She smiled. ‘You’ve earned some brownie points by making an early confession, which gives you a better chance of a lesser sentence. Would you like to continue with the guilty plea?’
Anna nodded. ‘Absolutely.’ To plead innocent would be like invalidating Charlie somehow.
‘Well then, our job is to come up with all the possible ways we can persuade the judge that you should get a suspended sentence. One very obvious thing we can do is make really clear the serious nature of the abuse the girl was enduring at home. Who else could testify as to the unsafe nature of . . .’ she glanced down at her desk, ‘. . . Charlie’s home?’
‘Well, I called FACS but they didn’t come, so they’d be no good,’ said Anna. ‘Oh . . . there was a woman called Nella who was a neighbour at the caravan park where they lived before. She might be worth talking to.’
Bridget typed on her laptop. ‘Alright, we’ll subpoena the FACS records. In a minute, I’ll get some more detail about what days and times you called them. What do you know about this Nella?’
‘Just that she used to talk to Charlie through the door of the caravan when Charlie’s mum left her there by herself. I think she used to feed her, too. I don’t even know where the caravan park is.’
‘Hopefully we can find that out. Is there anyone else?’
‘My . . . boyfriend, Dave. He’s a lawyer with the DPP. He was with me one evening when we heard her being assaulted. He called the cops.’ She wasn’t sure she should call him her boyfriend anymore.
‘Yeah.’ Bridget smiled. ‘I noticed there’s a transcript of an interview with him in the brief. I’d say the DPP will farm the prosecutor’s job out to someone in another office because any prosecutor in Sydney will know Dave and there’ll be a conflict of interest, or the perception of a conflict.’
‘Right.’ Anna had tangled Dave up in something very messy.
‘And are you okay if I contact Dave to see if he’ll appear at the sentencing?’
‘Yes. I think he’s expecting that.’
Bridget said, ‘His evidence could be quite powerful for you. Anyone else? Neighbours? Relatives of the girl? Your relatives?’
‘No.’
‘The police have statements from people who live in houses near where you took the girl. A Patrick Fenlan. Beatrice Stutchbury. Sabine Mannigel. If any of these people appeared at the sentencing, and were asked about your relationship with the girl and how well she was cared for, what would they say?’
‘Well, they helped me look after her. They knew she was well cared for.’
‘So they’d say that?’
‘Yes. Absolutely.’ If they appeared, Pat, Beatie and Sabine might have to perjure themselves in order not to be charged with helping Anna detain Charlie. What a mess. ‘Will they call Charlie to give evidence?’
Bridget looked down and shuffled through the folder. ‘No, I’d be very surprised. Especially as they have a comprehensive interview with her in the brief of evidence. No, I’d say not. The courts try to avoid calling children to give evidence unless it’s necessary.’
Anna tried not to show her relief. She fixed her eyes on the bookshelf behind Bridget. Maybe she’d get away with her visit to Charlie.
Bridget looked up. ‘I’ll give you a copy of the brief and you’ll see the interview with her from that day is very thorough. It was done by a Child Abuse Squad. If we want, we can make a request to view the DVD of her interview. We’d have to go to the DPP offices to see it.’
‘No.’ Anna knew there was no way she could watch a video of Charlie from that day, so vulnerable and beyond Anna’s reach. ‘Is there any way I can have contact with her before the sentencing?’
Bridget looked down at the file in front of her. ‘One of your bail conditions is that you have no contact with her.’
‘That’s right.’
‘And the child is living with the grandmother, as far as you know?’
‘As far as I know.’
Bridget shook her head lightly. ‘Well, we’d have to get a bail variation and I don’t think the court would be easily persuaded to give you contact with the child, given that we’re talking about abduction, and hiding out in the hills . . .’ She looked out the window. ‘We’d probably end up in the Supreme Court and even then . . . I just don’t know that it’s a wise track to go down. And we wouldn’t want emerging, in the course of that application, any suggestion that you’d had contact with the girl and breached your bail.’ She stood up. ‘Do you want a glass of water?’
