The Diggers Rest Hotel

by Geoffrey McGeachin

  About the author

  Melbourne-born author Geoffrey McGeachin has spent much of his life as a photographer, shooting pictures for advertising, travel, theatre and feature films. His first novel, Fat, Fifty and F***ed!, won the inaugural Australian Popular Fiction Competition. His next novels, D-E-D Dead! and Sensitive New Age Spy, both feature secret agent Alby Murdoch and were nominated in the Ned Kelly Awards for Crime Writing.

  GEOFFREY McGEACHIN

  THE

  DIGGERS

  REST

  HOTEL

  VIKING

  an imprint of

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  VIKING

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (Australia)

  250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada)

  90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Canada ON M4P 2Y3

  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd

  80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL England

  Penguin Ireland

  25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland

  (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

  Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd

  11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ)

  67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand

  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd

  24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London, WC2R 0RL, England

  First published by Penguin Group (Australia), 2010

  Text copyright © Geoffrey McGeachin 2010

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  Digital Conversion by Pindar NZ

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

  McGeachin, Geoffrey.

  The diggers rest hotel / Geoffrey McGeachin.

  ISBN 9781742530680

  A823.4

  penguin.com.au

  As ever and always,

  for Wilma

  23 January 1945

  Near the German–Polish Border

  Berlin found the potato the night before the SS officer shot the Jewess. Around five in the afternoon the German guards forced the column of shivering POWs out of the sleet and into the meagre shelter of a wooden barn left shattered by repeated Russian air strikes. If the winter sun was still out there somewhere beyond the leaden clouds the POWs couldn’t tell, and they cared even less. The horse-drawn army field kitchen was nowhere to be seen so the starving men knew it would be another night without food.

  The potato was hidden under the layers of filthy straw, dirt and human waste that carpeted the floor where three hundred exhausted men, grateful to be out of the snow and wind for the night, would try to sleep.

  It reminded Berlin of home, of his grandmother and a time when he was safe and warm, with a full belly. He slipped it into his pocket and held it tightly through the night. Fourteen hours later the SS officer pulled the trigger. The Jewess died and a part of Berlin died with her.

  ONE

  Berlin joined the afternoon drinkers at the Port Melbourne corner pub which, like many pubs in the docklands, was dedicated to easing the aches and sorrows of the working bloke through the worship of beer. It was also a tribute to the art of the tiler: every surface that could be tiled had been tiled, right up to the ceiling. The tiles might have been white at some stage, but years of neglect and the smoke from thousands of durries and tailor-mades had left them coated with a nasty yellowish brown stain.

  The tiling was a masterstroke of functionality. At six o’clock, when the mad rush of the post-work swill was over, the landlord would hose the public bar clean, flushing spilled alcohol, cigarette butts, sometimes blood and more often vomit out the doors and across the footpath to the gutter in a tidal wave of carbolic suds.

  Berlin leaned back on the bar and studied the other drinkers through a thick, blue-grey haze of cigarette smoke. There were the blokes who laughed with their mates as they drank – the ones who were lucky to be alive and knew it. These men had seen death but it had passed over them, and they took each new day as a gift and tried to put the horror behind them. But there were also the solitary souls, men with haunted, downcast eyes and shoulders stooped from carrying a great burden. They had advanced once too often at the machine-gun nests or had watched a mate blasted into a quivering, screaming, bleeding mess of shattered bones and torn flesh and would never forget it.

  A heavy-set man in his thirties ambled up to Berlin, choosing a spot at the empty bar right next to him. He was wearing a smart grey woollen overcoat. Underneath it Berlin could see a tailored suit and an expensive silk tie.

  The man sized Berlin up quickly. Nicely polished shoes – always a good sign – overcoat clean but showing its age around the cuffs, same for the hat. Office clerk, he guessed, skiving off for the afternoon. He didn’t look into Berlin’s eyes, which was his biggest mistake.

  ‘Whisky, eh?’ He indicated the glass of Dimple on the bar at Berlin’s elbow.

  Berlin ignored him.

  In a pub like this, non-beer drinkers were regarded with suspicion. Whisky was for toffs or for toasting the memory of a loved one who had passed away, or a mate crushed on the docks when a sling slipped and a couple of hundredweight of crates fell from a crane. The barman had poured the drink and taken Berlin’s five-pound note without comment, but he’d slapped the change down squarely in a puddle of stale beer.

  The stranger held up his empty glass. ‘Beer’s the go with me, cobber.’

  ‘You should buy yourself another, then.’

  The man smiled. ‘Just trying to be friendly, mate.’

  Berlin picked up his glass and emptied it. He put it on the bar and nodded to the barman for a refill. ‘I’m not your mate and I’ve got all the friends I need right now.’

  The second part of Berlin’s statement wasn’t a lie – at this point in his life having no friends at all suited him just fine.

