St Kilda Blues (Charlie Berlin #3)(63)

He set the typewriter up on the kitchen table, inserted two sheets of foolscap with carbon paper between them and began the letter. He’d just typed Gerhardt Scheiner’s name when Rebecca came out of the bathroom in her white bathrobe, hair wrapped in a towel. She leaned across him, hand on his shoulder, and looked at the sheet of paper in the typewriter carriage. She was warm and desirable as always but right now what was going through Berlin’s mind forced those thoughts away.

‘Shall I make some tea while you do that? Or would you like coffee? I brought a fruitcake home from the city.’

He asked for tea and sat and stared at the sheet of paper in the typewriter. Rebecca lit the gas under the kettle and then came and sat next to him. He felt her reach for his hand.

‘Is it the girl, Charlie? Is that why you couldn’t sleep last night?’

‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to keep you awake.’

She squeezed his hand.

‘Last night was the third night.’ He wanted to say more but couldn’t. If it was the same person who took Melinda Marquet then the knife or whatever it was would have been used by now. How many times? Where? How much pain?

Rebecca stood up and moved across to the teapot on the bench by the sink. She had her back to him as she scooped tea-leaves out of the caddy and into the pot. When she spoke he understood that having her back towards him was a concession, it was her making a safe place for him if he chose to answer.

‘It’s not just the Scheiner girl, though, is it, Charlie? It’s the girl in Poland too, isn’t it? The one on the road.’

He knew she knew but it was how much she knew that he was unsure of. What had he told her, drunk or sober, and what had she pieced together from what he said in his nightmares? He had tried to tell her the whole story several times, knowing he owed her at least that, but he could never get the words out. It was all a confused mess, a jumble of real or imagined memories, except in the nightmares when it was all crystal clear and too terrible to talk about. Sometimes in the nightmares he walked a long corridor with Rebecca appearing in doorways, reaching out a hand to him and saying, ‘Tell me, Charlie, trust me,’ but the doors always slammed shut before he could speak.

They drank their tea and ate the fruitcake in silence and he knew she loved him despite everything. She rinsed off the dishes and then came up behind him, put her arms around him and kissed him on the top of the head.

‘You want to save everyone, Charlie, don’t you? You want to set everything right, bring everyone home, but you can’t. And I love you because you know that you can’t but you still have to try.’

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Rebecca was in bed and asleep by the time he finished the letter and sealed and addressed the envelope. He would post it first thing in the morning by airmail and then he would be able to concentrate on finding the girl or girls, if they were still alive, which he doubted. They were being taken at regular intervals and the intervals suggested how long each of them had taken to die. Was it better to die suddenly or have time to reflect on what was happening? he wondered.

His crew had gone quickly, there one minute and gone the next, with their pilot and skipper and leader blown clear by the same blast that vaporised them. He had seen burning Lancasters and Halifaxes tumbling away from the bomber stream in what seemed like slow motion and he decided faster was better. Better than being trapped inside a jammed steel and plexiglas gun turret or held fast against a bulkhead by centrifugal force in a spinning, burning, out-of-control bomber with the escape hatch just inches away from grasping, desperate fingers.

Rebecca was breathing lightly next to him, close but sometimes so far away. She was naked as always and he knew just a gentle touch on her back or shoulders or that lovely round bottom would rouse her, arouse her, sleepy still but ready for love, her lips soft and comforting or hard and urgent against his as the mood took her, and it was always a surprise to him what that mood might be. But he was angry tonight, or as angry as he allowed himself to get. His anger with suspects was real but kept compartmentalised now, as a part of his job. He was still scared of the places he could go when he let the anger loose, though somehow it had been held in check for years.

He stared up at the ceiling. It was twenty years that they had been together. He’d been a shambles when they met, and why she hadn’t turned and walked away he would never understand. But she hadn’t and she had saved him. She had eased the bottle from his lips and the pistol from his temple more than once and had washed the blood and vomit from his clothes and left the children with the neighbours to spare them the distress of seeing him in pain and had never asked why.

She knew that his crew, six young men he was responsible for, were dead and gone, and that he had been a POW. She knew he had been marched at gunpoint through snowdrifts and howling winter blizzards from the camp in Poland back into Germany in ‘45, just days ahead of a steadily advancing Red Army whose artillery rumbled and flashed constantly on the horizon behind them.

What else he had told her or she had pieced together he really didn’t know. What had he said on those days and weeks when he fell into despair, seeking solace in drugs or grog? He still had nightmares, and though the visitations from his dead crew had stopped a long time back, putting his head down on a pillow was still an effort. Did he talk in his sleep? he wondered, did he tell the story? Did he say what he had seen and could never unsee, never erase, never block out?

He remembered she had watched as he pulled the first potato from the backyard plot when the house was still new, the concrete paths white and dusty, the suburban street outside still a dirt track, and young Peter hadn’t yet begun to crawl. He had taken a spade and, using the sharp side like an axe and with tears in his eyes, savagely hacked into the earth he had so carefully tended, trying to destroy all evidence of what he had grown. She had asked him once about it but he had shaken his head and he guessed something in his eyes must have warned her not to ask again.