St Kilda Blues (Charlie Berlin #3)(2)
Berlin had gone to England’s Brighton by train from the troopship, on his arrival from Canada along with yet another mob of recently graduated Australian aircrew. He guessed that Melbourne’s Brighton had never had its mansions and grand houses disfigured with blackout curtains or blast tape crisscrossing the window glass, never had walls of sandbags sheltering its major buildings. The RAAF had its arrivals centre there to welcome and brief the young airmen before they went off to their assigned RAF or RAAF squadrons, off to war and an unknowable fate.
And now Melbourne’s Brighton had seen a way-too-young person go off to an unknown fate and Berlin’s job was to track her down. In the other, far-off, long-ago Brighton the name Charlie Berlin had once been written on a folder, an RAAF-issue manila folder. In 1944 that folder had been stamped ‘Missing, Ops, Germany’, though of course he had eventually come home. But Charlie Berlin now knew a secret, and a very bad secret it was. Charlie Berlin knew that when you’ve been missing and then get found, not all of you ever really comes back.
DORSET, ENGLAND, 23 March 1945
Every twitch and jerk of her leg pulled the wire tighter, increasing the torment and bringing her end another minute closer. Tiring now, she was panting from the pain and her long, lonely struggle. She first sensed vibrations through the soil, then heard the sound of the footsteps coming closer, through the clumps of bracken that had once sheltered and protected her. The footsteps were the sound of her death approaching.
The farmer already had two rabbits slung over a shoulder. Tied together by the ears, they were neatly gutted and would be skinned later. Pushing the bracken aside, he made his way towards the burrow and the snare he had set nearby. The boy followed, his tread on the ground softer, lighter. The farmer stopped, studied the rabbit twitching on the wire for a moment and nodded his head.
‘She’s a fine fat one, eh, lad? ‘Nother good’un for the pot, I’d say. We done well.’
The boy didn’t reply. The boy hardly ever spoke.
The farmer put his boot on the doe’s neck, bent to grasp her hind legs and pulled. There was a sharp snap as her neck broke. He didn’t see the lad’s head jerk back as if in sympathy with the rabbit. The farmer bent down and loosened the snare. He took his knife and quickly slit the twitching belly open, flicking the guts, hot, wet and bloody, to one side. Some of the offal splashed onto the boy’s face.
The farmer looked up and grinned. ‘Sorry, young’un.’
The was no indication from the boy that he had heard, and the farmer let the smile die. The boy was big for his age, and strong with it. He was a strange child too, that was for certain, sent to them from London six months back by the daughter of the farmer’s wife’s second cousin. They’d said it was from fear of the pilotless and lethal buzz bombs that had begun to fall regularly on the capital after D-day, though in truth the boy had been sent just to be rid of him.
The child had been made in a dark East End alleyway on a warm summer evening in 1939, three months before war was declared. His mother was not yet sixteen, already with a woman’s body and a reputation for being easy. The father was a barrow boy who would rise beyond his humble origins to drive a General Grant tank in the Middle East and be burned alive and screaming inside the vehicle when a German 88 scored a direct hit. At least he had done the right thing, it was agreed by the girl’s family, marrying her before being sent off overseas.
He was long gone when the child was born so he never had to see the cold eyes and lack of expression that made the boy’s otherwise unremarkable face something of dread. The girl had first ignored her son and had then grown to fear and hate him for his stillness, lack of tears and inability to voice a cry even when hungry. The child was five when the German victory weapons began to fall on London, and that was as good an excuse as any to get rid of him. The girl often wondered why she hadn’t thought to get rid of him when he was in her belly.
Another reason to be rid of the child was that he made things awkward when the girl was entertaining American servicemen in her tiny bedsit. She usually favoured officers but wasn’t that particular – if someone was generous to her, she was generous in return. As he grew bigger, the boy became even more difficult to palm off on one of the neighbours. This was not because he was a badly behaved child, in fact he was too well behaved. He simply sat and stared. If she was unable to get rid of him for an evening she made the boy sit and face the wall while the bed squeaked and banged and captains and lieutenants and even once a general laughed and gasped and groaned and quite often called on God, though not for salvation.
There was a roar from behind the farmer and the boy. A black-painted Halifax bomber lumbered into the air above them, its four Bristol Hercules engines screaming. Seconds later a glider attached to the bomber by a long heavy cable lifted into the air behind it, the wind whistling over the plywood fuselage and wings. This must be something big, the farmer realised, given the number of planes he had heard taking off so far. He had listened to the bombers and gliders taking off last June to spearhead the D-day invasion of Hitler’s Europe and, months after that, for the Rhine bridges in Holland. He knew the creaking wooden hulls of the gliders were packed with nervous young members of the elite 6th Airborne Division, glider infantrymen being dragged silently through the sky to an unknown fate.
His own boy might be on board a troop-carrying aircraft right now, bound for the same destination as the gliders. The lad was Airborne too, a paratrooper, proud possessor of a jaunty red beret that marked him as special and earned him free pints at the pub when he was home on leave. Parachuting into France in the first hours of D-day he had been blooded in battle, jumping again months later into the disastrous flaming hell that was the Dutch town of Arnhem. He was one of the few survivors to make it back across the freezing, flooding Rhine, guided to the Allied lines and safety by red tracers fired intermittently into the night sky from a Bofors gun. The lad was different after that, more thoughtful, moody, quieter.