Times of Trouble (5 page)

Sophie shook as she
ducked down behind the gate to the platform, hiding from the two
men as they hurried away. People were running from everywhere
towards the sounds of the screaming. Sophie felt her insides were
melting, as she dragged herself up to stand and watch the scene.
Katie was under that train. Sophie wanted to scream and cry, but
this instinct was smothered by an overriding fear of someone
spotting her. She hurried down the platform, careful not to look
towards the fussing and yelling where Katie lay. She didn't want to
see what the train had done to her friend. She just needed to find
Charlie. He must be in the toilet.

She slammed open the
door, and could instantly hear him whimpering, the sound echoing
around the empty tiled space. He was in the last cubicle. Katie
must have somehow managed to lock him in there, and climb out
herself. Sophie used the toilet in the cubicle next door as a step
so she could drag herself over the partition. His sling was clipped
around the cistern, keeping him safely sitting on the toilet lid.
His little arms reached out as she picked him up, and clipped him
to her front. Then she mustered as much calm as she could, and
strode out of the toilet, along the platform and out onto the
street. She promised herself Charlie would never hear what happened
to his mummy. She didn't want him haunted by a memory she knew
she'd never be able to forget. It was all her fault. How could she
ever forgive herself?

Chapter 5

I wanted to read the
emails from the private investigator in private, so I printed them
all, including the responses from mum. As I got comfortable on my
bed with the pile, I wondered who this Liam Kingsley was. Where did
mum find him, and what was his experience? How old was he? And how
much did he charge? He had already taken way too much money, given
the lack of results so far.

The first email was an
enquiry from mum, sent on the 20
^th
October. She gave him a brief outline
of the help she needed, and asked if either he knew of someone in
London who he could recommend, or if he would be interested in the
case himself. Liam’s response was a bit over the top, and it was
obvious he was desperate for the job. He couldn’t have been rushed
off his feet with other cases, as he emailed back almost
immediately, offering to take the case himself, at $300 a day plus
expenses. He signed the email Liam Kingsley LLB. If he had a law
degree, then why wasn’t he a lawyer? He sounded like such a suck
up, I disliked him immediately.

I did a quick
calculation on my mobile phone, and, assuming his daily rate stayed
at $300, the $80,000 spent so far could have accounted for about
nine months of work. He took on the case exactly three months ago.
So how had mum spent so much money? Was he making up fluff about
looking for Sophie, when he was actually conning mum? The numbers
just didn’t add up. And worse, this was only his second case since
he’d given up law. Terrific. Inexperienced and
expensive.

But mum seemed
desperate for help and took him on anyway. I felt even more
miserable as I read her directions to Liam about keeping the case
secret from me, because I’d ‘been through a hard time recently’,
and she didn’t want to 'burden me with this problem’.

I seriously didn’t
like the sound of this Liam guy. He signed his email ‘Green but
keen’. How sad was that? I couldn’t help worrying that he was a
complete fraud. Every word seemed too smarmy to be real. Maybe the
reason he hadn’t found Sophie, and had wasted so much time on the
case, was because he was completely incompetent. My mind was
spinning with just how much money mum had poured into his account.
I pictured him sitting by a pool in Bali, sipping cocktails,
putting them on his hotel bill, and charging mum for every minute
of it. And the fact that he hadn’t even had to speak to mum, or
meet her face to face, just made it easier for him. My heart sank
as it occurred to me we only had Liam’s word for it that Sophie was
in Sydney, and still alive.

It became clear as I
read mum’s next email that she was more desperate than loser Liam.
She needed to believe he would help her, because she was frantic to
save Sophie, and had no other options. She gave Liam basic
information about Sophie, including photos and details of the last
post card we received from her. She also forwarded the email she
got with the jumbled cry for help. There really wasn’t much else to
tell.

I pictured a list of
things mum could write to describe her second daughter, me. She
would be able to tell someone what I ate for lunch yesterday, and
what I watched on TV on Tuesday nights. She could tell them when I
last went to the dentist, and when my driver’s licence was due for
renewal. She could tell them how big and strong my hands were from
all the piano playing, and how self-conscious I was about them. And
how little I cared about clothes, wearing the same old pants and
jumpers for years until they fell apart. And she could tell them
what dramas and triumphs I had lived through, my best and worst
hours.

I felt sad that she
knew so little about Sophie; it reminded me how much we both lost
in our lives. Dad disappeared, literally never heard from again
from the day he went for a beer at the pub, and never came back. He
left mum a note which she never brought herself to show us. If he
hadn’t, we would have assumed he was missing, and mounted a search.
But this was the last thing he wanted. He wasn’t missing. He knew
where he was, and he knew where we were. He just didn’t want those
two places to be the same. And so it would seem with Sophie, at
least until three months ago. She hadn’t been missing, just absent.
Some families talked to each other every day, even when they were
scattered all over the world. Not us. In our family, if you chose
to disappear, you were not followed. But it still hurt me and mum
too much to admit to ourselves, let alone to each other, that for
seven years, Sophie hadn’t needed us in her life. Not until
now.

I looked at the photo
mum sent to Liam. It was Sophie’s year 12 school portrait. Even
with her face unenthusiastically posing, with a smile so slight it
could be mistaken for a scowl, she was just as stunning as she had
always been. She was one of those people who always looked
attractive. Even in her school uniform, with thickly applied
makeup, and purposely tousled hair, she was more photogenic than I
had ever been in my life. I wondered if she still looked like this
girl in the photo. If she was still stunning, and making men fall
in love with her without even speaking to them. Maybe if she had
stuck around a bit longer, some of her charisma would have rubbed
off on me.

