Blood Sisters

by Caroline de Costa

  ‘They took me into the big bedroom at the end,’ she translated. ‘Then Fang went away. The boss started to hit me, be quite rough and I was trying to stop him, I was crying, saying why are you doing this to me. Then he—’ The interpreter burst into tears and reached for a tissue.

  ‘We’ll stop for a minute,’ said Cass. But Maria was unruffled. She continued in English:

  ‘Then he fucked me, that was the first time, he just wanted anal, it was always anal with him, no condoms, no lube, nothing. He was really rough. Later, I was bleeding. That never usually happened to me.

  ‘When he stopped, I still thought I might be going to Sydney. But he just left and didn’t say anything, and he locked the door.

  ‘After a while Fang came and took me into the other room, where I was when you came, but the bed didn’t have the chains on then. He brought me some food. I said, how long do I have to stay here?

  ‘He said as long as the boss wants you.’

  ‘I said, my family at home is going to be looking for me; all my friends, they’ll look for me.

  ‘He said, we know you got no family. No one’s gonna be looking for you.’

  ‘Is that true?’ Cass asked.

  At this, Maria began to cry softly. ‘Yes. My mother died when I was twelve years old. My father went a long time ago. I haven’t seen my brother for many years; he went to Saudi. I was just saving money to take back home. I thought maybe I could go back to my village and have a shop. But they took all the money.’

  Cass looked across at Drew. ‘We’re beginning to see a pattern here,’ she said. He nodded.

  ‘And then what happened?’ Drew asked Maria.

  ‘Then I have just been there. Until you came. A long, long time.’

  ‘You have never been outside that building since the day you were taken there?’

  ‘No, never outside. I thought I was going to die there.’

  ‘You were fed? You had showers?’

  ‘Yes. When I was very sick, they gave me some medicine. Fang did. He brought the food. And my clothes. But not my bag or my other things. Not my passport.’

  ‘And McFadden—the boss—he continued to abuse you sexually?’

  ‘Yes. Sometimes every day. Then sometimes he would be gone for weeks.’

  ‘And Fang?’

  ‘Not at first. At first it was just the boss.’

  ‘And there were always other women there?’

  ‘At first just me. That was terrible. Then Selena came. I never saw her or the others. We had our food separately and our time in the bathroom. To empty our toilet buckets and to wash. Not a very long time, though. Like prison. Then Nelia came and Florentina.’

  ‘You couldn’t talk to them?’

  ‘We had to shout to each other through the walls. We always did that at night, but we had to be careful. If Fang or the boss caught us doing that, they would whip us or beat us. They were afraid we would try to escape together.’

  ‘Tell us more about the other women.’

  ‘The first one to come was Selena. She was in the second room and she told me she was tied to the bed. That was what Fang did. He wants it with the woman tied up. He’d burn her with cigarettes, too. I knew about that. And she was afraid she was pregnant. Then she realised she really was. I heard Fang beating her many times. I cried and cried because I couldn’t help her. He would just tell me to shut my face, and would hit me, too. I was worried that I was going to become his prisoner, too, he was worse than the boss.

  ‘Then one day Selena was gone. When I asked Fang, he just laughed and said she had gone to God. I think he kicked her till she died. I think maybe she miscarried and bled till she died.’

  ‘And the next one was Felicia?’ asked Cass.

  ‘Next was Anna. She wasn’t there long; we only really spoke one time. She was from Angeles. One night there was a lot of noise like she was being beaten. Then next day she was gone. I asked Fang and he said she’d gone to Sydney. But I didn’t think that was true. I think she died.’

  ‘Then Felicia arrived?’

  ‘Yes. That was last year. She was taken into the big bedroom first. She was for the boss then. And the next day was the first day that I had to service Fang.’

  ‘When you weren’t with the men, they let you watch television?’ asked Drew. ‘Did they let you do anything else?’

