Black Wattle Creek (Charlie Berlin #2)(30)

As he carefully worked the polish into the seams he thought about Roberts. If he hadn’t asked him to look up that licence plate number, would he still be in a hospital bed, beaten bloody? A lot of people, even coppers, took a walloping on Saturday nights but this was something different. Berlin knew what people looked like after a random street brawl; he’d been on both the winning and losing sides of more than a couple in his time. No, in Roberts’ case, someone who knew what they were doing had methodically taken him apart. It was the kind of thing you might do if you wanted to send a message.

He turned the brush over and began working the bristles rhythmically over the leather, his fingers tucked into the neat little space past the laces where Sarah’s pretty little toes would hide. Back and forth. He remembered being amazed at the tiny fingers and toes of both his children, the first thing that had struck him after their births. Back and forth, buffing now, the shine beginning to return. Sarah would outgrow these shoes soon. She was growing fast now, both the children were, he could almost see it happening.

In nine or ten years Peter would be as old as the youngest of his crew, he realised. Berlin’s thoughts wandered to Gary, the shy young Canadian navigator who at barely twenty plotted their courses nightly through the darkness, from point to point and on to the target, where glowing markers had been dropped by the pathfinders. Gary, in his cramped, curtained hidey-hole behind Berlin’s cockpit and the flight engineer’s station, working at his chart table, allowing for headwinds and drift and no doubt dreaming of marrying Gwen.

Gwen was the pretty WAAF who drove the bus that took the aircrew out to the bombers through the long twilight and next morning picked up those who had survived another overnight mission. She was probably married with children by now, while Gary had become windblown ash in the night sky over the docks at Kiel. He was just a memory, one more name on a memorial back home, somewhere out on the bleak Canadian prairie.

Berlin picked up Peter’s school shoes and shook his head. By rights the boy should be doing this job himself. Scuffed toes, frayed laces and a new gash in the side of the left shoe made Berlin clench his jaw. Both soles were showing a lot more wear than when he’d last checked. The damn things would be worn out before they were outgrown. He imagined the boy on a parade ground with a screaming sergeant hurling spittle-flecked abuse in his face over the ‘bloody ’orrible’ condition of his shoes.

Berlin worked the Nugget polish generously into the tips of Peter’s shoes, but it was hopeless. The badly scuffed leather would never shine like Sarah’s and he knew it. As he rubbed he struggled to remember Gwen’s face but couldn’t do it. Was she a redhead? Did Gary have a photograph of her pinned under the Gee receiver, or had he imagined that? Gary’s Gee unit, a flickering, black-and-white oscilloscope screen, displayed radio pulses that he carefully plotted on a lattice grid over his maps to fix their exact position.

Berlin worked the brush over the leather and ran through the events of the last few days in his mind. Point by point, that was how you made it to the target, to the solution, to the answer.

Point one: the story of a man in a coffin with part of his leg missing on the morning of his funeral. A story told by a woman who was one hundred percent sure of what she had seen but who had now changed her mind.

Point two: a funeral director who liked to talk big and had stupidly tried to claim that a burial was in fact a cremation. Point three: a Hungarian refugee who drove a hearse and had seen two men leaving the funeral parlour very early on the morning in question, carrying something.

Point four: a mysterious white panel van with a dicky licence plate taken from an abandoned farm truck. And several similar white panel vans parked out the back of the Blackwattle Creek asylum, just down the track from the farm.

And now Bob. Was he point five? Had his inquiry about the licence plate earned Roberts his beating? Was it a punishment, or was someone looking for information? Someone wanting to know what had triggered his inquiry? And in all of this, what was the target?

When Rebecca finally called him to lunch he had polished every pair of shoes he could put his hands on. Even though the job was done and his arm was aching he was none the wiser.





TWENTY-ONE


Berlin was washed, shaved and dressed by the time Rebecca had the kids ready for a new school week. He had exercised, following the ten-minute regimen he learned in the air force, and then made the bed. He liked to make the bed. He had vague warm memories of helping his mother make his bed every morning. till he was five – until that day his parents went away for a grownups’ afternoon together and never came back.

Rebecca had put together buttered milk-arrowroot biscuits for morning playtime for the children, with cheese and Vegemite sandwiches for lunch. The food was wrapped in greaseproof paper, slipped inside brown paper bags with twisted corners, and packed into their schoolbags along with an orange or an apple. In summer their leather bags would hold sticky-sweet cordial in plastic bottles as well.

More often than not the two of them walked to school by themselves, but this morning Rebecca had suggested Berlin go with them, even though it was just one street over. Bob’s beating had made her a little skittish, he guessed.

But he’d welcomed the suggestion and now Sarah held his hand as they walked, and told him all about her teacher and some of the bad boys in her class. She was wearing a tartan skirt and a pink spotted jumper, an incongruous combination that she had insisted on, made even more unusual by her Davy Crockett cap with its furry dangling tail. Berlin smiled at the memory of last Christmas morning, when the children in the street had rushed out to play and show off their new bikes or dolls or cap guns, almost every single one of them in a brand new coonskin cap. She was a funny little bugger, this daughter of his, but at least she took care of her shoes and chose her steps carefully.