Jacob had been set upon by a man while walking home from the shops, but it turned out she made that up. I was actually surprised that Dad had printed that rubbish. It came out that she and the boyfriend had done it. She went to prison for manslaughter and, from what I could see, she died there, some ten years later. There was no record of what happened to him, and no clue as to what had happened to the other kids. Still, there was no doubt in my mind that the Lauren Cameron I’d seen at the Sound of Love inquest was the same Lauren Cashman in this story. It also seemed obvious to me that people would be interested in the fact that the aide for the ‘Sound of Love’ inquest had a tragic background of her own.

  I looked at the photograph of her, and thought, ‘Poor kid.’ But, on the other hand, I thought, ‘Good story,’ and headed to my desk, with photocopies of the original articles under my arm. And then something really strange happened. The telephone rang and it was a guy saying, ‘Did you write that story about Lauren Cashman? Because I’m her brother.’

  I thought, ‘This is too weird.’

  He said, ‘We’ve kind of lost touch and I’m looking for her.’

  I didn’t tell him that I’d already figured out for myself that Lauren had a family. I just thought, ‘Well, that all fits. They would have been split up after the mother went to jail.’ I didn’t let on to the brother, though. Instead, I thought, ‘How good is this? If I can get the brother on the scene, if we can get a reunion going, this will be great.’

  I told the brother that Lauren was due back in the witness box and if he came down to the Coroner’s Court he’d definitely see her there – I’d even point her out if he looked me up, and he promised he would. I took down his mobile phone number and alerted the photographer. ‘We may have a bit of a scoop here,’ I told him. ‘Stick with me at the court today. Something might happen.’ Little did I know! I went to court that day, ready to write the reunion story, when the legal team for the Boyce family got up and dropped a bombshell.

  Lauren got into the witness stand. This was the day after the ‘Sound of Love’ speech, remember, so the press gallery was packed with reporters all interested in what she might say on her second day in the box. The counsel assisting the Coroner, Mr Bateson, stood up and said, ‘Miss Cameron, where were you the evening before your shift started?’

  I couldn’t immediately see the relevance of the question and my first thought was, ‘Uh oh, don’t tell me she was drunk? Maybe there’s going to be a twist in the story.’

  Lauren said, ‘I was out.’

  Bateson said, ‘Out where? Out on the town? Where did you spend the evening?’

  The hospital’s lawyer, whose name I now forget, was going absolutely nuts, saying ‘Objection’, but it was overruled, and Bateson was allowed to continue. He said, ‘Where were you, Miss Cameron?’

  Lauren’s face went red. She kept looking over at the hospital’s barrister. Then she said, ‘I was in a city hotel.’

  I thought, ‘In a city hotel. Not at a city hotel? What’s this all this about?’

  Bateson said, ‘In a hotel … you mean a bar?’

  A bar! So they were drunk. But Lauren said, ‘No.’

  Bateson said, ‘Well then, where? In a restaurant?’

  Again, Lauren said, ‘No.’

  I was thinking, ‘Where are they going with this?’

  The hospital’s barrister was on his feet again. He knew what was coming. We in the media had no idea. And then there it was, before us. She’d been with Bass. At the very moment that Mrs Boyce was in labour, when he really should have had his high-paid arse on the maternity ward, he’d been in the cot with an aide who later turned up to work alongside him! Excellent! Oh, I can see how it wasn’t technically relevant to the inquest, that it probably had nothing to do with whether the baby lived or died, but still, that kind of thing, it just blows a case wide open. Lauren must have known it was coming – I mean, surely she knew it was going to come out? – but still, she looked absolutely horrified.

  ‘You were with Stephen Bass in a hotel room, here in Sydney?’ said Bateson. And then, quietly, he added, ‘I take it his wife was not present?’

  There was pandemonium, obviously. The Coroner had to call a recess. Lauren took off, out of the courtroom. I thought she’d head for the toilets. That’s what witnesses normally do. They think they’re safe in there but actually, it’s always a bonus for us journos if they head to the loo, because once they’re in there, there’s only one way out, and we’re there waiting for them. But she didn’t go to the loo. She flew out of the courtroom and into the foyer and stood there, like a stunned mullet, looking this way and that, and then right into the face of a tall guy – a pale, freckly, white-haired guy, and I suppose I should have realised at the time it must have been the brother, but I was so caught up in what had just happened inside the court that I’d totally forgotten about Harley Cashman. She quickly took off again, and left him standing there, looking very confused.

