St Kilda Blues

by Geoffrey McGeachin

  The man in the doughnut caravan didn’t seem offended when Berlin swirled the first mouthful of instant coffee around in his mouth and spat it out. He looked towards the waiting car and raised the waxed paper cup. Roberts shook his head. Berlin briefly considered a jam doughnut to go with the coffee but his stomach immediately let him know it wasn’t a good idea. The caravan was parked with the serving hatch towards the roadway and its back to the water. An ocean liner was making a its way across Port Phillip Bay towards Station Pier, a thin trail of white smoke pencilled into the blue sky behind it. Just round to his right, past the new marina, was St Kilda, and the lake where the body of the seventh or eighth missing girl had been found.

  He swirled more coffee around in his mouth, spat again, then tossed the cup into a rubbish bin. He didn’t want to talk to any more fathers with missing daughters and he really didn’t want to see the spot where the body of some other bloke’s missing daughter had been found. God, he wondered, was there anything about this fucking job he had ever liked? It was a little like war, just a lot less bloody and final. It left strong men bent low under the weight of the things they had been forced to witness and broke weaker men, broke them sometimes into such tiny piece that they could never be put back together again.

  It was ten years since the beating that had scarred Roberts’ face and broken his body, and broken something else deep inside the man. Constable Bob Roberts had earned the beating by doing Berlin a favour, tracking down a licence plate missing from a truck. The brutal attack was meant as a warning to Berlin, to stop him nosing around in areas that didn’t concern him, and Roberts had almost died from it. His recovery had been slow, and while the physical damage had mostly healed, there was other damage, damage that only Berlin could see. It was there in the eyes if you knew what to look for and Charlie Berlin did. It was in his own eyes, and the reason he didn’t like seeing his face in mirrors. His eyes constantly reminded him that there was only and always a split second between life and death, between being here and being gone forever. For some people that knowledge was too much to live with.

  Charlie Berlin knew he was lucky. Rebecca had pulled him back from the brink several times and then the kids had given him a focus, a reason to fight the blackness and despair when the memories reared up from the dark place he kept them hidden. Rebecca had her own ghosts, of course, but she handled them better than he did, and she understood him. Alice, Bob Roberts’ wife, was a good woman, a good wife, a good mother, but she wasn’t Rebecca. Alice Roberts hadn’t understood the changes in her husband after his beating and she’d dealt with them by smiling and pretending everything was fine.

  The Roberts’ marriage had struggled on for six or seven years until it was suddenly a time of free love, doing your own thing and sex, drugs and rock’n’roll. This new era suited the different person Bob had become and there were a series of steadily younger and younger girls on the side until the day he finally up and walked out on his family. He’d eventually set up shop in a run-down Carlton flat with a blonde, pretty enough and just old enough Melbourne Uni arts student. Though christened Justine, the girl now called herself Sunshine and favoured long peasant skirts and tie-dyed cheesecloth blouses worn without a bra. She came from old money, with a barrister father and society-page mother, and Berlin figured her affair with Roberts, an older man, was rebellion or some sort of rite of passage.

  He walked slowly back to the waiting car. After checking one more time for any sign of vomit on his coat or trousers he climbed back into the passenger seat.

  ‘Something you ate, Charlie?’

  ‘Probably. I made dinner last night so who knows? Let’s get going.’

  It was a short run from the marina and the bad coffee to Fitzroy Street and the St Kilda end of Albert Park Lake. Half a night, a day and a full night had passed since Gudrun had disappeared, and it was the nights Berlin most wanted not to think about. He also knew he had to put aside that memory from the snow-covered Polish roadway for the moment. It was just one more thing to force down deep into the black space where all the bad moments lived. He had to concentrate on the girl, and just the girl, if she was to have any chance of coming home.

  Roberts parked the sports car on Lakeside Drive just a short walk from the lake. Reaching across Berlin to the glove compartment he took out a fresh packet of Craven A cigarettes. Berlin saw several more cigarette packets inside before Roberts slammed the lid shut.

