St Kilda Blues Read online

  Before he’d found Rebecca, Charlie Berlin was a loner, though not by choice. His parents drowned in a boating mishap when he was six, leaving him and older brother Billy to be raised by their grandparents. Billy Berlin was a wild boy, a larrikin, and Charlie’s hero. He enlisted in ’39 and disappeared without trace from a Singapore hospital after the city fell to the Japanese. Berlin joined the air force soon after, though as a young policeman he’d been under no obligation to serve. When he arrived home from Europe in 1945 his grandparents were both long dead and his fiancée had left him for a Yank soldier. In some ways he was glad that they weren’t there to see what he had become, what the war had made him. It was Rebecca who had saved him, who had brought him back from the dark places.

  After putting on a clean white shirt, a neatly knotted tie and his work suit, he wandered out to the front gate to collect the milk and morning papers. As always, his shoes had been carefully polished the night before and he avoided the damp grass bordering the concrete driveway of the three-bedroom weatherboard house he had bought with a war service loan. Droplets of dew were beading on the roofs and bonnets of the two cars in the driveway, a small pale blue Datsun station wagon and Rebecca’s green and even smaller Mini Cooper.

  Back inside the house Berlin put both foil-capped milk bottles in the fridge next to a three quarters–full bottle from the day before. He filled the kettle and put it on the gas burner. Two slices of yesterday’s bread went into the toaster. While he waited he checked the front pages of both The Age and The Sun for any news of far-off battles. For now it seemed the world was quiet, which made him happy. In local news the judicial inquiry into police corruption under Justice Llewellyn Luscombe was into its third month. The inquiry would decide if there were grounds for a royal commission into police corruption. Berlin, like any decent copper, could tell them a royal commission was needed and long overdue but also that it would never ever happen. Too many powerful people had too much to hide. He had to squint to read the tiny type of the weather forecast. It said to expect a nice day.

  The shower was running and he heard Rebecca humming. She came into the kitchen a few minutes later wearing a long white dressing gown, hair tied back and not a skerrick of make-up. She was still the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.

  ‘Keeping student hours now, I see,’ he said. ‘You’ll be out on the streets protesting soon.’

  She kissed him on the lips. ‘And possibly burning my bra too.’ She grinned and leaned in against him. ‘But I think you’d probably like that.’

  Berlin felt a tingle up his spine. It was partly from the kiss and partly from the whispered comment but, as always, mostly from the smell of her fresh from the shower and the touch of her body against his.

  She took butter and a bottle of milk from the fridge and a jar of Vegemite from a cupboard. ‘My first job isn’t till noon so I thought I’d have a look at the front garden. I think the frosts have finished so we might put in some dahlias and impatiens and marigolds this year. And maybe snapdragons.’

  Berlin nodded. He liked snapdragons. The toast was still a way off the shade of brown he liked. The kettle started to whistle and he turned the gas off.

  ‘What have you got on today, Charlie? Anything interesting?’

  Berlin poured hot water into the teapot and slipped a knitted tea cosy over it. ‘Just a bowling club where some silly bugger’s been tickling the till and then fiddling the books. I can barely contain my excitement.’ He poured milk into two cups. ‘We could probably cut back to one bottle of milk in the morning, since it’s only the two of us now.’

  They stood in front of the toaster and waited. Rebecca put her head on his shoulder.

  ‘I miss the little blighters, Charlie. This house is too damn quiet.’

  Berlin nodded. ‘Me too.’

  They drank their tea and ate their toast in silence.

  Chater’s phone call caught Berlin at the front door, just as he was buttoning up his overcoat. The sneering tone always came through in Chater’s voice, drunk or sober, though the man was hardly ever sober. Was it from last night’s session or an early start on the grog this sunny Monday morning? Berlin wondered. Rebecca was of the opinion that putting an incompetent like Chater in charge of the fraud squad was the ultimate irony and demonstrated that there was someone in the Victoria Police hierarchy with a sense of humour.

