Perfect Victim (10 page)

The minister was out for the evening, but I left a message with their babysitter, so her youth group friends could pray for her. The church immediately became supportive, as did Balwyn Baptist. Rachel went down on many prayer lists, in many churches. Not only Christians responded. We have Jewish and Buddhist friends, too. There was quite a prayer network on the go.

An hour later we drove slowly past the house of the man we had reported, in Michele’s car. Mike and I slid down the back seat. His car was not in the driveway.

At home I rang a mutual friend and asked if she had seen this man during the week. If she had not seen him I would have been concerned. She had seen him twice and his behaviour was the same as always.

My nephew Shaun and his girlfriend Renée arrived. We had not slept since the few hours on Monday night, and though we had found strength in our diet of adrenalin and coffee we had become incompetent drivers. Shaun was to be our wheels.

Around seven o’clock Shaun decided to go with Mike and place the man’s house under surveillance. If his car was not there they would drive to his family’s holiday house.

Michele, David, Renée and I drove to a supermarket and bought the largest torches we could find. Perhaps we should
not
ignore what police felt – that Rachel was a runaway. We certainly couldn’t sit at home, and with no new leads we were running out of options. Maybe if the police could see we weren’t closing down on their options they would not close down on ours, and keep searching.

But if Rachel had run away, where would she go?

We decided to walk around Mont Albert, where we had lived for five years, renting my stepmother’s house. We walked through the grounds of the local primary school. I felt ridiculous searching under shrubs, walking behind shelter sheds, and sussing out the play equipment, calling Rachel, Rachel, RACHEL. I checked in the shadowy brick corners of the old school building. Would I find a sleeping child like the children we saw by St Paul’s? I knew she would not be there.

We split up. David and Renée, Michele and I.

‘Tape the posters to all the light poles,’ I said. ‘We’ll put posters in the letter boxes of our old friends.’

I hesitated outside a two-storey house, pausing at the letter box. ‘Gail Reid lives here,’ I said.

Michele said, ‘Go and knock on the door.’

I put one foot inside the front fence, stepped back and pushed the poster through the letter box.

‘Elizabeth?’ said Michele.

‘I can’t.’

It was a large sombre-looking house in the night light.

We walked hurriedly around the corner. ‘Do you think anyone saw us?’

‘No,’ she said, looking back.

A few moments later she said, ‘Look at that gargoyle. Makes you want to shudder.’

‘Part of Gail’s house,’ I said. ‘It’s not a happy house.’

I remember, one afternoon, a few years before, Gail sitting at our dining-room table. We were enjoying a cup of tea and a chat. She had been to see a clairvoyant whom she hadn’t seen in a long while. I recall Gail saying she was feeling a little cheated. The clairvoyant was talking more about her Barber friends. We were a family Gail should not lose touch with, she said. We would remain lifetime friends.

A phone call came through from Mike. They had driven past the man’s house several times. His car was in the driveway. Everything seemed okay. They had sat for an hour at the entrance to the no-through road. They decided not to check his family’s holiday house, so they drove to Wattle Park.

Mike considered it possible that Rachel might have arrived at the Wattle Park tram stop
after
he left on Monday night. Perhaps she had gone to buy those two tops she had been interested in, forgotten the time, and on arriving late and finding no Mike, waited at the tram shelter, only to have been coaxed or dragged across into the park.

A week had gone by. Mike went into the park looking for a body.

Mike and Shaun split up and covered the whole grounds, checking the old trams, checking beneath tree canopies and around the creek. They half expected to find some kids shooting up or evidence of recently used bongs, but he knew she wouldn’t be there. We knew she hated drugs, intensely. ‘Mum,’ she said to me, on at least one occasion while on the phone, ‘are we doing anything this Saturday? I’ve been invited to a party.’ All the while shaking her head. She later said she’d recently discovered the girl smoked dope and didn’t want to go to the party.

Mike walked along the boundary of the golf course and around to the back, discovering walkways and footbridges he didn’t know existed. It was eerie in the dark.

