Perfect Victim (2 page)

She laughed. ‘Well, they’re not getting any of my money.’

I was amazed she didn’t fully understand about tax. ‘Haven’t you learnt about this at school?’ But with her head filled with dancing there would be little space for a rendering of tax.

‘Sorry, Rach, they will get your tax. They take it out before you receive your pay packet.’

She scoffed. ‘Well, someone should do something about that.’

At the end of this long two weeks for Rachel, I received a phone call from Dulcie, the artistic director at her dance school. She said Rachel had just been in her office.

‘Dulcie,’ Rachel had begun. ‘You know my fourth term scholarship? Could you
please
extend this to a full-time scholarship? Mum said if I could find something constructive to do I could leave school.’ Dulcie, who had apparently been so impressed with Rachel’s handling of the request, had agreed, if this was okay with me.

Rachel struggled through school. Her academic grades were low, not because she was mischievous but because teachers could not get through to her. In Year 8 she had cried one night, telling me it wasn’t that she deliberately didn’t want to do the work, it was because she could not understand it. It was in dance she excelled, never receiving less than a high distinction for her Royal Academy of Dance or contemporary dance exams. Rachel Star – that was the name she gave herself. One day, she would have her own Rachel Star dance studio.

Now she was into the fifth week of a potentially wonderful two years and her dreams were being answered in an almost fairytale way. Everything was coming together. Life was good.

So what was keeping them tonight? Rachel hadn’t called to say she would stay at Kylee’s: she had already arranged with me to spend Tuesday night with Kylee. At lunch I had thought of calling the dance school, just to see how she was going, but I thought they would start to get annoyed with me if I rang them too often. I wonder now why I had sensed the need to make contact.

The phone rang. It was 7.40. At last, I thought, they’ve found a phone, and how silly I’d been to worry. After all, they were barely an hour late.

Mike’s voice sounded concerned. He was ringing from his parents’, Rose and Arthur’s, in suburban Blackburn. Rachel had not got off the tram at Wattle Park. Had she called? Did I have any ideas? Maybe she had forgotten Mike was collecting her at Wattle Park? Not so. Mike said that this was the last thing they’d discussed. She’d be there for him at around 6.15 and had said, ‘Love you, Dad,’ as she always did.

He’d been there at ten past six and waited an hour. Kept hoping she’d step off. So where was she?

I could sense his panic stirring.

He’d go back to Camberwell and see if she’d got off the tram, mistakenly, where I had started to pick her up Tuesday to Thursday, the week before. After all, it was only her second pick-up from Wattle Park. If she wasn’t there, what then? It was dark now and Rachel hated the dark. I’d call the police immediately. Call Mike back. Then I’d call Rachel’s boyfriend Emmanuel and her dance school.

I rang the Box Hill police station around 7.40 and reported Rachel missing. They wondered how long she had been missing? An hour and a quarter. And how old was she? Fifteen. Yes, well, they didn’t exactly laugh, but I had the feeling they thought I was over-reacting. But to give them credit we were told that if Mike could not trace her in Camberwell then we should come to the police station and fill in a missing person report.

I rang Emmanuel, and he immediately feared the worse. ‘She meant it,’ Manni said. ‘I didn’t think she’d go.’

Panic. She’d meant what?

During the day Rachel had taken Manni into a shoe shop and had pointed out a pair of chunky blue Spice Girl shoes she was going to buy the next day. How was she going to pay for them? She’d said to Manni that she had been told not to tell her parents or boyfriend, but she was going to a job where clothing would be provided and she would make a lot of money. Nothing immoral. No need to worry.

No need to worry? Manni was worried. Mike and I were worried.

She had definitely left the dance school. Waving goodbye and calling ‘love you’ across the road as Manni and his brother disappeared down an alley to get their car. She had said she’d ring him that night to tell him all about it and told her girlfriend Kylee that she would be there for breakfast on Tuesday as usual.