  The next day, the Telegraph had a headline that I won’t forget for a while: ‘Love Me Do!’ They had all the scandalous details: Bass, a fifty-one-year-old married father, had been alone at a city hotel with the twenty-seven-year-old blonde nursing aide, while Elizabeth Boyce was labouring a baby with serious deformities who died in Bass’s hands
some hours later. It was a perfect story for the tabloids, the kind of thing everybody wants to read. We at the Herald wrote it up, too. Naturally, we all sent photographers to Lauren’s house – you wouldn’t believe how hard she was to find, living on the back of somebody else’s property – but soon enough, the nature strip was packed with reporters and photographers. Lauren wouldn’t come out, and the lady who lived in the main house kept chasing us off the lawn. My editor kept saying to me, ‘We’ve got to get some quotes from her,’ and I was saying, ‘What am I supposed to do, break the door down?’

  But I was thinking, ‘Even if she doesn’t come out, I still have the Barrett angle,’ something nobody else had. I called my dad, brought him up-to-date, and told him he was quite right, she had been in the newspaper before, and rang off, so I could meet the deadline.

  ‘Love Aide in Family Tragedy.’ That was the headline we put on the story. I wrote:

  Lauren Cameron, the nurses’ aide who was yesterday revealed to have been in a hotel-room tryst with specialist obstetrician Stephen Bass the night before the birth and death of Baby Boyce, has her own tragic family history.

  Lauren’s mother, Lisa Cashman, was in 1983 sentenced to 15 years prison for the manslaughter of Lauren’s five-year-old brother, Jacob.

  Mrs Cashman first told police that her son had been attacked by a man in the local schoolyard, a claim that later unravelled. The case made front-page headlines.

  I went through the events that had occurred in the house on DeCastella Drive as best I could. There was a hint in one of the stories that was published at the time that the real details of the case would never be known. The judge had sealed everybody’s testimony, so I had a few difficulties putting it all together, but I did manage to make the point that the Lauren who people had been reading about in the ‘Sound of Love’ inquest was the same Lauren who was on the front page of the Sun all those years ago.

  Did I think about how Lauren might react to her history being re-told in the newspaper? Not really. The story about Jacob was a matter of public record. It had been reported at the time. We were hardly broadcasting a state secret. True, it was locked in the archives, and yeah, I guess she had changed her name, but she was the one who volunteered to the court that she’d once been somebody else. And anyway, I like to think that my story might have softened her image in the eyes of some people who thought she was just a home-wrecker.

  Detective Senior Sergeant Brian Muggeridge

  I never forgot the Cashman kids. Lauren, especially, had some kind of hold on me, and don’t ask me how, but I knew – I just knew – I’d see her again one day. When I did, I saw her, like everyone did, on the front of the paper, under a headline that said ‘Love Aide in Family Tragedy’. They had a photograph of her coming down the court staircase. She still had that hair. I was curious to hear what had happened to her. I knew that her mother had gone to prison, and had died before she could be released. The boyfriend had gone to prison, too, but I had no idea what had happened to him. Paroled, probably, and when that happens, you lose track of them until they commit some other crime. The kids had gone into care and become state wards, and the Department doesn’t feel obliged to tell the cops what happens to them after that. You just hope you don’t have to turn up ten years later and arrest them because they’ve gone off the rails.

  About a year after Jacob died, a petition went around the Barrett Estate saying the house should be demolished. Nobody had been living there and the place had become an eyesore. There were rumours about bloodstains on the walls. All nonsense, but you can’t stop that stuff going around. One group of people, still angry about what happened to Jake, I suppose, wanted to burn the place to the ground. They actually put that up as a proposal; they seriously thought they should be allowed to set fire to the joint, as an act of revenge or some sort of catharsis. The fire brigade said, ‘Look, there is just no way we are allowing people to set fire to a house on a suburban street, with neighbours on both sides, so just forget about it.’

  That didn’t put people off, though. The house mysteriously caught fire one night. Kids had been through the place, ripping out the oven and anything else they thought they could use. The fire fighters put out the fire and boarded up the windows and nailed up the front door, and, boy, did it look like crap then. The house had always slumped, and now it was blackened and the windows were bare, and people really started to complain. It was a prime target for local teenagers, who would dare each other to break in there. Parents didn’t help matters much. They used to tell kids that the place was haunted.

