St Kilda Blues

by Geoffrey McGeachin

  The boy was still awake an hour later. The bed was uncomfortable and he heard coughs and sniffling and the sound of muffled weeping. There were footsteps on the path outside the dormitory and the lantern by the door was suddenly lifted up high. All the noise in the room stopped. The lantern slowly moved along the line of beds and stopped at the one opposite his. He heard the rustle of a blanket being pulled back, then the sound of small bare feet on the wooden boards as someone was led out of the room.

  The lantern moved through the dormitory a half-dozen times that night and then again towards dawn when the boys were led back to their beds. He could hear snuffling and sometimes sobs. He could guess who had been chosen, even from his brief time looking around the dining room. He would need to be careful now, careful to not look like a victim but careful also not to look like a threat. The dagger was close, but was it close enough? He would need a hiding place where it was safe but still accessible. If the lantern ever stopped by the end of his bed he wanted to be ready.

  *

  After a breakfast of cold water and lumpy porridge, Brother Brian produced clippers and trimmed the boy’s hair right down to the scalp. He gave him a new-arrivals tour of the mission and then led him to a small room at the rear of the administration building. It had a large overhead skylight and wooden filing cabinets set against one wall. There were big, boxy contraptions with leather bellows mounted on three-legged stands, and Brother Brian explained that they were his cameras.

  Behind the studio and behind a locked door was a strange room, windowless and full of nasty smells. Brother Brian explained it was his darkroom, a place where films were developed in total darkness and photographic prints made on special paper under the weak orange glow of a kerosene safelight.

  His new job, it was explained, would be assisting Brother Brian in his work. This entailed keeping a photographic record of the mission’s work to be submitted annually to the order’s headquarters in Germany. Brother Brian also kept photographic records of the many documents related to the running of the mission. When new children were brought in, their birth certificates and passports, if they had them, and all their other documents, were photographed on glass plates to be submitted annually to the Adelaide office along with a set of prints on photographic paper.

  Brother Brian was pleasantly surprised by the boy’s aptitude for photography. He quickly learned how to operate the bulky press camera and to develop the glass plate negatives with hardly any breakages. He was also most helpful in the making of the black and white prints under orange light in the windowless darkroom with its door locked against intruders who might ruin the photographic paper by exposing it to light.

  The boy quickly learned the procedures for moving the paper through the soapy-slick developer, the vinegar-smelling acetic acid stop bath and then the acrid hypo fixer, used to make the images permanent. He also quickly picked up on the special signals indicating it was the right moment for him to reach under Brother Brian’s robe and tug rhythmically at the skinny penis, aiming it carefully when the moment was right into the bin under the bench that held any badly made prints.

  Brother Brian would groan and whimper and jerk his hips forwards then catch his breath in great gasps and finally slump exhausted against the darkroom sink. Sometimes he would weep afterwards and always quietly beg God’s forgiveness while ignoring the boy, who went back to his assigned task at the darkroom sink. The boy didn’t find that part of his job too onerous and it seemed to ensure that the nightly visitors with the lamp never stopped by his bed.

  THIRTEEN

  Neither man spoke on the ride back out to Berlin’s place. It had already been a very long day. After the Buddha’s Belly they had visited a half-dozen other dance venues.

  All they had to show for it was the knowledge that what might be a cool and groovy and happening scene on a weekend night was pretty damn depressing on a weekday afternoon. Without the loud music, a packed dance floor and a lightshow pulsing through a mist of sweat, cheap perfume, Old Spice aftershave and cigarette smoke, ‘sad’ was the first word that came to mind for Charlie Berlin.

  Roberts carried the bundle of newspapers and the files into the house and dumped them on the kitchen table. Berlin filled the kettle and put it on the gas.

  ‘You want tea, Bob? You can have coffee if you like, if you can figure out how to use that bloody percolator.’

  ‘Tea’s good.’

  Berlin took down the tea caddy from the shelf and put two scoops into the pot. He was using a smaller teapot now that it was just him and Rebecca.

