Black Wattle Creek (Charlie Berlin #2)(10)
As Berlin passed the lake several ducks altered course to cruise towards him. No bread for you today, duckies, he said to himself. I should bring the kids one day, though, it could be fun. And he knew Sarah would love the black swans. Berlin veered left. The ducks lost interest and resumed their squawking and squabbling. Sounds like the bloody detectives section office, he thought.
A tall hedge sheltered the Queens Park Trugo Club green and he walked through the open gateway. His grandfather had brought him here once, he remembered, but that was years back and somehow the place seemed much smaller now. There were several buildings across the green from the entrance. Next to a scoreboard was a small wooden grandstand where players could keep out of the sun, smoking and chiacking their opponents while waiting their turn. A lock-up shed for storing the mallets and other gear was built to one side and next to it a small clubhouse.
Trugo was a game unique to Victoria, invented in the 1920s by the craftsmen who built carriages at the railway workshops at Newport. Players used heavy wooden mallets to knock big rubber washers up and down a grass pitch the same dimensions as the interior of a passenger carriage. Berlin once overheard his Scottish grandfather describe it as the bastard child of lawn bowls and croquet, and almost as big a waste of a grown man’s time as the Sassenach game of cricket. That was the only time Charlie ever heard him swear. Berlin’s grandfather had been a VFL man and an Essendon supporter to the bone.
Beryl Moffit, the woman Berlin was looking for, was the secretary of the Trugo Association. She and Rebecca had worked together on the monthly newsletter for the past six months. It was another of Rebecca’s little side jobs, one that helped pay the bills and combined her photographic and journalism skills. While it was still early and the whole place appeared deserted, the clubhouse door was open. He knocked. Even though he was off duty and this visit was a favour for his wife, Berlin figured it could still be classified as a missing persons case, of sorts.
He knocked again, took off his hat and walked into the room. The woman had her back to him. An apron was tied tightly around her waist and she had on blue rubber gloves.
‘Beryl?’
The woman didn’t look up from the sink. To Berlin’s eyes the pile of dishes on the right side of sink looked just as clean as those stacked to drain on the left.
‘I’m Charlie Berlin. Rebecca asked me to come and have a quiet chat, if you’re up to it.’
The woman didn’t turn around. She swirled a wire soap holder around in the sink to add more froth. ‘Rebecca’s been very good to me, I’m sorry that I bothered her.’ She spoke softly and Berlin heard the weariness in her voice, and the pain.
‘I stopped by your house and your sister said I’d find you here.’
Beryl stared down into the soapy water. ‘This is all her fault, stupid cow.’
‘I don’t suppose there’s any chance of a cup of tea?’
She turned to face him then and smiled. It was a tired smile. ‘Of course there is, Mr Berlin. You’ll have to excuse me, I was off with the pixies I’m afraid. I forgot my manners.’ Beryl was in her fifties, well preserved but with dark circles under her eyes that told Berlin how worn out she was. ‘That Rebecca of yours is a love, Mr Berlin. You’ve got yourself a real treasure there, you be good to her, you mind me.’
Berlin nodded. ‘I’ll do that. Call me Charlie.’
She held out her hand. Soapy water dripped off the blue glove and she stared down at it. ‘Oh dear me, Mr Berlin, I mean Charlie, I’m sorry about that. I’m in such a dither.’
‘She’ll be right, Beryl. Tell you what, you sit down here and I’ll make us that cup of tea. You can just tell me where everything is, eh?’
The shiny steel urn on a side bench was cold to the touch, so Berlin filled an electric jug and plugged it in. Beryl, still in her apron and rubber gloves, sat at the long table and gave him directions. Under a bench he found a small teapot and Beryl pointed out where he could find clean cups and saucers, the tea caddy and the strainer.
While the tea brewed, he found a bottle of milk in the refrigerator, its red foil seal still unbroken. Biscuits were in a large rectangular tin commemorating the Royal visit in 1954 by the new Queen Elizabeth. As an ex-serviceman, Berlin could have been at the Melbourne Cricket Ground to greet her, along with seventy thousand others, but he volunteered to go into uniform to help with crowd control. In fact he’d been stationed not far from here, out on Mount Alexander Road, where cheering crowds of flag-waving mums and dads and neatly uniformed school children had shrieked joyfully as her black Rolls-Royce zoomed past on its way from Essendon aerodrome.
When the tea was brewed he poured two cups, putting the milk in first. They were catering cups, solid, thick, built to stand heavy use. The police canteen used them, so did every air force mess he’d ever been in. He held his cup in both hands, letting its contents warm his fingers. Beryl had taken off her rubber gloves, and the apron was now neatly folded over the back of a chair. Her teaspoon was still going slowly round and round in her cup, though her single spoonful of white sugar had long dissolved. Berlin put his cup down on the saucer and took a biscuit from the plate on the table. ‘Why don’t you tell me a bit about your old man, Beryl? He was in the army, right?’
EIGHT
She smiled. ‘That’s right, Cyril was in the RAE, the engineers. Facimus et Frangimus, We make and we break. That was their motto till just after the war, when they changed it to something stupid. Cyril kept his old cap badge, wouldn’t change it, said he was a maker and a breaker and proud of it.’