Expectant, page 3
I refreshed the feed for the online Otago Daily Times on my phone and noted the new headline ‘Police Appealing to Public over Newborn.’ I clicked on it and scrolled quickly through the text, Police were looking for any sign of the newborn baby of the victim of Monday night’s horrific murder … Police were asking people to call if they noticed anyone with an unexpected newborn … Police said people could call 0800 Crime Stoppers if they wanted to remain anonymous…
0800 Dob in a Murdering Bastard more like. Well, we needed all the help we could get, and the public could be great sources of information. We were bound to get some calls about families who’d suddenly acquired a baby, and I already felt sorry for those who’d been called on to foster at short notice, or whose desire to adopt had finally, and suddenly, been realised. It would take the shine off the occasion if they were being looked at sideways courtesy of some sick bastard’s unfathomable actions.
My allocated task du jour was to read up on recent incidents involving baby snatching. I knew I was tossed this one because it was a desk job, and therefore safe for the pregnant woman – keeping the resident arsehole happy. And even though I knew everyone was looking out for my interests, it didn’t stop me from resenting it a bit.
The office felt very empty, as everyone else was out in the big, wide world doing what seemed like more hands-on and productive work. The lack of people energy in the room made the task feel even more grim and lonely, but, nevertheless, I settled down to do the bizzo.
I was aware there had been a couple of examples of baby abductions in Dunedin in recent years. Smithy had given me the heads-up on them. He was a born and bred Dunedinite, and although not assigned to those particular cases at the time, he remembered the furore they caused. I was only a recent arrival to the city, so they hadn’t lodged in my memory. The case that did loom large in my consciousness though, was the alleged baby-trafficking exploits of Minnie Dean, who was legend in these parts, and not for good reasons. But considering that all went down in the late 1800s, I didn’t think she’d be on the current list of suspects. Hers was a bloody sad case all around, really, and she had the dubious honour of being the only woman ever to be hanged in New Zealand. After the demise of some of her charges – and carelessly burying the bodies in her back yard – she was found guilty of infanticide. She was hanged in the Invercargill jail in 1895. Being a Southland girl, I was brought up on threats of being sent to Minnie to be ‘looked after’ if I misbehaved, which, being young and impressionable at the time, resulted in plenty of nightmares. Gee, thanks for that, Mum.
I decided to cast the net wider than Dunedin. Christchurch was only five hours’ drive up the road, which was nothing to us southerners. We wouldn’t bat an eyelid at hopping in the car and driving four hours along the twisty, turning, scenic road to Queenstown to get a pie or an ice cream, then heading back home. Me and my mates had done it a couple of times – it was almost a rite of passage, and the dungier the car the better.
I thought about the keywords to search for in the police database, and also in the general search engines. There were the obvious ones: baby abduction, kidnapping, snatching, assaults on pregnant women. But there were also the broader-picture subjects: baby trafficking, disputes over paternity, custody, Hague Convention cases. I stared out the window, trying to come up with scenarios where conflict might arise – not just at the extreme end, with violence, as this case certainly was, but also at the contention and argument end of the scale. I jotted ‘surrogacy’ down on my list, and ‘stored sperm’, even though it felt very left field. But there had been examples in the media of partners wanting to use the frozen sperm of their deceased loved-one to try and conceive a child, not always to the joy of the deceased’s family. It opened up a number of interesting ethical and moral dilemmas that the sensationalists latched on to pretty quickly. Even if wildly unlikely, in my experience the process of contemplating the outliers and low-odds cases often helped you focus in on the right path, or ignited the spark of an idea that led you to the truth of what had really happened. Sometimes you just had to trust your process.