  ‘Just the TV. One of us, one day at a time. Just certain shows. And some magazines in my language. I think maybe from the mamasan. From the TV I knew what day it was. Every day I cried and cried to get out of there. It was much, much worse than being in jail. Because no one knew I was there and I thought I would die there like Selena, and no one would know. Felicia, and Nelia and Florrie: they came later, they all were the same as me. No families to look for them. Florrie cried, too, every day. They beat her for that. But she couldn’t stop.

  ‘And Marcellina? Marcie? You talked to her when she arrived this week?’

  ‘Yes, I think she was going to be the next one anyway, the next girl like us. But then she had to come early because of something that happened, something happened to her cousin. So she was put on a mattress in the living room and tied up with a rope. It was hard to talk to her out there because there were two doors between us. In the small rooms where the other girls were tied up the walls were not so thick so we could talk through them.

  ‘The boss was angry with Marcie. He just let Fang do what he wanted with her. So, this week there were five of us. Marcie was very angry and fighting Fang when he came there, so he beat her a lot. I could hear him say she’d caused trouble, and her cousin caused trouble, she’d got the police onto them. Marcie was going to have to pay for this.

  ‘Then they brought the other girl. The Australian. I could hear her shouting at them. She was saying that the police would be coming to find her. The dog was barking, too. Fang was laughing at her. He said, “Well, you won’t be here”. When it went quiet in the night, I knew they had taken her away and I thought they had taken Marcie, too, because it was so quiet. I thought, they are going to kill those two. I just kept really quiet and still. I didn’t want to be next.’

  ‘Were you shackled, tied to the bed like that, the whole time?’ Cass asked.

  ‘Some days. Some days he would let me off for a while. He’d make me beg him to fuck me and then say to him please, please untie me. Sometimes he would, so I always did what he said. But sometimes he didn’t do it even though he’d fucked me—then he would kick me and keep me tied up until I wet myself.

  ‘He speaks Tagalog and Chinese?’

  ‘Yes. And English. I think he is Filipino Chinese from Manila. He is a very bad man.’

  Maria leaned back against the pillows and closed her eyes for a moment. Her eyelids was dry and thin.

  ‘Maria, I think that’s enough for you for one day,’ Cass said, standing up and pressing her hand to Maria’s. ‘You get some rest now and start getting back to health and we’ll come and see you again.’

  ***

  In her office, Susie outlined Maria’s health problems to Cass and Drew. ‘She’s very pale. She hasn’t seen the sun in years and she’s also anaemic. She’s also very underweight, as you can see, and malnourished and dehydrated. She obviously hasn’t had enough to eat throughout the whole time she was in that place. She’s got chronic sores on her wrists and ankles where she had the shackles on, and many infected sores on her skin where she was burnt with cigarettes. She has symptoms of urinary tract infection; and loose teeth and infected gums which are the result of vitamin deficiencies. Her incarceration has led to her having significant mental symptoms on top of all this, but I think she’s pretty resilient and that she’s going to heal up mentally as well as physically. Her whole experience of life has been so tough, and this has been another terrible experience for her, but I think that she’ll be all right in the long run.’

  In a room adjacent to Maria’s cell, Drew had found Felicia. She, too, was now in hospital in a room next to Maria Ramos. She was in slightly
better shape, though she had a similar story to tell about her recruitment. She’d arrived in Australia in 2011. She said she had met women back in the Philippines, including Rosa Delacruz, who had gone to Australia and made some money and come back home to their families. Rosa had told her that Maria Ramos was still there and should be in Sydney. They could meet up.

  ‘Do you have any close family back home?’ Cass asked her.

  At this Felicia began to cry softly.

  ‘She was brought up in an orphanage where she was left as a baby,’ said the interpreter. ‘She had a premature baby when she was 16, but the baby, a girl, died when she was three weeks old.’

  ‘How old is Felicia now?’

  ‘Nineteen.’

