St Kilda Blues

by Geoffrey McGeachin

  Berlin put out his hand. ‘My name is Charlie Berlin, Tim, and the gentleman yonder is Bob Roberts. And we are police.’

  Roberts was bent over the light box studying the transparencies of the Monaro again. Berlin knew he would have taken them back out of the envelope just to show Derek he could, and who was going to stop him? He looked up at Egan and nodded.

  Egan smiled and shook Berlin’s hand after wiping his own on the dustcoat. ‘Mr Berlin, Mr Roberts, pleased to meet you both.’ It was a good firm grip and Berlin felt calluses on Egan’s palm and fingers.

  ‘What’s this all about, Mr Berlin, if I can ask? You said something about a dead girl, that sounds terrible. You don’t think Derek might have something to do with it do you? He’s not a very nice person but I can’t believe he’d be mixed up in something like that.’

  Egan seemed to be genuinely concerned and Berlin smiled to reassure him. ‘We’re looking at all sorts of people right now, Tim. It’s how we do things. The dead girl disappeared from a dance and some others have also gone missing from dances. We thought there might be some useful information in some of the recent photographs Derek took for GEAR magazine. Do you think you could get those negatives and proof sheets he mentioned together for us? We don’t have a lot of time.’

  ‘Of course, I’ll do it straightaway, should only take me five minutes. I imagine it’s terrible for the parents of these girls, they must all be heartbroken.’

  Berlin nodded. It was the only response possible though heartbroken didn’t even begin to describe what the parents of the missing girls would have been feeling

  At the back of the processing area a row of shelves held quarto-size cardboard spring binders. Egan took down about a dozen and Berlin opened the first one Egan handed to him. It was crammed full of the same sort of filing pages that Rebecca used to keep track of her 35 mm negatives. Behind each page of negatives and punched to fit the two-ring binder was a black and white proof sheet, a series of same-size positive images of the negatives in the sleeve above. A number written on the proof sheet matched the number on the corresponding negative page. It was going to take a fair amount of time to go through all these pictures.

  ‘I can put these into a file box if you want, Mr Berlin, make them easier to carry.’

  ‘Thanks, Tim’

  ‘No worries. Anything I can do to help, you just have to ask me. It’s a terrible thing.’

  Egan emptied copies of Queen, Honey and British Vogue out of a box, replacing the magazines with Derek’s file folders.

  ‘Do you want me to carry it down to your car?’

  Roberts shook his head and picked up the box. ‘She’ll be apples, mate, but thanks for the offer.’

  Berlin followed Roberts down the corridor towards the studio where the flashlights were popping. The music volume was suddenly back up and he almost missed Tim Egan’s voice when he called out after them.

  ‘Good luck, Mr Berlin, Mr Roberts. I’ll say a prayer for you both, and for those poor girls.’

  TWENTY-NINE

  Tim Egan’s prayers didn’t help Berlin a whole lot with his search through the pile of proof sheets. Some of the faces were so small that it was hard to make out who was who. After an hour of looking he found Gudrun in the picture taken at Opus. He also found her in a shot taken at Bertie’s. The location was easy to identify by the marble staircase and art deco furnishings and he wondered if her being photographed by Derek more than once was a coincidence. Tim Egan was right, Derek Jones wasn’t a very nice person. But just how far did that go?

  After several hours of searching through the proof sheets his head started to ache and when Rebecca telephoned to say she was on her way back from the city and offered to pick up fish and chips he decided to take a break. When she arrived home he accepted a kiss and a hot newspaper-wrapped parcel. She also dropped an envelope on top of the jumble of negative files and proof sheets in the living room. It was from Lazlo and had been delivered to her studio on Collins Street in the city by someone she described as an Amazon on a Norton Commando. Trust Lazlo to have a glamorous girl on a motorbike making his deliveries; he knew how to leave an impression.