  ‘It’s a hell of a lot easier with just one.’

  Berlin leaned back against the kitchen bench by the sink, watching the kettle on the flickering gas. ‘Just one what, Bob?’

  ‘Just one victim. Makes it easier for us, that was what you taught me a long time back, remember? Mostly it’s someone they know, someone they trust. If it’s totally random and there’s no connection between the girls it’s going to be harder.’

  ‘You ever hear any of the older blokes talk about Arnold Sodeman?’

  Roberts shook his head.

  ‘Arnold Karl Sodeman, also known as the Schoolgirl Strangler. It was back before the war, must have been in the early ’30s. I remember hearing my grandad talk about the case. Sodeman abducted and strangled four girls. I think the oldest was fifteen and the youngest around six. Took them four years to catch him because the first two were total strangers. The last pair were actually kids of family friends and that’s how they eventually nabbed him, not too long after he killed them.’

  ‘Did he get the long drop?’

  Berlin nodded. ‘Didn’t appeal the death sentence, said he was sick in the head and when he had a skinful he lost control. They did an autopsy after he swung and he was right, he actually had something in his brain that was apparently aggravated by grog.’

  ‘Not an excuse though, is it?’

  ‘That’s not for us to say, Bob.’ He poured boiling water into the teapot. ‘But you’re right, even if it’s the same bloke doing these abductions, if the victims are all total strangers taken at random then finding Gudrun isn’t going to be easy’

  ‘The Yanks seem to get a lot of it.’

  Berlin was looking for the tea cosy but gave up. ‘A lot of what?’

  ‘This kind of thing – multiple abductions, murders. I was just reading a book by a bloke named Brophy who calls the people who do this stuff serial murderers. He reckons there’s always a pattern to it and they mostly choose people they don’t know, which makes it hard to track them down. Been going on for years over there, apparently.’

  Berlin picked up a strainer. Jesus, just what a man wanted to hear with a half-dozen or more girls missing. Was Melbourne’s very own serial murderer targeting dances and discotheques hunting for teenage victims? He poured the tea.

  ‘I thought Zane Gray was your preferred reading material, Bob.’

  ‘They’ve got a good library at the uni and my girl spends a lot of her days and nights there. Their Zane Gray collection is a bit limited and a bloke has to fill in his time somehow. Wouldn’t have any biscuits or fruitcake, would you?’

  Berlin hunted around and found a tin of assorted sweet biscuits but no fruitcake. Roberts took a couple of coconut-flecked Iced VoVos, which were Sarah’s favourites.

  ‘I don’t recall you ever having a Doberman, Charlie, just Pip the terrier.’

  Berlin decided he would have an Iced VoVo too. ‘Never did, it was just a story. Stupid bugger was always going to talk, I didn’t want to beat around the bush till he decided to do it. I just nudged him along a bit, that was all.’

  ‘You learn that in the fraud squad?’

  Berlin shook his head. ‘Funny thing about the fraud squad is, on our cases, people are just dying to come clean, confess. It’s not really investigating. You generally just have to show up and chat for a bit, wait till they’re ready to confess.’

  Roberts had finished the last of the Iced VoVos and searched
through the biscuit tin till he found an Orange Slice. He dipped it halfway into his tea. ‘Funny that – you and Scheiner maybe crossing paths during the war, him taking pot shots at your bomber.’

  Berlin wished Roberts hadn’t brought that up. He had managed to keep Scheiner out of his mind for the whole ride back from the city. ‘Twenty thousand feet apart isn’t exactly crossing paths, Bob, and some nights there were up to a thousand bombers in the air. We couldn’t see them and they couldn’t see us, except if you got picked up by a searchlight.’

  ‘Yeah, I suppose it must be different face to face, like in the jungle or the desert I mean. They reckon the Jerries in North Africa and Crete never liked it when our blokes got in close and used the bayonet. They didn’t like the idea of cold steel.’