‘No, thank you.’
Bridget poured herself water from a carafe on a side table.
Anna asked, ‘Does contact mean phone calls as well?’
‘Yep.’
Out the window behind Bridget was a tiny strip of blue sky between two stark glass buildings.
Bridget sat back down. ‘The arraignment’s next week. We’ll find out when your sentencing will be, and chances are that it will be about five or six weeks away. So there seems little point in trying to vary your bail in what might be a similar time frame. What do you think about focusing our energies on doing our best to get you a suspended sentence? We’re only talking six weeks.’
Six weeks. But how would Charlie be in six weeks’ time?
‘Once I’m sentenced, can I see Charlie then?’
Bridget looked at her for a moment. ‘If you’re not in custody. You need to understand that there’s a reasonable chance you’ll get a custodial sentence. Usually, for matters like this, the prosecution will be asking for actual jail time. You should prepare yourself for that. Courts do not like people taking the law into their own hands and child abduction is a serious crime.’
‘Right.’ Anna looked out at the strip of sky again and took a few shaky breaths. ‘How long? Roughly.’
‘Hard to say. In theory up to ten years but in your case, I’m guessing somewhere between eighteen months and two years. But Lindy will call the prosecutor and ask what they’re after and what they might recognise as mitigating factors.’
Eighteen months in jail. What would happen to Charlie in those eighteen months?
Bridget flipped through the file. ‘Assuming you get a suspended sentence, how do you imagine the grandma would feel about you having contact?’
‘I . . . imagine she’d feel just fine.’
‘Okay. Well, I’m going to talk to her anyway, so I’ll sound her out. What’s her name?’
‘Prue Seybold.’ She spelt it out. ‘And . . . here’s her address and phone number.’ She wrote them on a piece of note paper and slid it across the table to her. Bridget didn’t comment on the fact that Anna knew Prue’s details off the top of her head.
Bridget said, ‘Would she say good things about how you treated the girl?’
‘I expect so.’
‘I suggest we ask her to appear at the sentencing, then.’
‘She’s not very well. I think.’
‘Okay. I’ll talk to her. If she’s too unwell we could have her appear by telephone or audio-visual link, so she can say how much better the girl was looked after when she was with you, et cetera. Assuming she says that, she’ll be a valuable witness.’
Anna nodded at the brief. ‘Does it say in there who turned us in?’
‘Yeah, I did read it somewhere.’ She leafed through the folder. ‘It just said that police were notified after you took Charlie to hospital. So it was someone at the hospital.’ She glanced up.
‘It must have been the doctor or nurse.’
Bridget nodded and raised her eyebrows. ‘Just doing their job.’
•
On the way home to her dad’s, Anna pulled over by the side of the highway to call Charlie.
The girl’s voice was quiet. ‘Nanna won’t let me go to the park.’
‘No, not by yourself. How was school today?’ The television was loud in the background.
‘I dunno.’
‘What did you do?’
‘I dunno.’
‘Have you been riding y
our bike?’
‘When are you coming, Anna?’
Chapter Forty-one
Anna tiptoed past her dad’s open bedroom door, and in the kitchen, turned on the light and tipped some dog biscuits into the puppy’s bowl. Pup snuffled at the biscuits, then looked up at her as if to say, ‘Is that all?’
She flicked on the jug. It was still dark and cold outside. She knew the sun wouldn’t rise for another two and a half hours, when she was driving down from the mountains and close to Penrith. Her plane would land at the Gold Coast at 9.30 and she’d be at Prue’s before 10.30.
After that first trip to the Gold Coast, Anna was determined not to risk visiting Charlie again. She spoke to the girl every morning while she walked the pup, and sometimes phoned her in the evening too. Charlie wasn’t very chatty at first, and simply asked Anna to tell her about things they’d done at the cottage and creek.
Then Charlie started reminding Anna of details. ‘Remember the li-lo that got stuck on the boulder? How about the nests me and Claudy made?’