Of course, none of this addressed the motive behind something as up close and personal as carving a baby out of a woman, and that motive had to be the key to everything in this case. It was also something I felt a little ill-equipped to deal with at present. My emotional range was yo-yoing between intense gratitude that I seemed to be having a hale and happy pregnancy, to guilt that I was having a hale and happy pregnancy. Chuck in outright paranoia and fear that something awful might happen to me and this precious cargo, and I was a jittery bundle of anxiety. I gave a little shudder and my hands dropped to their default positions – top and bottom around my belly.
I spent some time reading through the results of my search – various depressing cases and situations. One headline in particular stood out. Yes, there had been a baby abducted from a maternity ward in Timaru hospital just shy of three years ago. Timas was a small port city only two and a half hours up the road from here, and was more renowned for its boguns and boy racers than its rich cultural scene and tourism charms. It certainly wasn’t a place I’d be lining up to live in anytime soon. I jotted that down for follow-up and continued scrolling through the search results. There were a number of historical abductions that I ruled out for now – they were quite specific, involving relationship breakdowns and custody disputes. Again they left me feeling saddened and repulsed. It must have been awful for everyone involved, and it appalled me that children became a gambit or bargaining chip in adults’ toxic relationships. The cases were complex and no one won, particularly in the Hague Convention cases, where a parent had secreted the child out of the country, to the devastation of the other party.
The Timaru case was the only straight-out abduction, where the victim and family was unknown and unrelated to the perpetrator. The family unfortunately happened to have a baby in the wrong town and at the wrong time. It all ended happily, with bubs returned safe and sound, but it had certainly taken the gloss off their happy occasion, and would likely have stoked a life-time paranoia around their child’s safety. I think in this instance it would be very hard not to become helicopter parents, and for that poor child not to be cotton-wooled and over-guarded for the rest of their natural.
My bladder was telling me it was time to go for a walk to the facilities, and my stomach was telling me it was time to go eat. One of the perks of being pregnant was that no one questioned when you decided it was time to take a break, particularly if there was food involved. Not that there was anyone around to question it. I had an hour before it was time to catch up with the team. They’d had the morning out doing the interesting stuff while I’d been wedded to the computer. At least it hadn’t been a colossal waste of time. I’d come up with some interesting things to follow up and scoped some background information on past cases. But the whole business had left me with an empty feeling, and a gloomy outlook that went against my usual faith in humanity. What was in order was an infusion of cheer.
I needed some company to go with the food.
CHAPTER 7
It didn’t take much convincing to get Paul to meet me at Kiki Beware for a quick bite before the team meeting. My hormones were telling me I needed carbs, and bitter experience told me that I argued with by body at my peril. It was the chip butty or go home. I’d been fantasising about hot fries and gravy stuffed in a bun all morning.
‘You really going to order that atrocity?’ My culinary tastes weren’t appreciated by everyone.
‘This coming from a man who thinks peas belong in mac ‘n’ cheese?’
The guy behind the counter gave a snort.
After ordering the drinks and carbs, I manoeuvred myself between two of the barstools bolted to the floor in front of the counter in order to wave the magic plastic over the contactless machine. What did we do before PayWave? Deed done, I went to back out, but to my dismay found myself quite firmly wedged in place. Whose dumb idea was it to stick the bar stools right in front of where people had to pay? Whoever it was, I was sending some serious ill-will vibes their way.
‘Fuck.’
‘Fuck?’ said Paul.
‘Fuck, I’m stuck.’ I was starting to sound like a character in a rhyming children’s picture book – the sweary edition.
There was another snort from counter guy, which was matched by the one that came from behind me. Snorts in stereo. Yay.
‘You could at least pretend to be sympathetic,’ I said as I braced a hand on the brown vinyl top of each stool and attempted to hoist myself up a bit to dislodge my belly. That action only succeeded in provoking straight-out laughter. Before I could retort back, two arms appeared from behind me and wrapped themselves around my chest, and I felt myself being gently lifted up and out of my predicament.