  As they walked across the grass to the lake a strong breeze from the east was puckering the sleek grey surface of the water. A muddy area by the lakeside still showed residual signs of being trampled flat by police and ambulance men. The odd patch of grass was gamely fighting its way back, reminding Berlin of the condition of the ground on a cold and rainy late Saturday afternoon at Windy Hill after Essendon had trounced or been trounced by a visiting team. Apart from the battered earth, there were very few signs marking this spot as the place where the life of a young girl had ended.

  THE MISSION

  October 1950

  Towards dusk he heard the sound of bells somewhere ahead and the landscape began to turn from brown to green. The mission sat on an artesian basin, Brother Brian explained, and the water pumped up from below ground was the only reason that life could exist in such a hostile place. The boy first saw the windmills that did the pumping and then there were fields of green crops, with farm machinery scattered about and, on a hillside, neat rows of little bushes. Grapevines, Brother Brian explained, to make wine for the mission.

  Buildings began to appear, mud brick houses and rough wooden barns for the horses that pulled the farm machinery and pens for the cattle and sheep. Half a dozen two-storey buildings surrounded the church, the severe and utilitarian design reminding him of the orphanages in which he had been placed. There was a central lawn surrounded by trees with a statue at its centre. The statue was a smiling man wearing the same robes as Brother Brian and with his right hand raised in a benediction.

  ‘Our founder,’ Brother Brian said and he crossed himself. ‘The boys are at evening prayers right now so what say we get you settled and then you can meet your new young friends at tea.’

  He led the boy into a long building with wooden floors and tiny windows. There were rows of rusty metal beds along both walls, each separated by a narrow, crudely made wooden cabinet. Each bed had a single blanket over a lumpy straw-filled mattress that reminded the boy of his time on the farm in Dorset. He counted three dozen beds. There was a large bathroom at one end of the dormitory with two tin bathtubs and an open tiled area with half a dozen showerheads suspended from the ceiling. Brother Brian opened the door at the far side of the bathroom and pointed to a low wooden structure set away to one side of the compound area.

  ‘Over there is the privy,’ he said. ‘That’s where you do your business. Our friends in Adelaide send us old newspapers and as the new boy one of your jobs will be to cut them into squares and make sure the privy is always well stocked. You will also have to help empty the tubs of nightsoil as required.’

  Brother Brian allocated him a bed and gave him a towel and a nightshirt. Both items looked to have had many previous owners and the towel smelled of stale sweat and mildew. The boy placed his meagre possessions in the wooden cabinet while the brother stood and watched. When he was done the boy slid the empty kitbag under his bed, back against the wall as far as it would go.

  As they crossed to the building containing the dining room, Brother Brian laid out the rules. The boy was to be quiet and respectful, to instantly obey the brothers in all things, to attend morning and evening prayers, to work hard at any task to which he was appointed and to seek the guidance of the Lord in all things. And he was to avoid spending overlong periods alone in the privy. He must be wary of the solitary vice and avoid it, and likewise avoid those who indulged in it. The boy had no idea what the solitary vice was, and he was distracted by the sight of a cat as they passed one of the barns. He wondered if the dagger would be safe in its hiding place i
n his kitbag and decided his first task would be to seek out a better place to store it.

  There was a row of washbasins fitted to the wall outside the dining room. He followed Brother Brian’s example and washed his hands in the brackish-smelling water, though there was no soap. He shook his hands and followed the brother into the dining room. It was the same dimensions as the dormitory but with rows of tables and hard wooden benches instead of beds. There were no windows in the dining room, which was illuminated by a row of hurricane lanterns suspended from the ceiling.

  The six tables nearest the door had four occupants along each side. There was a brown-robed brother at each table and then seven boys whose ages ranged from four or five up to perhaps fifteen. At several of the tables Aboriginal boys were mixed in amongst the white children. Their skin colour varied from brown to black, with several having such a deep blue-black tone that it was difficult to make out their features in the weak light of the kerosene lanterns. The boys were all wearing grubby shorts and patched and faded cotton shirts and were barefoot. Their hair was cut short or shaved off completely. Brother Brian saw that the boy was staring.