  Nelia and Florentina were in a ward together. They had both been kidnapped and incarcerated by McFadden earlier in the year. Their stories were the same as Maria’s. Brought up in poor circumstances in the Philippines, with few remaining relatives there. Enticed into coming to Australia, working for a while in Cairns making little money, tricked into going to the Bayview house and locked up ever since. Constant physical and sexual abuse from McFadden and Fang. Their health problems were the same as Maria’s but not so advanced. Susie thought they would both need at least two weeks in hospital.

  Finally, there was Marcie. Like Maria she was in a room with a view of the sea. When Cass arrived, Marcie jumped out of bed and hugged her, then began to laugh and cry at the same time.

  ‘You saved us!’ she said. ‘I thought we would all die. They would shoot us all and that would be the end.’

  ‘Well,’ said Cass, hugging her in return, ‘I thought so, too, when I drove into the forest behind you and saw they had guns.’ She sat down on the bed and was gratified to see that the colour had returned to Marcie’s face, although she had sores there and on her arms from cigarette burns which had been cleaned and dressed by the nursing staff.

  ‘I need to ask you some questions,’ she said to Marcie. ‘When were you taken to the place where you were locked up?’

  ‘On Thursday. On Wednesday afternoon after I came to see you in the police station, I told the mamasan that I want a proper funeral for Dorrie, I want to go to the funeral. She said, yes, that the funeral will be in a few days, and she will get a priest for it. I would just have to sign some papers that she showed me. Then the hospital would send Dorrie’s body to some people who would fix up her funeral. I said, okay. I know how to sign my name.’

  ‘Then on Thursday morning, she called me at the house where you saw me and said because the police knew about me, it was better for me not to stay and work here in Cairns. I would go to Sydney. I said that’s fine, when will the funeral be and when will I go to Sydney? She said no money for a proper funeral, and Dorrie would be burned. Also, she would come and get me and then I would go to Sydney. But until she came, I should just stay in the house and not go out anywhere. I was very worried, but I didn’t know what to do.’ Marcie shivered, remembering this.

  ‘Then that afternoon, very late, she came to get me, I got all my things and she said we were going to her house. When we arrived, I told her, you have a very beautiful house. She said, you can come inside and just wait for a while, then you will go to the airport. So I went inside and she put me in a room at the back. She had put my bags in the kitchen. I was in the room by myself for a while, waiting for her to come back.

  ‘Then out the window I saw her driving away with her little boy and straight away Fang came into the room. I never saw him before, but I knew then he was going to be big trouble. He said, you are coming with me. He took me across the back of that place. I was trying to scream and get away, but he hit me hard across the mouth and said shut up or you will get much worse. He pushed me into that place at the back. That’s where I was until they brought Emily, too.’

  ‘Did you see the others there?’ asked Cass. ‘Maria and Felicia and Nelia and Florentina?’

  ‘I saw them when he let them into the bathroom, but I couldn’t speak to them. I was on a mattress and tied up all the time. It was terrible. At night we talked through the walls, but it was hard to hear. We all said, how can we ever get out of this place? It seemed no one would ever come to find us. There was no one at home who would miss me. Maria Angela would just think I’d stayed in Australia after Dorrie died. And I realised why they made us, me and Dorrie, use names of other women when we worked. Like Dorrie was Maria Ramos. It was in case anyone came looking for those girls. It would seem like they must be still alive somewhere.’ Cass nodded.

  ‘Could you talk to Emily, after they brought her there?’ she asked.

  ‘No. We were both tied up and they put tape over our mouths. It was hard just to breathe. We were both very scared.’ Marcie screwed up her face and clenched her hands as she thought of it. Then she said to Cass: ‘What will happen to me now? Will I be sent back to my country? And can I see Scarlett and Emily again?’

  ‘We—some other police—are interviewing McFadden and Fang today. They will be charged: kidnapping all of you, keeping you locked up, raping and abusing you, and possibly with killing one or more women. We are just at the beginning of this investigation. I’m really sorry that we had no idea all this was going on right here in Cairns. But that’s what’s happened, and we know things like this have happened in other countries, too.

