Read again the curious tale of Keli Lane who was today sentenced to 18 years for killing her two-day old baby Tegan. This story by Jane Cadzow first appeared in the Good Weekend magazine in July 2005.

It's a story that has enthralled the nation: whatever happened to baby Tegan, born to a woman who kept the pregnancy (and two others) hidden? Jane Cadzow observes the stranger-than-fiction case of Keli Lane.

John Abernethy, the NSW coroner, is grey-haired and gravel-voiced, a phlegmatic character whose career has included the inquest into the deaths of six sailors in the 1998 Sydney to Hobart yacht race and co-ordinating the identification and return of bodies after the 2002 Bali bombings.

"I have been on this bench 21 years," he says early in the inquiry into the disappearance of Tegan Lane, "and nothing surprises me or bothers me now."

But in the days to come, Abernethy's world-weary air gives way to something like incredulity. The more evidence he hears, the more baffled he seems to become. Nothing about this case adds up. "It's surreal, isn't it?" he exclaims at one point. "Bizarre."

On September 12, 1996, a young woman named Keli Lane gave birth to a daughter she named Tegan. Hospital records show she was discharged two days later, at about 2pm on September 14. Her child has not been seen since.

That same afternoon, Lane attended a friend's wedding -a home video shows her arriving at the church at 4pm. Crisply turned out in a cream Country Road suit, she walks hand-in-hand with her then boyfriend, Manly rugby union player Duncan Gillies. As she moves to her place in a pew, she looks unruffled. Almost nonchalant.

What did she do with the baby? On a midwinter Monday morning nearly nine years later, reporters from major newspapers, television networks and radio stations are gathered at Westmead Coroners Court in western Sydney in the hope of finding out.

Sitting in the front row of the public gallery is Keli Lane, her head held high, a bottle of mineral water on the floor at her feet. At 30, she is handsome and athletic-looking, with brown eyes and streaked blonde hair brushed straight back from her forehead. Until recently she was a popular sports mistress at Ravenswood School for Girls on Sydney's North Shore. Now she is at the centre of a mystery that has made headlines around Australia.

The court hears that Lane has changed her story several times in interviews with social workers and police. First, she denied ever having had Tegan. Next she said she gave her daughter to a Perth family. Then she said she handed Tegan to the baby's father, a man named Andrew Morris. Subsequently, she said the surname was Norris. Despite a nationwide search and a public appeal for information, no trace of Tegan or Andrew Morris/Norris has been found.

Perplexingly, Lane's family and closest friends say they had no inkling of Tegan's existence. It seems that she hid the pregnancy from them all - even Gillies, with whom she was sleeping. What's more, police have discovered she secretly had two other babies, one born in 1995 and another in 1999. Both were given up for adoption and, as with Tegan, the people who knew Lane best were unaware of the births.

How was that possible? Admittedly, Lane has broad shoulders and a stocky build. Studying her in court as Detective Senior Constable Richard Gaut details his painstaking efforts to track down Tegan, I can imagine she might carry a pregnancy to five or even six months before it was obvious. But nine months? Quite apart from the difficulty of disguising a swollen belly, it is hard to believe she could have had three babies in five years without telling anyone - not her best friend, her mother, or the footballer who loved her.

Like everyone else, I am intrigued. I want to know what happened to Tegan. And I want to know more about Keli Lane. In the back of my mind is a conversation I had with Bruce Falson, coach of the Australian junior women's water polo team in which Lane played at the world championships in Quebec in 1995.

At the elite level, water polo is a fast and furious sport, and Falson described her as a formidable competitor.

"She was very tough," he said. "She was probably not as gifted as some of the other players as far as some of the skills go, but she was really, really tough."

Falson had plenty of respect for Lane. She took no prisoners in the pool, "but out of the water, she was a lovely young girl".

Detective Richard Gaut is a tall and earnest 43-year-old with closely cropped brown hair and a mild demeanour. Since taking charge of the hunt for Tegan nearly three years ago, he has followed hundreds of leads, trawled through birth registers and electoral rolls and spoken to dozens of men named Andrew Morris or Norris. In mid-June, he thought the quest might be over. After an appeal to schools across Australia to comb their enrolment records for girls the same age as Lane's child, he spoke to the parents of a fair-haired eight-year-old in south-east Queensland. Her name was Teagen (not Tegan), her birth certificate showed her father's surname was Norris and she was born on September 12, 1996. But her mother insisted the girl was hers - and DNA tests proved her correct.

