Black Wattle Creek (Charlie Berlin #2)(29)
Now Bob’s lips were moving. Berlin watched him struggling with his bruised and swollen upper lip. The lip had a split which would probably need a stitch or two. Was his tongue swollen as well? he wondered. Bob strained to form words and Berlin had to lean in closer to hear. When he did he straightened up quickly, startled.
He was still feeling a little shaken even after he and Rebecca found a coffee shop on Elizabeth Street, down towards Flinders Street station, and he had a good strong cup under his belt. This early in the morning they were the only customers and they’d taken a booth at the rear. Berlin liked a café with booths; he felt comforted, cocooned, cut off for a time from everything around him. Rebecca ordered coffee and raisin toast for them both. The toast came just as he liked it, dripping with butter, but he didn’t feel like eating. Or talking. They sat in silence, and when Berlin put his cup down Rebecca reached across and took his hand.
‘He’ll be okay, Charlie. You heard the doctor, they’ll look after him. And so will we. We’ll look after them both.’
Berlin nodded but remained silent.
‘Do you think it was random? Was Bob in the wrong place at the wrong time, I mean?’
‘Could be,’ he said. ‘I suppose. Saturday night, a copper getting a belting, it happens.’
‘Well, whatever happened, he’s lucky to have a friend like you.’
Was he? Berlin wondered. Would they in fact still be friends after this? It had been hard to work out what Bob was saying in the hospital, let alone judge his tone of voice. The man had worn himself out articulating the words, every breath causing him pain, but eventually Berlin got the message. When Bob could see he’d finally understood, his good eye closed slowly and he drifted off to sleep, leaving Berlin all alone by the steel-framed hospital bed. Berlin squeezed Rebecca’s hand. He loved the touch of her skin, the smoothness, the warmth. He smiled at her over his empty cup and untouched toast and wondered if she could guess that he was freezing inside. Bob, his friend, had felt the need to fight through pain and fear to tell him something before lapsing back into unconsciousness. And for all the effort his message was clear and succinct.
‘I told them nothing, Charlie, but next time you need a licence plate looked up, do it your bloody self.’
TWENTY
Sunday was always a difficult day for Berlin. It had been since he was a youngster, when he and his brother were living with their grandparents. Their grandmother had had no time for religion or things like Sunday School, not after her daughter and son-in-law had died in a boating mishap. She had followed their coffins out of the church stony-faced, ignoring the words of comfort from the Presbyterian minister. Her next attendance at any church was to be inside her own coffin.
With no church to fill the morning, Sunday became an empty day for young Charlie and Billy. Everything was shut of course, shops, picture theatres, sporting venues and the pubs. The boys wandered the deserted streets of Flemington looking for things to do and generally finding very little, even in the way of mischief. Their school friends, neatly dressed in Sunday school clothes, were unwilling to roughhouse. In any case, everyone needed to be home by noon for the inevitable lamb roast.
There would be no Sunday roast for the Berlins today, at least not for Charlie and Rebecca. The trip to the hospital had made that impossible. By the time they got back, Maria had already fed Peter and Sarah next door, along with her own five kids. Their lamb had been cooked in the wood-fired brick oven Joe had built in his backyard not long after the family moved in. Half a dozen of his friends had turned up to help him, accompanied by their wives and multiple children. Berlin remembered that the partying had gone on well past midnight.
He was in the backyard, standing inside the unfinished darkroom. Peter and Sarah were next door and he could hear them over the side fence, playing and laughing. Joe and Maria’s children, all girls, ranged in age from three to fourteen. Sarah happily mothered the younger ones, leading them in games and make-believe tea parties, while Peter mooned after Antonella, the eldest. The girl was a lithe, olive-skinned, raven-haired beauty and already getting way too much attention from the local teenage boys. And she was getting looks from a couple of the local married men who should have known better. Thank God I’ve only got one girl, Berlin said to himself.
He looked at the sky through the open space where the galvanised-iron roof would eventually go. If he started work early enough tomorrow, and the weather co-operated for the whole week, and if the hardware store delivered his asbestos sheets for the side walls as promised, he reckoned he had a half-decent shot at getting the job done. But that was a lot of ifs. He was following a plan, but even so he knew he would run into the odd snag as he progressed. He’d already solved a couple of problems and pushed on. It was the same with detective work – it was just a matter of solving the problem.
Rebecca had suggested sandwiches for lunch, which was fine with Berlin even if the bread would be a little stale. He decided to polish the children’s school shoes while he waited. He sat on the small wooden stool inside the back door and took his brushes and tins of polish from the shoe box. The box had a hinged sloping top where he could rest the shoes as he worked. Sarah’s first, the easiest job. Her shoes were still shiny, the black leather in good knick. He used the rounded bristles on the back of the brush to apply the polish from the flat round tin. He loved the ritual, and that shoe-polish smell, the mix of naphtha and wax and lanolin and turpentine.