St Kilda Blues (9 page)

Berlin took a chair from one of the tables and put it down in front of the couch. He sat down and leaned forward. His first words were spoken softly, casually. It was always the best way to begin.

‘My name's Detective Sergeant Charlie Berlin, Jim, but you can call me Mr Berlin or Sir. Dee seems nice, you really shouldn't have yelled at her. Nice looking too. By the time you get out of Pentridge she'll probably be legal. Probably have a kid or two and maybe a husband as well by then, but life rolls on. You might not even like girls by then anyway, some blokes change when they're inside for a spell. Now, before we get to the drug possession and carnal knowledge part of the proceedings I need to know everything that happened in this place on Saturday night, and I mean everything. And look at me when I talk to you.'

Jim kept his head down. ‘I told the other cops when they came, and the detective who came to my place yesterday arvo, that Selden bloke. It was just the usual stuff, just a normal Saturday night, you can ask him.'

‘But I'm asking you. So it was just sex and drugs and rock'n'roll?'

Jim looked up and into Berlin's face. ‘That's right, and a light show and we also had some folk music up here too. There was a banjo, as I recall.' The last part was said with a hint of a sneer.

Berlin leaned in closer and spoke very softly. ‘You might want to watch your tone, sunshine. I don't want to hit you but I will if it's necessary.'

Berlin held the other man's gaze until Jim was forced to look away.

‘Look, it was just a normal night, okay? Until this old chook comes in around eleven and starts disrupting the place, yelling out for some bird named Gertie or Gladys.'

‘The girl's name is Gudrun.'

‘Okay, Gudrun then. An old bloke with a driver's cap comes in after her and about fifteen minutes later there were cops everywhere and that was it for the night. The band packed it in and so did all my customers. That's all I know. Don't know anyone named Gudrun, never met her, never saw her, don't know where she went. I don't even know if she was ever here.'

Berlin heard Roberts coming up the stairs behind him. Roberts knew enough to stop at the top, to keep still and listen.

‘She was here all right, Jim, and now she's gone missing. She's just fifteen and it seems you have a bit of thing for fifteen-year-olds, going by young Dee there.'

Jim stared Berlin directly in the face. ‘That bitch told me she was eighteen. And you can't prove she didn't, so fuck you, pig.'

The last four words were said in a lowered voice but Berlin knew he was definitely meant to hear them. ‘You're a little bit slow on the uptake, aren't you, Jim? Don't own a dog by any chance, do you?'

‘What?'

‘You know, Jim, a dog. Woof, woof, woof? Lassie, Rin Tin Tin, Old Yeller, that sort of thing.'

Berlin had asked the question in a soft voice and Jim stared back at him, confused, head tilted to one side. ‘What the fuck are you on about?'

‘I like dogs, Jim. I used to have a Doberman once, those skinny German dogs with no tail, pointy ears, a big chest and very, very big teeth. Savage buggers, they use them for guard dogs. The bloke who sold it to me, the breeder, he told me Dobermans do what they're told to start off with but eventually they will always have a go at their owners, just to see who's really in charge. And a bloke can't have that, can't have a dog snapping at him, can't have an animal that doesn't know who's in charge, can he, Jim?'

Berlin kept his eyes fixed on the other man's face. ‘This bloke reckoned that what you do when they turn nasty, the dogs I mean, what you do is grab the choke chain and hold them up so their back paws are just off the ground. You let them dangle there, struggling, choking and gasping, until you think they're about ready to pass out and then you look them right in the eye and punch them in the face, as hard as you can.'

Berlin looked into Jim's face, into his eyes. ‘He reckoned there's a bloody good chance you're going to break a couple of bones in your hand but the dog will be okay when it eventually wakes up.' Berlin leaned in very close and spoke softly. ‘And from that moment on, this bloke told me, there is absolutely, absolutely no question about who is in charge.'

Berlin still hadn't takes his eyes off the other man and even though his voice was low and the tone neutral, the message was very clear. ‘You want a smoke before we get on with the questions, Jim?'

Jim nodded. Berlin held up his hand. Roberts crossed the room and shook a cigarette loose from the pack in his hand. Jim took the offered cigarette without looking away from Berlin. Roberts lit it for him. There was no way Jim could have done it for himself at that moment, given the way his hands were shaking.

‘It was just like every other Saturday night, Mr Berlin. It was a good crowd, given they had Jeff St John on at the Thumpin Tum. We have a pretty strict dress code that keeps the dags out and we never have any problems. We're getting to be popular, even though a lot of the bands are starting to play in pubs now, and just lately we've had some pretty good coverage in the music magazines as well. We get lots of photographers coming by to shoot the bands and the crowds. We've even had photographers from
Go-Set
and
GEAR
stopping by.'