‘Jesus, Sam, you’re a goon,’ Paul said, still laughing. ‘I don’t know any other person on the planet who could get themselves into some of the scrapes you do, woman. I should start keeping a diary.’ He placed my feet back on the ground, spun me round and planted a kiss smack in the middle of my forehead. It was impossible to stay miffed with that kind of adoration.
‘It’s a gift,’ I said, and had a quiet chuckle too. Dignity be damned.
We parked ourselves at one of the high tables, which involved an undignified scramble to get up onto the seat, and I pretended not to notice the smiles from the other patrons. Thank God no one had whipped out their phone to record my moment of glory.
‘How did you get on with the online searches?’
‘Good,’ I said, ‘as far as potential trains of thought and avenues of pursuit. It was all a bit depressing though.’
‘How so?’
‘Well, all of the scenarios I was looking up were the result of desperation of some form or another. People snatching babies because they couldn’t have one of their own, or because they’d lost a child and their grief was so profound it was having a huge effect on their mental health and they were beyond making rational decisions. Even when looking at the less extreme ends of offending, the majority of it was driven by distress rather than malice.’
‘Well this case is pretty much the most distressing one I’ve come across in my life. I don’t know about you, but I’m finding it disturbing, and we haven’t really got started.’
‘Yeah, I hear you.’
Counter guy came over and slid a lemon tea onto the table for me and a long black coffee for Paul. The lemon tea was famous in Dunedin and was a tasty if token nod to reducing my caffeine intake.
‘There’s one thing I thought I should flag, and I’ll bring it up in the team meeting later. One of the historical cases I was looking at, the woman concerned had actually planned the kidnapping so far in advance that she’d faked a pregnancy, so no one would bat an eyelid when she arrived with a newborn. She was from Dunedin but travelled up to Timaru to snatch a baby.’
Paul tapped his lip. ‘That is next-level planning.’
‘Yeah, family and friends would be celebrating with you, little knowing that their gain of a new little bundle of love was some other poor family’s loss.’
‘And kidnapping from out of town was smart, because when kinfolk read it in the news they wouldn’t make the connection.’
‘There was lot of planning involved and a huge risk of being caught, which of course she was. It’s amazing what the need for a child will make people do. Some will try and adopt, some put themselves into debt trying multiple rounds of fertility treatment, and I don’t want to imagine the emotional toll of that. And some, like this woman, go for the steal.’ Having a child had not been on my agenda at all at this stage in my life, but fate, luck and, as my mother so coarsely put it, taking seriously something poked at me in jest, had taken the matter out of my hands. Out of our hands.
‘I’m also guessing that if they went to that much trouble, the planning also involved looking for victims with shared traits – you know, ethnic background, hair colouring, that kind of thing?’
Paul made a damn good point.
‘I hadn’t thought about that side of it, but it makes sense. I’ll dive a little deeper into that.’ I took a sip of the tea – it lived up to the hype. ‘What I’m getting at though, is we shouldn’t make the assumption that a baby will pop up out of the blue, although God knows I hope this one pops up, safe and sound.’
‘Ditto.’
Paul gave me that look – the intense one that made you hold your breath so you could keep looking back. It usually meant he was going to say something serious, or suggest a shag. I was guessing, given the location, it was the former.
‘Am I being silly if I’m feeling, well, a bit guilty – at you … at us being so happy to be expecting this little person into our lives, when there’s this other family out there who have been torn apart?’
I gave a long exhale. People say you should be on guard for red flags in relationships, but they neglect to consider the opposite – looking out for the green flags; the, lordy, this one is a keeper, flags. With all his bluff and bravado and reputation for being a bit of a lad, few people understood what a caring and empathic guy Paul was. He concealed it well.
‘Nope, not silly at all.’ He’d just articulated a feeling that had been churning away in the recesses of my mind, but that I hadn’t quite been able to nail down. ‘I’m with you there. I think this case is going to be challenging in a myriad of ways. So let’s just make a promise to each other right here and now to keep talking about it if we’re feeling uncomfortable, or thinking that it might overwhelm us. No secrets – no bottling it up, huh?’