  Berlin picked up Lazlo’s envelope when dinner was done and the dishes were washed and put away. Lazlo had thoughtfully included a carbon copy of one of his own recent inquiries to the Wehrmacht records office, with the name and information concerning the person he had been inquiring about carefully inked out. Berlin would be able to copy the format of the letter, inserting the personal details he had been able to gather on Gerhardt Scheiner during a quick visit to the library in the city on his way home.

  Mid-evening Rebecca had decided to take a bath and as these sometimes lasted an hour or more, Berlin used the opportunity to have a go at writing his letter. It would be good to get it out of the way. There was typing paper in a hallway cupboard along with a small Olivetti typewriter. Rebecca’s old ex-Argus newspaper typewriter had been replaced by a much more compact Olivetti Lettera 22, its incongruous tartan dust cover made less so given it had been manufactured in Glasgow. Just like my old granddad, Berlin had mused when Rebecca had first brought the typewriter home.

  He set the typewriter up on the kitchen table, inserted two sheets of foolscap with carbon paper between them and began the letter. He’d just typed Gerhardt Scheiner’s name when Rebecca came out of the bathroom in her white bathrobe, hair wrapped in a towel. She leaned across him, hand on his shoulder, and looked at the sheet of paper in the typewriter carriage. She was warm and desirable as always but right now what was going through Berlin’s mind forced those thoughts away.

  ‘Shall I make some tea while you do that? Or would you like coffee? I brought a fruitcake home from the city.’

  He asked for tea and sat and stared at the sheet of paper in the typewriter. Rebecca lit the gas under the kettle and then came and sat next to him. He felt her reach for his hand.

  ‘Is it the girl, Charlie? Is that why you couldn’t sleep last night?’

  ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to keep you awake.’

  She squeezed his hand.

  ‘Last night was the third night.’ He wanted to say more but couldn’t. If it was the same person who took Melinda Marquet then the knife or whatever it was would have been used by now. How many times? Where? How much pain?

  Rebecca stood up and moved across to the teapot on the bench by the sink. She had her back to him as she scooped tea-leaves out of the caddy and into the pot. When she spoke he understood that having her back towards him was a concession, it was her making a safe place for him if he chose to answer.

  ‘It’s not just the Scheiner girl, though, is it, Charlie? It’s the girl in Poland too, isn’t it? The one on the road.’

  He knew she knew but it was how much she knew that he was unsure of. What had he told her, drunk or sober, and what had she pieced together from what he said in his nightmares? He had tried to tell her the whole story several times, knowing he owed her at least that, but he could never get the words out. It was all a confused mess, a jumble of real or imagined memories, except in the nightmares when it was all crystal clear and too terrible to talk about. Sometimes in the nightmares he walked a long corridor with Rebecca appearing in doorways, reaching out a hand to him and saying, ‘Tell me, Charlie, trust me,’ but the doors always slammed shut before he could speak.

  They drank their tea and ate the fruitcake in silence and he knew she loved him despite everything. She rinsed off the dishes and then came up behind him, put her arms around him and kissed him on the top of the head.

  ‘You want to save everyone, Charlie, don’t you? You want to set everything right, bring everyone home, but you can’t. And I love you because you know that you can’t but you still have to try.’

  Rebecca was in bed and asleep by the time he finished the letter and sealed and addressed the envelope. He would post it first thing in the morning by airmail and then he would be able to concentrate on finding the girl or girls, if they were still alive, which
he doubted. They were being taken at regular intervals and the intervals suggested how long each of them had taken to die. Was it better to die suddenly or have time to reflect on what was happening? he wondered.

  His crew had gone quickly, there one minute and gone the next, with their pilot and skipper and leader blown clear by the same blast that vaporised them. He had seen burning Lancasters and Halifaxes tumbling away from the bomber stream in what seemed like slow motion and he decided faster was better. Better than being trapped inside a jammed steel and plexiglas gun turret or held fast against a bulkhead by centrifugal force in a spinning, burning, out-of-control bomber with the escape hatch just inches away from grasping, desperate fingers.