So here we are in court, hushed and expectant. The role of a coroner is usually to inquire into deaths - violent deaths, accidental deaths and those of unknown cause. An inquest is a fact-finding expedition. If it reveals that an identified person contributed to a fatality, the matter is referred to the state's director of public prosecutions and criminal charges may be laid. In this case, though, we have no body. The first step is to determine whether Tegan is dead or alive.

In one of the video recordings of Gaut's interviews with Lane at Manly police station, he asks her if she killed her daughter. "No, I did not!" she replies, sounding outraged.

"I did not do anything like that."

Gaut: "Did someone else?"

Lane: "No. No."

Gaut: "All right. So, like I said, I'm going to have to make a lot of inquiries now. I'm going to have to go..."

Lane: "Please, don't."

The overwrought woman in the grainy film clip bears little resemblance to the portrait Lane's friends paint of her. "She was always a very happy-go-lucky, enthusiastic person who really took life on with a lot of gusto," actor Allison Cratchley says in the witness box. Cratchley - who played police diver Emma Woods in the TV series Water Rats - grew up with Lane in Manly and used to think of her as a younger sister. But she was always aware that a certain reserve lay beneath her exuberance. "Keli was not the type to share intimate personal details," she says.

Now Lane's life is to be laid bare. One by one, colleagues and acquaintances are called to give evidence about her - to recall incidents, venture opinions, repeat half-remembered conversations. Journalists feverishly take down their words, pens flying across notebooks as we wait for the quote that will make the evening news and tomorrow's papers. Unlike me, most in the group are hardened court reporters, knowledgeable about everything from arson to armed robbery, and veterans of any number of grisly murder trials. A tabloid journalist says in a break in proceedings that this case leaves her cold - there are too many anomalies and imponderables. But the weirdness is precisely what appeals to the rest of us. At morning tea and lunchtime, while some of our number stand outside smoking and talking urgently into mobile phones, others huddle in circles swapping theories

on Tegan's fate.

In Cratchley's testimony, she mentions an early boyfriend of Lane's named Aaron Tyack. "It was a very serious relationship and Keli was always in love with Aaron," Cratchley says. Tyack is not on the witness list, so at the first opportunity I phone him at his present home in Torquay, south-west of Melbourne. "She was great - really outgoing," he says of Lane. "Everyone who knew her liked her."

And a lot of people did know her. "Manly can be a very cliquey place - it's like a small town," says Tyack. Lane's family had lived in the area for decades. Her father Robert, a senior policeman, coached local rugby union teams. Her younger brother Morgan played rugby and, like Lane, belonged to the surf club. According to Tyack, who was then in the national junior kayaking team, "she was like the golden girl down there. Blonde hair and tanned. I thought she was beautiful."

In 1994, Lane met Duncan Gillies, who must have appealed to her family in at least one respect: he played rugby for Manly. In court, several people remark on how well the pair hit it off. "They were almost the life of

the party. They had a good time," says Kati Cummins, who has been a friend of Lane's since high school.

Cummins hung out with Lane at the beach and the surf club but wasn't a member of Gillies' fan club. "Duncan was a real boy's boy," she says. "I didn't like him."

Neither did another witness, Lisa Andreatta, one of Lane's fellow students at the Australian College of Physical Education at Homebush. Andreatta's objection? "Just his character. Just the way he treated people."

I am transfixed by this stuff. No detail is too small to capture my attention. I go to sleep at night thinking about the case. Mull over it when I wake up. It seems to me that in Abernethy's bland and functional courtroom (flecked blue carpet, a blond-wood bar table, rows of lights recessed into a low ceiling) a completely compelling human drama is unfolding.

Counsel assisting the coroner is Sergeant Rebbecca Becroft, who wears pinstriped suits and a short-back-and-sides haircut. She looks severe but turns out to be a soft touch. When reporters gather round to ask questions during adjournments, she is as willing to explain the intricacies of the Coroners Act as to give us the spellings of names we might have missed. Nervous witnesses respond gratefully to her matter-of-fact manner as she guides them calmly through their evidence.