She finished every call pleading with Anna to come and visit.
At eleven one night, Anna’s phone rang on her bedside table, and Charlie was on the other end, crying and begging Anna to come. After about five minutes, Prue got on the phone and said that she and Charlie had an argument and it was a mountain out of molehill and she was going to bed. If Anna wanted to talk to her she had to call back so Prue wasn’t paying for it. Anna called back and talked to Charlie for an hour, and it became clear that Prue had slapped Charlie across the face, and that it wasn’t the first time. Anna got off the phone and booked a flight for the next day, a Saturday. For the past three weeks, she’d been flying up and back every Saturday, and telling her dad she was visiting Dave.
She poured boiling water over the teabag in her travel cup and was putting a couple of Anzac biscuits into a paper bag when her dad appeared in his woolly dressing gown and slippers. He shaded his eyes from the light. ‘I still don’t get why you have to go this early.’
‘When did you last drive into Sydney in peak hour? It’s madness, even on a Saturday.’
The puppy flopped at her dad’s feet, and he bent to fondle its silky ears, then got himself a mug from the dish rack and dropped a teabag into it. ‘You’re not doing anything silly, are you?’
She said nothing. She couldn’t bring herself to tell any more lies.
His shoulders dropped. ‘Shit, Annie. Your sentencing is only three weeks away. Don’t blow it now.’
‘You would have done anything for us – for me and Luke – if we were in trouble, wouldn’t you?’
‘I still would.’ His voice was sharp. ‘There’s no past tense about it.’ He poured hot water into his mug. ‘I wish your mother was here to talk some sense into you.’
Anna stood at the open fridge for a moment. She couldn’t believe he was bringing up her mother. She pulled the milk carton out and shut the door. ‘I don’t think she’d have more sway than you.’
‘Don’t you?’ He looked down at the puppy, who gnawed loudly on a fake bone. ‘Maybe the two of us together could have helped you more.’
‘What would she have done, you think, if she were in my shoes back in December? Would she have taken Charlie?’
He sighed. ‘If, like you, she had no kids, then yes, I think she would have. She had a powerful desire to look after children.’ He paused. ‘And a . . . a certain disdain for the law.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Ahh . . . she had quite an anti-authority streak, your mother. I think she got it from her dad. Made for some interesting conversations with my colleagues at dinner parties and barbecues.’
‘I never knew that about her.’ Anna put the milk on the bench. ‘I’ll never know who she was. Not adult to adult. And I barely remember what she was like as a mother.’
‘No. But you had something I didn’t. That unconditional love of a mother for her child.’
‘I wish I could remember it, though . . .’ She opened and closed the spout on the milk carton. ‘Dad, do you remember taking me out of Mum’s hospital room, the very last time I saw her?’
He shook his head. ‘What do you mean?’
Was he going to pretend he didn’t remember? He was definitely there.
‘Well . . .’ She took a shaky breath. ‘I have this tiny memory of standing by her hospital bed and she was stroking my hand . . .’ She pressed her lips together for a moment to stop the tears. ‘. . . and she wanted me to stay, and you . . . you took me out. You took me away from her.’
He spoke softly. ‘Well, when she went into the coma, I didn’t think it was good for you two to see her like that.’
‘But she was awake, she was touching me and you seemed so angry. It was like you didn’t want me there. You just wanted it to be her and you.’
He looked down. ‘Well, I guess that’s true in a way, if I’m honest. I don’t remember that particular time you’re talking about, but I did kind of want it to be just me and her right at the end, like it was at the beginning.’
‘But didn’t she want me there? She wanted me to stay.’
‘If she’d asked for you to stay, I wouldn’t have taken you out unless there was some really good reason.’ He poured milk into his tea and jiggled the teabag about.
When Anna thought of her mother, she thought of the two of them: Anna and her mum. It was the two of them, not the four of them. It seemed that her dad did the same. It was about him and Anna’s mother. Each of them had been a pair with her; Luke, too, no doubt. Her mum had been the linchpin for each of them, and when she disappeared, they fell apart.