  ‘We’ve had an outbreak of ringworm, I’m afraid your hair must come off tomorrow as well, then a good rinse with kerosene. It shouldn’t sting too much but it has to be done.’

  The boy nodded. Pain didn’t matter all that much to him, not his at least.

  The dining room was silent even though almost every space at the tables was taken. This silence surprised him after the horseplay and rowdiness that had become a feature of the children’s dining room onboard the ship, especially after Mavis’s death. He hadn’t joined in the fun, preferring just to eat what was put in front of him and watch the antics of the others. He spent the mealtimes carefully studying what made the ringleaders into leaders and what made the others into sometime-challengers or simply submissive followers. It was the submissive ones, the followers, the lost ones, those who always seemed about to cry, who most held his interest.

  NINE

  The breeze off the lake had an edge to it and Berlin turned the collar of his overcoat up.

  ‘You want to tell me what we know so far, Bob?’

  Roberts glanced at the notes on his clipboard. ‘Local bloke, name of Partridge, was out walking his mutt early on the Monday morning. He was the one who spotted her, half in the water, facedown. The coroner’s report said she had been starved and tortured, though the cause of death was determined as drowning – remember, I told you?’

  Berlin nodded. ‘Water in the lungs, I remember.’ He was looking down, studying a tuft of grass near the toe of his right shoe. ‘Keep going.’

  ‘She also had injuries received just before her death, injuries consistent with being struck by a car travelling at high speed.’ Roberts pointed back towards Lakeside Drive. ‘They found fresh skid marks and broken headlight glass back there. The theory is that she was skittled on the roadway then dragged across the grass before being dumped into the lake by a person or persons unknown.’

  ‘Do we have any idea when she went in?’

  Roberts looked at his clipboard again. ‘The dog stroller wandered past around six in the morning and a divvy van from St Kilda made a sweep around the lake at 2:30 a.m. so it must have been some time in between.’

  ‘Any chance the blokes in the divisional van might not have seen her?’

  Roberts shrugged. ‘I spoke to the constable who was driving the van about that yesterday afternoon. He said the moon was well up and he reckoned there was no way he’d have missed seeing those skid marks on the road. If they were there when they cruised past he’d have stopped to have a look around for sure.’

  Berlin made a mental note to check the weather and the phase of the moon on the night in question. ‘And I assume there aren’t any reports of a naked, hysterical, fifteen-year-old girl running across Fitzroy Street and then down here, getting hit by a car and then dragged across the grass and dumped in the lake.’

  Roberts shook his head. ‘You know how it is, Charlie, it’s St Kilda. A naked fifteen-year-old girl isn’t going to attract too much attention at three or four in the morning, not around this area.’

  Berlin turned away from the lake and looked back across the parklands, through the trees towards St Kilda and its main drag, Fitzroy Street. The once-genteel bay-side suburb had never recovered from the Great Depression, when many of its mansions and fine apartment buildings had become boarding houses for the destitute. World War II was the next blow, with the arrival of hordes of American servicemen making the suburb a mecca for the pimps and prostitutes and sly grog men and drug dealers who serviced them.

  And now it looked like it was set to fall even further as crew-cut, clean-faced GIs on R and R leave from a new war, Vietnam, were starting to drift south, looking for an alternative to the concentrated sleaze of Sydney’s Kings Cross. They would start flying directly down from Saigon in a few months’ time and if the Kings Cross experience was anything to go by, Berlin knew that heroin pushers wouldn’t be far behind them.

  Somewhere off to his right, on the corner of Grey Street, was the decaying George Hotel, the word ‘TITS’ standing out in eight foot–high letters over the entrance portico. You had to be a whole lot closer to see that the sign actually read ‘This Is The Show’. The massively oversized capital letters advertised the strippers in the upstairs Birdcage Lounge, pulling in the raincoat brigade, the desperately curious schoolboys and the bucks’ night crowds with spruikers outside promising more girls, more glamour and more skin to the acre.