Nevertheless, she gets little sense out of Juan Ramirez, a water polo associate of Lane who rented a room at Duncan Gillies' house in suburban Gladesville. When Gaut interviewed him in the course of the investigation, Ramirez said Gillies had once told him that Lane was pregnant and had gone away. He also recalled Gillies talking of the need to keep this from her parents. But by the time Ramirez takes the stand, he isn't sure what Gillies said - in fact, he cannot be certain the conversation took place at all. The more he is questioned, the more vague he becomes. "We need to know the truth," presses Becroft. "I need you to be honest with me." But it's no good. Ramirez's memory has gone hazy. It's as if he has lost interest in the whole thing.

Gillies, by contrast, appears keen to help. He now lives in Ireland but has returned to give evidence. Aged 33, he is lean and sporty, with an open-necked shirt and a spark of laddish good humour. Ramirez, referring to Gillies' busy night-life, called him "a player". When Becroft asks what Gillies understands the phrase to mean, he all but winks at his audience. "An upstanding, intelligent, good-looking member of the community," he says.

Most of us laugh, but not Lane. At times she has shown a lot of emotion - wiping away tears at references to the two adopted children, weeping when friends attest to her kindness and generosity - but during Gillies' evidence she stares stonily ahead.

His jauntiness is largely bravado anyway. He was devastated when he learned Lane had concealed so much from him, he tells Becroft.

"I had no comprehension whatsoever that she had two babies in the four years I was going out with her." Gillies knows this sounds implausible. After all, he and Lane shared a bed (though officially she lived with her parents). He saw her naked. But if he noticed her gaining and losing weight, he had no reason to leap to the conclusion that she was pregnant, he argues. He knew she was on the pill, had often seen her taking it. And he thought their relationship was based on trust.

"I was just out there living life and having a great time and taking every opportunity that came my way," he says. "I wasn't skulking around in the dark to see if the woman I loved was having babies out the back door."

Allison Cratchley didn't doubt Gillies' commitment to Lane. "Duncan was possessive of Keli," she says. What about Lane? Was she the possessive type? Gillies tells the court he cheated on her only once, when he had a one-night stand with one of her best friends. Lane was certainly angry when he told her about it. He remembers her shouting, "You're not getting away from me that easily!"

To me, that has an ominous ring, but Gillies says he took it to mean that Lane had decided to forgive him - that she was giving him another chance.

According to medical records of the birth of her first child, in 1995, she was wheeled into the emergency ward by her boyfriend. Gillies denies it was him. He also denies having discussed any pregnancy with Ramirez. It was Gillies who eventually ended the relationship with Lane, having met the woman who has since become his wife, but when he talks to Becroft about his former girlfriend, he radiates a sense of betrayal and wounded pride.

Gaut was impressed by his sincerity when he interviewed him last December. "I found Gillies presented as a very believable witness," the detective says in evidence.

One morning, Lane is approached in court by a messenger who hands over a note and makes a hasty exit. The coroner is irritated but not entirely surprised to learn that it is an invitation to appear on 60 Minutes.

"An unsavoury program, sensationalist and not worth watching," says Abernethy, who warned journalists only the previous day to keep our distance from Lane.

"They are like what the Europeans call paparazzi," he says of the posse of photographers and television cameramen who have been ambushing her in the forecourt.

I understand the fascination with Lane. From my seat at the side of the courtroom, I stare at her for hours. She looks so wholesome and outdoorsy - so uncomplicated. That fresh complexion and unlined brow. In photographs in the Ravenswood year book, she smiles broadly as she poses with the junior swimming and cross-country teams. You'd pick her as the least neurotic teacher in the school.

Yet everything we hear from witnesses contradicts that impression. After the 1995 birth, concerned nurses referred Lane to social worker Deborah Habib, who has been called to give evidence. "Keli was crying and they didn't know why," says Habib, who recorded in her notes that the then 20-year-old told her she aimed to compete in water polo at the Sydney Olympics in 2000. "She felt she couldn't achieve the goals if she continued to parent the baby," says Habib.

Adoption agency records show that Lane named Gillies as the baby's father (a DNA test has since ruled this out) but gave a false address and phone number for him. The court is told that when the agency persisted in trying to contact him, she invented one tale after another - that he had gone to Scotland for a rugby competition, that he consented to the adoption but wanted nothing to do with the paperwork, that they had separated. And so on.

Just two months before having the baby, she had performed so well at the national water polo championships that she was selected for the Australian junior squad. Three months after the birth, she left for the world championships in Canada. "When she went away, she was fighting fit," coach Bruce Falson tells me on the phone. "Certainly no indication that she'd had a child."

