Missing in never never l.., p.46
Missing in Never Never Land, page 46
Ross let it run to the end without a word spoken, then he turned it off and faced them saying.
“My final question was very foolish. I don’t know why I asked it. After that I wished I had not. At first the other side wanted me to take that part out. I persuaded them not too, this picture speaks far louder than words.
“We can all see, despite the new life she has made, there is a connection to the old. I do not doubt for a minute that she is totally genuine in saying she remembers nothing, her mind must have walled off that part as a last resort of self protection. But I would hate to put her in the witness box and start questioning her about that time. I would equally hate for it to happen from a journalist or third party.
“I think the best thing we can do is to allow her to quietly disappear and get on with her new life, to respect the wish that she clearly stated at the start of this video not to know about her past.
“I am troubled that, even then, her past may come back to haunt her. But I would not like it on my hands to cause it. I fear it may not end well.
“It is a strange thing. In many ways she is a delightful and lovely person. She has great warmness and kindness. It comes through very strongly, as if all her bad parts of her character have been taken away and locked out of reach. Now all that remains is a kind and gentle shell.
“But the box of horrors is still there, buried somewhere. I would not wish to open it. When I spoke those words, the terror on her face was something I would never wish to see again. You can only glimpse it in this video. But that is enough to understand what a bad place that must be for her.
“Perhaps with time she will find a way to deal with it, perhaps her family can help. But for us, here today, the kindest thing, in fact the only decent thing we can do, is not to harm her any more. So I leave it in your hands to find a legal way to let her get on with her new life. In effect that is what my report says, though it uses more long words. I am sure you have already read it, but there is nothing in it that you cannot see here with you own eyes.
“Her memory loss is genuine and it exists to protect her mind from something at the furthest edge of terror. It would be most foolish, much more than foolish, to force her to confront that place. I advise you in the strongest possible way, Do not do that!
“Now any questions, gentlemen?”
There were none. Dr Ross Sangster excused himself and left the room.
The remainder of the meeting took but a few minutes. All present agreed to recommend to Executive Government that a pardon be granted to one, Susan Emily MacDonald for her conviction to the murder of Vincent Marco Bassingham.
Beck was left alone to put the executive wheels in motion. By the end of the day it was all prepared for a meeting between the Attorney General, the Chief Minister and his key advisors on Monday. No problems were expected and the formal process was expected to take about a month.
She took a deep breath and said a silent prayer as she walked out of the office that night that it would go smoothly so this girl could be left to get on with her life, never to be found again by those who would do her harm.
Chapter 25 – Confession
Beck was full of trepidation at the thought of meeting Ross for dinner. With the advance notice she had arranged for a neighbor to sleep over with her Mum so she did not need to be back at a particular time.
But, since seeing the video, she had a sense of betrayal of Ross’s trust in what she had told Jacob. She did not think his or her name would ever come out from Jacob. But she had used the ‘in confidence’ information Ross gave her to send Jacob off on his hunt for Susan. Jacob was exactly the type of bloodhound who would succeed.
As the first step this afternoon she had rung Alan, told him about the agreement for the pardon, but also asked him to warn Susan’s friends to be very careful about her location. She suggested to Alan it might be a good idea for Susan to move to another part of Australia as, with documents floating around in senior government which referenced her examination by Ross Sangster in Brisbane, the chance of a leak was much greater. With this came the risk of journalists searching for her in this part of the state.
Alan agreed she was right and said he would pass it on “post haste”.
So, hopefully, that would protect Susan, though Beck did not feel sure. But what most ate at her was she had betrayed the trust of a man she really liked. She hated facing him with this between them. After meeting Jacob she buried the money deep in a drawer with her clothes. Since seeing the video she could not bear to bring it out and touch it, it had such a tainted feel.
As she dressed to go out she looked at her over-strong jaw and nose and wished she had been born softer and prettier. Not that Ross was a drop dead gorgeous type either, but she wanted him to look at her with liking on this night out together. She thought that, perhaps, she was as nervous of him and how he looked at her as she was of the secret she held. After looking in the mirror yet again she gave away the effort at covering her face with a layer of make-up, he would have to take her as he found her.
They met in the lobby of the hotel he was staying in. An excellent restaurant with a mixed Asian cuisine, which she loved, was next door. For ease she had suggested it.He was already at the bar when she walked in and he looked as nervous as she felt. That relieved her. Maybe he cared what she thought of him too. He looked well in black pants and a white shirt and his black hair neatly brushed back. He seemed taller than her when she came up to him. Impromptu she leaned up on her toes and lightly kissed his cheek in greeting.
In return he took her hands and looked at her saying, in a quaint, old-worldly way, “You look quite lovely.”
“She blushed with pleasure.”
They fell into casual conversation. She went to talk about the case at first, but he pressed a finger to her lips saying, “It is not so often I get to have dinner with a beautiful girl. How about you begin by telling me about yourself and how you come to be living here, working in such an important position.”
