St Kilda Blues (Charlie Berlin #3)(36)
It was around one in the afternoon when the boy saw the figure in the distance. The Aborigine was walking on the left-hand side of the gravel roadway, the passenger side. He had a spear and woomera in his left hand, but apart from that was totally naked. Even at a distance he seemed around the right height and age so the decision was made. The car was doing about 40 miles per hour when the boy grabbed the steering wheel and pulled down hard. He had no idea of mass or momentum and his plan would have failed if a confused Brother Brian hadn’t stamped down hard on the brake pedal, causing the back end of the car to slide out on the gravel and swing round. The rear mud-guard struck the young Aborigine just above the knees and then the car stopped and was still.
‘What did you do?’ Brother Brian was staring straight ahead, his hands clenched on the steering wheel. He reached down and turned off the ignition. A cloud of slowly settling dust from the skid surrounded the vehicle and in the silence they could hear whimpering coming from behind the car.
‘You stay here, don’t move.’
There was a note in the boy’s voice that Brother Brian hadn’t heard before and it confused and frightened him.
The boy climbed out of the passenger side of the vehicle and walked around to the back. He had to step over the broken body of the young Aborigine to open the tailgate. His kitbag and the water bottles had been the last things to go into the car, he had made sure of that. He opened the clasp on the kitbag and reached into the lining.
Brother Brian was sitting with his hands in his lap when the boy opened the driver’s-side door. Apart from the constant whimpering from the back of the car, the only sound was the tick, tick, tick of the slowly cooling engine.
‘What do we do n-’ Brother Brian started to ask. He stopped when he realised a knife had been pushed into his chest, right up to the hilt. He was going to ask why but breathing was difficult and the sun was starting to set, which was very strange given it was just an hour past noon. The light dimmed more and more and then everything was dark.
Wherever he was now, Brother Brian was spared the sight of the dagger being pulled from his chest with an awful sucking sound and the bright red blood that glistened on the blade being slowly licked off.
FIFTEEN
Berlin had allowed a little over an hour for the trip into the city and then out to St Kilda and his dinner meeting with Lazlo. What he hadn’t allowed for was a flat battery. At five-thirty, when he turned the ignition key in the Bluebird station wagon, the starter motor made a single clicking noise then was silent. Rebecca had the Mini in town, which meant he couldn’t use her jumper leads to get the car started. Several of the neighbours would be happy to help him out but right now he wasn’t in the mood for the small talk that would come with their assistance. He walked back into the house and’ rang the number for Silver Top Taxis.
The taxi pulled up outside the front gate twenty minutes later, tooting its horn twice. It was a long time since Berlin had taken a taxi and he wondered when drivers had stopped walking up to the front door and knocking politely. He slid into the clear vinyl-encased front seat of the taxi, gave the address in St Kilda and then got on with the ritual declining of the offered cigarette, discussion of the weather, hearing about the superiority of Holden over Ford as a taxi vehicle, and then a commentary on Saturday’s grand final match. Berlin’s polite but clipped responses indicated he didn’t want to talk, so the driver eventually turned up the radio and confined himself to occasional mutterings about all the bad driving by young smart alecs in hoon cars he was forced to witness.
Apart from the driver’s grumbling and constant changing of radio stations in search of Frank Ifield songs, it wasn’t an unpleasant ride. Berlin kept his eyes off the meter, deciding to get the shock when they reached the café. It wasn’t that much of an extravagance really, given the fact that Rebecca was doing well and they had both kids off their hands for the moment, but the habit of watching the pennies was hard to shake.
There was little traffic and somewhat less erratic driving than he had expected, despite the driver’s complaints. It would soon be two years since ten o’clock closing for pubs had finally been legalised, ending fifty years of the six o’clock swill. This frantic rush to drink as much as possible in the short window between work finishing and the beer in the public bar being turned off was now gone and not missed. No one missed the fights, the ugly scenes of public drunkenness and the ensuing bouts of domestic violence, especially not the police. Introducing the breathalyser and the .05 blood alcohol limit for drivers at the same time had also had an impact on the nightly carnage on the roads.
The drunken orgies predicted to follow ten o’clock closing had never materialised, and pubs that had been tiled floor to ceiling like public toilets to make hosing out after closing easier were now calling themselves ‘hotels’, putting in carpets, tables and chairs, proper restaurants and even live entertainment. They reminded Berlin a little of the friendly English pubs located near his airfield, but that memory was always ruined by flashes of the smiling faces of too many young men who were laughing and holding a pretty girl or a pint one evening and were dead and gone the next.
Other, even darker memories of the war were behind Berlin’s trip into town this evening. He wasn’t even sure if Lazlo would be able to help him but he had no other options. And he knew he had to do something about the situation so that he could give all his attention to the missing girls. He was angry with himself for not fighting harder to stay on the case back when it was just three girls, which was of course three too many. Would they haunt his dreams too, he wondered, like the girl on the roadway in Poland?