The Diggers Rest Hotel

by Geoffrey McGeachin

  She shook her head. ‘No pressure, Charlie.’

  Her finger traced the line of smooth white skin running down from his shoulder. ‘This the only scar you’ve got?’

  He was silent, and she glanced up at his impassive face. ‘Sorry, sometimes I talk too much.’

  She stubbed out the cigarette and threw back the blankets. Berlin stared at her extraordinary body.

  ‘But on the other hand, Charlie, I’ve found that sometimes a good chinwag can help to straighten things out.’

  She slid down his body and her dark hair spread over his belly. Berlin gasped at the first touch of her lips.

  A short time later she looked up at him and smiled. ‘Told you, let me know if you want me to stop.’

  He stared at her and slowly shook his head from side to side. He didn’t want her to stop, not ever.

  Then she was on top of him, astride him, riding him, her hair whipping across her face. Their eyes locked and he wondered what she was seeing. She was staring hard into his eyes until hers glazed and Berlin saw a flush begin between her breasts and spread up her throat to her face, and then she was gasping, gulping air in short breaths, her hands gripping his arms so hard he thought they might break. As she climaxed, eyes closed and whimpering, Berlin felt disconnected. Though he had physically been with Rebecca, their eyes and bodies locked together, their sweat pooling in the cold air of the shabby room, his mind was somewhere distant.

  He looked across to the corner of the room and found himself looking into the emptiness of his own eyes. He saw the mud caked on his boots and a light dusting of snow on his woollen cap and on the shoulders of his dirty khaki greatcoat. If he had climaxed with Rebecca he was unaware of it, his body and mind having somehow lost track of each other on a country road on a freezing, sleeting morning in Poland.

  Later, Rebecca watched Berlin as he slept. He looked peaceful for a few minutes and then his face started to twitch as his head jerked from side to side and he groaned. She could see his jaw muscles tighten as he ground his teeth. She stroked his head, which seemed to soothe him momentarily.

  When she had first arrived in Ballarat, Rebecca’s parents let her get a puppy for company. When he slept the puppy would twitch and yelp, and sometimes a tremor ran through his body and paws. Rebecca’s mother would always smile and say, ‘Look, Rebecca, he dreams he’s chasing rabbits out in the fields.’

  As Rebecca watched Berlin’s face twist and contort, listening to the groans and sharp gasps, she knew whatever his dreams were they were not about chasing rabbits.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  ‘Berlin.’ The bomb-aimer’s voice crackled in his headphones over the roar of the Merlins. ‘Berlin dead ahead, Skipper.’

  On the horizon he could see the eerie white beams of the searchlights probing the sky, hunting for the pathfinders; the flaming red of the massive, pink pansy target indicators burning on the ground; the yellow smudges of the air-bursting smoke markers staining the sky over the target.

  Berlin. Fuck.

  The German capital was called the Big City by the aircrew, and it was always nasty. The men in the ops briefing room groaned when the curtains were pulled back on the wall map to reveal the ‘Target for Tonight’ and the long lines of tape indicated flight paths converging on Berlin. There was a rumour that when the mess cooks found out the target was Berlin they drastically reduced the number of hot meals they prepared for the returning bomber crews.

  Berlin. Fuck.

  Pathfinder Mosquitos had followed the Oboe wireless beams, dumped their markers and fled, leaving the lone Master Bomber circling high above, over the target. The city was dead ahead, and Berlin’s Lanc was closing in quickly, leading the bomber stream with the blue-white beam of the radar-controlled master searchlight relentlessly hunting him. This was the moment Berlin felt most alone, most powerless, with one master above him and one below.

  Although the heavy flak from the massed anti-aircraft guns on the Kammhuber Line was miles behind them, the AA fire of the Big City’s three massive flak towers was beginning to play its deadly percussive concert. Bang! Bang! Bang!

  Berlin. Fuck.

  Bang! Bang! Bang!

  Berlin was sweating inside the leather jacket under his flight suit. He was going to die tonight, he just knew it.

  Bang! Bang! Bang! The shells bursting closer, red-hot shards of razor-edged shrapnel peppering the Lanc’s fuselage, searching for fuel tanks to ignite or oil or hydraulic lines or human veins to slash and sever, draining the life out of aircraft and crew or burning them up in a conflagration that would peak in the load of high explosives crammed in the bomb bay, blasting them all to kingdom come.