‘That's good to hear, Jim, I'm pleased for you, but let's just stick with Saturday night for the moment.'

By this stage Jim was quite attuned to Berlin's tone and he got the message.

‘Sorry, like I was saying, it was just a regular Saturday night until the old chook – that lady – came looking for her daughter. I don't really know what else I can tell you, Mr Berlin.'

‘It wasn't the old chook's daughter but that's not important. You the only person round here with a taste for jailbait, by any chance?'

‘Look I told you —'

Berlin held up one finger. It was enough.

‘Okay, we do get the odd dirty old man but we can make it uncomfortable enough for them that they leave. And sometimes we get older blokes who say they're just keeping an eye on their daughters, making sure they're safe, but believe me, that's not where their eyes are looking. Just lately we've been getting some Yanks too, not many, R and R from Vietnam, down from Sydney. You can spot them easy from the clothes and the haircuts. And mostly they're a bit twitchy, if ya know what I mean.'

Berlin didn't nod but he did know what Jim meant.

‘And we always get a few of the awkward younger ones, you know, pimply kids in brown cord pants and paisley cravats and desert boots. They're usually too shy to ask the girls to dance or even to talk to them and they generally leave by themselves after a bit. Probably go out peeping in windows or home to spend the night in bed wrestling with Mrs Palmer and her five daughters.'

Was that what Peter's Saturday nights had been like? Berlin wondered. Was breaking and entering easier for a pimply fat boy than asking a pretty girl for a dance?

Jim took a long drag on his cigarette and dropped the butt at his feet. He crushed it into the dirty floorboards with the tip of his right boot. ‘Look, we don't sell booze, so if these teeny-boppers' mums and dads don't mind them coming into town and staying out late, what can I do? You can't really tell how old they are by the way they dress and most of them reckon they're on the pill anyway, and they always say they're old enough. If they tell you they're eighteen and they look it, no bloke in his right mind is going to knock them back. Would you? You must have been young once.'

Berlin shook his head. ‘No, Jim, I don't think I ever was.'

Dessert was some sort of preserved fruit he didn't recognise served with a runny custard. After the meal one of the brothers on the raised platform performed a benediction. While the girls who had served the meal gathered up the bowls and mugs, the boys scampered outside to play in the last of the fast-fading daylight. Those who had spent the most time wriggling on the hard benches of the dining room moved quickly in the direction of the privy.

The moon was just beginning to rise when the clanging of a handbell indicated it was time for bed. Several of the brothers herded the boys in the direction of the dormitory and, once inside, began calling out names. Those who were called picked up towels from their beds and went into the bathroom. The rest of the dormitory's inhabitants changed into their nightshirts and sat waiting on their beds under the flickering light of the hurricane lanterns. He could hear running water in the bathroom and shouts from the brothers who were supervising the washing session. Several brothers lounged by the bathroom area smoking and talking and occasionally looking in to see what was happening.

He carefully checked the contents of the small cupboard beside the bed and noticed that several items had been rearranged. The empty kitbag had been moved away from the back wall but a surreptitious check showed that the dagger still remained hidden. He pushed the kitbag back against the wall. Finding a better hiding place would be his first task tomorrow.

The freshly scrubbed boys came back into the dormitory, and he noticed a couple were crying. Brother Brian came into the room and the boys climbed off their beds, kneeling beside them on the hard, bare boards with hands clasped. While Brother Brian led them in a prayer, another brother lifted the hurricane lamps down from the ceiling using a long pole and lifted the glass on each to blow out the flame. The room was dark when the prayer was over and the boys scrambled into bed. Brother Brian walked the length of the room holding a lantern and the boy noticed that the approved sleeping position appeared to be with both hands outside the thin blanket. Brother Brian winked as he passed the boy's bed and left the still-burning lantern on a chair by the dormitory door.

The boy was still awake an hour later. The bed was uncomfortable and he heard coughs and sniffling and the sound of muffled weeping. There were footsteps on the path outside the dormitory and the lantern by the door was suddenly lifted up high. All the noise in the room stopped. The lantern slowly moved along the line of beds and stopped at the one opposite his. He heard the rustle of a blanket being pulled back, then the sound of small bare feet on the wooden boards as someone was led out of the room.

The lantern moved through the dormitory a half-dozen times that night and then again towards dawn when the boys were led back to their beds. He could hear snuffling and sometimes sobs. He could guess who had been chosen, even from his brief time looking around the dining room. He would need to be careful now, careful to not look like a victim but careful also not to look like a threat. The dagger was close, but was it close enough? He would need a hiding place where it was safe but still accessible. If the lantern ever stopped by the end of his bed he wanted to be ready.

