Berlin nodded. ‘Sounds like it.’
‘And all our locomotives are bloody stuffed anyway. They got neglected for want of money back in the Depression and then with the war they got worked twice as bloody hard as they should have been and they made us burn lousy coal you wouldn’t even put in your mother-in-law’s fireplace. The only reason most of those locos can still pull a load is that buggers like me are coaxing one more ride out of ’em.’
‘I was a pilot. I got us there and I got us back. But there was a flight engineer coaxing what was needed out of the engines the whole time. And they were shooting at him the same as they were shooting at me.’
Champion was looking at his beer glass. ‘They didn’t shoot my boy,’ he said quietly, ‘they cut off the poor little bugger’s head. Why would they do that? Shooting I can understand, it was a war, but not that.’ He looked up at Berlin defiantly. ‘That’s why I cut off the Lee girl’s head.’
Berlin shook his head. ‘No you didn’t, Cec, and we both know it. You could never make another family go through what you have, so don’t waste my time.’
‘Kenny didn’t do it neither so why don’t you let him go?’
‘Kenny knows something about the girl, Cec, and he’s not doing himself a lot of good by keeping his mouth shut. I’m hanging on to him until he tells me what I want to know.’
Champion stood up. ‘You’re a cold, cold bastard, Berlin, you bloody know that?’ He put his empty glass down and moved off unsteadily towards the doorway.
Fifteen minutes later, Rebecca joined Berlin at his table. ‘They’re keeping Whitmore overnight for observation.’
‘Much damage?’
‘He was coughing up a fair bit of blood but the doctor reckons nothing’s broken. Has to be a miracle, considering that fight. He’s a lucky bloke. Did you eat yet?’
‘I was waiting for you.’
The kitchen was closed, but there was bread, cold ham, potato salad and beetroot set out under damp tea towels on the bar. Rebecca filled a couple of plates while Berlin ordered drinks. He glanced up when the light fitting hanging above the barmaid’s head began to swing gently.
Maisie saw Berlin staring at the ceiling. ‘Probably just Vern prowling about upstairs. He’s in one of his moods again. I don’t envy Lily, being married to him.’
Berlin kept staring.
‘I wouldn’t be too worried, this old place might creak and sway a bit but Vern reckons she’s got rock-solid foundations and good beams. I’m sure it’s not going to fall down around our ears just yet.’
Berlin watched the light fitting slowly settle and he looked at the spot on the ceiling that Whitmore had said would be torn to bits by a burst from a Tommy gun.
He turned to Rebecca, who was standing next to him holding two plates heaped with food. ‘You have a torch in your car, by any chance?’
‘Of course. I’m a seasoned reporter, Charlie, and a former Girl Guide.’
‘Then grab your coat. We’re going back out to the football oval at Bandiana.’
‘What about dinner?’
‘Dinner can wait.’
FIFTY-SEVEN
In the dark, the sports ground seemed even more forlorn than on the wet afternoon of their earlier visit. Berlin had Rebecca park the Austin with its headlights shining directly on the storage shed. He took the torch and walked across to the hut that housed the changing rooms and showers and squatted down, shining the light under the building.
‘See that?’
Rebecca squatted beside him. ‘What am I looking at?’
‘This hut is pretty much your standard army design. Easy enough for any half-decent team of carpenters to knock up quickly out of local materials. You whack in some stumps, lay your cross-bearers, joists and floorboards and then you put up the walls and stick on a tin roof. Solid enough, but there’s usually a bit of give in the floor.’
They walked back to the larger maintenance shed that butted up against the cliff. Berlin shone the torch around the base of the structure.
‘Now this one looks the same, but it’s built on a concrete base. You commented on how solid the floor was the other day but I didn’t realise what that meant.’ He swung the torch beam up to a heavy power line strung overhead. ‘And there’s a hell of a lot of juice coming into this building just to run a pie warmer, an urn and a few 60-watt bulbs. So you’ve got all that power going in, those big double doors and the concrete ramp at the front.’
