St Kilda Blues (Charlie Berlin #3)(4)
The shower was running and he heard Rebecca humming. She came into the kitchen a few minutes later wearing a long white dressing gown, hair tied back and not a skerrick of make-up. She was still the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.
‘Keeping student hours now, I see,’ he said. ‘You’ll be out on the streets protesting soon.’
She kissed him on the lips. ‘And possibly burning my bra too.’ She grinned and leaned in against him. ‘But I think you’d probably like that.’
Berlin felt a tingle up his spine. It was partly from the kiss and partly from the whispered comment but, as always, mostly from the smell of her fresh from me shower and me touch of her body against his.
She took butter and a bottle of milk from the fridge and a jar of Vegemite from a cupboard. ‘My first job isn’t till noon so I thought I’d have a look at the front garden. I think the frosts have finished so we might put in some dahlias and impatiens and marigolds this year. And maybe snapdragons.’
Berlin nodded. He liked snapdragons. The toast was still a way off the shade of brown he liked. The kettle started to whistle and he turned the gas off.
‘What have you got on today, Charlie? Anything interesting?’
Berlin poured hot water into the teapot and slipped a knitted tea cosy over it. ‘Just a bowling club where some silly bugger’s been tickling the till and then fiddling the books. I can barely contain my excitement.’ He poured milk into two cups. ‘We could probably cut back to one bottle of milk in the morning, since it’s only the two of us now.’
They stood in front of the toaster and waited. Rebecca put her head on his shoulder.
‘I miss the little blighters, Charlie. This house is too damn quiet.’
Berlin nodded. ‘Me too.’
They drank their tea and ate their toast in silence.
Chater’s phone call caught Berlin at the front door, just as he was buttoning up his overcoat. The sneering tone always came through in Chater’s voice, drunk or sober, though the man was hardly ever sober. Was it from last night’s session or an early start on the grog this sunny Monday morning? Berlin wondered. Rebecca was of the opinion that putting an incompetent like Chater in charge of the fraud squad was the ultimate irony and demonstrated that there was someone in the Victoria Police hierarchy with a sense of humour.
The conversation was mostly one-sided, the gist being that Berlin was to wait at home and someone would be out to see him directly. Full and total cooperation was expected. Whatever was on his desk would be taken care of by others in the fraud squad. Berlin knew what the sign-off would be and Chater didn’t disappoint.
‘Don’t you bloody f*ck this up, Berlin, or I will do you, and do you good and proper, and that’s a promise.’
He replaced the receiver and took off his overcoat. There wasn’t a lot on his desk at the moment in any case and the call meant more time with Rebecca, another cup of tea and a chance to listen to the ABC news together at eight o’clock. They held hands across the kitchen table, breaking the touch only when the announcer moved on to local news with no word of recent violence in far away places like Israel and Vietnam.
Rebecca changed into khaki Yakka overalls after the news. She had a green thumb when it came to flowers and starting on the front garden would be a good distraction for her. The backyard fruit trees and vegetable patch were Berlin’s area. He liked the idea that he could always provide food for his family, no matter what. He made more toast and took it into the front room to wait.
The framed photograph of Peter and Sarah above the living room fireplace was one of Rebecca’s best. Berlin had developed an understanding of composition and tonality and focus and the difficult skill of capturing a person without artifice in the twenty years he and Rebecca had been together. The daughter of a country town photographer, she had been an air force photographer in the war. A post-war career on the social pages of The Argus newspaper had of course ended with her pregnancy and marriage to Berlin. After Peter and then Sarah were born she was a mother first, though wedding photography had helped to pay the bills when the kids were finally old enough to be left in the care of Maria next door.
Peter was just eighteen when the photo was taken, a year back now. In a proper Collins Street studio portrait his hair would have been brylcreemed, combed and neatly parted and a smile plastered all over his face, but Rebecca’s picture had captured the sullen, rebellious little bugger he was and the hurt and confusion and desperation lurking behind his eyes. On Peter’s good days those eyes sometimes reminded Berlin of his late grandfather, but sadly the lad’s good days had been few and far between.
In the photo, Sarah, then almost seventeen, had her brother in a headlock and her grinning face was alive with mischief and love and happiness. She saw something in her brother that his father couldn’t and she protected him even though she was the younger child. She had been Berlin’s princess at age seven, a gangling tomboy at ten and at fourteen she had almost magically transformed into a slender, elegant and beautiful young woman with a smile that melted his heart and a wickedly dry sense of humour that usually bemused or confused him. Berlin saw Rebecca in both their faces but Sarah was more like her in temperament and the boy more like him, which was a poor legacy for a father to bestow on a son.
A squeal of tyres came from the direction of the street corner and then the rumble of a big engine. A dark green shape was suddenly reflected in the glass of the framed picture, hiding the children’s image in its glare. Berlin turned and looked out through the venetian blinds. A sports car was stopped at the kerb outside his house. The top was down and he could hear music through the living room window. He vaguely knew the words, something about tripping a light fandango. The group was called Procol Harum, he remembered. Most groups had strange names now, strange names and stranger clothes and hair grown shaggy and too long.