Black Wattle Creek (Charlie Berlin #2)(18)
He stopped behind a tram on Mount Alexander Road, waiting while the passengers alighted. The Luckies packet was empty and Berlin crushed it in his fist. He’d have to stop by a tobacconist, dammit, another three shillings and threepence out of the weekly budget. Perhaps it was time he started rolling his own cigarettes.
Horvay was an interesting bloke. Would Rebecca like him? he wondered. Out in the suburbs she was a bit cut off from the kind of friends she’d had before they got married. Horvay and Rebecca had the Jewish thing in common, but while the war had made Rebecca rediscover her religion it had made Horvay, or whatever his name really was, abandon his.
As he drove, Berlin thought about Lazlo and his tattoo. It was not unusual, after the arrival of displaced persons began in earnest in the late forties, to see a number tattooed on an arm. Berlin usually looked away and tried to think of other things, tried to avoid returning to the snow-covered roadway in Poland and the miserable columns of allied POWs and concentration-camp inmates that had passed each other one misty morning, and the horror he had witnessed.
He took a deep breath and forced the image from his mind. He smiled at the memory of Rebecca walking the kids to school that morning. He had watched from the front gate as Peter went on ahead, just far enough to make the point that he was big enough to go on his own. Sarah held her mum’s hand, chattering away, carefully stepping over the rocks sticking up out of the cinder-covered footpath.
After the death of his bomber crew over Kiel, Berlin had vowed he would never again take responsibility for another person’s life. He had been forced to confront this vow ten years ago in a bullet-shattered shed on the outskirts of Wodonga. The faded bloodstain on his overcoat hem, the blood of a just-made and now long-gone friend, was a reminder of his decision. But that was the past. Now he had two little people who relied on him completely. But not him alone – they relied on him and on Rebecca. He relied on Rebecca too, he realised. That was a big weight to put on anyone’s shoulders but she seemed to cope. Even better than he could sometimes.
THIRTEEN
The engine in the Studebaker was starting to miss again. Berlin was getting pissed off with cars and mechanics, and with doing favours for people, even for his wife. It was nine o’clock on Saturday morning, and instead of working on the darkroom before getting ready to listen to the live broadcast of the grand final on the wireless with Peter, he was driving the undulating dirt roads out past Bulla looking for a farmer and a truck.
He’d been in the shower washing off a Friday afternoon’s worth of sawdust and sweat when Bob had called him back. Rebecca had written down the message. The number plate he’d asked about was last issued to an Owen Giles for an ex-military Ford V8 truck. The truck hadn’t been re-registered for five years and there was no record of the plates having been returned. The address given for Owen Giles was Romney Road, way out in the sticks in the Bulla shire.
Berlin had turned left off the bitumen road about ten minutes back, just past a small bluestone bridge over a creek. Now he was bumping along a rocky track that felt like it had last been graded by the shire council sometime before the war. He drove cautiously, hoping to avoid a tyre blowout on the sharp stony outcrops. It was quite pretty country, which improved his mood a little.
There were no house numbers along the track, mainly because there were no houses. After a mile or two, Berlin saw a windmill ahead on the left, then the shape of a couple of farm sheds and the much lower outline of a house. Braking gently on the gravel road, he pulled the car over by a sagging wire fence and switched off the engine, gambling on it starting again. He was parked under a peppercorn tree next to a faded red five-gallon oil drum with one end cut out. The drum, nailed to a post as a letterbox, had the name ‘Giles’ in flaking white paint on the side. Going by the cobwebs covering the opening, it had been a year or two at least since anyone had checked for mail.
Berlin climbed out of the car and glanced into the drum. Whatever had been last in the letterbox was now just a mountain of powdery snail droppings. In the long grass a bit further on under the tree, he could make out an old car tyre. The rubber was perished through to the wire reinforcing and there were remnants of rotted rope tied around it. High up in the peppercorn tree he could see the frayed remains of more rope lashed round a thick branch. There had been a country kid’s swing here once, but no one had played under that tree for a very long time.
The house and sheds were set back from the road. A wire gate blocked the path leading up to the house, with a wider gate in the fence over a track leading out to the sheds. Both gates were rusted shut, with weeds and what looked like wheat or oats growing wild up through the wire. There were two sheds, each of rusted corrugated-iron sheeting, with the occasional panel starting to fall away. The house was in the same shabby shape. Rusty tin roof, crumbling brick chimney, and a bull-nosed veranda that had collapsed at one end. Since switching off the Studebaker’s engine Berlin hadn’t heard a single sound, not even a bird.
He took off his suit jacket and left it carefully folded on the driver’s seat. As he climbed over the house gate, the wooden post on the side with the hinges broke away and he fell on the overgrown path. Bastard! He checked for scuffs on his shoes and tears in his trousers and shirt but found none.
The planks on the front veranda were rotted away in places. He carefully crossed using the bearers, which were in slightly better condition. He had to rub a layer of dirt off one of the windowpanes to get a look inside. Past rotting lace curtains he could see the place was empty, abandoned. An old cane chair lay on its side in the middle of the room and a calendar hung on one wall, its desiccated pages curling upward. It was impossible to make out the year and he didn’t think it was worth the effort to break in and check.