  For those wanting private and more intimate contact there were plenty of tarts working Grey and Blessington streets and pretty young boys congregating around Shakespeare Grove. If your taste ran to it, there were men on Barkly and Belford streets who wore stockings and wigs and dresses and called themselves Rita or Pearl or Margot. They never appeared to lack for company, though like the queers in Shakespeare Grove or out on Chaucer Street they were often skittish and wary. Bashings and robbery were a painfully regular part of their hidden-away lives.

  Berlin took the clipboard from Roberts to look at the coroner’s report. The rope marks on the wrists and ankles were clearly visible in the photographs of the body lying by the lake and those from the later autopsy. She had definitely been alive when she went into the water, poor little bugger. The knife wounds, in the coroner’s opinion, had been inflicted over a prolonged period and were intended to cause pain and almost certainly to draw blood. Not enough blood to kill her, though, Berlin understood, just enough to fulfil whatever sick fantasy her captor had.

  He handed the clipboard back and walked across to the edge of Lakeside Drive. Roberts had parked a good 25 yards back from the second area of trampled grass next to the roadway. There were fading black skid marks on the asphalt leading up to where Berlin stood.

  Roberts joined him. ‘The motor accident squad boys say she was hit here and they reckon she went about fifteen, twenty feet that way.’ He indicated the lake behind them with his thumb over his right shoulder.

  Several tiny pieces of headlight glass sparkled on the roadway. Roberts nudged at one of the crystals with the toe of his shoe. ‘First detectives on the scene reckoned she was run down by whoever had her held captive. They might have been taking her somewhere and she somehow got free and out of the car.’

  Berlin bent down and picked up one of the pieces of glass. ‘Is that what you think? Whoever had her held captive chasing her down to finish it off?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘How do you see it happening?’

  Roberts pulled the packet of cigarettes from his pocket. He tore off the clear cellophane wrapping, crushing it in his hand before tossing it aside.

  ‘It’s all on the road there, Charlie, or what’s left of it. They were braking when they hit her, braking really hard and skidding, trying to avoid her. I reckon she almost made it across.’

  Berlin turned the fragment of glass slowly between his thumb and index finger, watching
it sparkle. ‘Then why not call an ambulance, try to help, rather than dragging her across the grass and dumping her in the water?’

  Roberts peeled back the silver foil on the packet of cigarettes and offered one to Berlin, who shook his head. ‘Panic, possibly. Three or four o’clock in the morning in this area, who knows who’s about? Could have been someone joy riding in a stolen car, someone doing the wrong thing. Or maybe they had the wrong person in the car, some other bugger’s wife. Might have been hopped up on drugs, could be a thousand things.’

  Berlin slipped the fragment of glass into his overcoat pocket. ‘You’d have to be a pretty cold bastard to drag an injured girl across the grass and toss her in the water.’

  Roberts put the packet of cigarettes back in his pocket and took out his lighter.

  ‘C’mon, mate, it’s bloody St Kilda. Three or four o’clock in the morning, all the Salvation Army god-squadders, friendly shopkeepers and upright citizens are tucked away nice and warm in their own little beds.’ He cupped his left hand around the lighter to protect the flame from the wind, lit his cigarette, took a deep drag and exhaled. ‘Cold bastards are the stock-in-trade around here after midnight, Charlie, you know that. It’s just tarts and punters and predators and victims.’

  Berlin’s nose twitched as the smoke blew past him. Why does that first puff always smell the best? he wondered. Predators and victims? That was unexpected. Whatever else Bob Roberts was getting out of Sunshine the uni student, the relationship was definitely helping with his vocabulary. Just like that section in the Reader’s Digest about how it pays to increase your word power but with a lot of barely legal sex thrown in as a sweetener. Predators and victims – Bob had that right.