The Diggers Rest Hotel

by Geoffrey McGeachin

  And Berlin was tempted on his first week back on the beat. A nine-year-old running late on her way to school was struck and killed by a tram and he had helped carry her shattered body off the roadway. He drank for three days straight, and when grog and the drug both failed to ease the pain he tried drowning himself in sex with a series of lonely war widows. Driven on by the manic hypersexuality the Benzedrine unleashed in him, he existed in a downward spiral of anonymous naked bodies, sweat and tears, until the awful night he recognised a face from his training days staring at him from a black-banded, framed photograph next to a woman’s bed.

  Around midnight a uniformed constable in Pascoe Vale found him vomiting into the gutter and he spent the night in their lock-up. In the morning they called Russell Street and then tore up the charge sheet, giving him back his personal belongings, including an empty inhaler. He kept it in his pocket as a reminder of a place he never wanted to go again.

  SIX

  The Dakota bounced three times on the Albury runway before settling. As the tail came down Reg yelled, ‘Sorry ’bout that!’ through the open cockpit door. They taxied quickly towards a run-down hangar, where Berlin could see a couple of vehicles waiting. When they finally came to a stop, Reg switched off the engines and walked out of the cockpit.

  ‘Bit of a gusty crosswind there, Charlie. I’ve done better landings on strips chopped out of the jungle with Japs shooting at me.’

  Berlin shook his hand. ‘No worries, mate, at least now I can chalk up thirty safe landings.’

  Outside the aircraft a quarter-ton Chevy truck was waiting to pick up the cargo. Just past the truck Berlin saw a tan four-door Dodge sedan with a uniformed constable standing next to it. He was wearing one of the old British-bobby-style Sudweeks police helmets. As Berlin walked across the tarmac the constable came to attention and saluted.

  ‘Constable Roberts, DC Berlin. Welcome to Wodonga, sir – I mean Albury, we have to drive back over the river to Wodonga.’

  Roberts looked about eighteen or nineteen, tall and solidly built with pale skin, blue eyes and a smattering of pimples on his chin. Berlin noticed a small shaving nick on his jaw. The constable’s neatly pressed blue tunic was done up to the neck, the buttons brightly polished. His black shoes had a parade-ground shine that almost matched the gloss of the Dodge. The two men shook hands.

  ‘Pleased to meet you, Constable. You’re not expecting Dugout Doug by any chance, are you?’

  The constable looked flustered. ‘I’m sorry, sir, I don’t understand.’

  ‘All the spit and polish. General MacArthur has returned from whence he came, son. I’m just a cop up from the big smoke.’

  ‘My sergeant wanted to make sure we did things by the book. I’m to be your driver while you’re in Wodonga, sir.’

  ‘That’s very nice but I’m not sure I’ll be needing a driver.’

  ‘I’m afraid Sergeant Corrigan insists, sir.’ The constable appeared to be a little uncomfortable, avoiding Berlin’s eyes.

  ‘Fair enough, no skin off my nose.’

  ‘Shall I take you to your hotel?’

  ‘If we’re going by the book I think I’d better have a look at the crime scene first.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Roberts snapped another salute.

  ‘Let’s drop the saluting. And what’s with the hat?’

  ‘We were issued with the new flat caps, sir, but not enough to go round.’

  ‘I guess that means you’re the most junior constable at the station.’

  ‘There’s just four of us, plus the sergeant. I’ve been here a year.’

  ‘Always a bastard being the junior. I know what that’s like. You get all the worst jobs around the joint, right?’

  ‘That’s the truth!’

  ‘And picking me up is probably one of them.’

  The constable smiled. ‘I don’t mind. Maybe, I hope – I mean, I might learn something.’

  Berlin decided he liked the lad. ‘Not planning on spending your whole career in uniform, then?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Fair enough. Lesson one is that the scene of the crime is usually where most of the answers are. I want to see what these bastards have been up to, so I suggest we get moving.’

  ‘Shall I get your luggage first, sir?’