There was a party up at the café near the tennis courts. People were out and about, glasses in hand, laughing. What would these people think of the torchlights searching the grounds? Nobody noticed, or if they did – what was it to them?

The creek was densely overgrown, dirty-looking. Mike searched the undergrowth and along the edges – looking for Rachel lying beneath a film of murk, green algae braiding her hair. What did this father imagine now? What of his living grief? It wasn’t an imagined fear: it was a real fear that he would come across the distorted body of his first-born.

I can still see the pride in his face when he first saw her. He was thirty-seven. He had called her Rachel from the moment we knew of her conception. We had not found out through ultrasound that we were having a girl. He instinctively knew. He desperately wanted a daughter. We had always agreed our first girl would be named after my grandmother. I remember saying early on in the pregnancy, ‘Don’t keep calling the baby Rachel! What if it’s a boy? You’ll be disappointed.’

‘I won’t be disappointed,’ was his reply. ‘The baby is Rachel.’

And as my stomach bloated with new life Mike would rest his hand there, feeling his daughter’s movement. The unborn Rachel and I would relax together, daily, on the couch. Headphones brimming with classical music held to my naked stomach. Chopin, Grieg, Mozart, Liszt. Her favourite, Mendelssohn’s
Midsummer Night’s Dream
. We knew this by her body movement. Is it any wonder she was born to dance?

‘Don’t dance to the music,’ I said to my six-year-old Rachel, ‘dance as if you are a part of the music.’ She will forever be a part of the music.

Later that Saturday night we watched a building in Church Street, Richmond. ‘Keep an eye on the grey stone building. It’s a halfway house with about forty rooms,’ Mike was told by a man in a local restaurant. The man had a friend who lodged there. Didn’t like what he saw. Kept to himself. There was a steady flow of male-only traffic that did seem suspicious. Was this a drug drop-off and collection point? Were there prostitutes inside? Could this have been why Rachel had disappeared so quickly?

Shaun went across to ask one of the waiting taxi drivers what they were doing. The driver told him through a mouthful of food that they dropped off clients.

In an adjacent block of flats Michele’s attention was drawn to the top floor where a group of men, naked down to their pubic hairlines, were dancing and drinking beer. We stood on a low concrete fence on the opposite side of the road, watching these men, who were drunk and obviously enjoying themselves, in the seclusion of their own unit. We felt like Peeping Tomasinas – invading their privacy.

Then the place took on a more sinister feel. No women were visible, and Michele did not like the way the men were apparently taking turns going into a side room.

‘Imagine,’ she said. ‘Rachel could be there.’

‘Holding her hostage.’

‘Taking turns.’

Mike could see our concern and gestured he would investigate. He walked around the back of the older-style block of flats. There were curtain-free windows but when he climbed the wooden steps to look inside all he could see was blackness. It was amazing he was not reported to the police for prowling.

Obviously Rachel could not be in all these places at once, but our emotions were extreme. We were, as the policewoman said, making quantum leaps. We felt abandoned, and in our despair, our anger and our fear, it was what we believed.

But I am imparting this to help local police understand why parents faced with missing children are not consoled by the known facts, or the statistics. It wasn’t irrational fear that made me swear abuse at the policewoman who did not know our daughter. It was absolute despair. Was Rachel crying, slumped in a slimy dark corner of a Melbourne street, wondering why we hadn’t saved her? Was she about to face death, or had she already faced the
hurt
of death? It was this that sent us searching into the hidden stories behind Melbourne’s streets.

It’s strange that family members also felt the need to justify excessive behaviour. We were adamant we were right and the local police were adamant we were wrong:
go home to your two smaller children and seek special counselling
. How much we wished we
were
wrong.

We regrouped at McDonald’s in Richmond, just before closing time. We were laughing. It’s an odd experience to laugh when faced with exhaustion and looming defeat. Nature’s way of saving your sanity, perhaps. I’ve always thought so. ‘Even in war,’ my dad once told me, ‘laughter can keep you on track.’ Not only were we laughing, but noshing into hot chips and coffee.