‘Maybe they need to store other machinery here sometimes.’
‘Take a look at how thick this concrete is. You could drive a bloody Sherman tank into that place.’
Inside the dark, unlocked shed there was a strong smell of exhaust fumes and the beam of Berlin’s torch picked up a gleam on the concrete floor. Kneeling down, he dabbed a fingertip into a small, dark puddle and then rubbed his finger and thumb together. The slippery feel and a quick sniff told him it was motor oil.
Rebecca found a light switch and Berlin turned off the torch. He began inspecting the rear wall where the back of the shed met the rock face. The wall was bare apart from some girlie calendars and covers torn from Man magazine. He ran his fingers up a vertical section of the wall next to a wooden beam. After searching for a couple of minutes Berlin found what he was looking for – an indentation. ‘Gotcha.’
Rebecca heard a click and then Berlin pulled back a vertical half-section of the wall, which was hinged on one side. It swung easily into the room. As did the other half. Behind the wall the concrete floor of the hut continued on into a black space. Berlin used the torch to search the darkness inside the entrance until he found a wooden-handled, heavy-duty electrical switch. Pulling down on the switch produced a slight arcing sound, and then lights snapped on.
The tunnel was carved out of solid rock and widened as it got further away from the entrance until it was about thirty feet across and ten feet high. Light bulbs in green metal army fittings hung from the roof at six-foot intervals. Large wooden crates were stacked as high as the ceiling along one wall. Stencilled lettering on some of the crates indicated they held ammunition and bully beef. Against the other wall there were drums of fuel and water and metal workbenches with tools. And three Harley-Davidson motorcycles with sidecars. Berlin put his hand on the engine of each of the motorcycles. They were still warm.
Several empty 44-gallon fuel drums with the tops cut off were lined up near a workbench. Berlin looked inside one and whistled.
Rebecca peered into the drum and whistled too. There was a jumble of coloured bank notes, the browns and greens and blues of ten-bob and one- and five- and ten-pound notes filling the container almost to the top.
‘There must be thousands of quid in here, Charlie.’
‘Could be tens of thousands, but if you’re thinking no one is going to miss a fiver or two I’d get that idea out of your head quick smart.’
A pair of coveralls were hanging over the lip of another drum and when Berlin lifted them up a black woollen balaclava fell to the floor. He picked it up and tossed it back into the drum, along with the coveralls.
‘Nice work, Charlie. Looks like you’ve found the Bandiana Boys’ hideout.’
‘Who?’
‘The Bandiana Boys. That’s the name I came up with for the gang. My editor liked it and we’re going to be using it in the stories.’
‘Makes them sound a bit too glamorous for my liking, but I suppose it sells papers.’
‘That’s the name of the game. How far back do you think this tunnel goes?’
Berlin was wondering that himself. ‘Buggered if I know. Could be miles, but I’m not going to go exploring. They might show up and I’ve had enough of these blokes for one night.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’ll tell you about it later. Right now we’re going to close this place up like we were never here and head back into town. In the morning I’ll organise some surveillance but we’ll need more men and a lot more firepower if we’re going to take this gang on.�
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In the Austin, driving back to the hotel, Rebecca asked, ‘What do you think the place was built for, Charlie?’
‘What?’ Berlin’s mind was elsewhere.
‘The hideout, what do you think it was built for?’
‘My guess is that in the panic after Pearl Harbor someone decided a concealed workshop and storage area would be the go. It’s far enough away from the main camp and innocuous-looking enough to be hardly worth wasting a bomb on. And then when the Nips didn’t invade and the war moved up into the islands and away towards Japan they forgot about it.’
‘C’mon, how could you forget about something like this?’
‘Easy as pie. There was a war on, remember. I’ll bet the engineers who built this did it secretly and then they would have been shipped out to where the fighting was and a lot would have been killed. Maybe some wound up billeted in Darwin or Perth or bloody Port Moresby. It’s just one more thing they’d built along with all the bridges and wharves and warehouses, and then the war ends and all they want to do is get back to their old lives. Why would they care about a tunnel they once dug or a hut with a false back wall they knocked up at a football field out the back of woop woop?’
