Blood Sisters

by Caroline de Costa

  When Cass called the number, a crisp female voice told her that the line had been disconnected, and Telstra confirmed that the Hawthorne School of English had ceased operations six weeks previously and all its schools throughout Australia had been closed. It now had only a post office box as an address.

  This was interesting. Whose idea had it been that Dorentina Lavides come to Australia? And what were they expecting her to do when she got here?

  And Number 1A Sheridan Street? Cass got up and went to the window. Yes, 1A Sheridan Street was right next door. It was the Cairns Court House. Hmm, someone was playing funny buggers. And it probably wasn’t Dorentina Lavides.

  Maria Ramos, then. This was the name on the motel receipt they’d found in the handbag from Room 19 at Palmlands. There were dozens of women with this name on Facebook, and many more listed on the Immigration database, with Australian, South American, Spanish and Philippine passports. Narrowing it down to those under 25, there was a Maria Ramos who was a Spanish exchange student in Melbourne, studying English and international law. There was the daughter of a South American diplomat in Canberra. There was a Maria Ramos aged 25 with joint Australian and Spanish citizenship, daughter of a couple who owned a Spanish restaurant in Wollongong.

  And there was a Maria Ramos who had entered Australia from Singapore in mid-2010, travelling on a Philippines passport with had a student visa for a year, but who gave an Australian address that proved to be fictitious. She had never exited Australia on that passport. Cass made a note to check that out—what was the address? She had never been reported as a missing person. She was born on 15 February 1989 in Angeles City. No one seemed to have taken any interest in her whereabouts in the past two years.

  No one had yet called or phoned, looking for Dorentina, either.

  ‘How about we check that convenience store in Mooroobool—the one on the receipt?’ Drew suggested, when Cass told him about the visas and the failure of Maria Ramos to leave Australia. ‘Using the photo?’

  ‘That might work.’

  Cass got herself another coffee and one for Drew before they headed out to the pool car and drove the few kilometres to Mooroobool. It was a warm, dry winter’s day, with a sky empty of clouds. Cass soaked up the sun on her face before entering the store, bracing herself for the blast of air-con she knew would hit her.

  Standing behind the cash register was an overweight seventeen-year-old with a try-hard moustache and a bad case of acne, and a woman of about fifty with grey hair in a ponytail and nicotine-stained fingers. Cass produced her ID, and Drew pulled out the photos found in the motel.

  ‘I’m Detective Senior Constable Diamond. We’re trying to identify a young woman who may have made some purchases here last week. Can you look at these photos to see if you recognise her—this one here?’

  ‘Nah, never seen her,’ the boy said, a bit too promptly. The woman gave him a long look.

  ‘Why do you want to find her?’ she asked.

  ‘We want to identify her,’ said Cass, ‘not necessarily find her. I’m sorry I can’t tell you more. If you think she might live around here that would be helpful to everybody, including her family if she has one.’

  ‘Well,’ said the woman. ‘I think you’ll find those girls live in the units around the corner.’ The boy giggled but she silenced him with a stare. ‘Has something happened to her?’

  ‘I’m sorry, I can’t tell you that,’ answered Cass. ‘Can you tell me exactly where this is?’

  ‘Number 21. Unit 5, I think. Second from the end. They don’t always get up too early, but.’ She glared at the boy. ‘Poor things,’ she said. ‘They’ve got to earn a living. Just like everyone else.’

  Returning to the car, Cass and Drew drove around the corner and parked outside Number 21. A row of six two-storey breezeblock units extended back along a piece of land that had once held a Queenslander and a large garden. Wheelie bins were tipped over in the street outside and food wrappings blew in the morning breeze. The units’ pale green paintwork was in urgent need of refreshment. Sagging palings divided each yard from its neighbour’s and a row of spindly palms stretched along the side fence.

  Drew led the way along the cracked cement driveway that ran in front of each unit and ended in a parking area at the back. Washing was hanging from the balconies of the upper floors. At Number 2, a couple of windows were missing glass and were boarded over. The sounds of daytime television floated from Number 3, a baby cried in Number 4. In the rear carpark stood a ute and an old Toyota. And a very shiny new, white Ford Falcon. Drew nodded at this.

