Debi Marshall - Lambs to the Slaughter

August, 2008. A melange of humanity, alienated and ragged, spews from the overcast, dank streets of Melbourne onto the early morning trams. Everywhere seems a cacophony, surreal and Kafkaesque, as though I have inadvertently stepped onto a post-apocalyptic movie set. The tram has crisscrossed the city and its geographical social divide from leafy, upmarket Hawthorn, where I am staying, with its lemon-scented cafs and chic boutiques, through the city's jarring heart with its commotion and chaos and onward to North Melbourne, where once-majestic Victorian homes, now in sad disrepair, jostle with car workshops.

A sallow-faced junkie, his vacant eyes fluttering open and closed, incessantly scratches an inside elbow tortured by needle marks before he keels forward in slow motion, on the nod. A man in a business suit watches and turns away, and I am riveted to my seat. Should I rouse this stoned stranger, or should I wait? How long does one wait; what is acceptable? A moment later he is on his feet, lurching distractedly off the tram. He lists along the footpath as a young couple, gaunt as corpses, with pockmarked transparent skins and the scatty agitation of speed freaks, hurl foul abuse at one other, oblivious to the sideways glances of passers-by or the irony of slugging it out at nine o'clock in the morning in front of an advertisement that warns, 'Ice: It's a dirty drug.'

Two women in soiled black tracksuits that fail to hide their paunches swig from long-neck bottles of beer as they stagger onto the tram. 'What the fuck're you lookin' at?' they slur at a bewildered elderly man before they, too, stumble off at the next stop. I hunker down with my book, trying to look unobtrusive; trying not to stare with repulsed fascination at the middle-aged woman sitting directly in front of me who loudly and continually grunts while caressing the bearded growth on her chin. Tram brakes squeal, ambulances scream past, gaudy illuminated signs compete for attention. My nerves rattle.

The cloistered, hushed inner sanctum of Victoria's Public Record Office, which houses the state's archives, is a blessed respite from the bedlam outside. Security staff bid me a quiet good morning and assign me a locker in which to store my personal belongings. No handbags, mobile phones or pens are allowed inside this library, where precious archival material is handled by staff wearing soft cotton gloves. The file that I ordered a week ago the Body Card Series, created when a body arrives at a hospital and used to determine whether it is necessary to hold an inquest is waiting for me, a plump manila folder bulging with its promise of details to flesh out the forty-year-old story I am researching. Inside are the depositions of witnesses and police, autopsy reports and photographs.

I settle in at the long table, pencil and paper at the ready, and open the file. For more than twenty years, as a journalist and author, I have written about crime. In yellowing coronial files and the depositions of police witnesses; in the eyes of parents weeping for lost, abducted children; in the thousands of hours researching and writing true-crime books and countless magazine stories, I have observed the worst of human depravity, the darkest excesses of the human soul. I have written stories about paedophiles, rapists, serial killers and child killers. So many stories: the savagery of the so-called 'bodies in the barrel' Snowtown killers; the murder of seventeen-month-old Deidre Kennedy, whose killer dressed her in women's underwear before throwing her body on top of a toilet block; the unsolved serial killings of the beautiful young women from the salubrious suburb of Claremont, Perth, Western Australia. So many terrible, terrible stories: the Port Arthur tragedy, and the mother who broke her silence after four years and sobbed in my arms as she recounted how she had thrown herself over her fifteen-year-old daughter's body in a vain effort to protect her from Martin Bryant's bullets. He shot the girl anyway: in the head at point-blank range. Or the mother of another teenage girl, abducted from a bus stop, who wept that her daughter could not have recognised even one of the four men who had raped and killed her, as she was totally blind. Stories told me by police officers and paramedics, too unpalatable for the daily press, of parents bartering their children with old men for sex in exchange for cigarettes and mothers holding down their crying kids while their step-fathers rape them. Stories told me by people cradling secrets so bleak they stay permanently off the record; stories so horrendous that they beggar belief.