St Kilda Blues (Charlie Berlin #3)(75)
Lauren laughed and Berlin heard echoes of the easy way Rebecca and Sarah had sometimes joined forces to tease him over some meaningless transgression or forgotten birthday, or just for the sheer fun of it. He envied the relationship his wife and daughter had, and wondered what kept him and Peter from making the same sort of connection.
It took surprisingly little time for Berlin to forget the fact he was standing next to a very beautiful naked girl. The time passed quickly as it always did when he worked with Rebecca. He moved the reflector as instructed, helped with the lights and watched, intrigued as she suggested poses, adjusted lights, skilfully sculpting Lauren’s body with shadows and highlights, finding and revealing beauty. And he loved the look of joy on Rebecca’s face when she captured that beauty, pressing the shutter button at precisely the right moment, the right pose, the right attitude.
Rebecca was right on with her timing and was loading a fresh roll of film into her camera for one last shot when there was a loud knocking on the studio door. It opened before Berlin could get to it. The very young police constable standing in the doorway blinked at the bright light coming from the centre of the studio. Berlin saw he was breathing heavily.
He took off his cap. ‘Are you DS Berlin?’
‘That’s right, what can we do for you, son?’
The young constable was flushed and sweating. ‘Thank God. Sergeant Roberts said you might be here but the phone’s been busy so I ran all the way from Russell Street.’
Berlin crossed the room to the table and lifted up his overcoat. He must have knocked the telephone’s handset out of its cradle when he put the coat down.
‘What’s going on, why the rush?’
The young constable didn’t answer. His eyes had adjusted to the bright light and he was staring across the room at Lauren. The girl was eating an apple while she waited for Rebecca to finish loading the film. Berlin stepped in front of the constable to block the view. ‘Why was Sergeant Roberts trying to get in touch with me?’
The boy was up on his toes now, trying to look over Berlin’s shoulder. ‘He telephoned in to Russell Street and said you have to get back to the flat in St Kilda right away and you’d know what I meant. It was about someone named Jane or James, I think.’
Berlin took the constable by the shoulders, turned him round and stood him with his back to the girl. ‘You should learn to write things down, son. Was the names Jones?’
The constable nodded. ‘That’s it, it was about someone named Jones. David, Derek, something like that.’
Over the constable’s shoulder Berlin could see Lauren watching him. ‘What about Derek Jones? What’s happened?’ he asked.
‘He’s dead, Sergeant Roberts said. Apparently he knocked himself off.’
THIRTY-SIX
The first firemen on the scene had done the right thing, turning off the gas at the downstairs meter while waiting for the police. The constable who kicked in the front door had opened all the windows so the smell of gas was almost gone from the second-floor flat by the time Berlin and Roberts arrived. The lock was hanging off the open door and fragments of splintered doorjamb littered the entranceway. The kitchen was to Berlin’s left and he could see a pair of legs and the upper torso of a man. Derek Jones’s head and shoulders were hidden inside the oven.
There was a typewriter sitting on the living room table along with a single empty glass and a less than quarter-full bottle of Scotch. The label on the whisky bottle indicated it was one of the blends packaged to sell cheaply through a supermarket chain. A crumpled brown paper bag and a torn soft foil seal suggested the bottle had only been recently purchased and uncorked. The typewriter held a single sheet of paper and there was a manila envelope on the table behind it. The flap on the envelope was open and Berlin could see there were photographs inside.
Roberts leaned over the typewriter and studied the piece of paper. ‘The first constable to see this took one squiz and was smart enough to call me. I told him to turf everyone else out of the place and wait for us.’ He rolled the sheet of quarto typing paper up a little higher in the carriage. ‘Says here our Derek’s very sorry for what he’s done and all the pain that he’s caused. He’d like the families of the missing girls to try to forgive him. Nice of the bastard.’
Berlin was carefully looking round the room as he listened.
‘Anything else?’
Roberts pulled the sheet of typing paper from the typewriter carriage. ‘He says the last girl, Gudrun, was wrapped in chains and dumped in the Bay. It doesn’t say where. He hopes he’s going to a better place.’ He lifted his head and looked around the living room. ‘I reckon any place would have to be better than this shithole.’
The envelope on the table contained a dozen or so black and white prints and Roberts shuffled through them. ‘It’s the missing girls, Charlie, seems to be all of them. You want take a look?’ Berlin shook its head. ‘Not really.’ He took the photographs from Roberts’ hand.
The girls were naked, gagged, blindfolded and tied securely at the wrists and ankles. All of them had the knife-blade cuts he had seen on the body of the girl in the lake and it looked like they were all alive when the photographs were taken. Rope had been used to restrain them, except for one girl who had handcuffs around her wrists with what looked like shiny new chain running from the cuffs up towards the ceiling.