  Berlin held up the folder. ‘Travelling light today.’ He took a cigarette from the packet of State Express 333s in his coat pocket. As he reached for the box of matches, Roberts pulled out a shiny metal Zippo lighter and flicked it open. He cupped his hand around it and Berlin caught the sweetish smell of lighter fluid on the breeze before the flint sparked and the wick caught. He leaned forward and lit his cigarette. ‘Lesson two, Roberts. Don’t try too hard. I’m just a bloody detective constable. Now let’s get going, shall we?’ Berlin winked at the constable.

  Roberts opened the passenger door. The vehicle had leather upholstery and the interior was immaculately maintained. Berlin whistled. ‘Very nice. A bloke could get used to this. Army surplus?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Staff car. Used to belong to a colonel. A lot of the vehicles running locally are ex-military, too.’

  ‘That so?’

  ‘Oh, yeah. There’s tons of military surplus around here, Mr Berlin, because of all the big army camps we had nearby. The local farmers can get surplus trucks and tractors or they can have a go at pulling a plough with a Bren gun carrier. They were going for fifty quid not long back.’

  Bren gun carriers were small, open-topped, lightly armoured scouting and transport vehicles. Their twin caterpillar tracks were intended to take them over rough country, and with their V8 engines a farmer’s flat wheat fields would be no challenge.

  ‘They reckon some cove up by Yackandandah’s using a General Grant tank with the turret knocked off. War ends one day and the next there’s a million tons of stuff nobody wants. Stuff made for killing people and now that’s over, thank God.’

  ‘There’s a lot of people out there trained for killing people, Roberts, and for a lot of them it’s not over.’

  Roberts’ helmet was knocked off as he slid into the driver’s seat, and he tossed it onto the rear seat before starting the engine. As the Dodge rounded the back of the hangar a startled Berlin exclaimed, ‘Well, bugger me!’

  A twin-tailed, four-engine aircraft was parked on the concrete apron. Suddenly Berlin’s mouth was dry again, there was that familiar hollow feeling in his stomach and his hand found the inhaler in his pocket.

  ‘That’s what you flew, sir, right?’

  ‘Very similar, Roberts,’ he said, after a pause, ‘but that’s a Halifax, I was in Lancasters. The old Halibag was a good aircraft though. Rugged as hell. What’s an RAF heavy bomber doing way out here?’

  ‘After the war some demobbed RAAF boys in England got tired of waiting for a ship home so they bought it as military surplus and flew her back with paying passengers. It’s mostly used for hauling cargo now.’

  ‘Smart buggers.’ And braver than me, Berlin thought. Twelve thousand miles – and most of it over water – wasn’t something he’d have fancied.

  They drove out of the airport gate and onto the gravel roadway.

  ‘So how’d you know I was a pilot? Your sergeant been checking up on me?’

  ‘He made a call when we heard you were headed up here.’

  ‘And what did he find out?’

  Roberts stared straight ahead at the road without speaking.

  ‘It’s okay, you can tell me, and it’s just between us.’

  Roberts glanced across and studied Berlin’s face for a brief moment. Sizing me up before he answers, Berlin decided. Fair enough too, it was the smart thing to do and the kid looked smart. Just how smart, he would judge from the answer.

  ‘They said you were a good copper but a loner and a bit bomb-happy, you know, screwy.’

  Berlin took the cigarette from his mouth and flicked the butt out the window. ‘Sounds about right.’ Probably a bit of an understatement, truth be told. ‘Anything else?’<
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  ‘They said we were to report back to Melbourne right away if you went off the rails.’

  Berlin smiled. ‘I’ll make sure you’re the first to know.’

  He glanced out the window back towards the airport disappearing in the dust behind them. The Halifax stood out clearly among the silver aircraft hangars and low scrub. At this distance it could have been a Lancaster, and it looked totally out of place. No more than me, Berlin decided.

  SEVEN

  Almost every evening of the war, hundreds of heavy bombers formed up at assembly points in the night sky over England, before heading towards the Channel and occupied Europe. After extinguishing their navigation lights over the coast, each aircraft was on its own, travelling at a specified height and speed until it arrived over the target. Once there, German parachute flares, searchlights and the glow of the flames twenty thousand feet below allowed the pilots a glimpse of their companions in the bomber stream for the first time in hours.

