Promise (37 page)

‘But didn’t she want me there? She wanted me to stay.’

‘If she’d asked for you to stay, I wouldn’t have taken you out unless there was some really good reason.’ He poured milk into his tea and jiggled the teabag about.

When Anna thought of her mother, she thought of the two of them: Anna and her mum. It was the two of them, not the four of them. It seemed that her dad did the same. It was about him and Anna’s mother. Each of them had been a pair with her; Luke, too, no doubt. Her mum had been the linchpin for each of them, and when she disappeared, they fell apart.

She would never know who her mother was, and never know which of her memories were reliable. Even if her father had shared his memories, they would never have been a substitute for all those motherless years. And yet, Anna knew that the loss of her mother was what propelled her, in so many ways, to rescue Charlie. And no matter what the courts said, no matter if she ended up in jail, Anna would do it again if she had to.

A
nna sprinkled grated cheese over the top sheet of lasagne.

‘But it needs more,’ said Charlie and poked at an exposed patch of tomato sauce.

‘It does. Can you please grate some more?’

‘That’s okay.’ Charlie smiled at Anna. She reached for the block of cheddar and carefully dragged the cheese down the side of the grater a couple of times. She lifted the grater up. ‘Is that enough?’

‘That looks great,’ said Anna.

‘Great grating!’ laughed Charlie and sprinkled the few strands of cheese over the lasagne.

‘Step back, sweetie,’ said Anna. ‘Into the oven it goes.’

Charlie crouched in front of the glass oven door while Anna washed up. Over Prue’s half-curtain Anna saw a dog trot by, the wind blowing its fur the wrong way. Behind her, Charlie crunched on raw lasagne sheets.

‘How does that taste?’ asked Anna.

Charlie shook her head. ‘It’s better cooked.’

‘You’ll have some of the cooked stuff soon.’

The television bleated in Prue’s bedroom. Every Saturday, when Anna turned up, Prue went to her room and spent the whole day there, resting with the door closed. Over the weeks, Anna and Charlie had created a routine: as soon as Anna arrived, they put a load of washing on, went to the park for an hour, came home, hung out the washing then cooked food to freeze and for Charlie’s lunchbox. Spinach and cheese triangles, lasagne, bolognese sauce. Lemon cake.

‘Can we make banana cake next time? I don’t really like the lemon cake anymore,’ said Charlie.

‘Sure. Listen, Charlie. You know how I got in trouble from the police for taking you away from your mum?’

‘Mmm.’

‘Well, I’m going to go and talk again to the police and I might get in pretty bad trouble and have to go away for a while. I hope not. But if I do, I won’t be coming to visit you for a while. I can phone you sometimes and I’ll write lots of letters for Nanna to read to you.’

‘Where will you go?’

Anna hadn’t wanted to mention jail but how would Charlie make sense of it otherwise? ‘I might have to go to jail for a while.’

‘Jail?’ Charlie’s eyes widened and she whispered, ‘That’s not fair.’

•

Before she left at five, Anna and Charlie brought in the washing from the line near the back door. Anna unpegged the clothes and passed them to Charlie who dropped them into the basket. Anna had bought Charlie a second school uniform and some cotton dresses.

The guy from the next unit walked by with his little dog. ‘Hi, Charlie!’ he said in a too-friendly voice.

Anna put the last of the clothes in the basket. ‘Let’s go in.’

In Charlie’s bedroom, they folded the clothes and stacked them on the shelf. Then it was time for Anna to go.

The only time she let herself really contemplate going to jail was on the flight back to Sydney. Somehow, while she was high in the air, sealed off from the world, the idea of jail was less real. She had no idea what life would be like inside, but she did know that she wouldn’t be able to look after Charlie. The girl would be on her own, again.

T
he courtroom was freezing. Anna had been sitting in the dock for just fifteen minutes, in her new blue dress, and she was cold to the bone. She didn’t want to wrap her arms around herself in case it made her look scared or defensive. Bridget, the solicitor, had told her to remain calm, sit up straight and not to react to anything the prosecution or a witness might say.