  ‘It’s going to take a long time to get all the evidence together and to go through a trial. In that time, you and all the others—Maria, Felicia, Nelia, Florrie, and any other women we find who have been brought to Australia by McFadden and his mates in the Philippines—will be looked after by the Australian government.

  ‘We want to protect our witnesses so that you are not afraid to talk about what happened to you in the court. So, sometimes it’s possible for witnesses even to stay on in Australia after the trial. We will be contacting the immigration department to arrange all this for you. Between us, we will find you a good safe place to live and make sure you are well looked after. I can’t tell you yet exactly where all this will be, but it will be in Cairns and, yes, you will be able to see Scarlett and Emily. Emily was here until this morning, she had her leg fixed up because she was bitten by the dog. She’s gone home now but I’ll tell her you’d like to see her.’

  ***

  Cass went back to the office where Susie Ortega was dictating notes. She stopped when she saw Cass.

  ‘Come in, sit down,’ she said. ‘Would you like some tea?’

  ‘I’d love some,’ answered Cass. ‘This stuff is overwhelming, isn’t it? And these are the ones who are still alive. Our people have uncovered at least two bodies as well, so far.’

  Suddenly Susie stood up, excused herself, and ran to the bathroom. When she returned, she looked pale but her green eyes were glittering. Cass was concerned.

  ‘I’m sorry—you’re not well?’ she asked Susie. ‘It must be a bit stressful seeing what’s happened to these women and looking after them.’

  ‘Oh no, it’s not that. Although, yes, it is very shocking, their condition.’

  Susie smiled, and then after a moment she said: ‘I simply must tell you! I’m pregnant!’

  Cass looked at her. Susie’s whole face was now glowing.

  ‘Oh, that’s wonderful!’ Cass exclaimed, standing up to hug her. ‘When did you find out?’

  ‘Just yesterday. You know I told you we were trying IVF... When it didn’t work, I decided to just stop thinking about it. And, of course, we weren’t using any contraception. When I missed a period, I thought it’s my age, I must be coming to the menopause! I mean, what would I know, I’m just a gynaecologist!’

  Susie laughed and went on: ‘Then last night when I was with Maria, I suddenly started to feel wretched and I had to run away and throw up, which is what I’ve just done again now. I thought it must be the stress of seeing Maria and the others, as you said. Then it dawned on me: this is what pregnancy is like!

  ‘So I did a pregnancy test with one of the kits here, in the middle of the ni
ght, in the middle of looking after the women. And voila! Two blue lines! I was so excited I could hardly sit down.

  ‘When I called Henry and told him, he didn’t believe it, either. So, just to confirm it, at six o’clock this morning he did an ultrasound for me. And it’s true! A foetal heartbeat—I’m seven weeks’ pregnant!

  ‘I don’t want to tell everyone, at this stage, though, because at my age a lot of things can go wrong. I want to get through the first three months and all the tests, before I really think that we will have a child. But I so much wanted to tell you, after our talk the other day.’

  ‘I’m so thrilled for you and Henry,’ Cass said. ‘And I’m sure Henry will be taking very good care of you!’

  ***

  Emily and Scarlett had also spent what remained of Thursday night in the hospital. First, they were checked over by Emergency Department staff: Scarlett was completely unscathed, but Emily was covered in bruises from rolling down the hill behind the house and then being beaten by Fang. There were also lacerations on her wrists where the wire had rubbed, and a dog bite on her left leg.

  Sally had been frantic when she found neither of the girls in the house when she got home after work. When she’d called Scarlett’s mobile and had got no answer, she had called Meredith but found the girls were not there either. They were on the verge of calling the police when Scarlett had called her mother. After that, she’d collected Meredith and both mothers were waiting there when their daughters arrived. As Scarlett later said to Emily, it seemed that their mothers had made some kind of pact to not get angry with them for what they’d done.

  ‘I guess they’re really glad we didn’t get ourselves shot,’ Scarlett said.

  The ED doctor had said that Emily needed to be admitted overnight but that Scarlett could go home.