  The conversation was mostly one-sided, the gist being that Berlin was to wait at home and someone would be out to see him directly. Full and total cooperation was expected. Whatever was on his desk would be taken care of by others in the fraud squad. Berlin knew what the sign-off would be and Chater didn’t disappoint.

  ‘Don’t you bloody fuck this up, Berlin, or I will do you, and do you good and proper, and that’s a promise.’

  He replaced the receiver and took off his overcoat. There wasn’t a lot on his desk at the moment in any case and the call meant more time with Rebecca, another cup of tea and a chance to listen to the ABC news together at eight o’clock. They held hands across the kitchen table, breaking the touch only when the announcer moved on to local news with no word of recent violence in far away places like Israel and Vietnam.

  Rebecca changed into khaki Yakka overalls after the news. She had a green thumb when it came to flowers and starting on the front garden would be a good distraction for her. The backyard fruit trees and vegetable patch were Berlin’s area. He liked the idea that he could always provide food for his family, no matter what. He made more toast and took it into the front room to wait.

  The framed photograph of Peter and Sarah above the living room fireplace was one of Rebecca’s best. Berlin had developed an understanding of composition and tonality and focus and the difficult skill of capturing a person without artifice in the twenty years he and Rebecca had been together. The daughter of a country town photographer, she had been an air force photographer in the war. A post-war career on the social pages of The Argus newspaper had of course ended with her pregnancy and marriage to Berlin. After Peter and then Sarah were born she was a mother first, though wedding photography had helped to pay the bills when the kids were finally old enough to be left in the care of Maria next door.

  Peter was just eighteen when the photo was taken, a year back now. In a proper Collins Street studio portrait his hair would have been brylcreemed, combed and neatly parted and a smile plastered all over his face, but Rebecca’s picture had captured the sullen, rebellious little bugger he was and the hurt and confusion and desperation lurking behind his eyes. On Peter’s good days those eyes sometimes reminded Berlin of his late grandfather, but sadly the lad’s good days had been few and far between.

  In the photo, Sarah, then almost seventeen, had her brother in a headlock and her grinning face was alive with mischief and love and happiness. She saw something in her brother that his father couldn’t and she protected him even though she was the younger child. She had been Berlin’s princess at age seven, a gangling tomboy at ten and at fourteen she had almost magically transformed into a slender, elegant and beautiful young woman with a smile that melted his heart and a wickedly dry sense of humour that usually bemused or confused him. Berlin saw Rebecca in both their faces but Sarah was more like her in temperament and the boy more like him, which was a poor legacy for a father to bestow on a son.

  A squeal of tyres came from the direction of the street corner and then the rumble of a big engine. A dark green shape was suddenly reflected in the glass of the framed picture, hiding the children’s image in its glare. Berlin turned and looked out through the venetian blinds. A sports car was stopped at the kerb outside his house. The top was down and he could hear music through the living room window. He vaguely knew the words, something about tripping a light fandango. The group was called Procol Harum, he remembered. Most groups had strange names now, strange names and stranger clothes and hair grown shaggy and too long.

  Sarah had played that song constantly on the little record player in her bedroom in the weeks bef
ore she left. He had banned her from using the radiogram in the living room a year back over a broken needle. It came out later that Peter had been the one who did the damage to the stylus but she had covered for him, taking all the blame. It took her six months to save up for that little record player, working after school at the local doctor’s surgery where she was a favourite of all the patients.

  The music stopped when the engine was cut. The driver climbed out and paused to light a cigarette before walking towards the house. Rebecca was on her knees at a flowerbed beside the driveway, clearing weeds. The driver stopped beside her and had a word. Just a word. At one time there would have been hugs and kisses but not now. ‘He’s inside,’ he heard Rebecca say without looking up.

  Berlin had the front door open before Bob Roberts could knock. If the scars that war had left on Charlie Berlin were all hidden deep inside, the wounds to Bob Roberts from a very different conflict were plain enough to see. There was the limp, of course, not bad but still there, and the thin white scar on the cheek, arcing savagely from his eye socket to the corner of his mouth. And the anger.

