The Diggers Rest Hotel

by Geoffrey McGeachin

  SIXTEEN

  Berlin couldn’t see the young soldier anywhere in the dining room. He stopped Lily, who was passing by balancing several plates of food.

  ‘The young bloke who was at the bar, the soldier, Kenny, know where he went?’

  ‘He took some empty plates out to the kitchen for me. He’s a good lad. Let me fetch him for you.’

  ‘I’ll do it, you’ve got your hands full. Kitchen’s through here, right?’

  Berlin turned and walked through a narrow passageway. The hotel’s kitchen was a large room with a long wooden table in the middle. A huge, black slow-combustion wood stove was set into one wall and there were two large refrigerators and several benches stacked with dishes and cooking utensils.

  He almost ran headlong into the young soldier. The boy’s face was flushed and he looked upset. Behind him Berlin caught a glimpse of blue fabric and black hair as someone disappeared through a screen door at the rear of the kitchen, slamming it behind them.

  ‘Your sergeant’s out in the car park. He’s ready to leave.’

  The boy pushed past him without speaking.

  Rude little bugger, Berlin said to himself.

  Back at the table, Rebecca smiled when Berlin sat down. ‘Want to go halves on your dessert?’

  Berlin looked at the plate of fried scones swimming in golden syrup and shook his head. ‘Order your own. I don’t like sharing food.’

  ‘Not a good start for someone hoping to see a photograph of the robbers in action. Or wanting to get into my pants, for that matter.’

  The comment caught Berlin off guard again. He knew how to handle tarts, but this woman wasn’t a tart, even though she talked like one. ‘What makes you think I want to get into your pants?’

  ‘Give me your hand.’

  Berlin stared at her warily.

  ‘C’mon. I won’t bite.’

  Berlin slowly extended his left arm across the table. She took his hand, turned it over and placed her fingertips on his wrist for a moment.

  ‘Well, that confirms it. You’re a bloke and you definitely have a pulse – that seems to be the criteria for lustful desire in every man I’ve ever met.’

  Berlin moved his arm away, disturbed to find he had enjoyed the touch of her fingertips. ‘I’m still not sharing.’

  ‘Suit yourself. But I’m a woman of my word so here’s the photograph.’

  She lifted her satchel onto her lap and undid the snaps. Under the flap were slots for pens and a place for an ID card.

  ‘Is that a motorcycle dispatch rider’s satchel?’

  ‘Yep. Got it in an army disposal store for five bob.’

  ‘Don’t you have a real handbag? A purse?’

  ‘It holds everything I need, it was cheap and I think it looks good. Is there a problem?’ She fished in her bag and pulled out an envelope.

  ‘No.’ He’d never met anyone quite like her before – blunt and plain-spoken like a man but everything else about her was all female, except for the damn trousers and that satchel.

  He carefully studied the blurry black-and-white, eight-by-ten inch photograph she handed him. It showed three motorcycles with sidecars turning left just as they raced out of the loco-shed gateway. Two of the motorcycles had a passenger in the sidecar but the third only had a rider, obviously the one holding the loot. The five bandits were wearing dark coveralls, leather gauntlets, black balaclavas and motorcycle goggles. The driver of the lead motorcycle had his head turned towards the camera.

  ‘Where exactly did you take this?’

  ‘Right outside the gates of the loco sheds, just after they grabbed the payroll.’

  ‘And you just happened to be waiting, all on your Pat Malone, at the scene of the crime at exactly the right moment?’

  She smiled. ‘Old press photographer’s motto for a perfect picture – just set your lens to f11 and be in the right place at the right time.’

  ‘I don’t know what f11 means, Miss Green, but I need to know if your being there was just dumb luck or something else.’

  ‘You think I’m an accomplice to these wicked deeds, DC Berlin? I’m flattered.’

  ‘I don’t know much about you, Miss Green.’

  ‘I’m over the age of consent if that’s what you’re getting at. And it’s Rebecca, remember.’

  ‘You talk about sex a lot, Miss Green.’

  ‘I’m not all talk, DC Berlin.’

  ‘If I give you some of my pudding can we change the subject?’

