For the second time this morning I left a short message on voicemail. The first was to my pathologist pal, Alistair, who was usually on the sharp end of the job on a Monday morning, catching up on what had been stored in the chillers over the weekend. The second was a more carefully worded message to Naomi, my midwife, to make sure she realised the reason for the call was not urgent and about work, rather than my needing her services for an untimely arrival. We didn’t need any panic stations. Hopefully between the two of them I would get the information I needed about amniocentesis. I always found it way easier to talk, in person, with people I knew when I needed information rather than cold calling. I didn’t really do telephones, so cold calling rated up there with dental appointments and being on traffic patrol. I did have a recommendation of a tame obstetrician, so there was a plan C, but I hoped it wouldn’t come to that.
My rather heated and awkward conversation with Smithy had prompted a need for a walk around the block to regather my composure. That regathering had also involved a coffee and a sausage roll that I was already regretting.
I turned my attention back to previous cases with anything that had involved babies, but this time through the lens of potential medical connections. Logic was telling me that I should narrow it down to cases that had occurred within the last five years. To my mind that time frame was still a bit broad, but the numbers weren’t huge, so it wasn’t like I would be overwhelmed. I also discounted any cases where a successful prosecution had occurred, which included the two most recent Dunedin instances of kidnap. A number of those convicted across the South Island had completed their custodial sentences and to my mind were unlikely to re-offend. Those cases had been more about people desperately wanting a child to the point of doing something irrational, and were the kinds of incidents where, although justice was served, it was still terribly sad and you felt deeply for both the victims and the guilty.
One stumbling block to this train of thought was the completeness of our records. The police files contained profiles and interview transcripts, observations and some medical information that was relevant to those investigations, but not full and comprehensive information about those involved. So there would be an element of following up and reopening the dialogue around that if needed. I wasn’t going to be lacking in things to do.
There was one element of my background investigation into cases involving babies and hospital admissions or medical reporting that I had been putting off. Every time I had been involved in investigating a certain type of case I had been left feeling sickened and traumatised, and I knew that looking back into them was going to be like picking the scab off old wounds. These were the instances where parents had harmed or killed their own children. Where the very people who were supposed to love and care for the most vulnerable had instead turned their hands against them in sometimes utterly cruel and unfathomable ways. Unfortunately, New Zealand had some of the worst statistics in the world when it came to the domestic abuse of children. The thought that on average a child died every five weeks was horrendous. Yet every time another child was murdered at the hands of a parent or caregiver, there was a massive public outcry – ‘this must stop’, ‘something must be done’, ‘the system is broken’ – and there were promises to enact change, train people working with children to identify abuse, address inequity and poverty and social deprivation, and those huge underlying societal drivers, to support communities and families to be good parents, to stop that kind of atrocity from happening again. But nothing ever changed. Children were still being beaten, broken or killed at the hands of their supposed loved ones. The sad truth was, even though New Zealand was a small country, we didn’t seem to be able to protect our most vulnerable tamariki. The statistics were appalling, but of course, they only counted the reported cases, the ones where children were injured enough to need medical attention, or where abuse had been picked up by child-care centres or schools. It didn’t count the invisible ones, the God knows how many children who suffered abuse every day. Fuck, even thinking about it was getting me down.