St Kilda Blues (Charlie Berlin #3)(76)
It was hard to be sure with the gag and blindfold but Berlin knew the girl in the chains had to be Gudrun Scheiner. Melinda Marquet had somehow slipped out of her ropes before escaping from her prison and the sick bastard holding her had learned his lesson.
Berlin’s eyes moved off the girls and on to what he could see of where they were being held. The place might have been a cellar, from the brick wall he could see in the back of the image, but apart from that there was not much information that would help in tracking down a location. He slid the photographs back into the envelope and put it down on the table. He was breathing in short gasps and he realised that he was probably about to be sick all over the evidence.
It was a very small kitchen so he had to step over Derek’s dead body to get to the sink. The stink of whisky was stronger now than the lingering smell of gas. The sight and smell of rotten food in an over-flowing rubbish bin made his nausea worse. When he turned on the tap there was a loud hammering noise from the pipes. He ran the water until it was cold then splashed some on his face. Images of the girls, tied up and brutalised, crying, terrified, calling for their mothers, filled his head. Think about something else, he told himself
Running his eyes around the filthy kitchen he noted a cleanish plate with a knife and fork on the sink next to a bottle of White Crow tomato sauce. One of the kitchen cabinets was slightly ajar. He opened the cupboard door using just the tip of a finger. The contents were a jumble of chipped and mismatched drinking glasses covered with the ubiquitous film of grime that seemed to characterise Derek’s short and nasty little life. Bob was right – any place would be better than this shithole.
There was a glint from the back of the cupboard as he started to close the door. He picked up the knife from the sink and used it to push several of the drinking glasses aside. The glass at the very back of the cupboard matched the one on the table next to the typewriter. Unlike all the other glasses sharing the space, this one was sparkling clean. He left the door open and turned back to the stove.
Berlin remembered hearing people complain about the size of the oven on the old Early Kooka kitchen stoves but this one seemed to have taken the young photographer quite comfortably. Derek Jones’s head was fully inside the oven with his torso resting on the open door and his legs splayed out on the greasy seagrass matting. Why the hell would anyone use seagrass matting in a kitchen?
There was an aluminium kettle on one of the stovetop burners. A filthy cast-iron baking dish sitting next to it held a folded-over brown paper bag. Berlin leaned across the body to touch the bag. The oval shape of the object inside and a shiny grease stain on the outside suggested it was probably a pastie. The paper of the bag was also dried out and slightly crisp-looking, and was black where it had started to char a little at the corners. He looked around the kitchen one more time before stepping back over the body and rejoining Roberts in the living room.
A police constable stuck his head in through the front door of the flat. ‘You reckon we can get the doctor in anytime soon? And the photographer’s waiting.’
Berlin was thinking and didn’t respond.
Roberts dismissed the constable with a shake of his head. ‘He’ll still be dead in half an hour so they’ll just have to bloody wait.’ Roberts waited too, which Berlin appreciated. Had he always been this patient?
It must have been a good ten minutes before Roberts checked his watch and a minute more before he spoke.
‘Going to be a bit tough on the families, I reckon, Charlie. Where the hell do we look next? If he did dump them all in the Bay we don’t have a hope in hell of finding the bodies. We know they’re dead and we know who did it, which is good for us, I suppose, but bloody hard for the families. Losing a child has to be the worst thing, I reckon. But losing them and not knowing where they are, not having a body to bury, has to make it even worse.’
Berlin ignored the comments. ‘Tell me what you see here, Bob.’
Roberts glanced over at Berlin. He had spoken so softly that Roberts had missed it. ‘Sorry, what did you say?’
‘Take a good look around and tell me exactly what you see.’
Robert shrugged. ‘Okay, there’s a dead bloke in the kitchen with his head in the gas oven, suicide note on the living room table, a nearly empty bottle of Scotch and some pictures of a bunch of dead girls.’
‘Those girls weren’t dead when the pictures were taken, Bob, though they probably are now. You don’t see anything else?’
Roberts ran his eye around the room again and shook his head.
‘You remember Pete Whitmore up in Wodonga, Bob? The Military Police sergeant out at the Bandiana army camp.’
‘Bugger me, Charlie, that’s going back a bit.’
It was going back a bit, back to when Berlin was sent to rural Wodonga on a case meant to end his career. The border town was where he’d first met a young probationary constable named Bob Roberts and a smart-alec woman reporter named Rebecca Green who was out to make a name for herself. And Wodonga was where he’d met former commando Peter Whitmore. He had recognised the man’s demons as his own and in the end had become enough of a friend to help him end his own suffering. Young Peter Berlin was named for Whitmore, though they were very different people.
‘I still remember something Pete told me, Bob, something he learned fighting the Japs on the Kokoda Track. Pete said there’s a big difference between looking and seeing, a bloody big difference.’