  The two men shook hands. The last time they’d met, Roberts had been in a suit but now he was wearing a black rollneck skivvy, dark trousers and a brown corduroy jacket. His hair was longer, with sideburns almost down to his jaw. He’d probably soon have a moustache like a Mexican bandit, going by what some of the other St Kilda detectives were starting to look like.

  ‘G’day, Charlie. What is it, six months, a year? You’re looking fit. Still doing those morning push-ups, I see. How are things with the fraud boys? I heard you moved over.’

  Berlin shrugged. ‘About what you’d expect. I suppose I’ll get used to it one day.’

  ‘You’ve got to go along to get along, Charlie, you should know that by now.’

  ‘I’m a changed man, Bob, keeping my head down, my mouth shut and staying well out of sight.’

  Roberts grinned. ‘Seems to be a lot of that going around just lately. Not worried about the inquiry, are you?’

  ‘Not really, how about you?’

  Roberts looked at Berlin and smiled. He was still a good-looking bloke, Berlin decided, despite the scar, or perhaps because of it.

  ‘Me, Charlie? I’m as pure as the driven snow, just like everyone else. Anyway we both know this inquiry will end up same as all the others: wasting six months, costing heaps of money, going nowhere, frightening the chickens and turning up bloody nothing.’

  Berlin looked over Roberts’ shoulder. Rebecca was watching them, still on her knees with the trowel in her hand. He waved to her and she went back to her weeding.

  ‘Why don’t we go through to the kitchen, Bob? There might still be some tea in the pot and you can tell me why you’re here, and why I’m here instead of trying to figure out who embezzled six hundred quid from the Oatley Bowling Club.’

  ‘Fair enough, but it’s six hundred dollars now, remember, mate? Not quid. And the reason I’m here is there’s a young girl, a teenager, gone missing. Disappeared into thin air on Saturday night.’

  Berlin searched Roberts’ eyes. ‘I just read the papers and listened to the ABC news and they didn’t mention anything about any missing girl.’

  ‘That’s the thing about newspapers and the ABC, Charlie, they won’t always tell a bloke the stuff he needs to know.’

  TWO

  The tea in the pot was cold and Roberts refused the offer of a fresh one. He sat down at the kitchen table and took a packet of Craven A from his pocket. Berlin shook his head at the offered cigarette.

  ‘I’ve given them up, remember?’ He and Rebecca had both stopped smoking five years back when Peter turned fourteen. They’d agreed it was hypocritical of them to forbid Peter to smoke if they still did. It hadn’t stopped the little bugger though.

  Roberts lit his cigarette with a silver lighter. He put the lighter down on the table. The lighter looked expensive, very expensive.

  Berlin searched the kitchen drawers until he found an ashtray. He put it on the table and sat down opposite Roberts. ‘So what’s so special about this missing girl that Chater pulls me away from the great bowling club robbery?’

  Roberts slowly rolled the cigarette back and forth between his thumb and index finger before he answered. ‘Couple of things. For one, she’s got a rich dad who has the ear of the premier, so Mr Bolte wants action.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Turns out she’s number nine in the last twelve months.’

  Berlin felt his stomach tighten. ‘Nine? In twelve months? How do eight other teenage girls go missing without anyone making a fuss before now?’

  ‘You know how some kids are these days, Charlie, a lot of sex and drugs and boozing and staying away from home for days at a time. I guess no one saw it as a pattern.’ He paused. ‘No one but you, as it happens. That’s the reason I’m here.’

  ‘I’m not doing missing persons any more. They shifted me sideways in March, after that third girl, remember? No one wanted to hear what I was trying to tell them.’