Paul reached out his hand, little finger extended.
‘Pinkie promise?’ he asked.
I reciprocated and linked mine in his. ‘Pinkie promise.’
CHAPTER 8
The station phone desk and the 0800 Crime Stoppers line had been pretty busy since the public appeal for information. Dunedin’s residents’ abhorrence of the crime’s nature had prompted a number to phone in and report suspicious people and newborns. Not that a newborn could act suspicious – but the presence of a newborn might be.
Detective Constable Sonia Richardson had just returned from following up on one of these calls. Judging by the way she tossed her bag onto her desk, I guessed it hadn’t gone well.
‘Not quite the lead you had hoped for?’
‘Nope.’
I waited for her to continue and realised she was boiling with what looked like rage. I had never seen her get to even a rolling simmer before, so something must have seriously gaffed her axe.
‘Going to tell me what happened.’
‘I might need a moment.’
She plonked down into the chair and proceeded to log into her laptop with a ferocity that had me fearing for the life of the keys.
‘What did the poor computer ever do to you?’ I asked.
She gave me her best brow-furrowed scowl and leaned back in the chair with an exaggerated humph.
‘There are some seriously arseholish people out there.’
‘You’ve only just noticed that?’
‘Oh, I’d noticed alright, but I mean like properly fuckish fuckers.’
My eyebrows almost hit my hairline. I wasn’t sure if I’d ever heard her say the F-word, let alone the F-word squared.
She must have clocked the look on my face, because she promptly apologised.
‘Look, I’ve just spent half an hour talking down a hysterical woman, who had clearly recently given birth, and her horrified husband, trying to reassure them that no we weren’t going to take their baby off them. Some piece of shit had called in and said that they knew they must have murdered the woman and stolen the missing baby because the couple weren’t expecting, and then suddenly, there they were out and about with a baby. Instant family.’
‘That would not have been fun.’
‘Nope. And when I asked her why someone would make a report like that, she reckoned it was probably her ex, who had never accepted that it was over and years later still tried to make her life a living hell.’
‘Surely no one would be that shit,’ I said, knowing full well that, actually, yes, people could be.
‘Well, then you’d be wrong. The caller hadn’t given their name or contact details, and did it anonymously through Crime Stoppers, so there’s no way to trace it back. But I’m going to be paying him a visit later this week for a little chat, because if he was responsible then…’ She unscrewed the lid of her drink bottle with particular vigour.
‘That is some next-level shittiness.’
‘Yup. Just destroy what should be one of the happiest moments in a couple’s life with your own self-serving pettiness. It defies all common decency.’
‘So what could we charge him with?’
‘Besides monumental fuckerism?’
‘Besides that.’
‘Well, his behaviour sounded like it had been the next best thing to stalking.’
‘It could be a starting point – and wasting police time.’
‘Yeah, well we’d better come up with something, because I’m buggered if I’m going to let this one lie. That fucker needs a reality check.’
CHAPTER 9
This was one of those phone calls that made me feel dirty and sickened even to think about.
One of the aspects we couldn’t ignore was the possibility, no matter how remote, that this mother had been butchered, and this baby had been taken, to satisfy the warped appetites of the truly depraved. It was awful to admit it, but there was an element of society that got off on watching the pain and abuse of others, including of the youngest of infants. The internet provided a platform and an international market for the denigration and abuse of children. Anything inhuman you could imagine, these bastards enacted worse.
You had to be a special kind of person to work in the Online Child Exploitation Unit. But despite the amazing work they did exposing paedophile networks and the rewards they must have felt when rescuing victims and prosecuting the guilty, I could never do their job. It would be soul-destroying. I had an immense respect for those who did respond to that call to duty. There had to be some pretty heavy-duty support in place to keep them mentally and emotionally safe, working in that space.
