St Kilda Blues (Charlie Berlin #3)(15)
Berlin decided to keep his mouth shut and let Roberts dig himself in a bit deeper.
‘And what exactly is your type, Vera?’ Roberts asked.
Vera stared directly at the other detective and held his gaze for a moment before she answered. ‘Quite possibly the same as yours, Sergeant Roberts, a good-looking, leggy young blonde with nice tits.’
Roberts swallowed hard and blushed, the red of his cheeks making the white scar stand out in stark relief.
NEAR THE EQUATOR, 1950
It was a lascar sent up from the galley to dump breakfast scraps over the side who found the unconscious girl. Terrified that he would be accused of rape, he pulled her dress down to cover the exposed belly and thighs before raising the alarm. Crewmen gently carried the girl into the sickbay and put her onto a hospital bed, the sheets still rumpled and warm from a hasty post-breakfast assignation between the doctor and the children’s tutor. The doctor’s examination of the unconscious girl was already half done before he realised he needed to button up his fly.
The ship’s doctor was young, just out of medical school and out of his depth. He was having trouble juggling three ongoing affairs with passengers as well as coping with multiple cases of seasickness and heatstroke. He diagnosed Mavis as having a concussion and privately hoped it was nothing more serious, as both he and the sickbay were poorly equipped to cope with a major injury.
The children were gathered together in the ship’s library and given a stern lecture by the captain on the dangers of running and playing on his ship. A young girl was in the sickbay right now and very ill because of silly behaviour, he explained, and such behaviour would not be tolerated. The ship’s crew would be watching them now, he warned, and woe betide anyone who was brought before him for skylarking or causing mischief.
The doctor monitored the girl constantly, leaving the sickbay only for meals and furtive sexual encounters with one of his paramours – and several days later to join in the Crossing the Line celebrations when the ship passed over the equator. The crew created a temporary swimming pool out of canvas on the lower deck and a throne for King Neptune, the ship’s cook in a false beard with a cardboard crown and plywood trident, who would preside over the ceremony. His helpers, two stokers playing mermaids in long wigs, grass skirts and coconut-shell bras, cheerfully dunked all passengers and crew who were first-timers at crossing the equator. The doctor was one of those inducted and, sadly, while he was frolicking amongst the passengers and admiring the erect nipples the cold sea water produced amongst the females in swimming attire, young Mavis, left all alone in her sickbay bed, silently passed away.
She has gone to be with the angels, the guardians told the other children the next morning, while a crewman set up a film projector in the library to show silent black and white cartoons even older than the ship. With the children occupied in the library, the adults gathered near the stern of the ship to sing hymns and hear prayers from the captain before Mavis’s body, sewn into a cotton canvas shroud and weighted down with broken gears from the engine room, was consigned to the deep.
The boy had slipped away from the library and he watched the funeral service from an upper deck, spreadeagled and peering down over the lip of the deck. No one noticed that he was gone from the library, just as no one had noticed when he slipped away from King Neptune and his court to smother Mavis with a pillow in the sickbay. Earlier that morning the doctor, irritated by repeated questions about the girl’s prognosis and hoping to shut people up had confidently predicted that Mavis would soon be wide-awake and well and talking. That was something the boy knew he just couldn’t risk happening.
SIX
Berlin stood up. ‘I think now is probably a good time to see Gudrun’s bedroom, if that’s okay, Vera.’
Vera led them across the living room to a wide hallway and a flight of carpeted stairs. Berlin stopped at the bottom of the stairs.
‘Do you think I could trouble you for that cup of coffee now, if it’s not too much bother? We shouldn’t be long up there.’
‘Of course, Mr Berlin, I’ll put the percolator on. Gudrun’s bedroom is at the top of the stairs, to the right.’
Berlin smiled when he entered the bedroom. He thought of Sarah and her bedroom at home. Both bedrooms, he realised right now, only held memories of their occupants. Gudrun’s bedroom was almost totally white and was furnished in what he recognised as a reproduction Queen Anne style – very feminine and totally at odds with the look of the rest of the house. Vera had said the girl’s father found it hard to refuse his daughter anything and Berlin knew exactly how that felt.
He looked around. It was a big room and held a double bed that he thought was quite an extravagance for a fifteen-year-old. There were two wardrobes filled with a range of colourful clothes, and a study table with a desk lamp and chair. Photographs, notes, letters and postcards were pinned on a corkboard above the table.
Sarah was only a couple of years older than Gudrun but Berlin recognised a marked difference between the girls’ bedrooms. There were a number of dolls strewn about and Berlin recalled Sarah gathering up all of what she called her ‘kids’ toys’ on her fourteenth birthday and distributing them to the families in the street with younger children and inconsistent incomes.
Berlin sensed that Roberts, leaning in the doorway, was watching him. ‘I’m trying to work out who she is, trying to get a sense of her and what she might do or what she might have done.’