  ‘A bit out of place,’ he said to Cass.

  ‘Yep.’ She pressed the bell at Number 5. There was the faint sound of voices from within the house. She waited a moment then pressed the bell again.

  There was fumbling at the door leading onto the balcony above them. Then it opened and a young Asian woman leaned over the balcony. She was clutching a sarong around her breasts and her waist-length hair was tangled. She eyed her visitors warily.

  ‘What d’you want?’

  ‘Detective Diamond, Cairns Police,’ said Cass, looking up and showing her ID. ‘We’re looking for someone who might know Dorentina Lavides or Maria Ramos.’

  The woman’s eyes widened.

  ‘What happened?’ she asked. From behind her in the house came a male voice: ‘Bitch, get back in here and get on with what you’re paid for’.

  ‘We’d like to talk to you,’ Cass said gently. ‘Can we come back?’

  ‘Ten minutes,’ said the woman. ‘You come back in ten minutes, okay? But Maria, she’s not here. And the other one, I never heard of her.’

  Cass and Drew walked back to the car to wait, moving it so they could watch the driveway of the unit block. Two small children emerged from the front unit and stared at them. Across the way curtains twitched at a window.

  Seven minutes later the Ford appeared out of the complex, the rubber squealing as the driver rapidly turned right and accelerated.

  ‘Hopefully a happy ending,’ said Drew, as they got out and headed back to Number 5.

  The woman already had the front door open ready for them and was now wearing jeans and a T-shirt. The living room had venetian blinds drawn front and back, and a stained carpet. There was little furniture: a folding table and four plastic chairs, and a single bed that served as a couch, covered with a batik cloth. The kitchen was basic and in need of paint, but it was clean and there were no dishes piled in the sink or rubbish on the floor. Stairs covered with ageing carpet led up from the living area to the top floor, which no doubt consisted of two bedrooms and a small bathroom. In her time in Cairns, Cass had seen dozens of identical units, in which lived a highly transient population.

  ‘What’s happened? What do you want to know?’ the woman demanded. Cass could see she was near to tears. Her English was good though strongly accented.

  ‘There was an emergency call to an Earlville motel last night,’ Cass said. ‘A young woman was attended by the ambulance. I’m afraid she died. So, we’re trying to identify her and thought you might be able to help—’

  ‘Oh! Dead? No! No! No!’ The woman began to weep, collapsing onto the couch. Cass moved across and put an arm around her. Drew produced the two photos that had come from the dead woman’s bag.

  ‘I’m sorry to have to tell you this news,’ Cass said, ‘but we do need to identify her. We found this photo in her bag.’ She held out the photo of the young woman and the baby. ‘Is that Dorentina? Or Maria?’

  ‘Yes,’ sobbed the woman. ‘Yes, no, not Maria, not really. Dorrie. Oh, why did she die? How? How?’

  ‘We’re looking into that,’ answered Cass. ‘Tell me, was this woman, Dorrie, was she Dorentina Lavides or Maria Ramos? Was she your sister? Your friend?’

  ‘No, no,’ said the woman. ‘No, I don’t know her. I don’t know anything.’

  ‘Well,’ said Drew, studying the woman, ‘I think you must know her. I think that’s you there with her in this photo, isn�
�t it?’

  Cass held out the second photo.

  The woman stopped crying and looked defiantly at the two detectives. ‘I don’t know anything,’ she said.

  ‘We’re not here to accuse you of anything,’ Cass said gently. ‘We’re just trying to establish the identity of this person. At the moment her body is at the hospital. We need to find out who she is, who her next-of-kin are, and make sure they are informed. Because of the circumstances of her death she will need to have an autopsy. But we don’t have any reason to suspect you of anything. We just need any help you can give us.’

  ‘I can make one phone call?’ asked the woman.

  ‘Of course,’ said Cass. ‘You can make as many phone calls as you like. You’re not under arrest or anything like that. Do you want us to wait outside?’

  ‘No, I’ll go upstairs. Five minutes.’

  She disappeared up the stairs and soon could be heard talking quickly, anxiety rising in her voice. She was speaking English, but with the door closed between them her words were indistinct.

  ‘How old do you think she is?’ asked Cass.

