Without Consent (4 page)

After a week of television punctuated
by nightly walks with the labrador pup, Lillian Willard persuaded her son to venture out to the shopping center.

They waited patiently for the bus with a couple of other people, and Geoff kept his head down, hoping not to be noticed. Luckily, no one looked twice at them. The bus wasn’t crowded, and his mother chose a seat near the back. He sat behind, just like he had when he was younger and they’d gone to town. After what seemed like hundreds of stops, they got off in the middle of a group of shops.

Geoffrey stared at the traffic buzzing past. It was so much busier than Fisherman’s Bay: more cars, more trucks, more people. Horns honked and tires screeched, just like in the movies. Everything seemed so noisy—much too loud. And the place smelt like diesel. The air stank, nothing like the salty air at Long Bay Jail. His mother led him by the elbow, past a library and a bank with an armed guard outside. Geoffrey flinched when he saw the man and suddenly wanted to be back home.

“He’s just here to protect the bank,” his mother said.

A few doors along, they entered one of those church donation places, with clothes, toys and blankets. Behind the counter a pretty girl looked up and smiled at them. Geoffrey stopped and watched. He liked her face. She didn’t stare at him or yell, or run away, not like the people outside the prison when he came out. Her long, blonde hair looked soft and he wondered what it smelt like.

“How about this one?” His mother suggested a denim shirt from a long rack of men’s clothes.

“All right.” Anything was better than green tracksuits, he thought.

Sorting through another rack, Lillian presented him with a number of pairs of long pants and held them up to his legs. The smiling girl added a couple of black T-shirts to the collection and asked if he wanted to try them on behind a sheet-curtain at the back of the store. Inside, he saw a mirror and stripped to the pair of white Y-fronts his mother had bought. He could hear the pair chatting outside.

“You don’t often see a mother and son shopping together,” the pretty blonde declared.

“Yes, well, we thought we’d spend some time together for a change. He’s been through a very tough few years.”

“Let me know if I can help,” the shop assistant said.

Geoffrey chose the striped shirt and tucked it into black jeans; a bit baggy in the backside, but the right length. One glance in the mirror and he proudly opened the curtain for approval.

“They’ll do, let’s try the others,” his mum said.

He wanted her to say how good he looked, but she kept quiet.

The girl smiled again. “The shirt matches the blue in your eyes,” she said, leaning forward to catch his gaze. “They’re amazingly blue.”

Lillian flapped about, shoving Geoff back into the changing room. She kept handing clothes over the sheet until he was sick of being a shop dummy.

An hour later, Geoffrey had more clothes than he’d ever owned, in two large paper bags. He handed over sixty dollars and the girl gave him five dollars change. “We have some hats and baseball caps over there that just came in, if you’re interested.”

Geoffrey followed her to a table but was quickly distracted by a pile of comics lying on the floor nearby.

“I love
The Phantom
! Can I look at them?”

“Of course,” she said, blonde hair swishing as she bent over, exposing the tops of her breasts under her shirt. “I used to love comics when I was a kid, especially the
Archie
ones. You can take the lot for five bucks if you want.”

“Geoffrey, we need to save money for the television, remember?”

“I want the comics, Mum. You always reckon I need to read more.”

He’d handed over the money and collected the pile before his mother could object.

“This is a great shop,” he said, and smiled at the girl. “I’ll come back here again.”

It was the first time Lillian had seen her son smile in years. And it made her wish he’d never been let out of jail.

Thank God for screw-top wine bottles,
Anya thought, as she poured a glass of Chenin blanc from a bottle she’d opened a few evenings ago. After a day of meetings with the Department of Health, arguing about evidence collection techniques, Anya wanted some peace. Sitting cross-legged on her lounge with a large red pillow supporting her back, she opened the first of the reports Morgan Tully had asked her to review.