Shaun or Renée suggested we visit the refuge houses for young people. I argued that she wouldn’t be there, but we needed to cover all options. But where do you find refuge houses? We borrowed the McDonald’s
Yellow Pages
. Nothing under ‘Refuge Centres’. We looked under ‘Emergencies’ and found a reference to ‘Organisations – Family Welfare.’ Four columns. It all looked so confusing.

We were tired, couldn’t think straight, and wanted an answer now. Two or three main refuge centres, listed in the
Yellow Pages
under ‘REFUGE CENTRES’, holding information for the others. We wanted to visit them. Now. In the middle of the night.

‘There’s a public phone across the road. I’ll ring Lifeline.’

Renée came with me. We felt exposed. A dishevelled-looking man crab-walked unsteadily towards us. An offensive body odour hung on him. Trousers soiled? Dried vomit? He turned around and crab-walked away.

The phone number was engaged. Continuously. I thought if I was on the brink of suicide I’d kill myself out of frustration simply because I couldn’t get through.

I rang Telstra. ‘Suburb please.’

Poor woman got a life story. She became
my
lifeline. We whinged sympathetically together about the engaged phone number. My inability to find a refuge centre. Her inability to satisfy others who needed Lifeline.

‘It’s always engaged this time of night.’

She wished me luck in our quest, but couldn’t help us without a name. She suggested that perhaps refuge centres were not listed as refuge centres because then they would not provide refuge.

Michele and David left first. Shaun, Renée, Mike and I drove around the streets of Richmond again, finally making our way home at about 2.00 a.m. We stopped off at the Ringwood police to tell them about posters we had taped to telephone boxes in the district. Mike told the police what we were told regarding fines and posters. Their response: ‘Who’s going to fine you when your daughter’s gone missing? Just do it.’

10

T
HE
P
OSTER
C
AMPAIGN
C
ONTINUES

Day 6: Sunday, 7 March

My fortieth birthday. The avoided day. I can’t remember even considering my birthday on the Sunday morning, other than being thankful that a large parcel had not been delivered by courier.

Mike phoned Richmond police about 10.30 a.m. to see if the woman detective had been informed about our Saturday report of the man. The woman detective asked Mike if we were still concerned about him because records showed he didn’t have any prior convictions. Mike told her we had checked him out ourselves and felt with hindsight he was not involved.

We organised a railway station walk. Shaun, Renée and Manni would cover the Frankston and Pakenham lines from Malvern. David would cover Glen Waverley and possibly the Alamein line. Mike and I would cover the Belgrave line from Ringwood and from Richmond to Malvern, and the Carellas would break up and cover Zone 1 of the western suburbs. Our plan was to place a poster in most of the Zone 1 and Zone 2 railway stations, on both platforms.

Sunday was a boiling hot day and it took two days to achieve our goal. But we had to make the public aware of Rachel’s disappearance.

‘Yes, this is Rachel Barber,’ I wrote on the posters for East Camberwell station because it was the station most of Rachel’s old secondary school friends used. But within two days most of these posters had been pulled down by diligent cleaners.

David decided to walk around the Glen Waverley shopping centre as well. We had received a phone call saying that security personnel at a department store reported seeing a girl answering Rachel’s description at a checkout counter. David said he would drive around the suburb.

It was the last day of the Grand Prix, so if the Carellas and my father were right, Rachel may have shown up this day, this night. She didn’t. Could the police have also been waiting for the end of the Grand Prix?

We met up at Carlo’s single-storey terrace house in Richmond, in the late afternoon. Carlo was a close friend of Mike’s brother’s family, and had on occasion taken the girls to the zoo with Tamzin, our niece.

Police thought it a possibility that Rachel may have absconded with her cousin. ‘York Street, Prahran. Who lives there?’ we were asked. ‘Telephone records indicate a phone call to this number in the last three months.’

‘Tamzin did. Rachel’s thirty-year-old cousin. But not any more.’

‘And who lives at Windsor?’

‘Tamzin.’

Tamzin drove round the Prahran streets at night, looking for her little cousin and distributing posters.