They ate dinner back at the hotel and Berlin told her about the run-in with the gang. After dinner they went up to her room, and when he undressed Rebecca gasped at the bruising on his stomach and arms. She wanted to ask Lily for Goanna Oil but he said he was fine and besides, he didn’t want to smell like a goanna.
She laughed and they made love gently, Rebecca wary of hurting him. Afterwards she fell asleep on top of him. Berlin held her and listened to her breathing. He wondered if he could bear to love her and just how much he would hurt her before it was over.
FIFTY-EIGHT
The pub kitchen was empty when Berlin went downstairs. He used a tea towel to lift the lids on a couple of large black cast-iron pots on top of the slow-combustion range. One pot held porridge and the other a delicious-looking stew of lamb chops, potatoes and carrots.
Through the back door of the kitchen there was the sound of an axe splitting wood. He stepped over a scrawny kelpie sleeping on the porch and wandered out into the backyard. It was still quite crisp and it looked like the sky was having an each-way bet on rain before sunset. In a doorless outside washhouse he could see fire flickering under a steaming copper boiler. A hand-cranked wringer was mounted on the side of a concrete wash trough. Sheets and towels and children’s socks and underwear were pegged on several rope clotheslines held up by forked wooden poles wedged into the muddy soil.
There were several fruit trees and a well-tended vegetable garden set along one side of the paling fence that surrounded the back yard. He could see pumpkins among the ground cover, and beans and peas spiralled up the chicken wire nailed to the fence posts. More chicken wire surrounded a run where half a dozen chooks pecked busily away at the dirt. A rusty flat-bed Ford with frayed, deflated tyres and flaking duco stood in a corner of the yard. The truck looked like it hadn’t run since well before the war.
A wicker pram was parked near an enormous pile of firewood. Lily, wearing an apron over her shapeless dress, was wielding an axe. She swung it awkwardly down onto a reddish lump of wood resting on a thick upright stump. The axe bounced off the wood, which shot sideways off the stump and landed at Berlin’s feet. He picked up the gnarled lump and tossed it back on the pile.
‘Those mallee roots burn well, but they’re a real bugger to chop, aren’t they?’
Lily nodded and put another root on the tree stump. ‘My brother’s got a soldier settler block in the Mallee, over near Sea Lake. He runs a ute load over to me every few weeks. I usually put them in the stove last thing to give me a good, slow overnight fire and coals for the morning.’
‘What’s your brother farming?’
‘Wheat, he hopes, but right now, Mallee roots. They cleared the scrub but the roots still have to come out. Smash up your machinery if you try to work the soil first but they’re the devil to move.’
Berlin took off his jacket and hung it over one of the clothesline posts. ‘Let me have a go.’
‘Vern wouldn’t like me letting a guest do any work.’
Berlin held out his hand for the axe. ‘We won’t tell him then, eh?’
The axe had a black butt handle worn smooth by use. A slight pressure of his thumb on the edge of the blade told him it was sharp enough. A blunt axe is a dangerous thing, he remembered his granddad telling him.
Lily sat down on the laundry steps and pulled a box of Capstan cork tips from her apron pocket. She lit the cigarette with a match and sat smoking and rocking the pram with one hand, watching him.
‘My brother usually chops a few day’s worth before he leaves, and sometimes I’ll pay one of the local high-school kids a couple of bob to do me a pile. Vern is no use at it, obviously, and my boys are still too young to do it – little blighters would take off an arm or a leg for sure.’
Berlin hefted the axe and felt the balance. ‘I used to chop firewood for my grandad after school. Started chopping wood when I was six – the axe was taller than I was.’ He stood with his feet apart and, as he swung the axe, he felt a pain in his ribs from the night before. He ignored it and brought the blade down. The axe head jammed in the heart of the root.
‘How’d your mum feel about that?’ Lily asked.
