St Kilda Blues (Charlie Berlin #3)(9)
The Studebaker was gone because Peter had run it off the road on the first day he’d held his driver’s licence. He hadn’t asked before taking the car. The bloke from the motor wreckers handed over ten quid and grumbled that he should be charging them for hauling it away. Berlin had told anyone who asked that the car had blown its engine and wasn’t worth fixing. The sports car parked in his driveway right now was definitely worth a lot.
‘Must have cost you a bomb.’
Roberts was using his handkerchief to remove a smudge from the chromed windscreen surround. ‘Not really. Some of the blokes put me onto a dealer who’s amenable to doing coppers a favour.’
‘Amenable’ wasn’t exactly the kind of word Berlin had expected from Roberts.
‘I’m hoping you mean a car dealer.’
Roberts shook his head. ‘Same old Charlie, eh? Let me know when you need a new car and I’ll see that you get taken care of.’ He glanced past Berlin at the Datsun parked in the driveway. ‘And it will be something better than that bloody Jap crap, believe me. Who the hell calls a car a Bluebird anyway? Now, you want me to go through some of these case files?’
Berlin shook his head. ‘Let’s go over to the Scheiner girl’s home first, have a chat with her old man. And then we should take a look at that discotheque where she was last seen.’
Roberts opened the driver’s side door. ‘That’s the first thing you ever taught me. The scene of the crime is usually where most of the answers are.’
Berlin opened the passenger door and climbed into the seat. At least it wasn’t quite as low to the ground as Rebecca’s Mini and there was marginally more leg room. The gear lever stuck up from the hump between the seats and the instruments were fitted neatly into a shiny lacquered wood-grain dashboard. Shiny lacquered wood-grain dashboards seemed to be the hallmark of all quality English motor vehicles.
Roberts slid into the driver’s seat and tilted his head back in Rebecca’s direction. ‘You think she’s ever going to get off my bloody back?’
‘Jesus Christ, Bob, you’re pushing forty and the girl’s what, nineteen, twenty?’
‘She’s twenty-one in June and we’re in love, Charlie. We were meant to be together, it’s karma.’
What the hell was karma? Berlin wondered. ‘You’ve got a wife and kids, that’s who you’re meant to be with, looking after them.’
‘Things change, Charlie, people change, times change. We can’t all be you.’
If you really knew me you wouldn’t want to be me, Berlin said to himself.
‘You heard much from the kids yet?’
Berlin realised Roberts was trying to move the subject away from his love life.
‘Sarah called from Athens airport before they got on the plane for Tel Aviv. Sounded like she was full of beans. Peter writes to his mum pretty regularly.’
Rebecca sometimes read parts from Peter’s letters out loud and Berlin knew she left out any bits that she thought would worry him. And he knew from experience that Peter would have left out the parts that he knew would worry his mother. Berlin had done this himself, telling his fiancée and his grandfather about life on the airfield in England and their training flights, leaving out any mention of the terror of his repeated missions into the hell that was the night sky over German-occupied Europe. From his letters they would never have known he was flying operations, piloting his Lancaster time and again into anti-aircraft fire and night fighters and searchlights. They found out when they received the telegram that said he was posted missing and then later listed as a POW.
‘You reckon Peter’s safe over there? Vietnam, I mean. Never really saw him as the army type, myself.’
‘It was his choice.’ But it hadn’t really been that much of a choice for the boy: six months behind the bluestone walls of Pentridge for breaking and entering and a criminal record for life or, as a favour to his father for his long and faithful service in the police force, a way out by joining the army. Surprisingly, it was Peter who had first suggested the idea. More surprising still, Rebecca had agreed with the boy. She pointed out that the possibility of being conscripted was already looming and as a volunteer he would probably have more options for a trade than a national serviceman who was called up.
So Berlin had made his case privately to the magistrate, who was sympathetic and agreed to give Peter the option. Berlin had warned the boy to pick a trade like mechanical engineering when he went in and under no circumstances volunteer for the infantry, which would almost certainly mean combat. The little bugger had of course ignored him and was now carrying a rifle somewhere in South Vietnam. ‘They reckon a bit of time in the military can make a man out of a kid. You hold with that?’ Roberts asked.
‘It’s what they reckon. Bob.’ The military makes corpses of a lot of people too, Berlin thought, but he didn’t say that. ‘Let’s get moving, shall we, it’s a fair hike to Brighton and I’ve got the feeling you’re dying to show me just what this car can do.’
Roberts starred the Triumph. He revved the engine twice and then let it settle at idle. Berlin could feel the power of the rumbling engine through his feet pressed against the firewall.
THE VOYAGE, August 1950
They sent the boy back to London within a month of VE Day and the arrival of the telegram at the farm. His mother was ill with untreated venereal disease and in no condition to take care of him. so he was given into care. He was passed from hand to hand. home to home. orphanage to orphanage and into situations of abuse that ranged from benign neglect to physical and sexual violence. While the overt and constant brutality of the war was now gone. there was anger and shame and bitterness amongst the civilian population from loss of loved ones, and for those who had seen combat a loss of innocence and sometimes with it a loss of compassion and caring.