Chapter 15 – Anne’s Story
Anne now had a war chest of a hundred thousand dollars and set herself the task of finding out the stories of all the lost girls and recording them, along with Susan’s story. The money would fund her to go to the countries of origin of all the girls, to gather information about their lives and for any investigations that flowed from them, along with multiple trips to Darwin to work with the NT police in searching for clues.
She was determined to take only minimal expenses for her own living costs. David had offered to fully support her over the year but she did not want that either. Time enough for that when they were married, a plan that sat somewhere over the rainbow of when she finished this.
Alan and Sandy cleaned out the spare bedroom at their Darwin flat for whenever she was in town. She found this was helpful, it saved hotel costs and it gave her company and perspective. They were both the source of innumerable good ideas for her journey of discovery. Plus Sandy had her own different and unique insight into Susan’s mind that even Anne had not shared in talking to her friend.
She knew the book would be a best seller; it was one of those stories that, even if told badly, would be riveting. She intended to tell it well.
She had several publishers beating a path to her door for publishing rights a year from now. But she ignored these offers. In her mind any money the book raised would firstly repay what the Trust had given her and, after that, would go into funding the Trust’s ongoing activities. There were even talks of film or documentary rights, perhaps a TV mini-series. While she was willing to cooperate with this, it was too soon to think of this before she had got the stories. If a film happened, again it would be done through the Trust, with the money going there.
She wanted no private benefit herself from this unfolding set of tragedies, for her the motivation was to make a small step of reparation for her failure to protect her friend.
She had met all the parents in association with the police inquiry and the appeal. All welcomed her offer to write the story and use it as a way to try and find their daughters, or to raise funds to help others like them.
Each promised her free access to any material they held. They agreed she could do with it as she chose, with them having no right to censor what was found unless it raised information about crimes which should be referred to the police or it was very harmful to their girl’s own reputation. In this case they would all try to work out an acceptable way to tell these parts of the stories that was sympathetic but truthful.
In giving this undertaking Anne sensed they all trusted her motives and understood her pain through their own. So she felt charged with a great responsibility to be faithful to these girls’ lives and stories, the good and the bad, but to be kind in the telling.
In addition, from having seen Mark through Susan’s eyes as she had told her story, she must be faithful to her friend. She must not to take the easy way out and present Mark as a monster. Instead she must try to see him from the inside, the good with the bad, to take the insights from his diary and try to understand them. Then she must truthfully reflect the character they showed. She suspected, from the small amounts she had read this far, that understanding this man and his motives was actually a very complex thing.
To date she had deliberately refrained from a serious study of his dairy. It was police evidence after all but, at the request of the lawyer that David retained to assist them, she had been provided with a copy for her own private reading, not to be further copied. This was on the basis that she would use this, in combination with Susan’s story, to help understand the full story of what had happened and she would cooperate fully with the police in their own investigation.
So the judge had made a confidential order to this effect. In reality no order was needed; both she and Alan, who was leading the police inquiry, were driven by the same motivations, to discover the truth, to find again her friend and to find out the fate of the others. They talked of minor details almost every day.
Both Alan and Anne had copies of the Susan tapes and transcripts. They had spent two days locked in a room together listening to every detail and cross checking the transcript for accuracy.
Now, even though Anne had fully intended to start on reading and understanding the diary almost a month ago, she had done little more than skip here and there.
She now must spend a couple solid weeks on the reading until she had fully absorbed the contents. Then she would arrange to spend two weeks in Darwin talking in detail to the police officer reporting to Alan who was leading this component of the investigation. Together they would work on the task of the trying to sort out the people described in the diary, particularly these girls, and the dates and places they had been. Then, while Anne went overseas to try and gather the other story and understand about the four girls whose passports were found, the police would try to track Mark’s contacts, and corroborate dates and places he visited through other sources.
In her initial look at the diary it had rapidly become apparent that it was not a chronology, things were out of order, stray reflections, creative pieces and factual descriptions were interspersed with their beginnings and endings often blurred. In many places the language was so cryptic that separating fact from reflection was challenging, particularly for most early entries where there was little ability to corroborate from other sources.
