Black Wattle Creek (Charlie Berlin #2)(19)
The first shed was as empty as the house. Just a few old hessian bags that had once held seed. Something scuttled away as he entered. Rats maybe, or mice. Which meant the possibility of snakes. Might still be a bit cold but a bloke wouldn’t want to take any chances, he decided. He found an old, wood-handled garden rake in the grass as he walked towards the second shed and he smacked it hard against the ground a couple of times to let any wildlife know he was coming. Inside this shed was as empty as the first. Apart from the truck.
After the war, ex-military trucks like the Ford were everywhere. The army didn’t need or want them any more and they were a bargain for farmers, or anyone with a need for a cheap, reliable vehicle. In Wodonga, back in ‘47, Berlin had seen thousands of trucks lined up neatly on the gentle hills around the Bandiana army camp: Fords and Chevys and Studebakers. They had all been shiny and new back then, but this one had obviously led a hard life after it was demobilised. Same as me and a lot of other blokes, Berlin mused as he carefully inspected the vehicle.
There were only a few residual traces of the truck’s original jungle-green paintwork. All four tyres were flat, the wipers hung away from the filthy windscreen, and when Berlin forced the driver’s side door open he could smell that the seats were home to a colony of mice. At the back of the vehicle a metal frame that once supported a fabric cover over the cargo area was now festooned with streamers of limp rotting canvas. There was no sign of a rear number plate, just the boltholes where one had been.
He passed along the passenger side of the truck back to the entrance. It was dark at the rear of the shed but up here by the open doorway it was brighter. Berlin knelt down and ran his hand over the place on the front bumper bar where the licence plate should be. The steel bumper bar was badly pitted with corrosion but he could see that there had been a plate here until quite recently, protecting a small area of less-worn metal underneath.
Berlin walked slowly back to his car, using the rake for support as he stepped carefully over the caved-in gate. He put the rake into the back seat of the Studebaker. The head was still good, though rusty, and he could easily clean that up. He’d get at least a year out of the wooden handle before it needed replacing. A man would be a fool to let something like that go to waste. He decided to leave his jacket off, as it was getting warmer.
He lit up a smoke and then looked at his watch. Still a fair bit of the morning left to work on the darkroom if he headed home right now. And Rebecca needed the car back by twelve at the latest anyway, for the wedding. Who the hell would get married on grand final day? Most of the men in the congregation would be grumpy, twitchy at being out of contact on the biggest day of the year. Several would be sitting with heads tilted sideways to better hear the crackly coverage of the match through little plastic transistor radio earpieces, passing along updated scores in whispers throughout the ceremony.
The grand final would be close to starting by the time he put his tools away, got cleaned up and made the kids their lunch. How interested would Peter be in the big match? he wondered. He still couldn’t decide if his son actually liked football or just went along with him, it being easier than throwing a tantrum. He also wondered what he could tell Rebecca now that it looked like he’d reached a dead end. He dropped his cigarette butt on the ground, pressing down on it gently with his foot, and then climbed into the car.
He’d have to come up with something to tell the widow Moffit, but exactly what he had no idea. The woman had called last night just after dinner and he heard Rebecca laughing as she hung up the phone. Beryl had wanted to thank her for asking him to look into things, and to tell her that her husband was a real charmer and she was going to make him a cream sponge with passionfruit icing. She’d added that he could also make a good cup of tea.
Berlin glanced at his wristwatch. A good cup of tea would be nice right about now he decided and he switched on the ignition. The engine rattled and coughed several times before catching. While he waited for it to settle down he thought about the four Rolls-Royce Merlin engines on his Lancaster coughing into life. Now, that was an engine. How many times had they taken him from England to Germany and back without missing a beat? Of course, the only place you found a Rolls-Royce engine these days was in a Rolls-Royce car, and that was way beyond most people’s wildest dreams.
He was about to put the Studebaker into gear and head for home when he heard the rumble of another engine. He looked in the rear-view mirror. A car was approaching from behind him, a cloud of dust billowing in its wake. It sped past, tyres juddering on the rocky track. Berlin wound his window up quickly to avoid the dust. Not the bastard’s own car, he guessed. A man didn’t drive like that on a road like this in a car he’d paid for out of his own pocket.
Berlin hadn’t been able to see the licence plate on the vehicle speeding by, but it was definitely a white Holden panel van. He slipped the Studebaker into reverse and carefully backed out onto the roadway. The dust haze was still settling when he straightened up the steering wheel and rolled the car forward. There was no way he was ever going to catch up with the panel van at the speed it was going, but he figured the track they were on had to end somewhere.
FOURTEEN
The dust from the panel van was long settled as Berlin’s Studebaker crawled along the rocky track. After about five miles he could see the top of a red brick chimney over the next rise. Topping the rise, he found himself looking down on a large complex of about a dozen one-and two-storey stone buildings, surrounded by a high wall made of bluestone blocks. A winding asphalt roadway was visible on the far side, so he figured the dirt track he was on must lead to the rear of the place.