  After its first mission, the airfield mechanics christened Berlin’s Lancaster bomber, T for Tango, ‘The Berlin Express’. The station control-tower log showed the aircraft as last away on a run to Stuttgart and first back on the airfield circuit seven hours later. Some suspected Berlin of squibbing the mission – dumping his bomb load over the Channel and stooging aimlessly about for several hours – but target photographs from the bomber’s camera soon put that to rest. T for Tango had dropped its load of high explosives and incendiaries right on top of the pathfinder markers, and no one could argue with that.

  Jock, the mid-upper gunner, described Berlin’s style as ‘the three Gs’: ‘Get there, get it done and get the fuck out’. It was also how Gary, the shy young Canadian navigator, described it to Gwen, the pretty blonde WAAF who drove the big Dodge crew bus from the ready room out through the deepening twilight to the waiting bombers. But he left out the expletive because Gwen was a nice girl.

  Each morning, Gwen and the other WAAF drivers collected the surviving aircrew and ferried them to debriefings with the station’s intelligence officer. They served hot coffee to the men waiting to be interviewed and tried not to look too deeply into the red-rimmed and still-terrified eyes of those who clutched their enamel mugs tightly in both hands to stop the shaking. Gary was happy when Gwen was the one who served him coffee, and she always smiled and sometimes gently patted his hand. He was secretly in love, and desperately hoping to have sex with her before he was killed.

  The airmen all knew they were going to be killed because that was the way it was. Aircrew attrition, which was how the RAF described the ending of young men’s lives before they’d even got themselves a driver’s licence, was currently running at 15 per cent. The airmen called it the chop rate, and as a completed tour was thirty missions, even the most mathematically impaired could work out the odds.

  Night after night the radar-controlled night fighters, searchlights and massed anti-aircraft guns of the Kammhuber defensive line, which stretched across Europe, waited hungrily for the bombers. And every morning more FTRs were chalked up next to the aircraft listed on the big board in the ops room. ‘Failed to return’ was air-force speak for the annihilation of a twenty-ton Lancaster bomber and its seven-man crew.

  But over the next few weeks observers of the board began to notice the steady and regular early return of T for Tango. They quizzed the mechanics about any modifications Berlin might have had made to the four massive Merlin engines, but the mechanics shook their heads. Berlin’s crew just shrugged and said it was the three Gs – just get there, get it done and get the fuck out.

  And as the early returns mounted on the board, T for Tango’s crew began to wonder if they were actually going to make it – going to do their thirty, be rated TOUR EXPIRED, given leave and then posted to a cushy training squadron, and maybe even get to blow out the candles on their twenty-first birthday cakes.

  A newly qualified wireless operator, who cheerily jumped aboard T for Tango to do his familiarisation on a Bremerhaven run, was wide-eyed, white and shaking when they got back. After he’d finished vomiting up what looked like everything he’d eaten in the last week, a couple of mechanics took him behind a fuel bowser, gingerly stripped off his flight suit and uniform and used a fire hose to wash the stinking mess off him. His flight suit and trousers and even his newly issued sheepskin-lined flying boots all had to be burnt.

  They gave the man several triple whiskies in the sergeants’ mess. In borrowed overalls and with a trembling voice, he described a mad dash to the head of the bomber stream and then on to the target through probing searchlights, massed anti-aircraft fire and night fighters, dodging between falling bombs and crippled aircraft spiralling downwards in flames.

  ‘He’s bloody mad. The man should be put away. They’re all mad, every one of them. If they weren’t praying out loud they were cursing to high heaven and when we got to the target all I could hear in the headphones was that bastard in the cockpit chanting, “Do it! Do it! Do it!” And then when we heard, “Bombs gone” from the nose I thought the fucking wings were going to come off, he turned her so hard.’

  They didn’t notice Berlin walk into the mess in his blue RAAF uniform, darker than their RAF uniforms, with the ‘Australia’ flash on the shoulder. He ordered a whisky at the bar and turned to watch the group gathered around the shaken wireless operator.

