St Kilda Blues (Charlie Berlin #3)(8)
The village was preparing for its VE Day celebrations and it had taken the telegram delivery boy a good fifteen minutes to get his bicycle through the crowds and out on the road to the farm. The farmer had accepted the envelope at the door and the delivery boy, peddling furiously, had gone barely 100 yards before the wailing started inside the farmhouse. The war would be officially over the following day and the delivery lad hoped it would be the last of those damned notifications he would ever have to hand over.
Back inside the farmhouse the boy had no real idea of what was happening but he sensed that things were about to change. He made his way up the narrow stairs, away from the couple sitting at the rough kitchen table, the farmer staring silently up at the ceiling beams, his wife sobbing into her apron. The boy closed the bedroom door to shut out the noise and folded back the battered and stained straw-filled mattress on which he slept. There was an oilcloth-wrapped package under the mattress, left there by the paratrooper on his last visit home. He had shown the boy the contents of the package and instructed him never to touch it. But it seemed that he was dead now and that meant the boy could take whatever he wanted.
After placing the package on the bed, the boy carefully unfolded the wrapping. He ignored the heavy Luger pistol, the French and Dutch bank notes, the condoms and pornographic postcards, and went straight for the dagger. The gun and the money didn’t interest him, and neither did the postcards as he had seen the images they portrayed played out in reality many, many times in his mother’s little flat in London. The dagger was his favourite.
It was quite beautiful – the handle black and shiny, the double-edged blade chromed, the sheath of highly polished leather with a sharpening stone in a separate pouch. It was a dress dagger, meant for ceremonial use rather than combat, but it was Solingen steel and the paratrooper had carefully honed the edges of the blade till they were like a razor. There were letters embossed on the blade but they were in German and the boy could barely read English. The dagger had been taken from an SS captain cut almost in two by a burst of machine-gun fire. As they lay together in the bed the paratrooper, smoking and staring at the ceiling, had described in intimate detail to the boy the brutal effect of the bullets on the SS captain’s body. The boy had listened intently and once again felt that strange heat between his legs.
It was good that the paratrooper was dead, he decided, because now the dagger was his. If the paratrooper had come back and discovered the nick on the edge of the blade and the small flecks of blood on the sheath he might have been angry. The boy knew he was probably too small to kill a full-grown man with a knife, let alone a trained paratrooper, but he might have done it with the German pistol. He would have had to kill the farmer and his wife then, of course, and burning down the house would have taken care of any evidence against him. But now with the paratrooper dead and gone he was safe.
The blood flecks on the sheath had come from the barn cat and the nick on the blade had happened when the boy killed a calf on a neighbouring farm. He had wanted to lick the cat’s blood off the blade but couldn’t quite work up the nerve to do it. With the calf it had been easier, the taste salty and not unpleasant, and even just remembering the animal’s frantic struggling and its terrified bellowing always brought the joyful heat back to his loins.
Leaving the dagger on the floor, he rewrapped the other items and slid the package back under the mattress. He opened the battered kitbag he had carried all the way from London and found the hidden slit in the bag’s inner fabric lining. The dagger in its sheath fitted neatly into the slit and he worked it down under the fabric to the bottom then under the piece of plywood that gave the bag a solid base. The dagger was safe for now.
Through the floorboards he could still hear the farmer’s wife sobbing. He decided to wait. He would sit on the bed and wait to see what would happen. Things would change, he knew that much. He swung his legs backwards and forwards. He thought about the cat and then the calf. The calf was bigger and its struggle to live more pronounced. The calf was better.
THREE
Berlin stopped on the driveway to tell Rebecca he’d most likely be gone for the rest of the day. She brushed his hair back off his forehead and gave him a kiss.
‘You take care of yourself, okay?’ she said.
Bob Roberts smiled at her and put out his hand.
‘I’ll look out for him Rebecca, don’t you worry.’
Rebecca ignored the outstretched hand and gave Roberts a look that Berlin hoped would never be sent in his direction.
‘Coming from you Bob, that’s not all that much of a reassurance.’
The two men stopped on the nature strip beside the Triumph. The duco and chrome work shone in the morning sun and the tyres looked like they were freshly blacked. There were leather bucket seats for the driver and front passenger but not a lot of leg room. A glance showed Berlin that what passed for a back seat would have been impossibly cramped for anyone except maybe a child, and cars like these weren’t made for people with children. The cramped space was currently home to a stack of buff-coloured, foolscap-sized folders.
‘Nice car. Looks brand new.’
Roberts grinned and for a brief moment Berlin saw twenty years fall away, saw him without the scarring and the calculating look that always seemed to be in his eyes now.
‘I drove her right off the bloody showroom floor, not even five miles on the clock. Alice needed the Chrysler to drive the kids around and I had to have something. She’s got some real grunt, Charlie, let me tell you. Six cylinders, twenty-five hundred CCs and fuel injection. You can’t beat a big donk. You should have never gotten rid of the old Studebaker, you know that.’