A second heavy swing with the axe head and root locked together jolted the stump and shattered the dense red wood.
‘Mum and dad died when I was four and my brother six. Our grandparents raised us.’
‘I’m sorry.’
Berlin grunted as another root split in two. ‘Boating accident. Grandad was a policeman, they barely ever got a day off back then so me and my brother did as much as we could to help out.’
‘Your brother a policeman too?’
‘Apprentice carpenter. Died in the war. Missing at least – no chance he’s coming back after all this time. Our gran died before the war started so she missed that part, which was good, I guess. Grandpa got run down by a car in the brownouts. Poor bugger should have been long retired, really.’
He picked up another lump of Mallee root. ‘There isn’t anything you might want me to have a word with Vern about, is there, Lily?’
Lily touched the bruise on her cheek, trying to cover it, and shook her head.
‘Okay, if you’re sure, but I don’t mind.’
She shook her head again. ‘No, I’m good, Mr Berlin.’ She took a drag on her cigarette. ‘Vern isn’t such a bad bloke, you know. He was a different man before he lost his hand. He was going to be a big hero and come back to me with a medal and the poor feller didn’t even get to finish training. He can go a bit off the rails from time to time but he’s a good father to the kids, I guarantee you that.’
Berlin swung the axe again. He had a rhythm going now and he was starting to enjoy it. Swing, split, replace, swing, split.
‘Sorry about breakfast the last few days. I didn’t feel up to it, with the girl, you know. What can I get you this morning?’
‘Don’t worry about it. I’ll grab something later in town.’
‘Okay. If you’re certain.’
The pile of split wood was growing at Berlin’s feet. ‘Stew looks good,’ he said.
‘That’s for tea. We get the football crowd in after the game and they need something hearty.’
‘Must be tough being shorthanded,’ he said, ‘without the girl to help, I mean.’
Lily glanced over towards the pub and lowered her voice.
‘Jenny was a good kid. Young, but a hard worker. Pretty, too. But being young and pretty can get you into all sorts of trouble. I know that from experience, though you wouldn’t think it to look at me now.’
Berlin let her comment pass. ‘Did she have any special friends?’
Lily glanced towards the pub again. ‘There was a young soldier fellow, that’s all I know, from Bandiana. She thought she was in love.’
Berlin swu
ng his axe down hard again. ‘Kenny Champion is a young soldier fellow from out at Bandiana, isn’t he?’
She looked away. ‘They met when he went to her parents’ place for dinner once. Kenny didn’t kill that girl, Mr Berlin, he loved her. He’s a good kid and God knows he needed a little bit of joy in his life.’
‘But something went wrong?’
‘I tried to warn her, tell her what precautions to take, but kids are kids, poor little bugger. She was devastated – said she had disgraced her parents and they’d disown her. She was desperate.’
‘How would someone go about getting themselves out of that kind of situation in this town?’ He swung the axe again, giving her time to make up her mind about answering.
‘They’d talk to Doctor Morris. I gave her the twenty quid she was short out of my holiday money tin.’
‘Kenny know she was planning that?’
‘Kenny was happy, he thought they were going to run off together to Sydney and get hitched and have the baby. You know, Mr Berlin, I really don’t know why you men think it’s us woman who are hopeless romantics.’
Berlin split another root and Lily stood up and crushed her cigarette butt underfoot. ‘That’s plenty, you can stop now, thank you – that’s more than enough for me to be going on with.’
Berlin swung the axe overhead one last time and buried it deep into the stump. Near the woodpile there was a small billycart made out of a fruit box, some two-by-fours and pram wheels, and Lily began tossing lumps of firewood into it.
‘I’ll make sure you get an extra big helping of stew later.’
‘I’m really looking forward to that, Lily,’ Berlin said, slipping his suit jacket back on. ‘You going to add peas?’
‘Of course. I’m about to pick them, once I get this wood inside. I might make dumplings too, and maybe a cream sponge for later.’ She threw one more piece of wood into the billycart and glanced up at him.
The Diggers Rest Hotel Page 22