  Rebecca was breathing lightly next to him, close but sometimes so far away. She was naked as always and he knew just a gentle touch on her back or shoulders or that lovely round bottom would rouse her, arouse her, sleepy still but ready for love, her lips soft and comforting or hard and urgent against his as the mood took her, and it was always a surprise to him what that mood might be. But he was angry tonight, or as angry as he allowed himself to get. His anger with suspects was real but kept compartmentalised now, as a part of his job. He was still scared of the places he could go when he let the anger loose, though somehow it had been held in check for years.

  He stared up at the ceiling. It was twenty years that they had been together. He’d been a shambles when they met, and why she hadn’t turned and walked away he would never understand. But she hadn’t and she had saved him. She had eased the bottle from his lips and the pistol from his temple more than once and had washed the blood and vomit from his clothes and left the children with the neighbours to spare them the distress of seeing him in pain and had never asked why.

  She knew that his crew, six young men he was responsible for, were dead and gone, and that he had been a POW. She knew he had been marched at gunpoint through snowdrifts and howling winter blizzards from the camp in Poland back into Germany in ’45, just days ahead of a steadily advancing Red Army whose artillery rumbled and flashed constantly on the horizon behind them.

  What else he had told her or she had pieced together he really didn’t know. What had he said on those days and weeks when he fell into despair, seeking solace in drugs or grog? He still had nightmares, and though the visitations from his dead crew had stopped a long time back, putting his head down on a pillow was still an effort. Did he talk in his sleep? he wondered, did he tell the story? Did he say what he had seen and could never unsee, never erase, never block out?

  He remembered she had watched as he pulled the first potato from the backyard plot when the house was still new, the concrete paths white and dusty, the suburban street outside still a dirt track, and young Peter hadn’t yet begun to crawl. He had taken a spade and, using the sharp side like an axe and with tears in his eyes, savagely hacked into the earth he had so carefully tended, trying to destroy all evidence of what he had grown. She had asked him once about it but he had shaken his head and he guessed something in his eyes must have warned her not to ask again.

  Rebecca rolled over. Her left leg rested against him and her right lay against his belly. Her right breast was on his chest, her hand soft against his cheek, their skin crackling in contact as if they were both alive with static electricity and then she was kissing him. Sometimes she spoke, sometimes she was loud, foul-mouthed if she thought it excited him, or sometimes just gasping and moaning, fingernails cutting into his back, sweat pooling between her breasts or dripping down on him when she was on top, which she knew he liked. She was on top of him now, moving, rocking, twisting, her eyes on his. The pleasure would come soon, but it was what came after that frightened him.

  On a bombing mission, being awake and alert could save your life and drowsiness could kill. The aircrew were offered the amphetamine Benzedrine by the station medical officer for alertness, to stay wide awake on the night missions, to be fully conscious, with every nerve-ending active and tingling as you waited for the flak burst or night fighter cannon shell that would cripple you or the aircraft or hopefully quickly and painlessly end your young life, if you were lucky enough to be unlucky that way. And now, strangely, with the war long finished, sleep was still his enemy.

  THIRTY

  Bitter cold, hunger, exhaustion and despair were Berlin’s memories of the last days of the war and his captivity. The Germans had built most of their POW camps as far east as possible, into Poland, Czechoslovakia and East Prussia, maximising the distances escapees would have to travel to safety. In early 1945, with the Red Army’s relentless advance into German-held territory, tens of thousands of Allied POWs were forced out of the camps at gunpoint, joining millions of frightened refugees already jamming the roadways. They began marching slowly westward, back into Germany through what were quickly becoming the worst winter blizzards in a hundred years.

  Berlin’s camp had been evacuated over two days, with the thousands of prisoners split into more manageable groups of several hundred each. A small detachment of armed guards was assigned to each group, along with several very skittish German shepherd attack dogs. The dogs constantly fought against the leashes of their handlers, lunging and snapping at prisoners who fell behind the column or wandered off the roadway.

  On the seventh day of the march the guards forced the column of shivering POWs out of the sleet and into the meagre shelter of a wooden barn shattered by repeated Russian air strikes. It might have been around four or five in the afternoon but if the winter sun was still out there beyond the leaden clouds the POWs couldn’t tell. The horse-drawn army field kitchen the German soldiers called Die Gulaschkanone, or goulash cannon after its tall, smoking black chimney, was nowhere to be seen so the starving men knew it would be another night without food.