This case from 1998 involved the death of a three-month-old girl who was taken to an emergency department after being difficult to rouse in the morning. The mother had been out drinking with girlfriends the night before and left her twenty-four-year-old boyfriend babysitting. The next morning she had noticed vomit stains on the little girl’s pillow and tried to wake her. Instead of calling an ambulance, she put the child in the car and drove to the nearest hospital.

The emergency doctor’s statement said that he suspected child abuse as soon as he saw bruising on the child’s upper arms and back. The child was already in a coma and didn’t respond to painful stimuli. She had suffered significant brain damage. A cerebral CT scan confirmed the large intracranial bleed. According to the notes, the child was placed on a ventilator but died before anything could be done to relieve the pressure on her tiny brain.

So far the story sounded like a dozen other cases Anya could remember. Each one indelibly etched on her memory. The boyfriend said that the infant had gone to sleep at her usual time and slept through the night. He hadn’t heard any vomiting and had no reason to suspect anything was wrong.

Anya sighed. She’d heard that so many times. Amazing how a carer could have no idea what went on in a house when most parents reacted to the slightest noise where their children were concerned. She turned to the post-mortem report.

Alf Carney had described the gross findings. Multiple bruises ranged from 0.5 cm in width to 3.5 cm. On a tiny body, those bruises were anything but normal. The photographs showed round black bruises on both upper arms, consistent with fingermarks. The largest were at the front of the arms, where thumbs would have dug in if the child were held in an upright position. There was also bruising over the right collarbone and ribs.

On the back were red circular lesions that, although enhanced after death, looked exactly like cigarette-burns. The PM X-ray report showed multiple fractures—clavicle and posterior ribs, and a partially collapsed right lung. Anya closed her eyes and imagined the horror this tiny child had been forced to endure in such a short life. She thought of her own son Benjamin at the same age. He would giggle, babble and smile at everything he saw. And she clearly remembered how much affection he had been given, even from two parents who were emotionally detached from each other.

Anya took a sip of the wine and searched for the mother’s statement as to how she explained the wounds and injuries. Apparently, she believed that the lesions on her child’s back were eczema, and thought bruising was normal in children.

Unable to conceive how a mother could be in that much denial, the more disturbing thought occurred. The mother may have been a willing partner in torturing her baby, or even the sole abuser.

The post-mortem appeared straightforward, and Carney had documented retinal hemorrhages, small dot-like bleeds at the back of the eye, usually found in shaken-baby syndrome. Microscopic findings were barely commented on, and those in the report were consistent with the effects of severe physical abuse. Notably absent were histology reports on the lung and blood slides, or blood cultures. Apart from that, everything seemed routine and Anya suspected she’d been sent the wrong case to review, until she read Alf Carney’s final comments.

A swab of the right lung had grown a small amount of E. coli, a common finding at autopsy, thanks to contact with the bench surface; but the pathologist deemed that sepsis and overwhelming infection was present at the time of death.

Anya re-read the conclusion in complete disbelief. Not only did Carney ignore the possibility of child abuse and murder, he accused the treating physician of negligent homicide! He had failed to state that cardiac massage could cause fractures of the front, not the back ribs. There was no comment at all about the suspicious marks on the child’s back, and no slides were taken to confirm the pathology. In this case, all the physical evidence pointed to severe physical trauma from child abuse. A statement from Community Services mentioned that the family was under investigation following a complaint from the child’s maternal grandmother, who suspected abuse. Another, from a neighbor, claimed that the night before the child died she had heard a male voice screaming at a crying baby.

Based on the pathology report, the police would have been unable to pursue a case of abuse. Anya put the report on the rug and unpacked her laptop. She plugged in the power cord just as the phone rang. Unable to locate the handset, she pressed the microphone on the base station.

“Mummy!”

“Hi, Ben! I’ve just been thinking about you.”

“Hey, me too.”

“How are you feeling? Yesterday you sounded terrible.”

He took a deep breath to prove the lack of snuffles. “All better.”

“That’s great news. Did you go to preschool?”

“Yeah, but it’s a little bit boring.”