  The man studied the plain metal watch on Berlin’s wrist. It had been issued when Berlin was demobbed, along with his now shabby dark blue woollen overcoat. The watch had a plain brown leather band and the letters RAAF on its face.

  ‘Air Force, eh?’

  Berlin stared past him.

  ‘New Guinea? The islands? I didn’t go. Busted an eardrum from standing too close to a shotgun going off.’ The man winked. ‘Got me a job on the wharves.’

  Berlin knew all about ruptured eardrums and jobs on the wharves. ‘Bet you do alright for yourself, then.’

  ‘Can’t complain.’ He ordered himself another beer. ‘You a mechanic or something?’

  ‘Pilot.’

  ‘Fighters?’

  ‘Bombers.’

  ‘Up north?’

  ‘Europe.’ Berlin turned his back on the stranger.

  The man smiled. ‘Nice. Three meals a day and a bit of night bombing? And all them grateful Pommy sheilas to come back to every morning. Bloody cushy billet.’

  Berlin let t
hat one go. He picked up his glass.

  ‘You boys had it easy.’

  Berlin sipped his whisky. ‘If you say so.’

  ‘Get any medals?’

  He shook his head. Jesus, couldn’t this bastard take a hint?

  ‘Bet you gave those Jerries hell, though.’

  ‘They gave me some back. I was a POW.’

  The other man was silent for a moment. ‘Right.’ He took a swig of his beer. ‘In Europe, but. I heard the Germans were okay with our boys. Not like the bloody Japs – in Changi or on the Burma Railway. Bastards.’

  It was all relative, Berlin was about to say, but when he thought about some of the shattered men he’d seen during his time in the repat hospital he decided it wasn’t relative at all. Emptying his glass in one swallow, he pushed it back across the bar and straightened up to leave.

  The man looked Berlin up and down. ‘I’m off the wharves now, but I still have … connections. I can put my hands on anything a bloke might need at short notice. Like a new overcoat, for instance. Bloody good prices too – mates’ rates.’

  Berlin studied the worn cuffs on his coat for a moment before he spoke. ‘I don’t have any coupons.’ And even if he had the coupons he knew his lousy pay wouldn’t stretch to a new coat till next winter.

  The other man finished his beer and licked foam from his lips. ‘Bugger the coupons, mate, she’ll be right. So, what do you do for a crust?’

  Berlin took a pair of black leather gloves from his pocket. ‘I’m a policeman.’

  Several drinkers turned towards them then quickly went back to studying the racing results in the pink pages of the Sporting Globe.

  ‘And right now,’ Berlin continued, ‘I’m trying to decide if I should run you in for contravention of the clothing rationing regulations or just take you out the back and belt you till you piss blood.’

  The man in the smart overcoat looked a little pale.

  ‘You seem to have a lot of opinions, sport,’ Berlin said, pulling on his gloves. ‘You got an opinion on that?’

  TWO

  Berlin kept a room in a ramshackle two-storey brick terrace in Drummond Street, Carlton. Mrs Ivy Goodling, who lived three doors down, described it as a boarding house for broken men, and she knew a thing or two on that subject. Her father had arrived home from France in 1919, kissed his wife and three children and then adjourned to the local pub where, over the next seven years in the company of other returned men, he methodically and efficiently drank himself to death.

  Berlin’s landlord asked only three things of his tenants: that they paid the rent on time, didn’t set themselves and the house on fire by smoking in bed, and kept fancy women off the premises. Berlin was the sole resident who managed all three.

  There were nine rented rooms and Berlin’s was number six, at the top of the stairs. He was between the bathroom, where a leaking tap in the rust-stained bathtub gurgled all night, and number five, where a wild-eyed and lank-haired former Lewis gunner paced and smoked and murmured and swore and wept, crying out in terror in his sleep. The story went that he had lost a dozen mates, shot away beside him on some hellish island, and had once fought from behind a parapet he’d formed out of the piled bodies of fallen Japanese soldiers. Berlin had glanced in through his open door one afternoon to see an unmade bed, overflowing ashtrays and blinds still drawn. His nose had caught the stink of self-abuse and chronic despair.

  Berlin’s room was neat by comparison: his bed was always made and he kept the window wide open no matter what the weather. He didn’t like to feel shut in. The neatness was a result of his air-force training, as was the ten-minute exercise regimen he performed each morning before washing and shaving with cold water at the sink in the corner of his room.

  Berlin was twenty-seven, stood five feet eleven in his socks and weighed just over twelve stone. He had the balance, reach and reflexes of a boxer and a broken nose as a souvenir of his last bout at the Police Boys Club. The nose had been broken a second time in an under-seventeens game of Australian Rules football and now it was slightly twisted and flattened, giving him a brooding appearance that women seemed to find attractive.

  The police admissions board had liked the look of him, too. They’d decided his build and slightly battered face gave him a look of barely contained violence that suited their purposes exactly. And the fact that he could use his brains as well as his fists and knew when to keep his mouth shut soon had him marked as someone with potential for bigger things in the force. But that was before the war.