The crown prosecutor – a short woman in a black dress and very high heels – faced the judge from behind the long barristers’ table. As she handed the judge a number of documents, her voice was ponderous, as if to underline the gravity of what Anna had done.

‘Your Honour, the objective seriousness of this offence is made greater by the young age of the child – five years old – and by the fact that the offender detained the child for
three months.
’

The judge rested his chin on one hand as he listened to the prosecutor, and every so often, pushed his glasses up his nose. His old-fashioned wig only emphasised to Anna how far removed from real life this place was. The courtroom was like a dungeon, with no windows to the outside and a hard fluorescent light.

‘Additionally, Your Honour, the offender was not well known to the child – they had met very briefly on five occasions – so the child was taken from her home, and detained, by someone she knew only slightly.

‘The offender admitted in her police interview that the child asked for her mother several times, especially in the first two weeks after the abduction. While there is no victim impact statement from the child’s mother, Your Honour,’ the prosecutor glanced down at her notes, ‘the mother indicated in a police interview – a transcript of which I now tender as evidence – how upsetting she found it not knowing where her child was for almost three months, or indeed whether her daughter was even alive.’

This was the thing Anna felt worst about, in the moments she let herself contemplate it. Even if Gabby was a terrible mother, Anna had taken away her little girl.

The prosecutor waited while a woman in a blue uniform passed the document to the judge who perused it, then nodded at the prosecutor.

She went on, ‘This is not withstanding, Your Honour, the fact that the mother – during that three-month period – elected to hand over care of the child to the child’s grandmother.’

A machine hummed somewhere nearby, a relentless drone that only intensified the constriction in Anna’s chest. Sitting in that stark room, she felt like she was suspended in liquid. She was in a river, and she’d stopped grasping for something to keep her afloat, and instead concentrated on just keeping her mouth above the water, so she could draw each thin breath in.

‘As to the moral culpability of the offender . . . Your Honour, she made a conscious and informed decision to take and detain the child. The offender had a phone conversation with her partner, David Wilkins, as she drove away from the child’s home, with the girl in her car. In that phone call, Mr Wilkins, who is a prosecutor in the Sydney office of the DPP, made very clear to the offender the serious nature of the offence she was committing and urged her to return the child immediately. The offender may not have premeditated
taking
Charlie Seybold, but
detaining
the child was not a momentary lapse on the offender’s part. It was a deliberate and considered decision. It took her a day to drive north with the child, and in her police interview she said she did everything possible to avoid detection: buying cans of petrol at a station in Sydney’s west and avoiding main roads. And, most seriously, she chose to detain the child for twelve weeks.’

The prosecutor ran her hands up the sides of her lectern. ‘The offender’s moral culpability is, however, reduced because her intention in taking Charlie Seybold was to assist the girl, to protect the child from what she assessed as potential physical harm. In the two weeks prior to the offence, the offender contacted Family and Community Services’ Child Protection Helpline three times to report her concerns about the child’s safety and wellbeing, and she called police once.

‘The offender told police that on the day of the abduction she witnessed the child’s stepfather assault the child and was herself threatened by the stepfather. She again called the Child Protection Helpline to report the assault and when they explained they could not attend immediately and encouraged her to call the police, the offender abducted the child. I tender as evidence a report from FACS about the offender’s three phone calls to the helpline.

‘Further mitigating her moral culpability are witness statements that she took good care of the child during the three-month period of detention. Your Honour, the offender has no criminal history. Since her arrest on the second of March this year, she has been on bail, living with her father in Orange, New South Wales, and reporting to police three times a week.

‘The maximum penalty for a section 87 offence is ten years, with no standard non-parole period. She made a very early plea of guilty, on the day of her arrest, and gave a full and frank interview to detectives. Notwithstanding any further mitigating circumstances that my learned friend may submit,’ she waved an elegant hand in Lindy’s direction, ‘the crown submits that given the serious nature of the offence, and in the interest of general deterrence, a custodial sentence is appropriate.’