So they chatted about her. She found she did not want to pretend with this man. She told him of her mother again, but in more detail, how she lived with her and cared for her and it left little time for other things. She said, “Really I don’t have much time for going out now so I lead a fairly boring life. My days of being an out there party girl are long gone. It is strange how work has become my sanity outlet.”
He nodded, sympathetic, but more, as if he understood, saying. “My life is not too dissimilar to yours, not that I have the reason you have of caring for another. But I am not easy in most people’s company. I find that small talk does not come easily away from work. I often seem to say silly, inappropriate things. So, like you, my work has become my passion and main outlet. It is where I feel most comfortable. I sometimes wish I was a naturally social person. So it is nice to find a kindred soul.”
After that they followed other lines of conversation as they ate their dinner. He liked listening to classical music and they shared this interest, he had dabbled in photography as had she. The meal drifted by with a pleasant meandering feel. After the meal was done they moved to a lounge chair in a small alcove, sitting side by side but not touching, sharing a glass of port.
Finally he asked her about the case which she quickly updated him on.
He looked both relieved and pleased when she told him about the agreement on the pardon, saying, “I am very fearful for this girl, lest she be discovered. I only hope my own foolish mistake, that question about the crocodile, has not really harmed her. In the second after I said it, even before she had registered it, I wished I could have taken the words back. I think it was my ego, wanting to be clever and play God, the great fixer, rather than just waiting for her own self discovery. I have damaged her trust. I hope I have not damaged more. The thought gives me sleepless nights.
“Have you ever deeply wished you could undo something?”
As he spoke he looked into her eyes with searching intensity, as if seeking to discover kindness in her soul.
She felt shame well up, his mistake seemed such a small thing compared to what she had done, but for him she could tell the pain was real. She knew she must take this chance to unburden herself too. She took his hand which rested on the couch beside her, squeezed it with her own and turned her face back to his, searching his eyes as she gathered courage. “Thank you for telling me, it must be hard to speak of this. In time I think she will come to understand that you meant her no harm.” She took a deep breath to steel herself to go on, collecting her faltering words. “I have done something far worse, a thing that shames me. I harmed you and her in what I did.”
His eyes stared into hers in a kind, nonjudgmental way. She stumbled through the story, the lust and betrayal, the taking of the money, the buying of things to help her mother, and then the day just gone when she met this man again and took his money in return for telling what Ross had told her. She saw the pain in his face as she told of that, a wince. He did not look away.
She finished by saying, “After I saw the video I could not bear to touch the money. It is still in my drawer. I feel, having sold out, I should take it, use it to buy the thing for which I paid the price. Then a small piece of good can follow the bad. But I cannot bear one more betrayal. Before I saw her face and terror I pretended I was harming no-one, even though it was a lie.
“I cannot pretend anymore. In her face I saw the harm I had done to her, now and before. So, if I cannot repair that, I must do no further harm.” Beck’s body was shaking as she spoke; Her mind felt a tearless horror. Ross did not speak but put a big arm around her shoulder and pulled her in against him, cradling her head like a child. They sat like that for some unknown time.
At last he spoke. “What you did was a bad and selfish thing, and cannot be undone. For that you will always carry shame. Now you must learn to let it go. One day, should the chance arise, you must tell these words to those you have hurt, the girl and her man. They are good people and I am sure they would forgive as I do. Then perhaps you can begin to forgive yourself. In the meantime we should do something good with that money. Not use it for your mother, I will make sure she gets the wheelchair she needs without you needing to lie and steal secrets. But you should use it to help others in great need, those you do not know. That way the money will not taint them too.”
Beck put her arm around him and lay her head against his shoulder. “Did anyone tell you, you are a good man and a good friend.”
The weekend passed with them spending most of the time in each other’s company. They were not lovers but their friendship was a deep and intense thing, they had shared their deepest and worst secrets so now they felt as if they could each tell the other anything. On Saturday they drove out to Litchfield National Park. They walked alone along a barren stony track for half an hour until it plunged down a hole in the hills. They swam together in a clear rock-encased pool, both a little self-conscious about their revealed, imperfect bodies. A late wet season water flow plunged over a sheer cliff into this shadowed place below, spraying them with a fine mist that flowed over their bodies and made surreal shapes as they drifted in and out of the fog into the gloomy light.
That night Beck played host at her own house. While she worked away in the kitchen preparing food, Ross charmed her mother and the next door neighbor, a regular visitor who covered for when Beck was away, she was a longstanding friend of the family.
On Sunday night, in fact early Monday morning, she went with Ross to the airport for his red-eye flight to Brisbane. She sat with him at a small table, sipping a coke and keeping odd snippets of conversation going but mostly just sharing silence. Finally, when the flight was called, Ross took her hands, saying, “Thank you for a wonderful weekend; the best in my memory.
“I have been meaning to tell you but was not sure how to say it. I have been offered a job in Darwin, working at the hospital in the Rehabilitation Unit for people with brain injury, both from alcohol and traumatic causes. It sounds exciting, but in truth half the attraction is because you live here. What do you think about me taking it?”