  The police had no dedicated missing persons squad so any missing persons cases were usually flicked to whoever was at a loose end that week. Missing kids, especially the young ones, were the very worst cases, so Berlin always got those. Some were found quickly, some not. Berlin’s face told distraught parents he knew something about loss and despair and they warmed to him instantly, telling him stories of the missing tyke that broke his heart. Sometimes there was good news and sometimes no news, not ever. Invariably the cases were one-offs but there was something about these three missing girls that had caught and kept his attention earlier in the year.

  Perhaps it was having a teenage daughter himself, or perhaps it was that the missing girls came from Broadmeadows and Fitzroy and Yarraville, all working-class suburbs. He had seen similarities, sensed a pattern in the disappearances, asked for help, for another officer to assist or even a policewoman, but no one was interested. His suggestion in a memo that it would be a different matter if the missing girls came from more genteel suburbs like Toorak or South Yarra got someone’s nose out of joint and there was suddenly a vacancy in the fraud squad that needed filling.

  Roberts took a drag on his cigarette. ‘Taking you off that case wasn’t right, not right at all. You were good, the best, that’s what I told them.’

  Told who? Berlin wondered. ‘Not good enough to be doing it now, though,’ he said.

  Roberts looked down at the floor. ‘You still keep those shoes of yours nicely polished, don’t you? Feller could see his face in your shoes, Charlie, if he wanted to look.’

  Berlin glanced down. His grandfather had taught him early on that shoes said something about a man and they should be treated with respect. On the forced march at gunpoint through those winter blizzards in Poland, POW Charlie Berlin had also learned that a good pair of shoes, well looked after, could save a man’s life.

  ‘I don’t see your point, Bob.’

  ‘It’s simple. A touch of nugget and a bit of spit and polish is one thing, Charlie, but you’ve just never bloody learned to stop standing on other people’s toes, have you?’

  Berlin had lost track of all the ways it was possible to tread on someone’s toes in this job. Office politics and the sometimes subtle and ever-shifting power structure within the police force didn’t interest him, and that was what always tripped him up. Getting the work done, getting the right result, that was all he was ever interested in – and then getting home to Rebecca and the kids in one piece. He thought about Sarah, so young and so grown up now. And he thought about the parents of the three girls from earlier in the year.

  ‘I really don’t see how much help I can be on the case. I’ll do what I can of course, fill you in on what I can remember, but it’s been six months. What do you have on these missing girls so far?’

  ‘Not a whole lot. All young, all good girls, or so their parents told the investigating officers. All went missing from different discotheques and dances in the city or the inner
suburbs. That sound familiar?’

  It sounded much too familiar to Berlin. ‘And you said nine girls?’

  ‘That’s what it looks like. They had half a dozen policewomen sorting through missing persons files all of yesterday afternoon, looking for similarities. There were twelve girls on the list originally but three were confirmed as runaways who eventually showed up back at home.’

  Berlin felt a sour taste in his mouth, remembering the dismissive response to his request for just one policewoman to help out back in March. ‘You’re sure this latest one isn’t just another runaway?’

  ‘Doesn’t seem like it, not the type and her home life looks okay. She was last seen at a discotheque in Little La Trobe Street between nine and ten on Saturday night.’

  He did the calculation in his head. Thirty-five hours or so, coming up on a day and a half. ‘And there’s been no sign of any of the others?’

  ‘Just one, girl named Melinda Marquet, came from out in the bush, out Melton way. They reckon from the timing she was maybe the seventh or eighth to go missing. Pair of uniforms doing a patrol in a divvy van fished her out of the St Kilda end of Albert Park Lake early on a Monday morning.’

  ‘Jesus.’ Berlin had to resist the temptation to ask Roberts for one of his cigarettes. ‘When was this? I don’t remember hearing about it.’

  ‘Couple of weeks back, weekend of the second semi-final.’

  That would make it September tenth. Berlin, like most Melburnians, could easily fix dates around Victorian Football League finals matches. Richmond had cleaned up Carlton and there had been a lot of celebrating that night and the next day. And the Richmond victory was the kind of news that would have pushed a dead girl right off the front pages.

  ‘Did she drown?’