  ‘More than eighteen, anyway,’ said Drew. ‘I reckon sometimes the guys come here, sometimes they meet them outside, like in the motel. Which, if they’re on student visas is all fine, I guess. Kind of fine, anyway. But I sense something not quite right about it.’

  Cass nodded. ‘Yeah. Something else is going on. I’d like to know who’s on the other end of that phone.’

  There was the sound of a car passing down the drive. Cass stood up and peered through the side of the venetians. A bright blue Toyota stopped in the car park and a middle-aged man got out, walked to the door of Number 5, and rang the bell. Upstairs they heard the woman slide open the balcony door again. Stopping the phone conversation, she leaned over the balustrade.

  ‘Hi big boy! I got trouble here, big trouble. You call me, today, in the afternoon, five o’clock, okay?’

  ‘You told me eleven,’ the man grumbled.

  ‘I got real trouble. I got police here. You call me, five o’clock. I look after you, big boy.’

  At the mention of the police the man turned on his heel and disappeared.

  ‘Well, no doubt about the sex work aspects,’ remarked Drew.

  ‘Yeah,’ replied Cass. ‘Old whitefellas, both of them. Old whitefellas with cash.’

  The woman ended her conversation. The balcony door was banged shut, a toilet was flushed, and then she came back down the stairs. She had found herself some tissues and wiped away her tears, Cass could see, but she still looked shaken. And the toilet flushing—had she been destroying something? Drugs? But they had no warrant and indeed no real grounds for any suspicion, so whatever may have happened, they could do nothing about it.

  ‘Sit down,’ said Cass. ‘We realise this is a big shock for you, but we need to ask you some routine questions. Firstly, can you tell us your name?’

  ‘Marcellina,’ said the woman. ‘Marcie.’

  ‘Family name?’ asked Drew. ‘You speak good English.’

  ‘Lavides,’ replied the woman. ‘I learnt English in my home. The Philippines. From tourists.’

  Drew nodded. ‘I understand,’ he said. ‘And Dorentina Lavides—that would be your sister?’

  ‘My cousin.’

  ‘Do you have other family here in Australia? Who might help you in this situation? The person you just talked to?’

  Marcie looked fearful. ‘No family. All our family died. Most of them in the typhoon. Except Dorrie.’ She began to cry again, huge sobs rising from deep within her chest. Cass fetched her a glass of water from the kitchen and sat beside her on the couch.

  ‘Do you think Dorrie might have gone to the Palmlands Motel yesterday afternoon?’ Cass asked, when the sobbing had subsided.

  Marcie sat silent for a few moments then nodded her head.

  ‘Do you think she met anyone there? Someone who might have caused her death?’ Marcie spread out her hands, then shook her head.

  ‘I don’t know anything,’ she said.

  ‘We need very much to identify Dorrie,’ said Cass. ‘At least, to identify the young woman who died yesterday in the Palmlands Motel. From what you say she is probably Dorentina Lavides. We have quite a lot of information on who she was, her passport and when she entered Australia. We will also be accessing the same information about you. We would like you to come to the hospital with us to identify Dorrie, and probably later, for a short time, to the police station. Can you do that now?’

  The woman stood up. ‘Yes. I am coming. But... this is big trouble for me.’

  3

  Angeles City, the Philippines

  2004–2013

  When Dorrie first arrived in Angeles, Marcellina was living in a single room across the alleyway behind Jack’s Bar. Sometimes she used that room for work. Each day from midday Marcie would sit in the bar with the other girls at Jack’s, waiting for clients, and if one liked her enough to not only buy her a lady drink but also to pay the bar’s ‘fine’, she was his for as long as he wanted. Marcie preferred the clients who were staying in the more expensive hotels in Angeles, partly because the rooms were much nicer and had attached bathrooms with hot water. She also felt safer there as the porters and security people all knew her and knew she was there. In the cheaper places they didn’t care.

  Quite often, though, the client wanted to go to her place, and then she would take him across to her room. The alley was strewn with rubbish and stank of urine, and sometimes children were curled up asleep under sheets of cardboard, but the room itself was clean and smelt of the perfume Marcie always wore. The bed was always made up ready, and the earth floor swept.