She would never know who her mother was, and never know which of her memories were reliable. Even if her father had shared his memories, they would never have been a substitute for all those motherless years. And yet, Anna knew that the loss of her mother was what propelled her, in so many ways, to rescue Charlie. And no matter what the courts said, no matter if she ended up in jail, Anna would do it again if she had to.
Chapter Forty-two
Anna sprinkled grated cheese over the top sheet of lasagne.
‘But it needs more,’ said Charlie and poked at an exposed patch of tomato sauce.
‘It does. Can you please grate some more?’
‘That’s okay.’ Charlie smiled at Anna. She reached for the block of cheddar and carefully dragged the cheese down the side of the grater a couple of times. She lifted the grater up. ‘Is that enough?’
‘That looks great,’ said Anna.
‘Great grating!’ laughed Charlie and sprinkled the few strands of cheese over the lasagne.
‘Step back, sweetie,’ said Anna. ‘Into the oven it goes.’
Charlie crouched in front of the glass oven door while Anna washed up. Over Prue’s half-curtain Anna saw a dog trot by, the wind blowing its fur the wrong way. Behind her, Charlie crunched on raw lasagne sheets.
‘How does that taste?’ asked Anna.
Charlie shook her head. ‘It’s better cooked.’
‘You’ll have some of the cooked stuff soon.’
The television bleated in Prue’s bedroom. Every Saturday, when Anna turned up, Prue went to her room and spent the whole day there, resting with the door closed. Over the weeks, Anna and Charlie had created a routine: as soon as Anna arrived, they put a load of washing on, went to the park for an hour, came home, hung out the washing then cooked food to freeze and for Charlie’s lunchbox. Spinach and cheese triangles, lasagne, bolognese sauce. Lemon cake.
‘Can we make banana cake next time? I don’t really like the lemon cake anymore,’ said Charlie.
‘Sure. Listen, Charlie. You know how I got in trouble from the police for taking you away from your mum?’
‘Mmm.’
‘Well, I’m going to go and talk again to the police and I might get in pretty bad trouble and have to go away for a while. I hope not. But if I do, I won’t be coming to visit you for a while. I can phone you sometimes and I’ll write lots of l
etters for Nanna to read to you.’
‘Where will you go?’
Anna hadn’t wanted to mention jail but how would Charlie make sense of it otherwise? ‘I might have to go to jail for a while.’
‘Jail?’ Charlie’s eyes widened and she whispered, ‘That’s not fair.’
•
Before she left at five, Anna and Charlie brought in the washing from the line near the back door. Anna unpegged the clothes and passed them to Charlie who dropped them into the basket. Anna had bought Charlie a second school uniform and some cotton dresses.
The guy from the next unit walked by with his little dog. ‘Hi, Charlie!’ he said in a too-friendly voice.
Anna put the last of the clothes in the basket. ‘Let’s go in.’
In Charlie’s bedroom, they folded the clothes and stacked them on the shelf. Then it was time for Anna to go.
The only time she let herself really contemplate going to jail was on the flight back to Sydney. Somehow, while she was high in the air, sealed off from the world, the idea of jail was less real. She had no idea what life would be like inside, but she did know that she wouldn’t be able to look after Charlie. The girl would be on her own, again.
Chapter Forty-three
The courtroom was freezing. Anna had been sitting in the dock for just fifteen minutes, in her new blue dress, and she was cold to the bone. She didn’t want to wrap her arms around herself in case it made her look scared or defensive. Bridget, the solicitor, had told her to remain calm, sit up straight and not to react to anything the prosecution or a witness might say.
The crown prosecutor – a short woman in a black dress and very high heels – faced the judge from behind the long barristers’ table. As she handed the judge a number of documents, her voice was ponderous, as if to underline the gravity of what Anna had done.
‘Your Honour, the objective seriousness of this offence is made greater by the young age of the child – five years old – and by the fact that the offender detained the child for three months.’
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