  Rebecca started to laugh, and then she looked into his eyes and saw a hint of the pain that lived there and stopped.

  ‘I only want a taste. Puftaloons with golden syrup aren’t really my favourite.’ She picked up a spoon. ‘That Lily is one hell of a good cook.’ She dipped her spoon into the dessert bowl. ‘And as to me being outside the gate of the loco sheds this morning, I guess it was just good timing.’

  Berlin figured she wasn’t being straight with him about being at the right place at the right time and, as it turned out, she also liked puftaloons a lot more than she’d let on.

  SEVENTEEN

  After she’d helped him polish off the puftaloons, Rebecca had excused herself to listen to the ABC news on the radio. Berlin was usually perfectly happy with his own company so he was surprised to find himself wishing she’d stayed a little longer.

  He ordered another whisky after she left, and then another after that. Berlin’s rule was nothing before two in the afternoon and nothing after midnight. He only drank whisky, preferably Scotch, but he was willing to be flexible. He only drank in pubs and when the pubs were shut, in sly grog joints – if he could find one that wasn’t full of drunken coppers. Chater had once asked him why he didn’t just buy a bottle to keep at home and Berlin said he’d tried it and discovered that once you opened the bottle, whisky didn’t keep.

  Around half-past nine he asked Corrigan for his room key and followed the landlord out through the parlour. The hallway floor and stairway banisters both showed signs that they had been painted at some stage in the distant past, but there was little evidence remaining. Upstairs, numbered bedrooms lined both sides of a narrow corridor and on a doorway at the far end the word BATHROOM was painted in flaking gold letters on frosted glass.

  ‘Dunny’s down there to the left of the bathroom. The stove in the kitchen heats the water for up here so it’s hottish in the bathroom from around six in the morning and there’s a sink with cold water in your room. You need to supply your own soap and towels but if you’re short I can lend you some.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Berlin said. ‘Constable Roberts organised that for me.’

  Corrigan opened a door marked 4. ‘It’s not the bloody Hotel Windsor, but it’s clean.’

  The room was about twelve feet by eight feet, the floor covered with chipped and flaking green linoleum. There was a fireplace, a double bed with a couple of grey army blankets and a single pillow, a wooden chair and a battered bedside table with a reading light. A shabby wardrobe, which might have been the twin of the one in his room back in Melbourne, leaned against one wall. In the corner, near a window covered by a flyspecked brown roller blind, was a white enamel washbasin with a single tap. Above it was a small shelf holding two water glasses, and above that a mirror.

  ‘No animals allowed, Mr Berlin,’ Corrigan said, ‘but even if you did have a cat there ain’t really room enough to swing it anyway.’

  The parcels that had been on the back seat of the Dodge were on the end of the bed.

  ‘The wife must have brought those up. Anything else you need?’

  ‘Can I borrow some Nugget and a shoe brush?’

  ‘Don’t bother about that. Just leave your shoes outside the door.’

  Berlin didn’t trust anyone else to polish his shoes. He glanced at Corrigan’s empty sleeve. ‘I don’t want to put you to any trouble.’

  ‘No trouble for me, mate, the wife’ll do ’em. She’s already got the kids’ school shoes to do anyway plus my boots, so one more pair don�
��t make no never mind.’

  ‘Okay.’ It was late and probably not worth arguing over, Berlin decided.

  ‘Breakfast’s downstairs at seven sharp: porridge, bacon and eggs, steak and eggs or chops and eggs. But you can have a full mixed grill if you want something substantial.’

  ‘It’s sounding more and more like the Windsor every minute, Vern.’

  When Corrigan had gone, Berlin raised the roller blind and looked out. His window had a view over the hotel’s parking area, out across the roadway and down towards the tree-lined riverbank. Rebecca Green’s little Austin was the only vehicle left in the car park.

  He walked back to the bed and opened his parcels. One held a shaving brush, soap, a safety razor and Gillette Blue blades, a toothbrush and a tin of toothpowder, a comb and a jar of Brylcreem. The other package contained socks, singlets, underpants and a towel that was carefully cradling a familiar-shaped bottle.

