Betrayed (6 page)

When I got home, I lay down with the world on my shoulders,
stones in the pit of my stomach. Too tired and emotionally drained to
form a single constructive thought. In a place beyond grief and ex
haustion, time no longer seemed to stir and my misery no longer
seemed entirely my own. It was as though I was watching myself act
out a role in some badly produced B-grade movie.

I know a lot of people were in and out of the house the following
day, offering assistance, making coffee and food for those who could eat. But it's all a blur to me now. One thing I do remember clearly is
the phone call that came at about midday. A stranger told me he had
seen Tracey on the previous Thursday night.

He was reluctant to give many details because he was married and didn't want his wife to know that he had been cruising the sex clubs of Pretoria with a friend. Although he admitted that they had both
got very drunk, he was emphatic that he never forgot a face and now
he recognised Tracey's picture from the newspaper. He couldn't re
member which club he had seen her at but gave me a list of clubs he and his friend had visited.

I asked him to phone and tell Captain Kotze what he had told me.
At first he demurred, but I said I would phone the Captain and tell
him to expect the call. I had no real hope that this call would bring my
daughter home; the only reason she would have been in a sex club
was if she was there against her will. People may say you don't know
what your children get up to, but one thing I did know – this was
definitely not a place Tracey would visit if she had a choice in the matter. Since the episode in the stationers when she was five, she had always been careful to cover herself up, to deflect notice away from herself and her body. She wore no make-up, wouldn't expose
herself in a swimming costume, wore baggy shorts and oversized T-
shirts, nothing hugging her figure. A sex club would be the last
place Tracey would go willingly.

My friend Shaz was visiting at the time of the call. We talked abou
t
going to the clubs ourselves to ask around for more clues. Buddy
hovered in the background, listening and voicing his concerns, but knowing I was beyond listening to reason. I was more likely to snap his head off than listen to his advice. He gave up trying to talk to me.
He understood that all of us would do whatever it took to find Tracey
and bring her home and – against his better judgement – he would
have come with me if I had been stupid enough to insist on going to the clubs.

But sense prevailed. Knowing how dangerous that could be, I
phoned
Captain Kotze instead. By some miracle he answered. I re
counted what the man had said about seeing Tracey on the night of
her disappearance and told him to expect a call from him. The Cap
tain promised to go out immediately to make enquiries, and I begged him to keep in contact, whether he discovered anything or not.

More waiting  . . . but there was to be no call from him that night. I
learned later that the good Captain hadn't left his house. He had had no more intention of investigating this call or visiting the clubs than I had of becoming a lady of the night.

Once our visitors, well-wishers and supporters left us to go home, the family was alone, lost in our own thoughts, drowning in our ter
rors. The hours dragged by and still sleep didn't come easily to our drained minds. But I must have fallen asleep eventually because in
the early hours of Sunday morning, the ringing of the phone startled
me awake. I swallowed hard. There was a hot, dry hole in my chest, no blood, no heartbeat, no life at all. I felt a sense of something lurk
ing and knew that this was the call I had been dreading, expecting,
dreading for more than week.

Sunday 20 March and I was woken by a phone call just as the early
morning light was starting to slide across the bedroom window.

“Am I speaking to Mrs Thompson?” a woman asked.

“Yes,” I replied.

“Can I come round to the house now?”

“You've found her body, haven't you?”

The constable didn't want to answer me, but I insisted. I didn't want
to wait the extra few minutes it would take for her to get to the house
to hear the news we had so been dreading. She finally told me a young
girl's body had been found the previous afternoon. I gave her direc
tions to get to the house. I woke Buddy and Glen to tell them that ou
r
worst fears may have been realised, and I phoned my mother. Not long afterwards, two very young constables got out of a police car.
Without a word the woman held me in her arms and hugged me.

“I'm a mother and I couldn't allow a man to give you this news.
I'm dreadfully sorry,” she said.

At first I wondered who she was talking to; the enormity of what
she was telling me was beyond my grasp. It was easier to let my mind
pretend it was watching a book with someone else's story come to
life and unfold in front of me than it was to accept the truth. But deep
down, where I could siphon out the fantasy from the reality, the very
marrow was being stolen from my bones.

At about 5.30 the previous afternoon a farm labourer on his way home had found the body of a half-naked young girl with her shorts
round her ankles, her panties a few metres away, her T-shirt and
jumper
pulled over her head and a rope around her neck. The farmer
called the police station where the young constables worked. The po
lice said that the mortuary would collect the body and a detective
would be sent to the scene to investigate.