  When Dorrie first arrived, Marcie got hold of a mattress and put it on the floor of her room for her young cousin. If she had a client there during the day that was fine: Dorrie was at school, or playing with her friends in the street, or running errands on Fields Avenue for Jack. But until Marcie knew what her clients wanted each evening, Dorrie could not get into her own bed. Instead she curled up in an armchair in the corner of the bar, sometimes watching television, sometimes nodding off. If Marcie turned out to be going to a hotel, she would first help the sleepy girl across into bed. But if she was using her room with a client then Dorrie might spend all night sleeping in the bar.

  Dorrie quickly became a favourite of all the staff, not just at Jack’s but in the other bars and small hotels on their part of Fields Avenue. A lot of clients, too, also tried to talk to her, to give her sweets or money. Marcie had told Dorrie that she absolutely must not take any money, ever. Marcie also told her that the staff at Jack’s would keep an eye out for her when Marcie herself wasn’t there. The day after she first arrived Dorrie had heard Marcie tell Jack that no way was anyone going to pay a bar fine for her ten-year-old cousin.

  Dorrie was very surprised when she first came to Angeles, by the people around her. The women were all Filipina like her: small, slim, many very pretty with long dark hair like hers and Marcie’s, and brown skin. The men, on the other hand, were very large, often very fat, mostly very old, Dorrie thought, and usually bald. Nearly all of them were white. The only white men Dorrie had seen before were the Red Cross workers at the time of the typhoon. They had been different: younger, and not fat. Sometimes Dorrie would stare in amazement at some white man who had an enormous roll of fat drooping over his belt like an apron as he sat in the bar. How had he got to be that way?

  The first time Dorrie ever saw a white woman was about six weeks after she arrived in Angeles. The town lived off tourists, but they were all men. This woman was a nurse in the clinic that Marcie took Dorrie to when she had earache. The woman spoke nicely to Dorrie in Tagalog and looked into her ears with a light. Then she gave Marcie some medicine for Dorrie that she did not have to pay for. On the way home Marcie told her that money to run the clinic came from rich people who lived in some place far away and it was especially for poor people in Angeles. Dorrie wondered why the rich people would
do that for someone they had never met.

  Although Dorrie had been at school in her village and had learned to read and write a little, she was well behind the others in her class when she first started at the primary school run by nuns around the corner from the bar. Marcie had some savings which she had planned to use when she got too old to work in Jack’s Bar—the clients only wanting young, pretty women—but now her priorities had changed. She wanted Dorrie to finish school, to have the chance of getting a good job somewhere far away from Fields Avenue. So Marcie began to use her savings to pay for Dorrie’s schooling.

  The nuns were strict, keeping Dorrie back after school and making her copy her letters again and again. Every afternoon, Marcie made sure Dorrie sat in the bar and finished her homework before she was allowed to run off down the street and play. Determined not to let her big cousin down and knowing how hard Marcie was working to give her a better future, Dorrie made good progress, finishing primary school on time and getting accepted for high school. She began to learn English—she had already picked up a lot just hearing the men on Fields Avenue and in the bar—but it turned out that many of the words she knew were not good words. She borrowed English books from the library and brought them home, sometimes reading the pages out loud to Marcie, who could speak English but not read it. English soon became her best subject.

  When Dorrie was fourteen she got a weekend job cleaning in a supermarket, three blocks away from Jack’s Bar. By then she was taller than Marcie, her breasts were developed and she had her periods. Marcie told Dorrie that they should try to get somewhere else to live; she didn’t like Dorrie having to hang out in the bar each evening now she was older. She told her to be very careful of any man who tried to talk to her.

  When Marcie found that Dorrie was four months pregnant with Little Ronny she was furious, slapping her hard across the face hard and yelling, ‘Stupid girl! Now you’ll have to quit school!’ She knew it was not really Dorrie’s fault, though. Working in the supermarket on her own one Sunday evening, Dorrie had been in no position to fend off the advances of the boss’s son. Marcie had gone to the boy’s father. Your son made my cousin pregnant, she said. He’d laughed in her face. The cousin of a whore is a whore herself, he told her. And my son’s gone to join the navy. He’d pushed her out the door.