  Berlin broke the metal seal, worked the cork free, poured himself a large glass and took a drink. For a teetotaller Constable Roberts had made a good choice – Haig & Haig’s Dimple whisky was Berlin’s favoured drop. It seemed the boy was well on track for rising through the ranks of the Victoria Police, since the first thing a bloke needed to do was suss out his superior officer’s weaknesses. Of course, if Roberts had been a little more astute there might have been a Benzedrine inhaler nestled among the Chesty Bond singlets and underpants.

  Berlin wandered down the corridor to the lavatory. It had the familiar carbolic smell of Phenyle disinfectant and in the bathroom next door he could hear water running in the bath and the sound of a woman singing softly. He walked back to the bedroom and reluctantly left his shoes outside the door.

  In the room he took off his suit and hung it neatly in the wardrobe, draped his shirt over the back of the chair and pulled off his singlet, socks and underpants. He opened the window, pulled the shade down and got into bed. He lay there wondering if it was Rebecca he had heard singing in the bath. His watch told him it was just over an hour to midnight, and he reached for the glass and the bottle of whisky and drank himself to sleep.

  At least he thought he was asleep. Sometimes he wasn’t sure but Jock’s voice was strong and clear and definite. Wilf, the flight engineer, was leaning on the mantelpiece smoking that pipe he thought made him look older. Across the room Lou, the rear gunner, stood at the window, carefully scanning the star-filled sky and wondering aloud why Orion was upside down. The men were wearing their flying suits and sheepskin-lined boots and Berlin was embarrassed by his nakedness. Mick, the knockabout radio operator, and Harry, the cockney bomb-aimer, were listening as Jock, the mid-upper gunner, cracked jokes in his Glasgow accent and told his stories of growing up in the Gorbals, fights with razor gangs and beatings from seven-foot coppers from the highlands with fists like hams. Young Gary, the Canadian navigator, was morose as usual, still pining for Gwen. He kept complaining about being dead and Berlin tried to explain to him that being alive was no picnic either.

  Then the rooster in Lily’s chook pen crowed, and through the open window shade the brightening sky told Berlin dawn was close.

  EIGHTEEN

  Berlin felt like death. His head was throbbing, his mouth dry. A hair of the dog would fix that but it was the weariness in his soul he didn’t know how to fix.

  He washed and dressed then tiptoed down the creaking stairs in his socks, searching out the kitchen and his shoes. The kitchen was warm from the slow-combustion stove that had burned all night. A large black kettle bubbled on its top and there was a teapot ready on the table. Berlin found his shoes in a neat row of work boots and tiny school shoes. They were beautifully polished and there were no signs of any residual Nugget in the stitching or on the eyelets. He slipped them on and as he tied the laces he thought he could hear a woman sobbing.

  Berlin took his hat and overcoat from the rack in the hallway and let himself out of the hotel’s unlocked side door. There was no sign of frost, but his breath condensed in the chill air. Reaching into his overcoat pocket for his gloves, his hands touched the cold metal of the small automatic.

  Walking briskly, it took him twenty minutes to reach the entrance to the loco yards on South Street. The sky was brighter now and he could hear the raucous early-morning warbling of magpies and currawongs. In the loco sheds, massive steam locomotives snorted and wheezed and there was the clanging sound of a metal shovel in a coalbunker, followed by loud cursing in a Glaswegian accent. Jock?

  Standing across the road from the entrance, he tried to judge where Rebecca Green had been when she took the photograph. Then, turning right, he followed the road in the direction the gang had taken after the robbery. The train tracks were on his left now and on the right, on a slight rise, he passed a fuel depot with huge cylindrical petrol-storage tanks.

  The road ended at a small creek, where the train tracks crossed the trickle of water on a wooden piling bridge – a motorcycle and sidecar would have no trouble passing under it, he judged. There were no tyre tracks, as cattle on their way to the saleyards had recently churned the earth and sand. Berlin made a concentrated effort not to tread on any of the fresh cowpats. The trail was cold here and he looked up to the early-morning sky and saw the last faint outline of fading stars. No wonder Lou was confused by the stars – they looked so different from those in the Northern Hemisphere. On impulse he turned right, stepping over a trampled, rusting barbed-wire fence, and walked slowly out across the flat countryside, startling the occasional sleepy rabbit foraging among the thistles.