  ‘Then we go back, right through the bomber stream,’ the man continued, ‘through all these falling five-hundred pounders and bits of blown-up burning Lancs, and the tail gunner picks up a night fighter over Holland and screams for him to corkscrew port, and I swear, ten seconds later we’re upside down and the kite is creaking and banging and kit goes flying all over the place and he has all the damn throttles full to the gate. How those bloody engines didn’t tear themselves right out of the mountings I’ll never, ever know. Mad. Totally fucking mad.’

  At the bar Berlin took a bottle from the steward. He walked across to the group and topped up the wireless operator’s whisky. The rim of the glass, shaking in the man’s hand, rattled against the neck of the bottle. Berlin steadied the glass and looked down into the man’s pale face and terrified eyes.

  ‘You’re still alive, aren’t you, mate? Go and have a look at that list of FTRs on the board – those poor buggers aren’t.’

  The brass knew about Berlin’s tactic of racing to the assembly point and working his way to the head of the bomber stream, and he was repeatedly threatened with court martial for breaking formation but he knew it wasn’t going to happen because it would take him off flying duties. With Bomber Command’s continuing heavy losses every pilot was needed, especially one who made his target every time.

  Berlin ignored mechanical problems that gave other pilots an excuse to turn back. He was intent on ticking off the ops in his logbook and getting his crew to the end of their tour. He received no promotions or medals even though he had earned them, but that didn’t bother him. He figured it was better to be a live sergeant pilot with a ‘satisfactory’ rating than a dead flight lieutenant or wing commander with a posthumous Distinguished Flying Cross.

  Berlin and his crew stayed alive and they did their twenty-nine ops. On number thirty, over the docks at Kiel on a beautiful moonlit night, Berlin lined up on the target indicators and said to himself, ‘Looks like we’re going to make it,’ and that was the last thing he remembered. He learned after the war that other aircraft in the bomber stream had reported seeing his Lancaster exploding in mid-air. T for Tango was listed as lost, with no survivors.

  Berlin came to in a pine forest, swinging in his parachute harness, hooked high up in the branches of a massive tree. If the angry farmers on the ground had been armed with guns instead of pitchforks and shovels, they would have killed him on the spot. The Volkssturm home-guard soldiers who eventually cut him down were all old enough to be his grandfather but they still beat him to a bloody pulp before dragging him through the streets of the burning target city. They turned him over to the Luftwaffe, starting hi
m on his journey towards that freezing, sleeting morning on a muddy Polish roadway.

  EIGHT

  ‘You got a first name, Constable?’

  Roberts was a careful driver and he concentrated on negotiating a sharp bend before answering.

  ‘You can call me Bob.’

  ‘That make you Robert Roberts, Bob?’

  ‘I was registered Robert Rob Roberts, after Robert Burns and Rob Roy. My old man had a skinful at the time.’

  ‘People do silly things when they’re pissed.’

  ‘Yeah, but my old man had a skinful most of the time and he was a nasty bastard when he was drunk. My mum was surprised he passed the army physical, but she was glad to have him out of the house.’

  ‘Where is he now?’

  ‘Somewhere in the Middle East. He was an AA gunner and a Jerry Stuka dropped a bomb right into his gun pit. Everyone else got clear but they reckon there wasn’t even enough left of him to put in a sugar bag. They just filled in the hole and stuck a cross on top. We got the telegram on my thirteenth birthday while I was blowing out the candles. Best present I ever got.’

  ‘Fair enough. How come there’s no local detective here?’ Berlin asked, changing the subject.

  ‘Went mad and we shot him.’ The constable smiled at his joke, then caught himself and glanced across at Berlin. ‘Sorry, Mr Berlin, I didn’t mean … I mean he’s been off on medical leave for months, bad liver.’

  ‘Bit of a drinker?’

  Roberts shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t know.’

  That was good, Berlin thought. The boy was discreet.

  A few minutes later they were approaching the Albury city centre.

  ‘That’s the railway station coming up. Nicer than Wodonga’s, that’s for sure.’

  Ahead on his left Berlin could see a sandstone and red-brick clock tower topped by a steeple, rising over a long, low single-storey building. Wrought-iron lacework held up a tin-roofed verandah that ran the length of the station. It was an impressive building. Berlin hadn’t seen the outside before but he knew what the inside looked like.