St Kilda Blues (Charlie Berlin #3)(34)
After washing the dishes and putting the kettle on he found a number in the red plastic teledex next to the phone in the hallway. The telephone was answered, as always, on the second ring. Berlin knew the owner insisted on it.
‘Café Budapest, good afternoon.’
Once it had been grumpy men with thick foreign accents who answered but now it was a woman with a warm, friendly voice.
‘Good afternoon, can you tell me if Mr Horvay will be at his usual table at the usual time this evening?’
‘Mr Horvay will be in, yes.’
‘Would you be so kind as to tell Mr Horvay that Mr Berlin will be in to see him this evening between 6:30 and 7:00. Thank you.’
Berlin hung up and made another pot of tea. While it brewed he cleared space on the table and on the kitchen bench tops. He needed to layout the papers and the files, to begin a methodical page-by-page search. Page by page or point by point. Berlin remembered Gary, the shy young Canadian navigator who, at barely twenty, had plotted their courses nightly through the darkness, from point to point and on to the glowing coloured target markers dropped by the pathfinder force.
Remembering Gary brought all the others back to him. On the ground they were a tight-knit group like most bomber crews, though Berlin had tried to keep a distance. Once their Lancaster was air-borne they became just voices crackling in his headphones from their stations throughout the aircraft: Wilf the flight engineer at his instrument panels, Mick with his radios, Lou the rear gunner and Jock in the mid-upper turret sweeping the blackness with their Browning machine guns, and Harry in the nose, an air gunner too until he took the bomb-aimer’s perch as they approached the target.
The navigator’s station was a cramped, black-curtained hidey-hole behind Berlin’s cockpit and the flight engineer’s position. Young Gary worked at his chart table there, calculating headwinds and drift and no doubt constantly dreaming of marrying Gwen, the pretty English WAAF who drove one of the big Dodge buses that took aircrew out to the bombers. Berlin struggled to remember Gwen’s face. Was she a redhead? Was there a photograph of her pinned under Gary’s Gee receiver, or had he imagined that? The Gee unit, a flickering, black and white oscilloscope screen, displayed radio pulses that Gary carefully plotted on a lattice grid over his maps to fix their exact position, point by point.
Gwen was probably long married, with children, maybe grandchildren. Gary, not much older then than Peter was now, had become, like the other boys, windblown ash in the night sky over the docks at Kiel on their thirtieth mission. He was just a memory now, one more name on a memorial back home, somewhere out on the bleak Canadian prairie.
Berlin began on the pile of music papers. Point by point: that was how you made it to the target, to the solution, to the answer. Berlin’s target was Gudrun Scheiner and whoever was holding her captive. He began scanning through the photographs. Were these pictures the link? Gudrun and Rosemary had been photographed at a dance but so had a lot of other girls. Photographers came and went as they pleased, several discotheque managers had told him. Pictures in the music press were vital to building or maintaining a reputation as a hotspot, a cool venue, a happening place for the hip and the groovy to see and be seen. Almost any bloke carrying a black Nikon camera with a flash attached was allowed to jump the queues and bypass the cashier, whether he was known to them or not.
The music papers were all on cheap newsprint stock with the black and white printing rough and inconsistent in quality. Most of the photographs were dark and contrasty, some of the girls in them looking too damned young to be out by themselves at night. While a couple of the bands were nicely dressed by Berlin’s standards, many more were scruffy, wearing caftans or old military band jackets or shirts open to the waist with wide sleeves, and they almost always had flowing long hair and beards. What was wrong with dressing up in suits and ties like The Seekers? he wondered. They’d made it big in the UK without looking like a bunch of ruffians and their songs regularly topped the hit parade.
The clipping from Gudrun Scheiner’s corkboard had the number nineteen under it so Berlin turned immediately to page nineteen in each paper. He found the photograph in the third he opened, a publication called GEAR. The editorial details inside the front page gave an office address in Brunswick and listed seven contributing photographers. Perhaps Rebecca might know of some of them.
He moved on to the other missing girls. The files on the first three to disappear were at the bottom of the box. Not the originals, he noticed, but very ordinary photocopies. The notes and reports on the rest of the girls were also photocopies, jumbled and out of order as if the copying had been done in haste. There were pictures of the girls but the copying process had lost most of the details and the images were either too dark or too light. He tried to put all the information into some sort of order before he started reading.
The missing person files didn’t give a lot to go on, apart from the fact the girls had all disappeared from inner-city dances on Saturday nights – all except the girl found in the lake, who was listed as missing from her home in a rural outer suburb. This discrepancy caught Berlin’s attention.
Melinda Marquet had been reported missing two weeks before her naked body was pulled from Albert Park Lake. The police report indicated that the girl had first been notified as missing around ten o’clock on a Sunday morning. The report had gone into Melton police and the parents had been interviewed. The girl’s father, Clive Marquet, was the owner of a local furniture store. The family lived on a dozen acres outside Melton and the victim had four younger sisters. Berlin studied the photographs in the file, including one that showed a pretty teenager in school uniform. She was smiling in the photograph and even though the image quality was poor, there was something about the look in the girl’s eyes that Berlin found unsettling.