  After exercising and before washing, Berlin cleaned his shoes. He had two pairs, brown for the weekend and black for work. Both hand-lasted, round-toed lace-ups, they had been made for him by a shoemaker in Richmond, in a small shop that smelled of new leather and boot polish. At the first sign of wear in the heels or soles, Berlin returned to the shop to have them mended.

  He took a black-bristled shoe brush from a string-tied cloth bag hanging on the end of his bed. The bag contained several other shoe brushes and two round, flat tins of Nugget shoe polish, in Black and Nigger Brown. There was also an RAF-issue rolled-up calico bag – a ‘housewife’ – that held needles, thread, spare buttons and other items used by servicemen for making repairs to their uniforms.

  Berlin was surprisingly good with a needle. He had been able to slow down the deterioration of his one work suit with running repairs, and alternate day use of the two pairs of trousers. His suit coat, waistcoat, trousers, three ties and three white shirts were all hung neatly with his weekend suit in the gently collapsing plywood wardrobe.

  Berlin sat on the bed in his singlet, socks and underpants, rhythmically working the wooden-handled brush over the surface of the black leather and smiling as the shine came back. He had applied polish to the shoes the night before, leaving it to soak in, and now he studied the stitching connecting the uppers and the soles. If he was careful he would get another five years out of these shoes. His grandfather had taught him that shoes were important – they said a lot about a man and they should be treated with respect. In Poland Berlin learned they could save your life.

  On every evening of the twenty-seven days the POWs had stumbled through the howling blizzards and along slush-covered roadways, Berlin had methodically wiped his boots clean of the accumulated muck. On the nights there was a fire he dried them gently, careful not to let the leather dry out too much. Early in the march an air-gunner from Athabasca, in the remote north-west of Canada, showed him how to massage his toes to avoid frostbite. This, combined with his good boots, enabled Berlin to stay on his feet until they reached a railhead, where they were jammed into cattle cars and transported to a camp near Hamburg. When the Red Cross weighed him on arrival he was down to six stone, but at least he still had all his toes.

  Berlin washed his hands with Solvol in the small sink. The soap’s abrasive grit irritated the grazes on his knuckles and he briefly considered putting some Elastoplast on the cuts but decided against it. They would heal faster in the open air. All wounds heal faster out in the open, or so one of the repat psychiatrists had told him. All the other doctors had just urged him to forget the war, put it out of his mind and get on with his life.

  Berlin glanced at the overcoat hanging on the back of his bedroom door. He’d given the smart alec at the bar his old coat in exchange for this one, plus a couple of wallops for his trouble. Not textbook police procedure for dealing with black marketeers but he’d made his point. And a couple of grazed knuckles were a small price to pay for staying warm through the coming winter.

  THREE

  Berlin left before seven most mornings, walking to police headquarters on Russell Street even though there was a tram stop nearby, on Lygon Street. He walked most places. He walked because he could, because no one was there to stop him. There was no barbed wire, and no warning wire before the barbed wire telling him that to take one step more meant a burst of machine-gun fire from the watchtower or a bullet in the chest from the rifle of a perimeter guard.


  Even at seven on a weekday morning the streets were crowded. Factory girls and night-shift workers passed each other, the girls often laughing, the men with shoulders hunched and hats and caps pulled down over their eyes. There was the whiff of stale beer from the doorway of the early openers and some days the smell of hops from the CUB brewery hung in the air.

  The night-duty sergeant glanced up at Berlin as he walked in. ‘Pleasant stroll this morning, DC Berlin? Not too crisp for you?’

  Berlin shook his head. ‘Keeps the blood pumping.’

  ‘That’s a very nice overcoat you’ve got there, a fine bit of British tailoring if I don’t miss my guess.’

  ‘Well spotted, Sarge.’

  ‘You don’t often see coats like that these days, what with the rationing. Must have cost a few bob.’

  Berlin ran his hand down the grey woollen sleeve. ‘Gift from a grateful friend.’

  That was better, the sergeant thought to himself. The boy was finally getting back into the swing of things. It made the others uncomfortable when someone played it too straight. It was the sergeant’s job to take new recruits out for a beer and a chat and explain the facts of life to them. They usually caught on pretty quick, or they found themselves manning a one-person station somewhere out the back of woop woop, chasing cattle duffers.

  Berlin took the stairs to the third floor. The detective squad office was empty. It seemed Melbourne’s criminals and their pursuers both kept bankers’ hours.

  Berlin’s desk was behind Chater’s. Chater had been in Berlin’s training intake at the St Kilda Road police depot. When the war came Berlin joined the RAAF even though the police force was a reserved occupation and members were discouraged from volunteering for military service. Chater had stayed in the job and now the smarmy bastard outranked Berlin and was enjoying every minute of it. Same thing went for Hargraves, who was a brown-nosing shitkicker before the war but now ran the squad. Hitler and Tojo had been good for some people’s civilian careers.