She gave a spontaneous grin. “Well I am glad that is settled. Otherwise I would have had to find a way to move to Brisbane. That would have been tricky with my mother. In the meantime I was thinking of flying down to Brisbane for another weekend, just with you, only if you are free, of course. This time you can play the host.”
Now he gave her a huge smile in return, “I would really like that.”
Chapter 26 – The Returning
Vic had got the warning to move from Anne, via Alan, and took it seriously.
He had been shocked as he had looked at the record of Jane’s interview a few days later with Ross and the barrister. Jane’s upset manner on the day was bad, but she was over the worst when he saw her. Afterwards she had a distant and reserved manner, so unlike her normal sunshine self, which had persisted for a few days, as if for the first time in her remembered life she had lost trust in someone or something, though she had stayed affectionate to him. Fortunately this faded and now she seemed back to normal. But it had reinforced his sense of her vulnerability.
He had gone back to Brisbane the following week for a two hour meeting to decide on the contents of the video to be provided. They debated long and hard over what parts to leave in. Vic insisted that all parts referring to him or her living in the north Queensland aboriginal community must be taken out, lest others who saw it trace her that way. He also wanted the bit showing her acute distress removed, not that it gave anything else away. But it was far too raw and pain filled to let others see, or so he had thought.
Ross argued forcefully, that despite his question being a mistake, her reaction was the thing that would work best in getting the government to understand just how fragile and damaged she was. The barrister supported Ross, saying this picture was far better than any words.
But, even though he had finally agreed to it remaining, the awful sight of Jane’s terrified face frightened him to his core. He had already been thinking it was too dangerous for them to keep staying so close to Brisbane with the series of meetings he had been to there.
It would not require Einstein to start checking the smaller regional towns nearby, particularly checking out the temporary places where people stayed like caravan parks. He considered renting a house in one of the towns around here. But that was fraught with its own problems like the identity documents and references being needed for leases. He could try to find a farmhouse in the area in return for farm work, but his contact network did not run deep in this place and the act of looking would bring him into public view.
He hated the idea of randomly moving Jane and their children around, as much for the children’s sake as hers, they all needed stability and new roots, not an endless, half fugitive existence.
It was a devil’s choice between two evils, the evil of a forever fractured existence, links broken over and over when only half formed, and the evil which lurked in a buried place in her mind, threatening to break out and overwhelm her. He did not know what to do, each choice was not good.
At least with the message about the threat of exposure came the fact there was agreement for a pardon. The other thing that Vic had thought about and talked over with Anne was the need for Jane to have new identity documents. They were needed for marriage, which she mentioned regularly and they were needed for travel as well as the thousand other normal things a person did, health insurance, education, driver’s license – the list went on and on. Of course the primary identity of Susan MacDonald was an English one, so the identity change had to begin there.
He had a half formed plan of her needing a new passport in the Jane Bennet name. That would need a legal name change in England. That part would not be hard to achieve if Jane could remember her former self and give a signed instruction for her name to be changed. But it needed to be done without public knowledge and it needed to be done on her behalf by someone else, which meant her parents.
So he had talked it around with Anne and bounced ideas around with Ross too. They formed a plan for Ross to provide a report confirming Jane’s loss of memory and new identity. Ross would say she needed to be given identity documents in this new name, as it was likely to be very harmful for her to be forced to confront her previous identity.
At the same time Anne would use her legal connections in London to work out how this could be done both legally and in a non-disclosed way. Her idea was that Jane’s parents could sign forms authorizing a name change and then new identity documents could be issued in the Jane Bennet name.
With the wheels in progress for a pardon Vic also thought he should seek agreement from the NT government for this course of action, Alan was pretty good in getting things like this sorted as he had already shown.
So Vic was hopeful that within four to six weeks, shortly after the pardon was granted, Jane would have identity documents in her own name. Then, using these, they could get on with their lives together in a faraway place.
But this did not solve the conundrum of where to go now. He knew they needed a new home, one not easy to get to, one where the people could be trusted not to let the cat out of the bag. It had to be a place where there was control of others who came and went and, importantly, one where Vic could do something useful while he waited. He tried to think of all the remote parts of Australia where he had not been, at first thinking that, if he was unknown, no one would guess to look for him in these places. But, if he did not know the people in a small place, he would stand out like the proverbial dogs balls, not to mention Jane and their children. Their unknown status would make them subject of idle gossip and curiosity and that brought danger.
At last it came to him. He had to go back to where he was known and trusted, and with that came a trust in others. One of the stations at the outer edges of the Alice Springs district would be best. These were small family owned units, despite their immense size. Many had extra houses for workers or outstations. As of now most stations had yet to take on workers for the cattle season. He could think of several such places, it would need a bit of careful inquiry to work out which served best, for both the place and him. In such a place the only person who would know he was there would be the station manager. Most were already good personal friends. People from outside could only get to these stations with the manager’s agreement.