Falson has known Lane since she was 15 and is having trouble accepting revelations of her duplicity. "A complete puzzle," he says, uneasiness in his voice.

The court building is a charmless, single-storey brick structure surrounded on three sides by the sprawling car park of a large dental hospital. Adrift in a sea of asphalt in this bleak and unprepossessing part of Sydney, it is hard to envisage a world further removed from the salt air and squawking seagulls of Manly. Lane seems out of place here. On a day so grey and cold that one diminutive reporter dons an overcoat, beanie, scarf and gloves, the star of the show turns up in three-quarter-length pants, bare brown ankles flashing - evidently one of those born-and-bred beach people who refuse to acknowledge any season but summer.

Wading through transcripts of the hours of Lane's videotaped interviews with police, I linger over the sections where she talks about the man she claims is the father of her second child, Tegan. She describes Andrew Norris as fair-haired, tanned, well-built and of medium height. She says he lived in the Balmain area

in late 1995 and early 1996, when they had a brief affair, and worked in the city in banking or finance. Just as I'm thinking he sounds like a fantasy, a dream date, she claims Norris was angry when she broke the news that she was pregnant. "He said that I trapped him," she tells Gaut. "And that I was a slut."

Lane says the two had little contact after that heated meeting, but that Norris agreed he would take custody of the child. She says that on September 14, he came to the hospital with his mother and his girlfriend, a woman named Mel, to collect two-day-old Tegan.

All we know for sure is that Lane and the baby were gone from the hospital in western Sydney by 2pm, and that two hours later she was across town at Manly's Mary Immaculate Church, walking down the aisle with Gillies as they arrived at their friend's wedding. "I remember the weather that day was beautiful," testifies the groom, Craig Hansen. "Really clear and sunny, with a moderate temperature."

Lane has told police she went from the hospital to Gillies' Gladesville house. Then she went to her parents' house, where she showered and changed into her cream suit.

In court, her mother, Sandra, says she noticed nothing unusual about her behaviour that afternoon.

Coroner Abernethy registers his amazement. "Pretty cool, wouldn't you think?" he asks. "Put yourself in her position. Imagine! Having a baby secretly, giving it to somebody you hardly know, coming home and getting dressed and going with your boyfriend ... to a wedding."

Sandra Lane is small and solid, with short blonde hair, gold hoop earrings and a wary expression. On the one hand, she maintains that she and her only daughter have an open, honest relationship. On the other, she says she didn't know about the three pregnancies Keli carried to term while living under her roof. She says she hasn't asked her daughter to explain her lack of candour.

"Why ever not?" Abernethy asks impatiently.

"Because it has been very distressing," Sandra replies. "...I felt it wasn't appropriate to go into an in-depth conversation about it."

The court hears that the first Lane's parents knew of Tegan was in February 2003, when Lane told them about the police search for her. Later they learned from Gaut about the two other children. "That floored us," Lane's father, Robert, says in evidence. "It was just the shock of knowing that there were additional children that had been adopted out."

Robert sits beside Lane every day. When they leave in the afternoons, he takes her hand and rushes her past the waiting TV cameras. He is straight-backed and poker-faced, every inch the retired cop, and in the witness box he valiantly defends his daughter. But sadness hangs about him like a cloud. "She didn't want to disappoint the family," he says of Lane's obfuscation. "She was held in very, very high esteem by her family. She still is."

Like his wife, Robert insists he was never aware of the pregnancies. "In hindsight, I feel a bit foolish that I didn't notice anything," he says. He suspects that the man known to his daughter as Andrew Norris might have given her a false name, which would help explain the difficulty in finding him and Tegan. But otherwise he wholly accepts Keli's version of events.

Becroft asks if he considers it at all odd that Norris and his girlfriend, Mel, would agree to raise the child. "Of course it's unusual," he says. "This is a most unusual matter."

The coroner seems touched by this show of faith. "You believed her because she was your daughter," he suggests, peering over his glasses. "And because you love her."

"Yes," Robert says.

Westmead is a culinary wasteland.

If you don't count the dental hospital canteen (mass-produced meat pies and that antiseptic smell you associate with the drill), food is nowhere to be found in the vicinity of the court. The first couple of days, reporters optimistically set out in cars in search of sustenance. They return much later, thin-lipped, carrying Big Macs in paper bags. After that, we start bringing our own sandwiches, which we eat companionably in the foyer, squeezed together on maroon seats with chrome frames.