  ‘Mr Berlin!’ Bang! Bang! Bang! ‘Mr Berlin, wake up!’

  He staggered to the door, trying to remember where he was. Vern Corrigan was standing in the hallway, holding Berlin’s shoes. He was wearing a frayed dressing gown that gaped open to reveal a yellowed singlet and drooping flannelette pyjama bottoms. Corrigan was staring at him as Berlin fought to clear his head. Lily should put more blue in the wash next Monday, he almost heard himself saying.

  ‘Haven’t you got any pyjamas, Berlin?’

  Berlin realised he was naked and saw the landlord trying to peer over his shoulder, looking in the direction of the bed. He pulled the door half-closed.

  ‘What the hell do you want, Corrigan? Jesus, what’s the time?’

  ‘It’s just gone five. Constable Roberts is waiting for you downstairs.’

  ‘Another robbery?’

  The landlord shook his head. ‘Not this time. A murder. Said to wake you straight away.’

  Berlin tried to focus. Christ, a murder.

  ‘Tell Roberts I’ll be down in five minutes.’

  ‘Look, if you’ll be staying on for a bit I’m sure my wife can find you some pyjamas.’

  Berlin shook his head to try to clear it. What the hell was Corrigan going on about?

  ‘I can put the kettle on if you want a tea or a coffee but there’s no milk yet.’

  ‘Just give me my shoes.’

  THIRTY-NINE

  The reason there was no milk was because the milko’s horse and cart were standing outside the alley where the body was. The heavily maned draught horse munched contentedly on the oats in its nose bag, shaking its head occasionally and stamping a massive foot, causing the steel ladles hanging on the lips of the almost-full milk churns to bang and rattle. Berlin noted the sweetish smell of fresh horseshit and fresh blood, and the more acrid aroma of vomit.

  In the muddy alley constables Eddy and Hooper were shining torches on a shape covered with a police raincape. One torch flickered out as Berlin approached and Hooper bashed the ribbed silver case against his leg until the light was restored.

  ‘Where’s the sergeant, Constable Hooper?’

  ‘Gone home. He’s feeling a bit crook. He says you should handle this. Did Roberts warn you it’s a bit bloody grim?’

  Berlin knelt down by the body, careful to keep his overcoat clear of the mud. ‘So what have we got here exactly, Hooper?’

  Hooper lifted the cape. The girl’s legs were pale and streaked with mud and something else. She was barefoot and her dark blue dress was hitched up over her knees. Hooper pulled the cape back further and Berlin sucked in his breath. ‘Jesus.’ Hooper lowered the cape.

  ‘Local girl?’ Berlin asked.

  ‘Name of Jenny Lee, about sixteen. She’s wearing her school uniform.’

  ‘That’s all we have?’

  ‘Parents run a grocery store on High Street. Quiet people, no trouble, like most chinks.’

  A stooped older man wearing an old-fashioned belted overcoat stood off to one side, watching. He took something from a white paper bag and put it into his mouth. Berlin saw a tremor in the hand holding the bag and he caught the smell of peppermint. ‘Who’s the alky, Roberts?’

  ‘That’s Doctor Morris, does the coronial work when it comes up. How’d you know he’s an alky?’

  ‘You don�
��t need to be Sherlock Holmes to work that out. Who dragged him away from his bottle?’

  ‘The sergeant said he wanted a cause of death certified.’

  ‘Jesus, I’d think that would be pretty bloody obvious. You find the head yet?’

  ‘That’s how we made the identification. Trev actually found it. You know, Trev Casterton, the milko.’

  ‘The legless charioteer?’

  ‘That’s him. Anyway, Trev was heading back to his milk cart, walking down the alley, and there was the girl’s head in the middle of a puddle. It’s over there.’

  He pointed further up the alley to where another raincape lay on the ground, a slight bump in its centre.

  ‘Old Trev’s been pretty much spewing up his guts since he found her. Had the same effect on Sergeant Corrigan, which is why he left.’

  Berlin studied the buildings on both sides of the dark alley. ‘What was Casterton doing down here? I don’t see any billy cans left out for milk.’

