Black Wattle Creek (Charlie Berlin #2)(61)
Berlin was still smiling as he started reading but soon stopped. He looked at Jessop’s listing in Whos Who first and it made for interesting reading. The man was a doctor, as he claimed, but not a pathologist. The entry was sketchy, but reading between the lines it looked as if his postwar career had been in civil defence. In fact, he was listed as still working for the UK Department of Civil Defence.
Vera was right about the hardcover books on nuclear fission being heavy going but he found the articles in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists at least comprehensible. One covered an American test of a hydrogen bomb in the Pacific in March 1954, where an unexpectedly high yield from the device, combined with a sudden change of wind direction, resulted in fallout spreading widely outside the exclusion zone. Ships and people were contaminated, including the unlucky crewmen of a Japanese fishing vessel called the Lucky Dragon. Many of the crew were dead within days from what was termed radiation sickness.
The following article was of a more technical nature, and most of it made no sense to Berlin. Then he found a piece dedicated to strontium-90 and the formation of bone tumours in people who ingested it. From Berlin’s reading of it, the isotope was far from being the short-lived, almost benign substance Jessop had described – it was really nasty stuff. Even a small amount in the food chain could have serious long-term consequences.
Berlin asked Vera if it was possible to get photostatic copies of the articles but she said it would take several days. He decided against it. The only person he knew who might be able to explain what it all meant was Jessop, and Berlin was now certain he couldn’t trust him.
THIRTY-EIGHT
‘Your name Charlie?’
Berlin was standing in the fish and chip shop opposite the library. He was waiting on his Chiko Roll and trying to sort through in his mind what he had just read.
‘I said, is your name Charlie?’
The boy might have been sixteen or seventeen. He was wearing a private-school uniform, blazer unbuttoned, his tie loose at the neck of a badly creased shirt that was fighting a losing battle to stay tucked inside the waistband of his trousers.
‘What’s it to you?’
The boy shrugged. ‘Nothing really. Some sheila just gave me ten bob to pass on a message.’
‘What sheila?’
The boy nodded over his shoulder towards a car parked on the other side of the road, outside the library. It was a green Ford Zephyr. A young woman was sitting behind the wheel and she was watching them. Berlin had a feeling he had seen her somewhere before. And even though he couldn’t see the rear window from this angle he was almost certain it would have a St Kilda decal on it.
‘What’s the message?’
‘She said you should follow her.’
‘And why would I want to do that?’
The boy shrugged again. ‘How would I bloody know, I’m not a mind-reader, mate.’
This was undoubtedly true. If he had been capable of reading Berlin’s mind, the nasty little shit would be backing away from him very quickly.
‘Okay, I’ve got the message, so now take your ten bob and piss off.’
The man behind the counter was chopping lettuce for someone’s hamburger, sweat dropping off his forehead onto the cutting board.
‘Cancel my order will you,’ Berlin said, ‘I’m in a hurry.’
The man behind the counter looked up, a drop of sweat quivering on the tip of his nose. ‘C’mon mate, it’s almost cooked, what am I supposed to do with it?’
Berlin was tempted to tell him but he pointed to the kid instead.
‘He’ll take it.’
The kid grinned. ‘Gee thanks, Charlie.’
‘No need to thank me, I haven’t paid for it yet, you little twerp, and you’re the one with the ten shillings.’
Outside the shop it had started to rain. Berlin stood under the awning and stared at the woman in the parked car across the road. He did know her, he was sure of it, but from where? After a minute he nodded, got into his car and started the engine. She put her head out of the window to check for trams and stuck out her right arm to signal before pulling into traffic.
Berlin waited for a tram to pass and then did a U-turn over the tracks. A cop doing point duty at the intersection of Swanston and La Trobe streets blew his whistle and pointed at the Studebaker with a white-gauntleted hand but Berlin ignored him. When he pulled up behind her at the next set of lights he saw that he was right about the St Kilda decal.
He followed the Zephyr down Swanston Street, over Princes Bridge and then along St Kilda Road. She moved into the centre lane on St Kilda Road, where the wet tramlines made driving a challenge. They passed the Shrine of Remembrance on the left and crossed Toorak Road. The road ran straight now, a wide boulevard lined on both sides by tall trees and elegant mansions. When they reached St Kilda she turned right into Fitzroy Street and he followed.
Berlin had wound the driver’s side window down to reduce the condensation misting up the inside of the Studebaker’s windscreen. He could smell that distinctive Fitzroy Street smell of sea air, stale beer, rancid cooking fat, commercial sex and chronic despair. The Zephyr went left at Grey Street and right again into Neptune, where she pulled into a narrow laneway and stopped. Berlin didn’t want to drive into the laneway so he found a space out on Neptune Street and parked. He waited a couple of minutes before climbing out of the car.