  Berlin had found the potato a little over an hour after he and the other exhausted, freezing men had slumped gratefully down into the shelter of the barn. After cleaning his boots as best he could he tried to sleep, but something jammed into his back. He dug for it, expecting a stone, and was bewildered at finding a potato hidden deep under the filthy straw. How it had escaped detection by the hordes of refugees who must have used the barn every night was hard to understand.

  His fist closed around the black lump and he slipped it carefully into the pocket of the khaki army greatcoat issued to him after he was captured. Like all the others, Berlin was starving, but he held onto the potato. It reminded him of home, of his grandmother and a time when he was safe and warm, with a full belly, and he held it tightly through the night. There might be worse to come and he would need the potato, though he knew that if things became even just a little worse he would not survive.

  The next morning the snorting of a horse woke them and there was a watery soup waiting in the big boiler of the field kitchen. Berlin joined the line of hungry men, his hand still closed around the potato in his pocket. Some of those with dysentery stayed a little longer in the shelter of the barn, sobbing as they squatted and added another layer to the misery and squalor that would greet whoever used the place for respite that evening.

  As the men waited, stamping their feet and swinging their arms to keep warm, someone half jokingly suggested they should perhaps add the horse to the soup and just pull the wagon themselves. The Gulaschkanone was designed to be hauled by two horses, and their single carthorse looked as exhausted, scrawny and underfed as the POWs. Berlin doubted it would add much in the way of nourishment.

  He checked the sky for any breaks that might give respite from the sleet and snow. Sunshine would be welcome to warm their freezing bodies but clear skies would also make them easy targets for roaming Sturmovik, the Russian aircraft responsible for their burnt-out lodgings and the rocketed trucks and tanks they passed along the road. The grey sky and snow-covered landscape merged seamlessly at the horizon, meaning they would at least be safe for the first part of the day.

  Behind the barn a stand of fruit trees stood leafless and forlorn. Among the bare branches Berlin saw
ravens waking from rest. They were fat and sleek, eyes glinting, black feathers shimmering through the winter mist. The ravens would breakfast at their leisure while he starved, filling their bellies without the usual raucous squabbling over every morsel. It was a very good time for carrion-eaters.

  After breakfast the POWs moved off, shuffling westward. Around midmorning Berlin heard gunfire from somewhere ahead of the column. Single shots, spaced – pistol or rifle fire, not the steady, constant rumble of the Russian artillery far behind them. It was sleeting now and the prisoners kept their heads down. Berlin squinted into the distance and saw the guards at the front of the column beginning to force the prisoners off the main roadway and into the snowdrifts.

  An order was coming down the line, passed from one guard to the next. Berlin could hear the word ‘Juden’ repeated. The guard for their section began pushing men to the side of the road with his Mauser rifle held horizontally at chest height. The POWs protested, groaned, resisted, preferring the ankle-deep slush of the roadway to the knee-deep snow of the drifts.

  A thin, dark line appeared over the crest of the hill ahead, moving slowly towards them. As the figures drew closer they separated into two groups and Berlin heard an angry murmur from the POWs in front. On the right was a shuffling, stumbling line of people dressed in ragged striped tunics and pants, and in the middle of the road, out of the worst of the muck, was a smaller, more widely spaced group dressed in black uniforms.

  ‘Those bastards look like the fucking SS.’ It was a shivering airman standing behind Berlin who spoke. He spat into the snow for emphasis. ‘And them others, I think they’re bloody four-be-twos.’

  The German guards kept their backs to the column of Jews and SS men. To Berlin it appeared that they were more concerned with looking away from what was happening on the road than keeping control of their POW charges. Most of the SS men Berlin had seen since his capture had been neatly turned out in tailored black uniforms, but this group looked tired and angry, their clothes crushed and dirty. They carried rifles and holstered pistols or MP40 machine pistols, and several had whips or clubs.