Betrayed by Carol Thompson Read Free Book Online

to Tracey or anyone who knew of her where abouts. Now, desperate, I phoned the station and had my answer within two minutes. It wasn’t her.
    It was as though another being had invaded my life. I was outside my body, looking down at myself from a height, watching a stranger deal with a situation that I knew was mine to deal with and yet oddly had nothing to do with me. Empty hollows, cold spaces were form ing inside me. All finer feelings had vanished. What was left were the basics, going through the motions of living, yet not living. Each day had become a series of challenges, of smaller or greater traumas and imaginings I had to deal with or endure. I had survived one more . . . now for the next.
    Glen and I drove to the police pound to meet the driver of the low-bed and give him directions on where to take the car. Again the em ployees of the pound were surly and bad mannered. They refused us entry, allowing only the tow truck driver in to fetch the car.
    Once we got through all the red tape, we followed the truck to the premises of a mechanic friend who had promised to check the petrol level and report on any damage. The tank was bone dry – not even a tablespoonful of petrol remained. Glen and I took this opportunity to go through the car in the hope that we might find something that hinted at Tracey’s whereabouts.
    We found a sock and a shirt that didn’t belong to her, bits and pieces of paper with telephone numbers that weren’t in Tracey’s handwriting, and some till slips dated the previous Thursday – the day she’d gone missing. That all this was still there suggested the police hadn’t looked through the car for evidence. Nor were there any smudgy black signs to show that it had been dusted for fingerprints.
    The seat was set as far back as it could go. Tracey wouldn’t have been able to reach the pedals or the steering wheel from so far back, so who had driven the car? Or had the police moved the seat? We had no answers.
    We took from the car everything we thought may be important, including a strange copper pendant that neither of us had seen before. It looked like the icon of the Zimbabwe bird depicted on that country’s flag. Later, when we asked her friends about it, none of them had any idea what we were talking about. Where it came from remains a mystery.
    The seeds of doubt about our police department’s competence and commitment had started to germinate in my mind, but with no other alternatives to help in finding my child, I couldn’t afford to nurture them, couldn’t allow them to grow.
    Not knowing what else to do I drove to the office where I worked, to make more posters and flyers to paste on windows. The company I worked for leaned over backwards to help with printing and lami nating the posters and flyers. E-mails were being sent around the country with my contact details, asking for help in finding Tracey. The phone rang and rang, calls from strangers and friends alike, offering what help they could.
    Around mid-morning a phone call from the missing person’s division raised my hopes – only to dash them once again.
    â€œWhat’s happened to the missing person’s report?” the woman asked. “We haven’t got it yet, so we were wondering if maybe your daughter has been found and that’s why the police station hasn’t de livered it?”
    Incensed at this further delay, I gave her the incident number and the name of the person I’d spoken to at the police station so that she could find out what had happened to the report. And then, because I no longer trusted anyone, I phoned the local police station myself.
    â€œOh yes, looks like we haven’t sent the docket to the missing per son’s division yet. We’ll try and get it through to them by next week,” the officer said.
    Why so long? Why had it already taken nearly a week? These weren’t just bits of paper to be