I called her school. I called Kylee. I called Manni back. She had simply vanished. Perhaps there was really no need to worry. Maybe I was over-reacting. But Rachel
knew
how I worried. She would know I’d over-react. She would know I’d contact the police. It was past 8.30. She’d have contacted somebody by now. And she hadn’t.

Michael searched the leafy, middleclass streets of Camberwell but never imagined he’d find her there. The events of the evening were beginning to feel ominous. At 8.45 p.m. he officially reported her missing at Box Hill police station. Perhaps an odd choice, considering her dance school was in inner-city Richmond and we lived in suburban Heathmont about half an hour’s drive from Box Hill, but it was at least near where she was to get off the tram.

Mike doesn’t believe in over-reaction, and he was not over-reacting. Rachel had never disappeared before and it was so unlike her not to contact us if she’d been delayed. She hated the dark. She feared public transport. She would have phoned by now.

The police reaction was not to worry. What else could they say? She had most likely gone off with her friends and would turn up tomorrow.

My mother, Joy Southall, came to take care of our younger daughters, eleven-year-old Ashleigh-Rose and nine-year-old Heather, while we drove to Richmond to search for Rachel. Her dance school hadn’t seen or heard from Rachel since she left around 5.45 that afternoon. They were closing when we arrived.

We searched the streets of Richmond calling her name. It’s a dusty and busy inner-city suburb, famous for its footy club, and sitting in the shadows of the Melbourne Cricket Ground. But really our searching was pointless. We had no idea where she was. We knew, as others did who knew Rachel well, that the story she’d partly shared with Manni already reeked of foul play. I think we realised, even then, that Rachel had been baited with the equivalent of a bag of sweets a small child is warned about, and in her naivety been snared.

Another story.

The afternoon before …

Sunday, 28 February

Some time between five and six in the late afternoon, Rachel was on the phone. She was laughing and gossiping, probably to her boyfriend Manni, sharing with him the events of her day. During the morning she’d had breakfast with her mum at Doncaster Shoppingtown where she’d bought her new Bloch dance pants. She had grizzled to her mum about wanting a new top, and was upset that Mum had dismissed the need for extra-strong deodorant.

Rachel’s weekend had been full, too. Manni had been working all weekend, so she busied herself on Saturday afternoon handsewing him a giant purple velour heart created from some old scraps she’d found in her dad’s workshop. She would surprise Manni with it on Monday, telling him to keep her ‘heart’ safe somewhere, always.

On Sunday afternoon, at the Bayswater Family Pet Care Day, Rachel finally persuaded her mum to allow her to have the kitten she so desperately wanted, ever since Sable, their eighteen-year-old cat, had been killed by two stray dogs outside her bedroom window. The new kitten was to be named Humphrey.

But Rachel wasn’t speaking to Manni that afternoon on the phone. No one knew she wasn’t speaking to Manni. She spoke for some time. Telephone records indicate that during this one hour period, two calls were received – a fifteen-minute call and a twenty-nine minute call – received from someone with a silent number. Goodness knows what that person was filling Rachel’s head with.

Later that night, Rachel, Ashleigh-Rose, Heather, Mum and Dad sat together watching television. It was an episode of ‘Vanity Fair’ on Channel Two. Rachel enjoyed the series because of the period costumes and the tangled romance.

Rachel knelt on the floor in front of her mum, asking for a back massage. But Mum was tired and said no. Rachel persisted. Ever since she was little she had enjoyed massages. After a day at primary school she would often come running up the long driveway, flinging her bag down at the front door. She would climb onto the kitchen table where a towel and pillow would already be waiting for her. A trail of clothes from the door. Her mum would massage her, with Rachel stripped down to her knickers.

This Sunday evening, her mother looked at the smoothness of her daughter’s clear skin. ‘Please,’ Rachel’s voice urged, and her mother just managed a rub.

Rachel went to bed happily this night, revealing to no one, as promised, the details of these private calls. Maybe she thought, yes it will be all right, I’ll buy that new pair of shoes. The new pair of shoes she tried in vain, the week before, to show her mum, but the pair of shoes about which Mum had said, ‘I’m tired. I haven’t got time to look at a pair of shoes. And anyway, we can’t afford them.’