  ‘He says he was making a delivery, and it’s a shortcut, but some of us think he might have been knocking off the assistant stationmaster’s wife. The alley leads round to her back door and it seems like the horse knows this is a regular stop.’

  ‘So Trev and Jesse there were both getting their oats this morning.’

  Roberts grinned. ‘You could say that, I suppose.’

  The doctor noisily cleared his throat. Roberts looked towards him and then quickly looked away. The doctor walked over to them. ‘I’m not sure that kind of humour is appropriate here, gentlemen, given the circumstances.’

  Berlin put out his hand. ‘Doctor Morris, is it? I’m DC Berlin.’ They shook hands and Berlin could feel the tremor he’d noticed earlier.

  ‘Peppermint?’ The doctor held out the bag.

  Berlin shook his head. ‘No thanks.’ The mints might have disguised the whisky on the man’s breath but Berlin could smell it coming out of his pores. He put the doctor at around sixty, with the rheumy eyes, reddish nose, careful concentration and ever so slightly slurred words of a competition-level drinker.

  ‘How did they get her head off, Doc?’

  ‘Neatly. Possibly with one blow.’

  ‘You think they used a cleaver, Mr Berlin?’ Roberts said. ‘The Chinese use cleavers, so perhaps it was a family thing or a Tong killing.’

  ‘Every butcher in this town has a cleaver, Roberts, and somehow I don’t think Wodonga is a hotbed of Chinese secret societies. Perhaps it could have been a bayonet or a machete, Doctor Morris?’

  The doctor shrugged. The paper bag rustled in his hand as he reached for another mint. Morris had the DTs and he had them bad.

  ‘What about a samurai sword, then? A lot of our blokes brought them back from the islands as souvenirs.’

  ‘That might be a possibility, DC Berlin. Samurai swords are incredibly sharp, I understand. Cec Champion’s eldest boy was beheaded with one, you know.’

  ‘I heard. You up in the islands, Doc?’

  ‘Alas, no, I sat this one out. I was in Palestine in the first war, an army surgeon. They said I was too old in ’41 and besides, I had enough to do here.’

  Too old or too drunk? Berlin wondered.

  He knelt down near the body, again carefully holding the bottom of his overcoat to keep it clear of the mud. He lifted a corner of the cape. ‘There’s blood on her legs. Could she have been assaulted or raped?’

  The doctor glanced down at the body. ‘It’s a possibility, I suppose. I’ll find out in the autopsy.’

  Berlin stood up and looked around the alley. ‘Not a lot of blood anywhere else, though. You’d expect a lot of blood with a decapitation, right, Doc?’

  ‘Yes, if the victim is alive at the time.’

  ‘Are you suggesting she was killed somewhere else, Mr Berlin?’

  ‘Possibly, Roberts, or she was already dead when she was beheaded.’

  ‘As I said, DC Berlin, we should perhaps wait on the autopsy. Can we move the corpse soon? My surgery is just a couple of streets over.’

  Berlin shook his head. ‘Sorry, but I’d like some photographs of the body in situ first. Roberts, can you head back to the hotel to rustle up Miss Green and her box brownie.’ He hoped she’d be back in her own room by now. ‘And make it snappy.’

  Roberts returned with Rebecca in fifteen minutes. She was wearing trousers and Berlin could see that it made sense for her to dress that way. With the bending and stretching and squatting necessary to get the right angles, a skirt would have been impractical.

  As she worked, Roberts and Berlin stood at the end of the alley watching the sky lighten.

  ‘Has someone been sent to notify the girl’s parents?’

  ‘The sergeant sent First Constable Hogan.’

  Berlin glanced over at Roberts. His voice was flat and he had a faraway look in his eyes. The boy had something else on his mind.

  ‘This your first dead body, Roberts?’

  ‘My girlfriend’s old man is an undertaker over in Albury. She’s shown me some dead bodies before.’

  ‘Something else bothering you?’

  ‘Mr Berlin, what the doctor said before, about joking around next to the body – you think it’s wrong?’

  Berlin offered the boy a cigarette but he shook his head.

  ‘She’s someone’s daughter, Roberts, and she’s dead and that’s a terrible thing. But our job’s not mourning her, it’s finding out who killed her. She’s just a case, a job we have to do. Sometimes the only way to get through it is by making the odd joke. You start taking things personally then you might as well …’ Berlin was about to say ‘blow your brains out’ but he stopped. ‘Pack it in and go work in a shoe shop.’