Ben rarely talked about preschool over the phone. There was no point asking any more about it.

“Mummy, what are we doing when I come to sleep over?”

“Well, I’ve been practicing a new song on the drums. Maybe we can play it together. And we might go to the Powerhouse Museum again. There’s a huge
Star Wars
exhibition.”

“I love
Star Wars
! How did you know?”

“Maybe I just know you.”

There was silence for a moment. Then Ben’s voice almost whispered, “Love you, I miss you.”

“Me too, Speedie. Me too. Love you all the way to forever and back again.”

“And way past there…Uh, Dad’s calling. It’s bath-time.”

“Then you’d better go and get clean. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Okay. Bye.”

Before hanging up, she waited to hear the click at the other end.

At least her son was over his latest head-cold. Like other preschoolers, he had a constant runny nose, ear-infections and skin rashes that could only be described as “viral.” Any mother knew that the first years of contact with other children brought an endless string of respiratory and gastric infections. He was owed more swimming lessons than he’d been well enough to attend.

She wondered whether Alf Carney had children. Surely not, she thought, otherwise he would have known that was a normal process in young children, not pathological, and certainly not diagnostic of scurvy.

She picked up the second autopsy report—of another child, an eight-week-old boy, with the same surname as the first. Retinal hemorrhages, bruised chest and forearms; the pattern of injuries was disturbingly similar. This time, Carney concluded even more strongly that the child had died from natural causes, with a familial case of Vitamin C deficiency. After all, Carney had examined the baby’s sister, who had died of the same thing a year before. He referred to the previous report as confirmation. Again, the police were unable to act without a PM report that showed abuse or interference.

Anya began to type her report on these first two cases. Two hours later, she had referenced all her comments and felt satisfied that the cases should be reopened, based on the overwhelming evidence of abuse. In developed countries, scurvy was virtually unheard of, except in cases of severe malnutrition associated with abuse. Even milk contained Vitamin C, so small children were extremely unlikely to get this condition, even on a diet lacking fruit and vegetables.

With ten more files to review, Anya glanced at the clock. Too early to sleep and with only reality shows on TV, she decided to find out how many more cases of scurvy Alf Carney had stumbled upon.

In each of the next four cases, microscopic examinations had been minimally performed. In the sixth file, the slides had been provided for an elderly man found drowned on a beach at the south coast. The man had a number of lacerations to the head, which Carney explained as being post-mortem injuries, despite bleeding from the site. Although some head lesions oozed serum, especially in water, despite no blood flowing through a body, a large amount of blood from a wound suggested arteries still pumped blood at the time of the injury. Anya collected the slides of the biopsy of the skin from the laceration site and headed to the front room, her office. For economy, Anya did her private work downstairs in the front rooms of the terrace house and lived upstairs. During work hours, the kitchen, bathroom and lounge room were shared with her secretary. Once inside, she switched on the light and carried her small microscope over to the desk. After focusing the lens, she could make out individual characteristics of hordes of tiny cells fixed to the glass. The skin specimen showed a rim of early inflammatory changes around the wound. Double-checking, she noted the infiltration of neutrophils, part of the body’s defense system essential for preventing infection while the wound heals.

For these cells to be around the site, the elderly man had had to be alive when the wounds were inflicted. The injuries could not have been sustained after death, by knocking against rocks near where he was found. The diagnosis of accidental drowning needed to be reviewed in the presence of multiple lacerations to the scalp, and they were unlikely to have been self-inflicted. The death had to be deemed suspicious, and the case reopened.

Anya sat back in her chair, astounded by the conviction with which Carney excluded foul play in the most suspicious cases. The implications were enormous.

Could one pathologist possibly be that incompetent, or did he have his own agenda? If Carney’s evidence had stopped murders being investigated, how many killers had escaped prosecution? Like every pathologist, he had worked on thousands of cases over the years. The ramifications for the legal system were enormous. Morgan Tully’s “political time-bomb” was set to go off.