St Kilda Blues (Charlie Berlin #3)(53)
The Triumph was parked outside a record store. He could hear music from inside and there were bargain bins on the street out in front of the shop. The bins were full of 12-inch LP albums with the cheap, nasty covers bargain albums always seemed to have. He decided to stretch his legs and have a look. Reaching over, he turned off the sports car’s engine but left the keys in the ignition. About to open the passenger-side door he saw his reflection in the lacquered wood-grain dashboard and stopped and pushed the bright chrome button that opened the glove box instead. The cover swung out and down on its hinges. The packets of Craven A cigarettes were still there but the thick brown envelope was gone.
He closed the glove box and climbed out of the car to have a rummage through the record store bargain bins. None of the albums featured singers or groups or orchestras that were familiar to him. The more popular albums were inside the shop and he knew he would recognise the music from hearing the kids play it.
There were posters in the shop window for The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Rebecca and Sarah both loved the album. He didn’t know what to make of it and Peter, once a Beatles fan, hated it. It still rankled Berlin that back in 1964 he’d bet Peter ten shillings that a year after ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ had first topped the hit parade no one would even remember the name of the band. Losing the bet hadn’t been as bad as seeing the look of triumph on the boy’s face as he snatched the money from his father’s hand. Peter had moved on from the Beatles to the Rolling Stones but he’d always been smart enough not to play their music when his father was around to hear it.
Berlin gave up on the bargain bins. He leaned on a lamppost and waited. The street was quiet, just a few housewives pulling two-wheeled shopping jeeps, deliverymen, a postie with his leather satchel full of letters and a bloke walking along, holding the hand of a six-year-old. The girl was skipping, her dark ponytail swinging from side to side. Was there anything as lovely as a six-year-old girl skipping along and holding her dad’s hand? It was funny how life goes on, but it wasn’t really funny at all. The Marquet girl was dead and buried, others were still missing, including Gudrun Scheiner, and her old man was at home chopping wood and waiting.
What to do about the Scheiner situation? That was the thing that was bothering him. He could have left it in Lazlo’s hands but what if he was wrong? If those contact addresses from Lazlo arrived home with Rebecca he would write the letter tonight and send it in the morning, paying the hefty extra slug for airmail. With that done he could concentrate on the still-missing girls. What would he do if it was Sarah? He pushed the thought away. He didn’t know how Scheiner could cope.
A sudden gust of wind hit him, and he made his way back to the car. It was chilly. Summer was coming but it was still weeks away. Right now in Poland it was autumn, and winter there was still weeks away too. He tried to picture Scheiner as a younger man, a man in an SS uniform with a shiny silver skull, a Totenkopf, death’s head, as a cap badge and the SS flashes on his lapel. A man with a finger missing on his right hand holding a pistol to the temple of a starving and beaten but still-defiant woman, a woman who had decided it was her time to make a stand.
Berlin saw the snowdrifts and the lines of freezing, starving POWs and their guards. He saw crows circling in the dead, grey overcast that kept them all safe from the terrifying Russian ground-attack fighter-bombers with their cannon and rockets. And for one terrible moment, just as the SS man pulled the trigger, he saw Sarah’s face looking back at him instead of the girl’s, smiling peacefully. He blinked and made the awful image go away. Berlin was good at forcing the images and memories back down into the dark place where he kept them so he could go on with his life. He tried to think nice thoughts about Sarah, remember her skipping along and singing as she held his hand.
Across the street a tall man carrying a briefcase left the hotel bar, quickly looked left and right, then turned left and walked away. Berlin waited for Roberts to appear. It wasn’t a long wait.
‘I would have given it a couple more minutes,’ Berlin said when Roberts got into the car.
Roberts was reaching for the ignition and he paused. ‘What?’
‘If it was me, Bob, I would have given it a couple more minutes before I came out. Let the other bloke get well clear first.’
Roberts sat back in his seat. ‘Okay, Charlie, so I was meeting with a fizz. The bloke said he had some information on the missing girls, but you know what informants are like; half of what they say is total bullshit and the other half is mostly bullshit.’
‘Okay, if you say so.’
‘You don’t believe me, Charlie?’
‘All I’m asking is, whatever’s going on, just keep me our of it. Even just sitting and waiting for you across the other side of the road is too much involvement.’
‘It was just a meeting with a fizz, Charlie. Anyone ever tell you you’re bloody crazy, paranoid?’
‘Experts, Bob, doctors with stethoscopes and white coats and university degrees, so just do me a favour and leave me out of it, please.’
TWENTY-THREE
‘Come in, dear chaps, pull up a pew. Shall I have one of my girlies make us all a nice cup of tea?’
Berlin knew an interview was off to a bad start when the first words out of the interviewee’s mouth made you want to punch them in the face. He put Lance Meuwissen at maybe twenty-five, but with his drawling speech pattern he sounded like a fifty-year-old polite society patriarch. Meuwissen had his desert boot-shod feet up on an old wooden desk and was leaning back in a captain’s chair. Neatly pressed slacks and a white shirt with a paisley print cravat at the open neck finished off the outfit.