St Kilda Blues (Charlie Berlin #3)(82)
The officer dropped his cigarette butt on the driveway and ground it out with the toe of his highly polished shoe. ‘There’s that f*cking we again. Wake up to yourself, Berlin, they are dead and they are gone, long gone. Crab food at the bottom of the Bay according to the killer. And your career is down there with them, as it happens. Concealing evidence of a crime like this and insubordination is going to cost you your job and your pension. Your mate Roberts too, the bloody idiot. At least you probably won’t be going to jail with him.’
‘Jail? What did he do?’
The officer smiled. ‘Silly bugger thought he was too smart by half and he bloody wasn’t. On top of sticking his nose into an investigation that was none of his business he’s been collecting bribes, taking pay-offs, tipping off crims about raids and God knows what else.’
Berlin glanced around in the direction of the parked divisional van again. A still-handcuffed Bob Roberts was smiling and chatting to the two plain-clothes detectives as if he didn’t have a care in the world. Berlin decided to play the only card he had.
‘Sergeant Roberts has been acting as an undercover informant for Justice Luscombe’s inquiry and I can provide evidence to back this up.’
‘Jesus Christ, Berlin, you’re not doing your mate any favours here. We say what the evidence shows, we say who’s guilty and who’s innocent, and we decide who’s an informant and who’s not. You’ve been around the bloody traps long enough to know how things work, and it takes a really, really stupid bugger to think he can change things. And it doesn’t matter if Roberts gets one year or five or ten, we both know what happens to ex-coppers who wind up behind bars in H Division. He’ll be lucky to last a week.’
THIRTY-NINE
St Paul’s Anglican Cathedral is located diagonally opposite Flinders Street Station at the intersection of Flinders and Swanston Streets, with Young and Jackson’s pub on the corner between them. A row of clocks over the station entrance show the next departure times on the various suburban train lines, and during the war years an invitation to meet ‘under the clocks’ had been considered rather romantic. Young and Jackson had no row of clocks but it did have beer on tap and a famous painting of a nude named Chloe over the front bar. St Paul’s had no nudes or romance but there was Evensong and just recently a hip young minister with long hair and a red velvet-lined coat who served up earnest chat, instant coffee and rock’n’roll music in a groovy cellar café in the hope of luring the young and lately faithless back to the flock.
At eight on a Thursday evening the intersection, the station, the pub and the church were all quiet. The city centre’s offices and retail stores had all closed at five-thirty sharp and the shoppers and city workers were long gone. An occasional W-class tram rattled through the intersection, its spring-loaded trolley-pole flashing and sparking at junction points on the high-voltage overhead electrical wires that powered its motor. In the long gaps between trams, drunks and the odd passer-by glanced up at the intermittent flashes of bright light that were still happening even though there were no trams in sight.
The flashes were corning from inside the cathedral, where Rebecca was shooting an assignment with her newly suspended husband acting as her assistant. Berlin was standing next to a tripod-mounted camera at the back of the darkened cathedral holding a piece of heavy black cardboard and counting out loud. He was glad Rebecca had asked him to assist her, because he hoped the task would take his mind off his suspension from duty and the corruption charges pending against Bob Roberts, but mostly off young Gudrun Scheiner, now five days missing. With the case officially closed, any chance the girl might have had of being found was now gone. No one was looking anymore and if Gudrun was still alive he hoped to hell she didn’t know that.
***
Berlin had learned the basics of photography as part of his training in Canada. RAF bombers used magnesium flares for illumination, and tonight Rebecca was using something equally old-fashioned flashbulbs. ‘Lightweight, cheap, portable and powerful, Charlie my boy,’ was how she put it. The bulbs screwed into a tall cylindrical holder with a large, round, chromed reflector dish about the size of a dinner plate. Rebecca had carefully calculated it would take twenty flashes to illuminate the cathedral’s interior and she carried the bulbs in a wicker shopping basket, with a couple of extras in case of misfires.
Each flashbulb was the size and shape of a household light bulb and, like all photoflash bulbs, good for only one use. After firing, the bulb was red hot, the glass cracked and shrivelled and its clear plastic protective coating melted. Each dead bulb had to be unscrewed and removed from the chrome reflector and Rebecca used an old tea towel to protect her hands from burns while removing just-fired bulbs. The hot bulbs would be left on the tiled floor to cool down and collected after the shoot.
Berlin’s part of this project was fairly straightforward. Rebecca had arrived in the late afternoon to set up her camera. She had composed and carefully focused the image on the camera’s ground-glass screen under a black cloth. After stopping the lens aperture down and closing and cocking the shutter, she inserted a sheet of 4x5 film in its holder. Removing the dark slide, she had made an initial brief exposure just for the stained-glass windows lit up by the late afternoon sun. Once Berlin arrived to help they sat together in a pew, drinking coffee from a thermos while they waited for dusk and then darkness. They didn’t talk about missing girls, friends under arrest or suspensions and careers on the skids.