*

After a breakfast of cold water and lumpy porridge, Brother Brian produced clippers and trimmed the boy's hair right down to the scalp. He gave him a new-arrivals tour of the mission and then led him to a small room at the rear of the administration building. It had a large overhead skylight and wooden filing cabinets set against one wall. There were big, boxy contraptions with leather bellows mounted on three-legged stands, and Brother Brian explained that they were his cameras.

Behind the studio and behind a locked door was a strange room, windowless and full of nasty smells. Brother Brian explained it was his darkroom, a place where films were developed in total darkness and photographic prints made on special paper under the weak orange glow of a kerosene safelight.

His new job, it was explained, would be assisting Brother Brian in his work. This entailed keeping a photographic record of the mission's work to be submitted annually to the order's headquarters in Germany. Brother Brian also kept photographic records of the many documents related to the running of the mission. When new children were brought in, their birth certificates and passports, if they had them, and all their other documents, were photographed on glass plates to be submitted annually to the Adelaide office along with a set of prints on photographic paper.

Brother Brian was pleasantly surprised by the boy's aptitude for photography. He quickly learned how to operate the bulky press camera and to develop the glass plate negatives with hardly any breakages. He was also most helpful in the making of the black and white prints under orange light in the windowless darkroom with its door locked against intruders who might ruin the photographic paper by exposing it to light.

The boy quickly learned the procedures for moving the paper through the soapy-slick developer, the vinegar-smelling acetic acid stop bath and then the acrid hypo fixer, used to make the images permanent. He also quickly picked up on the special signals indicating it was the right moment for him to reach under Brother Brian's robe and tug rhythmically at the skinny penis, aiming it carefully when the moment was right into the bin under the bench that held any badly made prints.

Brother Brian would groan and whimper and jerk his hips forwards then catch his breath in great gasps and finally slump exhausted against the darkroom sink. Sometimes he would weep afterwards and always quietly beg God's forgiveness while ignoring the boy, who went back to his assigned task at the darkroom sink. The boy didn't find that part of his job too onerous and it seemed to ensure that the nightly visitors with the lamp never stopped by his bed.

Neither man spoke on the ride back out to Berlin's place. It had already been a very long day. After the Buddha's Belly they had visited a half-dozen other dance venues.

All they had to show for it was the knowledge that what might be a cool and groovy and happening scene on a weekend night was pretty damn depressing on a weekday afternoon. Without the loud music, a packed dance floor and a lightshow pulsing through a mist of sweat, cheap perfume, Old Spice aftershave and cigarette smoke, ‘sad' was the first word that came to mind for Charlie Berlin.

Roberts carried the bundle of newspapers and the files into the house and dumped them on the kitchen table. Berlin filled the kettle and put it on the gas.

‘You want tea, Bob? You can have coffee if you like, if you can figure out how to use that bloody percolator.'

‘Tea's good.'

Berlin took down the tea caddy from the shelf and put two scoops into the pot. He was using a smaller teapot now that it was just him and Rebecca.

‘It's a hell of a lot easier with just one.'

Berlin leaned back against the kitchen bench by the sink, watching the kettle on the flickering gas. ‘Just one what, Bob?'

‘Just one victim. Makes it easier for us, that was what you taught me a long time back, remember? Mostly it's someone they know, someone they trust. If it's totally random and there's no connection between the girls it's going to be harder.'

‘You ever hear any of the older blokes talk about Arnold Sodeman?'

Roberts shook his head.

‘Arnold Karl Sodeman, also known as the Schoolgirl Strangler. It was back before the war, must have been in the early '30s. I remember hearing my grandad talk about the case. Sodeman abducted and strangled four girls. I think the oldest was fifteen and the youngest around six. Took them four years to catch him because the first two were total strangers. The last pair were actually kids of family friends and that's how they eventually nabbed him, not too long after he killed them.'

‘Did he get the long drop?'

Berlin nodded. ‘Didn't appeal the death sentence, said he was sick in the head and when he had a skinful he lost control. They did an autopsy after he swung and he was right, he actually had something in his brain that was apparently aggravated by grog.'

‘Not an excuse though, is it?'

‘That's not for us to say, Bob.' He poured boiling water into the teapot. ‘But you're right, even if it's the same bloke doing these abductions, if the victims are all total strangers taken at random then finding Gudrun isn't going to be easy'

‘The Yanks seem to get a lot of it.'

Berlin was looking for the tea cosy but gave up. ‘A lot of what?'

‘This kind of thing – multiple abductions, murders. I was just reading a book by a bloke named Brophy who calls the people who do this stuff serial murderers. He reckons there's always a pattern to it and they mostly choose people they don't know, which makes it hard to track them down. Been going on for years over there, apparently.'