  Berlin checked his watch and then flicked his cigarette butt into a puddle. The sun was just breaking the horizon and somewhere in the distance he thought he could hear the sound of motorcycles.

  FORTY

  Back at the hotel Berlin went up to his room while Rebecca stopped to use the telephone at the reception desk. She knocked on his door a few minutes later.

  ‘The paper is giving me a couple of paragraphs on the news pages, with a by-line,’ she said. ‘Being Johnny-on-the-spot pays off.’

  ‘Congratulations.’ Berlin raised his glass of whisky in a toast.

  ‘Bastard of a way to get the editor’s attention, eh? The headline will read “Gruesome Murder in Country Town”. Gruesome is right.’

  ‘Want a drink? It’s a bit early, but under the circumstances …’

  Rebecca shook her head. She turned and walked down the hallway to the bathroom. He heard the water running in the shower and it seemed to him that it kept on running for a very long time.

  Berlin washed and shaved. He wiped the mud from his shoes with the brown wrapping paper saved from his parcels, changed his shirt and then went downstairs.

  Barry and Vern Corrigan were sitting at the kitchen table drinking tea but Berlin’s nose told him there was more than tea in their cups. Vern looked up as Berlin walked into the kitchen.

  ‘I’m sorry Mr Berlin, but we can’t do you any breakfast this morning. Lily got real crook when Barry told her about the chink girl. She took a couple of Bex powders and now she’s having a bit of a lie-down. I’ll have my hands full looking after the boys and the baby so I’m afraid you’ll have to try one of the cafés for something to eat.’

  ‘Any suggestions?’

  ‘You could try Peter’s, a couple of doors up from the police station, or there’s Dempster’s café opposite the Terminus Hotel. They’re usually open by now. It’s next to that girl’s … I mean it’s next to the Lee’s grocery store, where the girl lived.’

  The sergeant nodded in agreement. ‘Yeah, try there. But I don’t know how a bloke could be hungry after seeing something like that.’

  Corrigan’s usually florid face was almost a natural colour, which seemed as close as he could ever get to pale. Vern patted him on the shoulder.

  ‘Barry here’s still a bit under the weather
. Just look at him.’

  Corrigan shrugged off his brother’s hand. ‘I’ll be right in a while, Vern, you don’t have to fuss. And I’ve got a bit of news for you, Berlin.’

  ‘Is that right, Sarge.’

  ‘I called Wangaratta about the girl, and they called Melbourne.’

  Berlin knew what was coming next.

  ‘Melbourne called me right back. Consensus is that since we have a real-life, big-city detective already on the ground here, you might as well take charge of this case, too. I’ll be taking more of a supervisory role.’

  Berlin saw Vern Corrigan look at his brother proudly. Was it because he knew words like ‘consensus’ and ‘supervisory’ or because he got them out without tripping over his tongue?

  ‘I’ll get started right after breakfast. Dempster’s, you reckon?’

  ‘You want a lift?’ Rebecca was standing behind him in the kitchen doorway.

  He’d been wondering how he’d get into town. ‘Sounds good.’

  ‘I’ll warm the car up, while you get your coat and hat.’

  Vern followed Berlin out into the hallway. He stood next to him, nervously shifting his weight from foot to foot as Berlin pulled on his coat. Leaning in close, he lowered his voice almost to a whisper.

  ‘Mr Berlin, about last night and that girl, in your room I mean. This is a decent, family hotel and I’ve got kids and I don’t want to give offence …’

  ‘Then don’t.’ Berlin said it quietly and the two men stared at each other.

  ‘I just mean, if you can be a bit discreet …’

  ‘I guess you mean I should take a lead from you and Maisie then.’

  Corrigan looked at Berlin with those hard, angry eyes until something in the other man’s face made him look away. Berlin adjusted his hat. ‘One more thing – that salesman bloke, Brian, was he in the hotel all night? I didn’t see his car in the car park when I went out this morning.’

  ‘I’m afraid Brian didn’t avail himself of our facilities last evening, DC Berlin.’

  Avail? Berlin thought. Early-morning drinking seemed to do wonders for the Corrigans’ vocabularies.