About two months
after Sophie went to London, soon after we got the one and only
post card from her, I asked mum if she knew her address, as I
wanted to send her a letter. I had a bit of a crush on my new piano
teacher, Thomas, and I wanted Sophie’s advice about it. Actually,
it wasn’t a crush. I was completely and utterly in love with him,
in an obsessive and devoted way that at age 17, I had no idea how
to handle. He was 26, and I thought he was the most gorgeous,
brilliant person I ever met. He was good at the piano, great even,
but like me, never made it to a professional level. But when he was
teaching me, he still believed he could make it, and his ambitious
drive fuelled such a desire within me, I was probably practising
mostly to impress him. I was his best, and most committed student,
and since I had five lessons with him a week, he was my world. I
dreamt one day he would be in love with me, and we would travel the
world as famous pianists together.

I couldn’t possibly
tell mum how I felt. So I wrote a letter to Sophie to see if she
had any ideas about how to explain all this to Thomas. We hadn’t
been friends in the years before she left; maybe it was my attempt
at an olive branch. And besides, who else could I ask? She had
boyfriends for as long as I could remember: the first one when she
was about 12 years old. Some of them lasted a while, others we only
met once. She never seemed to get too emotional about any of them,
treating them like fleeting hobbies. But I was sure she would
understand how I felt when I explained the agonising pain in my
heart, that wouldn’t go away until Thomas and I were wrapped in
each other’s arms. With the letter written, and just in need of an
address, I was upset to hear mum didn't have any idea where Sophie
was living. I kept the letter in my diary and continued to build up
a romance with Thomas in my mind.

A few weeks later,
drunk with hormones and frustrated at the lack of progress, I tried
to kiss him during one of my lessons. I was in the middle of
Chopin’s Fantasy Impromptu, which, naturally, I found terribly
romantic. When he leant over to turn the page of my music, I
stopped playing mid bar, turned my head, and tried to plant my lips
onto his. I honestly expected him to kiss me back, and for us to
live happily ever after. But he was mortified, and jerked his head
back so fast that he fell off his chair. The sudden realisation at
what I had done made me burst into tears, and run from the room. I
never saw Thomas again. I got a new teacher, and to this day I
still cringe at the scene I caused. He must have thought I was a
complete nut case. I never tried kissing anyone since then. Trying
to forget about Thomas, I went back to Liam’s emails.

Something lurking at
the back of my mind resurfaced as I read on. Mum never mentioned
anything about going to the police. Why didn’t she try that first?
Just as I wondered about police involvement, so had Liam. Mum told
him she tried contacting police here, and in London, and had got
nowhere. They weren’t interested in a 27 year old
runaway.

Mum’s next few emails
were panicky requests for an update. I felt irritated. Why hadn’t
he stayed in regular contact as he promised? Maybe mum thought it
would take just a couple of days to locate her, and was surprised
that, after a week, she had no news at all. It was like when you
expected someone to be on time, and then you realised they were
running late, and you started to wonder whether they were coming at
all. If Liam couldn’t find her in a few days, was he ever going to
be able to find her? He still hadn’t after three months.

Liam’s responses were
full of apologies. He had organised for a friend who worked in IT
to track the email Sophie sent, to see whether he could locate the
computer it was sent from. He also contacted the Australian Embassy
in London. Someone there was able to confirm that Sophie entered
the UK on the 13th December 2002. Big whoop. We knew that. But he
did add that her two year working visa had expired, and they had no
record of her applying for another one. There was no record of her
leaving, either. Since she had presumably been living in the UK as
an illegal immigrant, he expected she would have kept a low
profile, and not applied for credit cards, paid tax ,or done any of
the other activities which would make her easier to find. This was
bad news.

The IT guy worked out
the email was sent from a computer that didn’t have a fixed IP
address. It was all gobbledygook to me. Apparently the internet
service provider was able to track down a group of computers that
were using this IP address; they were in an internet cafe in
Lambeth, London. And guess what? Liam decided he needed to go there
to continue investigating! And guess who paid for his flight? And
his hotel, and other expenses? Eating up the cash as much as he
could, no doubt. He said he wanted to have a look around
Whitechapel, where Sophie sent the postcard from... seven years
ago! As if she would still be there! What did he expect? That she
visited the same post box every day for seven years? No wonder mum
had to get the mortgage. She would never have afforded all this
expense otherwise.

I was getting more
and more angry as I read through the next few emails, sent as
updates from London, with less progress made every day. He visited
the internet café, and showed the people who worked there the photo
of Sophie. Someone thought they might have seen her, but had no
idea where she lived. What use was that? We knew she had sent the
email from there, so of course she had been there. He also
canvassed the surrounding area, asking as many people as possible
if they had ever seen her, again to no avail. There seemed to be so
many wasted hours of work, with each dead end costing mum literally
hundreds of dollars. Some of his emails didn’t even tell mum
anything, other than that he hadn’t found Sophie yet. Some
explained the work he was doing, expressing the view that he felt
it was all useful, but not yet fruitful. How could it be useful but
not fruitful? That didn’t make any sense.

He was basically
trying two avenues – one her present whereabouts, the other her
past. He tried all the hospitals in case she had been bashed up. He
tried all the missing person agencies. He tried the cafés in the
area where the email was sent from. He also tried to trace her from
when she first arrived. He went to all the theatrical agencies, to
see if she was ever on their books. This was especially time
consuming, as there were many agents, and most didn’t keep good
records. But eventually he found one that did have a record of her.
They even had a glamorous publicity photo on file. The agent told
him she had a few auditions, and did some work as an extra, but he
said he’d told her she should use her looks for modelling, rather
than acting. Liam then went to the film studios to see if any of
the camera crew remembered her.