Berlin picked up a strainer.
Jesus, just what a man wanted to hear with a half-dozen or more girls missing. Was Melbourne's very own serial murderer targeting dances and discotheques hunting for teenage victims?
He poured the tea.

‘I thought Zane Gray was your preferred reading material, Bob.'

‘They've got a good library at the uni and my girl spends a lot of her days and nights there. Their Zane Gray collection is a bit limited and a bloke has to fill in his time somehow. Wouldn't have any biscuits or fruitcake, would you?'

Berlin hunted around and found a tin of assorted sweet biscuits but no fruitcake. Roberts took a couple of coconut-flecked Iced VoVos, which were Sarah's favourites.

‘I don't recall you ever having a Doberman, Charlie, just Pip the terrier.'

Berlin decided he would have an Iced VoVo too. ‘Never did, it was just a story. Stupid bugger was always going to talk, I didn't want to beat around the bush till he decided to do it. I just nudged him along a bit, that was all.'

‘You learn that in the fraud squad?'

Berlin shook his head. ‘Funny thing about the fraud squad is, on our cases, people are just dying to come clean, confess. It's not really investigating. You generally just have to show up and chat for a bit, wait till they're ready to confess.'

Roberts had finished the last of the Iced VoVos and searched through the biscuit tin till he found an Orange Slice. He dipped it halfway into his tea. ‘Funny that – you and Scheiner maybe crossing paths during the war, him taking pot shots at your bomber.'

Berlin wished Roberts hadn't brought that up. He had managed to keep Scheiner out of his mind for the whole ride back from the city. ‘Twenty thousand feet apart isn't exactly crossing paths, Bob, and some nights there were up to a thousand bombers in the air. We couldn't see them and they couldn't see us, except if you got picked up by a searchlight.'

‘Yeah, I suppose it must be different face to face, like in the jungle or the desert I mean. They reckon the Jerries in North Africa and Crete never liked it when our blokes got in close and used the bayonet. They didn't like the idea of cold steel.'

Berlin had briefly used the army-issue Lee Enfield .303 rifle in his early air force drill training and the 1917 model bayonet that came along with it. Seventeen inches of razor sharp steel on the end of a rifle – who would be able to stand up to the thought of having that pushed into their guts? Or having to push it into some other poor bugger's guts, for that matter.

After the tea was finished Berlin walked Roberts back out to the sports car.

‘Do we have a next step, Charlie? I've got . . . people I have to keep informed.'

I'll bet you do
, Berlin said to himself. ‘Not right now. I need some time to go through the files and once I figure out what to do next I'll give you a ring. But you need to keep yourself ready to go.'

Roberts climbed into the driver's seat. ‘Sounds fair enough.' He looked up at Berlin. ‘You reckon we're in with a chance? Of finding the girl, I mean.'

Berlin thought about the autopsy photograph of the Marquet girl and the rope marks on her wrists and ankles. ‘I know it sounds cruel but if it is just one bloke and the bastard isn't killing the girls straight away, if he's keeping them tied up, locked up for pleasure or whatever it is he wants from them, then it means we might have a shot at finding her.' But of course what went on in the meantime really didn't bear thinking about. ‘I might be out for a bit tonight so I'll leave any messages for you at Russell Street. You should ring in every hour or so.'

Berlin took the envelope from his pocket and tossed it onto the passenger seat. ‘You're a bloody idiot, Bob, you know that, don't you? Those bastards you're working with would sell you down the river without even stopping to think about it.'

Roberts opened the Triumph's glove compartment and stuffed the envelope inside. He slammed it closed and started the engine. After a moment he switched it back off.

‘You know, you might be a smart bugger, Charlie, and okay at your job, but you don't know everything. Just because I'm a bad husband and a crook father doesn't necessarily mean I'm a not a good copper. You might want to try to remember that.'

‘And you remember to check in on the hour, Bob. And leave any message for me at Russell Street as well, let me know as soon as you hear of any developments with Tony Seldens's investigation, whatever they are.'

Roberts started the engine again and backed the Triumph out of the driveway, revving the motor a few more times than Berlin thought was strictly necessary. Standing on the nature strip, he watched the sports car until it turned right at the end of the street. From the sound of it Bob Roberts floored the accelerator once he was out of Berlin's sight.

He stopped to check the letterbox but it was too early for the afternoon post. The front lawn would need a good trim soon, that was for sure.
Why hadn't he done it on the weekend?
he wondered. He looked up the street towards the corner. The sound of the Triumph had faded and far in the distance he could hear the bells at the railway level crossing. What could Gudrun Scheiner hear right now, if she could hear anything at all? And if Bob Roberts was a good copper, what was he doing with an envelope stuffed full of cash in the glove compartment of a brand-new sports car he couldn't really afford?