Chapter 16

Little Girls Lost

It had begun and ended with a birthday. The interceding five and a half weeks had been the longest Delma Collins had ever experienced.

Every morning, Delma had risen with the hope that it would be the day they found her daughter. Day after day, that hope flickered alongside her despair. It never went out. At first, she silently wished for Nichole’s return by her birthday. Then she spoke it out loud, begging the police to find her by the day she turned 17. As fate would have it, she got her wish. Clutching a dozen red roses, Nichole’s favourite, Delma stood waiting. The anguish in her face was as honest and direct as her nature. It was her daughter’s birthday and she was dead.

It didn’t seem that long ago that Delma had brought her home as a newborn from Goulburn Base Hospital. Nichole’s big sister, Liza, who was eight, had hung around the house with her friends crooning over the baby in her bassinet. At bath time, there had been a mass of hands trying to reach in and put water on her. She had been so little. Since then, 17 years had passed.

The last time Nichole had come home had been for Delma’s birthday. Visiting from camp, where they had been celebrating the 15th birthday of her friend, Lauren Barry, she had bounced in, her skin bright from the fresh air, given her mother a hug and a kiss and handed her a card. Inside there had been poem she had written. Delma had smiled at her daughter, ‘Oh, that’s a gorgeous poem, darling.’ It had been the first time she had written a poem. Nichole had laughed and tossed her head back, her blue eyes dancing beneath her metal-framed glasses while her soft blonde hair jumped about her shoulders.

‘Yeah. It’s pretty good, isn’t it?

Minutes later, Nichole had grabbed her beach towel and headed for the door. A typical teenager, she’d spent the token amount of time with her family – her friends were waiting. Sissy, the nickname she gave her big sister, Liza, wasn’t arriving until that afternoon, and staying home, well, that was just boring compared to camp.

Graeme Collins stood by his wife, Delma, under a canopy of trees. They were standing in what should have been a tranquil and beautiful area of bushland, thick with ferns and shaded by blue eucalypts, but all that had been changed by the events of the last five and a half weeks. Now it was an evil, eerie place, darkened by the ghosts of his daughter and her friend whose lives had been terminated here.

There had been a gaggle of media on the bitumen road just as they had turned onto the dirt track. As they had driven through the throng, they had been greeted with a barrage of flashes, some of the journalists even mounting the bonnet in order to get the best picture. Graeme could understand that they had a job to do; his only worry had been that he would run one over.

However, this was intrusive. The helicopter was sitting about 30 metres above tree level waiting for them to come into view. A mass of wind and dirt whipped around them, the noise drowning out the sounds of the bush. Graeme wanted to be silent with his thoughts, needed to be alone with his grief. He knew Nichole’s death had been painfully slow, her screams perhaps muted by the manner in which she was murdered. The degree of her terror was inconceivable. She may even have watched as her younger friend was killed before her.

That morning, a reporter and her camera operator had arrived on the Collins’s doorstep, asking if they were going out to Cann River. Graeme had told them ‘no’ and asked to be left alone. Yet, they had staked out the house just up from the driveway and begun to follow as he and Delma headed out of Kalaru. When they dropped back, he’d assumed they had decided to adhere to his request, to leave them alone. Now he knew that they had radioed ahead and their chopper had taken over the pursuit. The media had turned from a great help to a pack of piranhas.

It had been the Chief Inspector’s decision that they go no further. Now, it was a waiting game. They were waiting for their privacy to be respected. The helicopter was waiting for them to come out from under the trees and the rest of the journalists were waiting for them to leave. A police officer got on his phone and instructed someone to get a message to the chopper.

‘Tell them if they don’t get out of the sky I’ll have them shot out of it!’

Within minutes, the almost deafening ‘chop, chop’ grew quieter and then disappeared. In its place came the sounds of trickling water, birds and the traffic on the nearby road.

‘Now we can continue,’ the Chief Inspector announced.

Numbly, Graeme stepped forward. He knew they had almost reached the spot. He had seen the log lying across the river below them as they descended the slope. The sharp, almost sweet smell of decay was inescapable.

Not far from Graeme and Delma Collins, the parents of Nichole’s friend, Lauren, Cheryl and Garret Barry, also struggled down the hill. Cheryl was carrying a bouquet of purple, violet and mauve flowers. Purple was Lauren’s favourite colour. The bouquet was vivid against the greens and natural ochres of the bush. Shaking, Cheryl was helped a little further down the slope. Already petite, the weeks of searching had stolen any remains of fat from Cheryl’s body. Her face was gaunt. Softly spoken and gentle in her anger, at this very moment, like those around her, she was engulfed in her own thoughts. Her heart was breaking.

Progress towards the site had been slow for the mother of two. The scrub was fairly dense and just days before her arm had been taken out of plaster and it was still weak. She and Lauren had been on their way to the State Athletics finals in Sydney when the accident happened. Driving up the wet and slippery bends on the way into Kiama from Berry, she had somehow lost control of the car and hit the side of a wall. The police told her that there was a mark from her car just before the top of the barrier where they had hit that was a couple of metres high at least. The car had somersaulted and landed back on its tyres. It had been concertinaed. The roof had caved in and all the sides had been dented. Her daughter, Lauren, had stepped out without a scratch on her, but Cheryl had broken her arm. All the windows on her side of the car had been smashed and she had to pick glass from herself for a long time, but they had been lucky. Or had they?

Somewhere, in the back of her mind, Cheryl reasoned that if only her daughter had broken her leg, then she wouldn’t have been able to walk off the night she disappeared. She pushed aside the thought. ‘If onlys’ took you in circles, they didn’t change the past. She refocused on the movement around her. There seemed to be an army of police busily moving about through the scrub. Below her was the gully in which the girls were forced to strip and wash away the evidence of their numerous rapes. It would be an image forever tied to future intimacy. She was tired, nervous and angry. The helicopter had further frayed her nerves.

Lauren had been an easy child. Unlike Cheryl’s first child, she had been born in two hours. The speed of the labour had made Cheryl violently ill, but her daughter had smiled her way into the world. Lauren had weighed seven pounds three ounces and was 21 and a quarter inches long. She had been a chubby, happy little thing. At ten weeks, when she had had her second set of vaccinations, the muscle in her left eye had collapsed and she had lost her pupil. The injections had been for diphtheria, whooping cough, tetanus and polio. They hadn’t caused the collapse but had escalated the process, as her muscles had already been weak. Over the next 16 months, she had to endure four major operations. The first had been when she was nine months old. Cheryl had watched her daughter being wheeled from the theatre. She had looked so small on the huge trolley. On her pillow had been the smallest teardrop of blood.

When the muscle in Lauren’s right eye had collapsed, she had returned to hospital. This time, there had been complications and her eye had swollen like a golf ball in its socket. They had been raced to Sydney, and for two hours the surgeon had fought to undo the mess the previous doctor had made. In the early stages it was thought the muscle would be lost, but somehow the doctor had managed to undo the tangle of knots and reset her eye. Later, the other eye had also needed to be readjusted.

Throughout the whole ordeal, Lauren had smiled. During the interminable hours in waiting rooms, the invasive procedures conducted by the nurses and the operations, she had remained happy. She was a perfect child.

The girls’ parents reached the base of the slope and one of the police officers quietly guided them to an area near the fallen log. Cheryl’s heart sank. Beside a stagnant pool of water was the imprint of where her daughter’s broken body had lain.