The young constables had seen one of my posters about Tracey's
disappearance and put two and two together. They made the effort to
get some more details. Both were positive it was the young girl who
had been missing for the past nine days. Not wanting an unknown
male detective arriving at our doorstep, the young constable took it
upon herself to phone us. Even though a positive ID hadn't been made
yet, the clothes, the tattoo and the general description of Tracey were
a perfect match.

At the time I was too distraught to think straight, but looking back,
I have huge respect and admiration for these two young constables,
who in their compassion went beyond the call of duty, defying the
rules by coming to see us. They must have been exhausted at the end
of their shift, yet they took the trouble to do some detective work on
their own. Instead of going home to their families and to get some
sleep, they took the time to break the worst of all possible news to a family that had been waiting for nine long days without news.

After they left, I looked up helplessly at the sky but a thick fog sur
rounded me. My head filled with anguished screams but not a sound left my mouth. Tears blurred my vision but only a few fell. It was as though my own life had been extinguished and the universe no longer made sense. My whole mind, body and soul were being crushed.
Scars were already growing over my heart. I knew that if I was brought
to my knees I would never stand again.

Buddy and I were broken. We had failed to protect our only daugh
ter. The child we loved was dead. He walked outside and I followed
him. Tears were pouring down his cheeks, his body wracked with
sobs. I tried to hold him, to comfort myself as much as him, but he
shrugged me off.

He had recoiled to somewhere where he could hardly be reached.

“Please don't push me away,” I begged.

Slowly he became less rigid and we held each other, battling with emotions that were pulling us apart.

“At least no one can ever harm my little girl ever again,” he murmured, his voice raw with pain and helplessness.

Neither of us had given Glen, our surviving child, a thought. My
memory is unclear on how we passed the next hours, but I know
neither of us was much comfort to our son. He made coffee and hovered over his broken parents, hiding his pain and anguish, trying to be strong for us when his own heart was breaking.

At last, I pulled myself together long enough to phone my sister
and a few friends to tell them that Tracey had been found. I tried to phone Captain Kotze, but his phone was switched off. I managed to
get hold of another officer at the police station. He explained that Cap
tain Kotze, who was assigned to Tracey's case, had not been the detec
tive sent to the crime scene, but he promised to get hold of him.

Waiting for the Captain to contact the family was torture. Time be
came blurred and smudged. Shocked into stupor by death, I remem
ber that my sister Marsha came from KwaZulu-Natal to be with us, but
I can't remember when she arrived or who fetched her from the air
port. All I know is that she was there. Even though I had told her
there was nothing she could do, she came to be with us and I was
grateful for her support. She answered the telephone, took messages
and kept the intrusive phone calls at bay as if she were protecting our
sensitive, burned skin. Her gift was allowing us the space to begin to try face up to our loss.

Eventually we got the call from Captain Kotze.

”I've been to the mortuary and just want to confirm if your daugh
ter had a tattoo of a dragon on her shoulder,” he said.

“Yes,” I answered curtly, thinking that he should have known this
already because it was one of the identifying features we had used in
our missing person's report. My reply enabled him to make a posi
tive identification.

“I want to see her,” I said, knowing that I would never otherwise be
able to accept that she was dead.

“No mother should ever see her child in the state your child is in,” he argued.

“I don't care, I have to see her.”

He wasn't the only one who tried to change my mind. Even Buddy
was worried that it would be too much for me. I was adamant. This was my child, the child I had carried under my heart and bonded with before she had drawn her first breath. The child I had loved,
cherished and nurtured. How could I accept she was dead if I didn't see her one last time?

It was Sunday and the following day was Human Rights Day, a public holiday, so I wouldn't be able to go to the mortuary until the Tues
day. One hour merged into another, and then another. I still didn't feel
as though I was living in the real world; reality hadn't yet made its
rude mark. We were just trying to get through a cruel day that didn't
belong in our lives. A day filled with pain that we didn't know how
to deal with or how to survive.

That night I told Marsha that the only place I had for her to sleep was Tracey's old room.

“If you don't feel right about sleeping there I could make a bed in the lounge or you could sleep at Glen's cottage,” I offered.

“Don't worry,” she said, wishing us goodnight. “It's fine.”

Soon afterwards she reappeared in the doorway with a question on
her lips.

“Do you mind if I move Tracey's shoes?”

She couldn't bear the sight of Tracey's shoes lined up, beacons of
emptiness and loneliness, waiting to be filled.