2

T
HE
S
EARCH
B
EGINS

Day 1: Tuesday, 2 March

It is an incredible sensation to wake in the morning and realise that life may never be the same again. I wonder, now, why we even went to bed, but there was always the hope that Rachel would arrive at her dance school, apologetic and having made whatever money it was, with her new shoes in hand.

Now I face a dilemma. How honest should I be in telling this story? I say this in fear of upsetting people; in fear of upsetting police. But my account of events will not have its full impact unless I share the two struggles we first faced.

Our anger grew during Rachel’s disappearance to a point of total frustration. Not only did we and our family and friends struggle with the grief of Rachel’s disappearance but we also struggled with convincing the police that we felt Rachel was
really
in trouble. Into the second week, Lauren, an old school friend of Rachel’s, rang: ‘Elizabeth, you
know
she’s not capable of running away. Don’t stop looking for her.’

I look at Rachel’s compelling green eyes, staring at me from her photograph, and sense her spirit saying, ‘Come on, Mum, tell it all. I am with you.’

We took the girls to school on Tuesday morning, telling them not to worry. What else could we say?

At the Box Hill police station, the officer on duty at the desk did not know what we were talking about when, photographs in hand, we made our third contact with police. He explained that their shifts had recently changed but said he’d look for the report.

After failing to find it he went to a side room from where another police officer came out. Mike recognised him as the sergeant who had taken the report. The sergeant immediately went and lifted the report from a hook on the back wall. I couldn’t help thinking that they had taken the report last night and hung it up on the hook, without further action. But, they said, police cars in the area would have been told to look out for a girl answering Rachel’s description.

We left the photographs with the policeman. They were confident she would turn up of her own accord, that Rachel would be safe.

Rachel had not had breakfast at Kylee’s, nor had she arrived at her dance school this morning. But then we really didn’t think she would have because everything was feeling so horribly wrong.

We spent the rest of the morning discussing Rachel’s disappearance with dance students and teachers. Nobody had noticed anything odd about Rachel’s demeanour on Monday. She had been positive all day and her usual smiley self, although she’d had lunch on her own as her classmates were rehearsing for something connected to the Moomba festival or the Grand Prix.

Manni was alarmed that Rachel had not phoned as promised the night before. They had rung each other every night for the last ten months, much to the frustration of their parents. They saw each other every day and were so happy together and so deeply in love it did in all honesty concern me a little. I thought, if ever one of them left the other, there would be so many pieces to pick up.

Mike and I used to say that if she had to have a boyfriend at fifteen then she could not have made a better choice. My mother later said in her Victim Impact Statement, ‘… Rachel had visited me along with her parents and Emmanuel Carella a few days before she was so cruelly taken from us. He was her very first love, and Rachel adored him. As she was saying goodbye to me, she suddenly flung her arms around me and whispered in my ear, “Nan, don’t you think Manni is wonderful? Wouldn’t you love him in our family?” I can still feel the warmth of that hug and the delight in her, and as they drove away and I waved to her until they were out of sight, I thought, “Dear Rachel, may the magic last for a very long time.” ’

I went with Manni into the shoe shop in Swan Street to confirm what Rachel had said about buying some shoes, not for myself but because I knew the police would want confirmation. I went with notepad and pen in hand.

The shopkeeper remembered Rachel and thought she was a lovely girl. She was often in looking at shoes, and yes, she had asked the lady to put the shoes to one side. Rachel had been very excited. The shopkeeper repeated almost word for word what Manni had said. It was then that Manni recalled that Rachel had referred to an old female friend. ‘It was nothing immoral because she was going with an old female friend.’

Old female friend?
A friend from primary or secondary school? A friend from the Baptist or Anglican church youth groups? Or from a previous dance school? Or was she referring to an
older
female friend, a woman? It was an expression we could not associate with Rachel. Old girlfriend, yes, but ‘female’? This sounded like the description of an older woman.