Even an hour later I was still chuckling at the grand entrance and rescue performed by Miriam Hardcastle. I couldn’t resist the urge to rewind and replay the expressions on The Boss’s and Smithy’s faces. If only I knew how to make a GIF.
I’d gone back to the two more recent abductions that had happened in Dunedin. Thankfully, in both cases the babies had been found, safe and sound, and both people responsible had been successfully prosecuted. Given that the guilty parties were still in jail, contemplating the foolishness of their actions, I didn’t think they were likely involved in the current situation. But it was still good to revisit them and see how the investigation had unfurled, follow the trail of breadcrumbs that had led to their arrest.
The first case was astonishing really. On a winter’s morning in July, two years ago, Anne-Marie Metcalff had walked into the main entrance of Dunedin Hospital wearing jeans and sneakers, a standard-issue, oversized, black puffer jacket, and a dark-green beanie. She’d walked through the foyer, past the cafés and main enquiries desk, and taken an elevator to the second floor and the Queen Mary Maternity Centre. There she had coolly walked down the corridor until she had come to the room occupied by Stephanie Graham and her day-old daughter, Katie. Unfortunately for all concerned, Stephanie was otherwise occupied in the bathroom at the time. Anne-Marie had exited the room with a much fuller, zipped-up puffer jacket and had calmly walked out of the hospital to the car she had parked in the five-minute parking space out front, then driven off into the sunrise. Stephanie had exited the bathroom to every mother’s worst nightmare.
It had taken a full week before the trail of crumbs had led to Anne-Marie’s home in South Dunedin. A week in which the Dunedin public had been howling for answers as to how someone could walk into the supposedly safe environment of a hospital and take a baby; a week in which it became abundantly clear how desperately understaffed the maternity centre was at the time. A week that was probably the longest of the Graham family’s life.
At the trial, under cross-examination, Anne-Marie’s partner, Jimmy, was asked why he hadn’t questioned her arriving home with a newborn, why he hadn’t reported it, done something about it? He had replied that she had really wanted a baby. They hadn’t been able to conceive, so when she’d said she was going to go get one for them, and then arrived home with a bundle of joy, he was happy and didn’t question it any further. That, more than anything else in the case, I found impossible to comprehend.
The second case was something you’d think could only happen in the movies. Brendon Edgar had popped down to the local corner dairy to get some milk and bread. He’d taken three-week-old Tiffany along in the car in the hope that that after half an hour of epic crying the ride would send her off to sleep, and give him and his frazzled partner some longed-for relief. The ploy had worked, as by the time he’d reached the dairy, via a fairly indirect route, the wee poppet had finally nodded off. Given the circumstances, he was loathe to wake her up just for the minute he’d be in the shop, so he took a chance and left her snoozing in her car seat in the back. Unfortunately for him, that minute was all it took for nineteen-year-old Clint Sutherland to steal the vehicle. Clint thought he was getting a Mazda Demio. What he was rather un-nerved to discover fifteen minutes later was he had scored a Mazda Demio with a bonus Tiffany Edgar. His panicked response had been to dump the car, complete with now screaming Tiffany Edgar, by the Marlow Park playground and disappear on foot into the relative anonymity of the streets of St Kilda. It didn’t take other parents making use of the park long to investigate the source the noise, and much to the relief of all concerned, the child was reunited with her parents pretty quickly. I didn’t even want to imagine the guilt that Brendon Edgar must have felt that day, and I vowed that I would never, under any circumstances, leave this poppet in the car alone. I was also pretty certain that if, when released, Clint decided to resume his former profession, he’d be checking the back seats from now on.
One of the hit-you-in-the-face things that connected all of the past cases and the Aleisha Newman one, was the baby concerned was a girl. The four cases were completely unrelated, but it did get me to thinking about what other things they had in common, so I could apply them as general filters when looking at the Newman case.
What were the patterns here? I asked myself. Although I had a disparate collection of material spread across my desk, there had to be some commonality, something I was missing.
Well, there was commonality in the obvious things. All of the babies were healthy, of good weight and robust. There was only one that had needed a little time under lights for jaundice, and that took care of itself quickly. They were all newborns, with the oldest being only two weeks. That meant looking into what was particularly special about newborn babies, other than them being gorgeous little bundles of joy. Were there any special characteristics only a newborn held? Yes, some babies came out looking overcooked and older than they were, or larger than the average, but on the whole, newborns had quite a distinct look. That whole squidged-in nose thing, and the way they seemed to have a ‘Who turned on the lights? What the heck is this place? When will I be fed next?’ expression.
What assumptions was I making that were pulling my focus in the wrong direction? The word ‘assumption’ make me smile. Dad’s catch phrase ran through my head: ‘When you assume you make an ass out of u and me.’ It was good to be able to replay his voice in my head and it bring a smile rather than tears. That milestone was only a recent development, and still somewhat tenuous. In the spirit of the old boy, I went analogue and pulled an A4 piece of paper out of the drawer and reached for a marker pen.
I wrote THE BABIES at the top of the page in careful block letters.
My pen wavered above the page. What was the grandest assumption I was making so far?
So far I had only considered that a man would have the wherewithal to cut open a woman to take her unborn child. Could a woman do that? Would a woman do that? Of course, the answer had to be yes. Women had committed astounding atrocities over the course of history. Violence and horror were not the domain of men alone.
I wrote a big MAN? and then WOMAN? on the page.
What else was I assuming?
I had only thought of the murder in terms of someone doing it for their own direct benefit. What if it wasn’t for them? What if they were in fact taking babies or getting something from babies to order?
Personal benefit and For a third party went down.
There would have to be a hell of a lot of dollars involved for someone to kill and carry the risk of being caught if it was babies for order. But then, history was full of accounts of people killing to supply a demand for everything from cadavers for medical dissection to organs for the transplant market – we’d all heard the urban myths about people getting blind drunk and waking up minus a kidney. The lust for money could make people go to extraordinary lengths.
What about the focus? Was this actually about the babies? What about the parents? Was there something special or distinctive about either of them?
The Mums and The Dads occupied the space in the middle of the page.
I thought back to Paul’s comments about someone taking care to match for physical characteristics such as ethnicity. How far would someone go to make a baby fit in, look the part? Would people hunt for blondies, or red-heads? Someone tall?
While I was at it a thought popped into my head. And I wrote the words planned and unplanned – referring to the crime, rather than the pregnancy.
The fact that the object used to remove the baby was extremely sharp suggested that there was a degree of planning involved. Most people didn’t just happen to carry around a finely honed knife or surgical scalpel. When in civilian mode I carried one of those little Leatherman multitools in my bag, because you never knew when you might need a little set of pliers or a pocket knife. Being an ex-girl guide the ‘be prepared’ motto was firmly embedded in my brain, but I didn’t think I’d be able to inflict that much damage with its four-centimetre blade.
My eyes drifted up to the clock on the wall. Not that I needed a clock to tell me it was lunchtime, my stomach had been doing its very best to remind me of its approach. One of the features of this pregnancy was an obsession with food. I was looking forward to the day when my life didn’t revolve around the next meal.
I was worse than a Labrador.