Black Wattle Creek (Charlie Berlin #2)(21)
‘I could see you going out walking from the window of my room,’ the man continued. He put out his hand. ‘Leonard Manning, Len.’
Berlin shook his hand. ‘Charlie Berlin, Len, nice to meet you. You feeling better now?’
Manning smiled. ‘You probably know how it goes, Mr Berlin, good days and bad days.’
Berlin nodded. ‘Call me Charlie.’
‘Fair enough. Copper, eh, Charlie? Nice job?’
‘You know how it goes, Len, good days and bad days. You work here?’
‘You got that right, and a bit of a turn-up for the books really.’
‘How so?’
‘Come back from the war straight into a loony bin and now a dozen years on I’m working as a guard in one.’ He winked. They like us to say “attendant”, though.’
‘This is a mental hospital?’
‘My word, that it is indeed. Well, sort of. Welcome to Blackwattle Creek.’
Berlin knew the name. If he’d come in the front way, driven up from the main road, he would have probably recognised the place right away from photographs he’d seen in newspapers. Blackwattle Creek was a place everyone knew about but never mentioned, at least not if they could help it. The place had started out way back in the 1800s as an establishment for the rehabilitation and education of wayward boys and girls. You had to wonder just how wayward these boys and girls were that they needed to be kept behind heavy iron gates and twenty-foot stone walls. From the 1920s onward, those walls and gates had become a major asset when Blackwattle Creek was gazetted as a State Asylum for the Criminally Insane.
FIFTEEN
Berlin found the green double doors of the administration building and walked down a long windowless stone corridor that rang with his footsteps. He shivered. It was cold and he had a strange feeling it was always cold here, summer or winter. There was an air of dread about the place, and something else he couldn’t quite put his finger on. It was the silence, he realised, as his footsteps echoed. It was so damned quiet.
He wanted to turn and leave, turn round and walk quickly back to the light, turn round and run back to the courtyard and the entranceway, through that iron door to freedom outside the walls. Deep breaths, he told himself, deep breaths and think about nice things. As always, he pictured his wife and the kids, remembering the photograph on the wall of his and Rebecca’s bedroom that her father had taken when Sarah was just a bub.
Paint was peeling from the corridor walls, and the overhead light fittings with their dim flyspecked bulbs were widely spaced so that he walked in and out of dull pools of illumination. Solid-looking doors broke the walls at regular intervals and Berlin wondered what might be behind them, but given what Len had said he wasn’t tempted to open one and see.
Just before the corridor took a sharp left turn he found a sign mounted on the wall above one of the doors. It read ‘Institute Director’. Berlin knocked. There was no response so he knocked again, harder this time. The door was of the same robust construction as all the others lining the corridor.
‘Come.’ The voice sounded distant.
He opened the door and walked into a small reception area. When he closed the door behind him he noted the solid lock and heavy sliding bolt fitted for extra security. The room contained a desk with a typewriter, a wooden chair, a telephone, a wall of metal filing cabinets and several shelves full of medical texts.
‘I don’t have all day.’
The voice came from a second room, beyond the reception area. The half-opened door had a top section of wavy opaque glass. The name ‘Doctor Roland Jessop’ was painted on the glass in gold letters.
Berlin took off his hat and walked into the room.
‘Dr Jessop?’
Unlike the reception room this one had a window. At first Berlin thought the glass was opaque, like the inner office door, but then he realised the panes were just filthy. Through the dirt he could see steel bars.
The fittings in this room were similar to the other but the desk and chair were of better quality. There was a washbasin on one wall, and a coat stand near the door held a suit jacket and a long white doctor’s coat. Beside the stand were a couple of tennis racquets and a pair of Dunlop Volley sandshoes. Well-worn leather handgrips and pitted lacquer on the racquet shafts said they were regularly used.
Roland Jessop was standing behind the desk, leaning forward with his knuckles pressed down onto the desktop as he read the contents of a foolscap-sized manila folder. Berlin could see that the man’s hair had been allowed to grow longer on the left side and was combed over an almost bald crown. Berlin reckoned his age to be around forty. Barrel-chested, about six feet in height, and fit-enough-looking, if a touch overweight. The tennis racquets were probably to keep the weight down, he guessed. The doctor was wearing dark suit trousers, a buttoned-up waistcoat over a white shirt. The shirtsleeves were pulled back from the wrists, held with shiny steel armbands fitted just above the elbows. On his right wrist was a leather watchband, the watch face concealed under a snap-down cover.
‘I don’t have all day,’ Jessop said again, without looking up. The voice sounded very English. And irritated.
When Berlin didn’t respond, Jessop finally looked up and Berlin saw the neatly trimmed moustache and goatee beard. It was the kind of beard you didn’t see a lot of around Melbourne, apart from the Eltham arts push and the amateur theatrical crowd. Fussy bastard, Berlin decided. He wondered if the doctor was a queer. It made no difference to Berlin one way or the other, but it might be useful information to have.