  After about five years, which is around as long as it takes the Department of Housing in Victoria to do anything these days, they came in and replaced the windows and painted the frames and dragged out the burnt mattresses. They said they were going to put more tenants in there! I could hardly believe it. The first family that arrived were Somali. They came straight from the refugee camp in Kenya to DeCastella Drive! There were nine of them, including six children and a cousin, and it was about four weeks before neighbours got them to understand what happened in that house. They fled. A lot of those refugees are Christian, but some of them have the old black-magic beliefs and they said they couldn’t stand it. They heard noises, and they were sure the soul of the child who died had remained in the house.

  The place stayed empty for a while after that, but then the Department noticed somebody was tapping into the power grid from there. They sent us to investigate, and when we knocked down the front door we found every room filled with hydroponics and marijuana plants. They were growing in rows of pots in the kitchen, the lounge, even in the bath. We cleaned the place out again, boarded it up once more, and now we keep it on our rounds, which means we drive by occasionally to check on it and make sure nobody moves in there without permission.

  I told the kids at the local schools, ‘You stay away from that house on DeCastella Drive. It’s been set fire to, and it’s not safe.’ I’m not sure they took any notice. To them, it was haunted, and what kid doesn’t want to believe in a haunted house?

  Truth be told I’ve heard the noises in there, too. I go in from time to time. I tell myself it’s to make sure squatters haven’t moved in, but yeah, I mostly just stand there and look around and maybe remember a few things. The place creaks and moans. Obviously, it’s not a ghost. It’s the timber in the frame of the house. It stretches and cools, and that makes a noise. There’s wagtails in the roof, too. I’ve seen them twisting on the lawn, and they’ve got into the eaves and they make a racket. That’s what people hear, not ghosts. There’s no ghosts, not real ones, anyway.

  Lauren Cashman

  I woke before dawn, and why wouldn’t I? I was in a strange bed with a strange man beside me. I was disoriented. Sitting up in the dark, I thought, ‘Where am I again? Where is this bed? Where is this room, and how does it fit into my life?’

  Then I remembered. I was in a queen-size bed in the Gundagai Motel on the banks of the Murrumbidgee River, and the breathing body lying next to mine wasn’t that of a stranger: it was my brother, Harley.

  He was stretching his whole body, pointing his big toes out and putting his arms – or rather his arm, and the other stumpy thing – over his head and grunting.

  My instinct was to nestle down and spoon against him, but he broke his pose and fished around the floor for a cigarette.

  ‘Want one?’ he asked, and I said, ‘I told you, I’m giving up.’

  ‘I noticed that,’ he said, handing me the packet, and I took one.

  We’d eaten a family-size pizza the night before, but Harley said he was hungry.

  ‘You want breakfast?’ he asked, and I said, ‘Sure.’

  He told me he’d take me to his favourite place, the place he always stopped at on the road to Melbourne, and then we’d go to ‘Mum’s’.

  ‘She’s probably already got the jug on,’ he said.

  Did he really think this was a good idea? To just bowl up at his mum’s place and expect her to be please
d to see me?

  He seemed to think it would be fine. He said, ‘Mate, we’ve been expecting you for a while.’ He was trying to put me at ease. ‘I called her. She’s looking forward to meeting you.’

  I didn’t believe that. I swung my legs over the edge of the bed and went into the bathroom. I must have been nervous because I remember I found it hard to open the plastic packet that the white soap came in. I dropped the face washer by my feet and let water pool around my ankles. I was thinking to myself, ‘How is this going to go?’

  The café wasn’t far from the motel – maybe half a kilometre. Harley drove. He seemed pretty excited.

  ‘Mum and Tony used to take me here when I was a kid,’ he said. ‘We’d get yabbies from the Murrumbidgee, and come here for milkshakes. And they taught me that song …’

  He started to sing, ‘There’s a track winding back, down the old forgotten shack – ’

  I said, ‘It’s an old-fashioned shack.’

  He continued, ‘Along the … road to … Gunda … gai!’

  The café was called the Niagara. It had curved glass windows, and silver metal lettering – N I A G A R A – above the counter and I remember thinking, ‘What is this? Some 50s-style milk bar from Happy Days?’ It had a vinyl booth and the walls were papered with cuttings from newspapers. The stories were all about an Australian prime minister, John Curtin, who had stopped at the Niagara one night in 1942, in the middle of the Second World War. He had been en route from Canberra to Melbourne and, according to the clippings, he’d knocked on the door. The owner told whoever was knocking to go away, but then he saw Curtin through the glass door and let him in, and made him steak and eggs at a table in the kitchen.