Custodial sentence.
Jail
. The cells were just through the door to Anna’s left and downstairs. They’d be cool and brightly lit, and she guessed they’d stink of bleach like the cell at the Byron Bay police station. How many hundreds of people who’d sat in this very dock over the years had ended up in jail? She swallowed the saliva flooding her mouth. If she got the two years that Bridget had suggested, then by the time Anna got out, Charlie would be almost eight.

The judge shuffled papers on the bench, the noise amplified through the court by his microphone. He glanced up. ‘Thank you, Madam Crown. Anything further?’

‘Not at this stage, Your Honour.’

The prosecutor sat down and, for the first time, glanced over at the dock. Anna found herself smiling, a jerky, tight smile. The prosecutor looked down and scribbled something on a pad of paper.

The judge pushed the glasses up his nose. ‘Ms Allen?’

Lindy stood. She was at the same table as the prosecutor, but closer to Anna. Her long dark hair was bundled into a low bun under her wig. Anna focused on her serene, oval face.

Lindy laid her hands on her lectern. ‘Your Honour, as my friend here has indicated, my client gave police a full and frank interview. The investigating detective has noted that my client expressed remorse. My client well understands that what she did was wrong.

‘The circumstances in which she made the decision to take Charlie Seybold should be understood. Not as an excuse, but as an explanation and as a mitigating factor in her moral culpability. In seeking to assist Charlie Seybold, my client initially made several attempts via legal channels, and only when in great fear for the child’s life did she take the unwise step of taking the child. Her actions were positive in motivation, but gravely misguided. I refer to already-tendered evidence, the transcript from Charlie Seybold’s interview with officers from the Child Abuse Squad, in which the child offered the information that her mother sometimes bit her. Your Honour, I propose to call the offender, Ms Pierce. She wishes to tell you first hand her observations of the risk of harm to the child, including her observations in respect of the bite injury. I call Anna Pierce.’

A court officer materialised beside Anna and opened the low timber door of the dock. The woman guided Anna over the carpet towards the judge. Everyone was watching her. Her legs were stiff with cold and she had a horrible thought that she might trip on the steps leading to the witness box.

The officer said, ‘Do you solemnly and sincerely declare and affirm that the evidence that you shall give will be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth? If so, please say “I do”.’

‘I do.’

Anna could hear the judge as he shifted in his seat, the rustle of his black and purple robe. Was the witness box placed so close to the judge to put the witnesses on edge?

Lindy gazed over at her. Could she see how rattled Anna was?

‘What is your full name?’

‘Anna Rose Pierce.’

‘Ms Pierce, what was the first thing you noticed about Charlie Seybold that caused you to be concerned for her safety and wellbeing?’

Anna swallowed. ‘I saw a bite on her leg. It looked like a human bite.’

Lindy nodded. ‘Could you please describe the bite?’

‘It was like . . . a very dark bruise in the shape of two half-circles . . . I could see the teeth marks, and there was a small amount of dried blood.’

‘Your Honour, I tender as evidence a photo my client took of the bite four days after she first saw it. The bruise had faded somewhat.’

The judge took the photo and looked at it for a long moment.

Lindy asked Anna to describe the moment she first saw the bite on Charlie’s leg, and as Anna spoke, it was as if she was watching herself kneel on the floor beside the couch all those months ago, completely unaware of how that moment was going to change her life. Unaware that from then on, she would be attuned to Charlie. Even right now, while she was up in the witness box, she knew Charlie was at school, wearing her uniform with the baggy shorts, and that in the girl’s pink lunchbox was the corn-and-fetta slice that they’d made together on the weekend.

When Anna described Harlan holding Charlie upside down in the backyard, she was surprised how shaken she felt conjuring him, even in the sterile courtroom. But she knew she had to recount it in detail, to convince the judge of the danger Charlie had faced.

‘And how did the girl react to what happened?’ asked Lindy.

‘She seemed very distressed. She crawled through a hole in the fence to my side and hid under a bush . . .’ Anna steadied her voice. ‘She was curled up in a tight ball, and when I could finally convince her to come out, I saw that she’d . . . wet her pants.’