  Berlin stopped when he could no longer see any sign of habitation. There was just a thin stream of smoke coming from the direction of the creek, perhaps a stockman’s camp. For a moment he thought he could smell Wilf’s pipe. A rabbit popped its head out of a burrow some twenty feet away and stared at him, blinking. He took the pistol from his pocket and checked the magazine – it was full. He cocked the weapon and slowly raised his arm to take aim. The rabbit stared at him, its nose twitching. One gentle squeeze of the trigger was all it would take and Mr Rabbit would be maggot food.

  Berlin hated the thought of maggots. If there was one saving grace in that march through the snow and ice of the worst European winter in a hundred years, it was the snow and ice. The bodies of people and animals that littered the roadways and fields were frozen solid, sleeping in their white cocoons, and they would stay that way, free from any signs of decay, till spring. Even the young Wermacht soldiers summarily hung from lampposts as deserters by roving bands of German military police had a sad, unconscionable beauty when a light snowfall dusted their uniforms.

  Berlin struggled to get the images out of his head. He felt the muzzle cold against his right temple. One gentle squeeze of the trigger was all it would take. How long would it be before they found him? Would a drover’s dog sleeping by the creek jump up at the sound of the shot and come to investigate? Or would the crows pick out his eyes before they found him here, sprawled among tussocks of weedy grass and thistles and cow shit?

  Berlin saw the white cap of the mushroom from the corner of his eye. It was smallish but there was a bigger one just beyond, and a bigger one beyond that. He took the pistol away from his head. There were dozens of mushrooms. He de-cocked the pistol and slipped it back in his pocket. Bending down, he pulled one of the larger mushrooms from the ground, shaking the stem free of soil. He turned it over and examined the dark brown ribbed gills underneath. He rubbed the cap gently with his thumb and checked it for any sign of yellowing, but found none. Yellow was a sign that the mushroom wasn’t safe to eat – his grandfather had taught him that.

  Berlin lined his upturned hat carefully with his handkerchief and harvested the best looking of the fungi until his hat was overflowing. When he had as many as he could manage he realised he had lost his way, but the loud whistle of a steam locomotive gave him a direction to head towards. After another few minutes, the glint of the morning sun on a steel petrol-storage tank confirmed it.

  As he walke
d, Berlin imagined his breakfast. He would chop the mushrooms and fry them gently in butter, or even better, bacon dripping if there was any, just like his grandfather had done for him. Some salt and pepper and maybe a dash of Worcestershire sauce and more butter at the end and freshly chopped parsley from the hotel’s garden and under it all thick-cut fresh white bread toasted golden brown. He smiled at the thought that a hat full of field mushrooms had brought him back from a very dark place.

  In the hotel kitchen Lily insisted on preparing the mushrooms for him. Berlin sipped hot, milky tea at the large table and watched as she cooked his breakfast just as he wanted, but with chopped bacon and even more butter. He insisted she share them and she fetched a second plate and more cutlery.

  ‘Are you sure they’re not poisonous?’ she asked as she buttered the toast.

  ‘I’m pretty sure, Lil, but what does it matter? They look so good it’s worth the risk, don’t you think?’

  ‘I’m game if you are, Mr Berlin.’

  But he noticed she gave him a couple of minutes’ head start, watching him closely before beginning to eat.

  NINETEEN

  Constable Roberts was waiting in the car park just before nine. The Dodge had been washed and polished and the tyres blacked. Roberts opened the passenger door and saluted.

  ‘You’re not just aiming for deputy commissioner, are you, Roberts? You’re planning on going all the way. But we can drop the chauffeur business for now, I can open my own doors. Hop in.’

  As the constable walked round to the driver’s door, Berlin slid into the passenger seat and reached for his cigarettes. He offered Roberts one and lit them both.

  ‘Oh, and thanks for rounding up the shaving kit and the other stuff for me. The whisky, too.’

  Roberts started the engine. ‘No worries, Mr Berlin. Do you want to go to the police station first off?’