St Kilda Blues (Charlie Berlin #3)(6)
Perhaps it was having a teenage daughter himself, or perhaps it was that the missing girls came from Broadmeadows and Fitzroy and Yarraville, all working-class suburbs. He had seen similarities, sensed a pattern in the disappearances, asked for help, for another officer to assist or even a policewoman, but no one was interested. His suggestion in a memo that it would be a different matter if the missing girls came from more genteel suburbs like Toorak or South Yarra got someone’s nose out of joint and there was suddenly a vacancy in the fraud squad that needed filling.
Roberts took a drag on his cigarette. ‘Taking you off that case wasn’t right, not right at all. You were good, the best, that’s what I told them.’
Told who? Berlin wondered. ‘Not good enough to be doing it now, though,’ he said.
Roberts looked down at the floor. ‘You still keep those shoes of yours nicely polished, don’t you? Feller could see his face in your shoes, Charlie, if he wanted to look.’
Berlin glanced down. His grandfather had taught him early on that shoes said something about a man and they should be treated with respect. On the forced march at gunpoint through those winter blizzards in Poland, POW Charlie Berlin had also learned that a good pair of shoes, well looked after, could save a man’s life.
‘I don’t see your point, Bob.’
‘It’s simple. A touch of nugget and a bit of spit and polish is one thing, Charlie, but you’ve just never bloody learned to stop standing on other people’s toes, have you?’
Berlin had lost track of all the ways it was possible to tread on someone’s toes in this job. Office politics and the sometimes subtle and ever-shifting power structure within the police force didn’t interest him, and that was what always tripped him up. Getting the work done, getting the right result, that was all he was ever interested in – and then getting home to Rebecca and the kids in one piece. He thought about Sarah, so young and so grown up now. And he thought about the parents of the three girls from earlier in the year.
‘I really don’t see how much help I can be on the case. I’ll do what I can of course, fill you in on what I can remember, but it’s been six months. What do you have on these missing girls so far?’
‘Not a whole lot. All young, all good girls, or so their parents told the investigating officers. All went missing from different discotheques and dances in the city or the inner suburbs. That sound familiar?’
It sounded much too familiar to Berlin. ‘And you said nine girls?’
‘That’s what it looks like. They had half a dozen policewomen sorting through missing persons files all of yesterday afternoon, looking for similarities. There were twelve girls on the list originally but three were confirmed as runaways who eventually showed up back at home.’
Berlin felt a sour taste in his mouth, remembering the dismissive response to his request for just one policewoman to help out back in March. ‘You’re sure this latest one isn’t just another runaway?’
‘Doesn’t seem like it, not the type and her home life looks okay. She was last seen at a discotheque in Little La Trobe Street between nine and ten on Saturday night.’
He did the calculation in his head. Thirty-five hours or so, coming up on a day and a half. ‘And there’s been no sign of any of the others?’
‘Just one, girl named Melinda Marquet, came from out in the bush, out Melton way. They reckon from the timing she was maybe the seventh or eighth to go missing. Pair of uniforms doing a patrol in a divvy van fished her out of the St Kilda end of Albert Park Lake early on a Monday morning.’
‘Jesus.’ Berlin had to resist the temptation to ask Roberts for one of his cigarettes. ‘When was this? I don’t remember hearing about it.’
‘Couple of weeks back, weekend of the second semi-final.’
That would make it September tenth. Berlin, like most Melburnians, could easily fix dates around Victorian Football League finals matches. Richmond had cleaned up Carlton and there had been a lot of celebrating that night and the next day. And the Richmond victory was the kind of news that would have pushed a dead girl right off the front pages.
‘Did she drown?’
Roberts nodded. ‘They found water in her lungs. But the coroner reckons she was probably wishing she was dead for quite a while before it actually happened. It’s a nasty one, Charlie, someone having themselves a good time with a very sharp knife. Looks like they kept her tied up someplace, she had nasty rope burns on her wrists and ankles. The investigating detectives kept that part out of the papers, you know, because of the parents.’
Berlin closed his eyes, picturing the desperate faces of parents begging him for news of their children. He tried to remember the faces of the three girls he had been searching for before he was transferred to the fraud squad. He couldn’t picture them and didn’t know if he should be glad of it or ashamed.
‘Charlie?’
He opened his eyes. ‘I’m listening, Bob, go on.’
‘I said I’ve got the files on the missing girls and the Marquet photographs and autopsy report out in the car. I didn’t want to bring them in, you know, with Rebecca, and the girl being a young’un like Sarah.’
Berlin saw a flash of a younger Bob Roberts in the comment. ‘Thanks, Bob, but Rebecca doesn’t need protecting, she’s probably tougher than both of us put together. Who’s the dad with all the pull, by the way? Got you out of Sunshine’s bed so bright and early.’