Holding those shoes in my arms, the realisation that my daughter would never wear them again was almost my undoing.

1
995–
1
997

In the year Tracey was fifteen, Buddy and I noticed a change in her. She was still quick to smile, but her laughter seemed to have gone underground. She was still keen on sport, but the unbridled enthusiasm she had shown just
a year or two before had faded. Although we knew that some “growing
pains” were to be expected as teenagers grappled with the challenges of
growing up, it seemed to us that this dramatic change in her personality
and mood must mask a deeper problem. We tried talking to her in a loving and non-judgemental way, encouraging her to share what she was going through. But she wouldn't open up to her dad or me. We didn't want to ask too many questions that might make her feel patronised or crowded, but we tried to make it clear that we loved her and would be there for her, no matter what.

Many a day when she came home from school she would lock herself in her room and listen to music instead of playing outside with the dogs and horses. Often her choices were from the sixties or seventies, the Beach Boys, Rolling Stones, Simon & Garfunkel, the Beatles, the Bee Gees, but she also enjoyed Guns N' Roses, Mike & the Mechanics and the Smashing Pumpkins. The volume was never turned up too loud, but sometimes just loud enough that the muffled beat could be heard through the rest of the house. I teased her about becoming a vampire – afraid of the sun.

She and I used to be so close, able to laugh together, tears pouring down our cheeks, even though no one else could understand what was so funny. Now we seemed to be arguing more than before, and it worried me. One moment she could be the best, sweetest daughter in the world, then in a flash she would fly off the handle and storm into her bedroom, iridescent with anger and hostility. The moments of laughter seemed fewer and further apart, though some nights she would still come into my bedroom and curl up on my bed with me, not talking, just lying with her arms around me. But all too soon, for no apparent reason, she would be in the worst of moods again, stomping off to the solitude of her bedroom.

I tried to ward off the thought of drugs, a parent's worst nightmare, but it seemed to offer a reasonable explanation. Worried enough to act, yet guilty about invading her privacy, I started searching her room for any signs of the paraphernalia that druggies use. I was relieved when I didn't find anything, but I knew in my gut that something was badly wrong. As her mood swings became worse, our relationship deteriorated further. I didn't understand what was happening – and she wasn't talking.

We consulted doctors and psychologists but could find no answers. Think
ing the problem might go back to her early trauma at the hands of a stran
ger when she was five, the psychologist suggested hypnosis. Tracey refused, scared off by the hype and hoopla of TV shows in which hypnotist entertainers made people bark like dogs or dance like chickens. She feared being out of control, not understanding that hypnosis couldn't make her do anything she didn't want to do. It was simply a state of absorbed or heightened awareness, much like when she lost herself in a favourite piece of music. But by temporarily bypassing her conscious mind and critical faculty, it could perhaps have helped communicate with her subconscious mind, where her emotions were. Was confronting these emotions what she was scared of?

Around this time there was an ugly incident at an interschool athletics meeting. A friend of Tracey's told me there had been a lot of racial friction between the students at their school. This was mirrored at the interschool meeting, which turned violent when a much older male student from another school threatened Tracey with rape and murder, trying to assert his power by bullying. The police were brought in to escort the youngsters to the buses to ensure that they would get home safely. The school headmaster refused to take action, saying this was the new South Africa and we must accept it.

All this left its mark on Tracey. She started trying to wriggle out of going to school, finding excuses, justifying without really talking about her reasons.
Things came to a head over a cross-country training session.

“I won't be able to go because I have an extra science class,” Tracey explained to her PE teacher.

“Cancel the class,” the teacher replied. “If you don't attend the training you'll be dropped from the athletics team.”

Tracey came home in tears and refused to go to school. Sport was what kept her going, so what would be the use? This wasn't the feisty girl we all knew, who would have stood up for her rights, argued her case. We talked and I tried persuading her. We argued and I told her she had no choice – she had to go back to school.

Unwilling or unable to face up to this challenge, she must have spent the night in a swirl of emotions. The next morning, instead of going to school, she ran away from home and took refuge with a friend in Johannesburg, who thankfully phoned to let me know she was safe. Torn between anger and
worry, I took Tracey back to the psychologist in the hope that she could
connect with her, find a solution and stop our family from been ripped apart from the inside. She talked long and deeply to Tracey, unpicking the threads
of her unhappiness and fear. We were all very worried about the signs of
depression and the possibility that Tracey might try to take her own life. Fi
nally
the psychologist recommended that we remove her from the school as soo
n as possible; she believed it was the cause of a lot of Tracey's problems.