We agree the extraordinary thing about Tegan's disappearance is that it went undetected for three years - until Lane gave birth again in 1999. She picked a new adoption agency this time, and said it was her first baby, but child protection officers in the NSW Department of Community Services dug up records of the two earlier confinements. Case-worker John Borovnik wondered why the second birth hadn't been registered. He says in evidence that he phoned Lane at Ravenswood, where she'd started working as a sports teacher, and asked her about the child born in 1996: "She said, 'I don't know what you're talking about.'"

Virginia Fung, a social worker at the adoption agency, testifies that Lane was "very caring and loving" with the 1999 baby. After first naming Gillies as the father, she told Fung it was really Aaron Williams, who she said

was an Australian living in London. Eventually she sent Fung a fax admitting to having had the two earlier babies. "There were three children, obviously I can't lie any more as the paperwork is there," she wrote. "The middle child lives with a family in Perth although I have not had contact with them for a long time. They befriended me just before I had her and supported us. I am not able to give you any details as I'm not sure myself..."

Borovnik called the police, who didn't interview Lane until 2001. Even then, nothing much happened. The case drifted until Gaut took it over the following year, by which time Lane was living with her fourth child and the man who is now her husband (neither of whom can be identified publicly).

In the witness box, her softly spoken spouse says the last pregnancy, too, was unplanned.

As far as he knew, she had been taking the pill. He seems to share Lane's mother's reluctance to raise awkward subjects with Lane. Has he ever asked why she had her first and third babies adopted out, and not the second? No.

"I certainly don't think it will benefit us as a couple for me to delve into those details."

The fourth pregnancy was plain to see, at least in the later stages, though an old schoolmate, Melinda Ward, tells the inquest that Lane wasn't large compared with other women. "She had a different shape in that she looked bloated in the stomach rather than the typical round, ball-shaped stomach," says Ward. Other witnesses make the point that Lane always favoured loose-fitting clothes: tracksuits in winter, shorts and big T-shirts in summer.

Of course, she wore swimmers at the pool, and at least one fellow water-polo player noticed that she ballooned in 1996. Stacey Gaylard says in court that she watched one day as Lane walked to the edge with a towel around her, then quickly slipped into the water. Her curiosity aroused, Gaylard put on a pair of goggles. "I saw Keli underwater and from her body shape I had no doubt that she was pregnant," she says.

When I phone Lane's then coach, NSW Water Polo Inc president Dave Woods, he says there were rumours of a pregnancy termination. "She put on some weight and we all kind of suspected something was wrong," he says, "then we thought she must have got rid of the baby or - I don't know."

Woods had expected Lane would go on from the Australian junior team to the senior team which ended up winning the gold medal at the 2000 Olympics. "But she just lost an edge while I was coaching her," he says. "She didn't train as well. And now I understand why."

Just before Lane is due to be called to the stand, John Abernethy announces he is adjourning the inquest so that the case can be reviewed by a forensic psychiatrist. He suggests to Lane's legal team that she undergo her own psychiatric assessment. The hearing will resume on September 12, exactly nine years from

the date of Tegan's birth, and is expected to continue until September 14, the anniversary of her disappearance.

Deflated? That doesn't begin to describe how I feel, and I can see from the faces of others in the gallery that I am not the only one. It's like going to a suspenseful play and having the curtain come down halfway through the third act. All the questions remain unanswered. And no one seems more distressed than Lane herself, who bursts into tears and shakes her head in disbelief.

Two years ago, police with a so-called "cadaver dog" searched for human remains in the yard of Duncan Gillies' old house at Gladesville. Though nothing was found, it

is clear from the transcripts of interviews with Lane that Richard Gaut fears the worst. "We've got nothing to say that Tegan is still alive," he tells her. "Tegan should be in school now. Tegan should have a birth certificate ... Medicare records. None of that exists."

Reading the transcripts, I have been struck by Lane's apparent lack of curiosity about the police investigation. Nowhere that I can see does she ask Gaut if he is any closer to finding her daughter. Yet her barrister, Peter Hamill, SC, tells Abernethy on the last day that Lane's husband has inquired about hiring a private detective to try to locate the child and Andrew Norris. Lane herself - or someone using her name - has posted notices on the internet asking Norris to contact her.

I am left thinking about Melinda Ward, who told the court her old friend Lane regularly minded her children. "She is great with babies," Ward said.