Names were another challenge; some were obviously these girls but did not really fit the passports.
There was an Elfin whose story was told a bit later in time than when the Swedish girl disappeared, as if written after the event. Her real name was Elin, but otherwise she seemed to match her description.
There was a BB who may be Isabelle, once he had called her my beautiful B with the beautiful mind, and a few times there was a Belle or Bella who may well be the same person.
There was an M and sometimes A, whose stories seemed to run together. She could be Mandy and Amanda. Some of what Mark said about her was far from nice, “scheming conniving bitch” seemed to refer to her in one place. But at other times he was quite tender about her describing her as another piece of damaged goods that her felt soft about. Anne thought this was the girl Susan described who had come at Mark with a knife and, at that point he killed her, but it was far from clear.
Then there was a J and once Josie who matched none of the names and dates in the passports. Josephine was Amanda’s middle name, but the dates and places seemed wrong. In the end it sounded like he had hunted and shot this girl from behind like a wild animal. It was a very disturbing sequence but also filled with parts of remorse and tenderness.
It seemed like, over time, the diary morphed from an initial thing with parts of light and fun told in earlier places, to a story with overwhelming darkness at its core near the end. Several times he talked of the “crocodile within which is driving me effin crazy”, but he also seemed to take a dark and perverse joy in communing with crocodiles, feeding them and drawing sustenance from his interactions with them.
The only girl whose identity seemed clear throughout was Kate, also often called Cathy. She seemed to fit with Cathy Rodgers, the Fiona of the passport. She initially emerged as someone with a light shining within after some very dark parts of the diary, where Mark seemed to become quite crazy. But even here it was cryptic. He described meeting her in Adelaide, saying that when she smiled at him it was like someone turned on a light in her face and that turned on a light in his brain and made him feel good. He also said she was one of those rare kind and generous souls who really tried to do good, but this goodness was her undoing. He told in detail and reflected on what seemed like some very dark and disturbing secrets that Kate had told him as they travelled together, being raped as child by an uncle. He said that, because of this, Kate was broken and damaged inside, fucked up in the head like himself. In one place, after describing a truly harrowing bit, where she told how the same was done to her sister too, who then committed suicide, he had written
, in heavy underline, “Bastard must be made to pay – I will hunt him down!!”
It was an endless jigsaw of puzzles within puzzles.
What Anne really must do was read it fully two or three times from start to finish and through this try and place herself inside Mark’s mind, absorb his idioms, see the world as he saw it. Then she hoped it would start to make more sense. But that was a job for another day.
Meanwhile Anne tried to keep herself busy and think of nothing but the work in progress, next steps and more next steps. Her legal secretarial training proved useful, giving her a task by task focus and an organising mind and good systems.
But lurking behind it all was a fear of what she might find at the end, or worse, what she might not find, an inchoate fear of nothingness as the ending to a year or her life, a year of toil, labour and searching, where the only output was a book of stories in which life was absent. One life would be enough, even if not Susan’s. She was not very religious but she would still pray, nightly before she drifted off to sleep, that at least one girl could be found alive.
A fortnight later she found herself in Darwin sitting with the detective who was trying to unscramble the diary. In the meantime she had fully read it, then gone through a second time and made notes in the margins about the things that seemed significant.
Now she and Detective John Arthur were working together off large photocopied pages, with a whiteboard to one side trying to make a chronology of events. She was beginning to see an overall pattern that Mark was damaged goods and understand he was drawn to others similarly damaged. None of the girls had what one would describe as full and happy childhoods except Susan and maybe Belle. Even for Susan there was a way in which the loss of her Aunt had caused her great distress and split her personality. Belle was less clear cut but even for her there was a sense that she was searching for something or someone. Amanda, Cathy and Elin had all had very difficult times in childhood as had the phantom J. So all were vulnerable and searching for new identities; so this dangerous sense of wildness and brokenness in Mark’s character seemed to connect deeply with each.
With this understanding Anne now felt she was ready to begin. The first significant event in the diary, which seemed to predate the first diary entries by some months, was the story of Elin, Mark’s Elfin.
Part 2 - Elfin