  Berlin had briefly used the army-issue Lee Enfield .303 rifle in his early air force drill training and the 1917 model bayonet that came along with it. Seventeen inches of razor sharp steel on the end of a rifle – who would be able to stand up to the thought of having that pushed into their guts? Or having to push it into some other poor bugger’s guts, for that matter.

  After the tea was finished Berlin walked Roberts back out to the sports car.

  ‘Do we have a next step, Charlie? I’ve got . . . people I have to keep informed.’

  I’ll bet you do, Berlin said to himself. ‘Not right now. I need some time to go through the files and once I figure out what to do next I’ll give you a ring. But you need to keep yourself ready to go.’

  Roberts climbed into the driver’s seat. ‘Sounds fair enough.’ He looked up at Berlin. ‘You reckon we’re in with a chance? Of finding the girl, I mean.’

  Berlin thought about the autopsy photograph of the Marquet girl and the rope marks on her wrists and ankles. ‘I know it sounds cruel but if it is just one bloke and the bastard isn’t killing the girls straight away, if he’s keeping them tied up, locked up for pleasure or whatever it is he wants from them, then it means we might have a shot at finding her.’ But of course what went on in the meantime really didn’t bear thinking about. ‘I might be out for a bit tonight so I’ll leave any messages for you at Russell Street. You should ring in every hour or so.’

  Berlin took the envelope from his pocket and tossed it onto the passenger seat. ‘You’re a bloody idiot, Bob, you know that, don’t you? Those bastards you’re working with would sell you down the river without even stopping to think about it.’

  Roberts opened the Triumph’s glove compartment and stuffed the envelope inside. He slammed it closed and started the engine. After a moment he switched it back off.

  ‘You know, you might be a smart bugger, Charlie, and okay at your job, but you don’t know everything. Just because I’m a bad husband and a crook father doesn’t necessarily mean I’m a not a good copper. You might want to try to remember that.’

  ‘And you remember to check in on the hour, Bob. And leave any message for me at Russell Street as well, let me know as soon as you hear of any developments with Tony Seldens’s investigation, whatever they are.’

  Roberts started the engine again and backed the Triumph out of the driveway, revving the motor a few more times than Berlin thought was strictly necessary. Standing on the nature strip, he watched the sports car until it turned right at the end of the street. From the sound of it Bob Roberts floored the accelerator once he was out of Berlin’s sight.

  He stopped to check the letterbox but it was too early for the afternoon post. The front lawn would need a good trim soon, that was for sure. Why hadn’t he done it on the weekend? he wondered. He looked up the street towards the corner. The sound of the Triumph had faded and far in the distance he could hear the bells at the railway level crossing. What could Gudrun Scheiner hear right now, if she could hear anything at all? And if Bob Roberts was a good copper, what was he doing with an envelope stuffed full of cash in the glove compartment of a brand-new sports car he couldn’t really afford?

  THE MISSION

  School was from eight till noon on weekdays when there were no crops to harvest. Incorrect answers or insolence could earn a student a beating from the brother giving the lesson, but the boy was a surprisingly good student. His reading and comprehension improved dramatically, but not from fear of punishment. He knew he had to be smart to succeed but not so smart as to stand out. On most of the tests he realised he could easily score 100 per cent, but decided a 60 per cent mark was the one to go for. More than that might draw praise and attention, and less could earn him a belting with the leather strap on his open palm or bare bottom. Pain he didn’t care about but drawing attention to himself was something to be avoided.

  Once school was done there was lunch, and then allocated tasks to be completed before the evening meal. On Saturdays, if there were no crops to be harvested or animals to be rounded up, there was football in the winter and cricket in the summer. But before cricket or football, Saturday mornings were dedicated to cleaning the mission buildings and grounds and gathering wood to feed the kitchen fires over the coming week.

  Firewood-gathering was a preferred occupation because there was only minimal supervision. The boys would spread out in different directions, gathering fallen branches and helping to cut up trees felled by some of the older boys or one of the brothers swinging an axe. They worked in teams, pulling handcarts to haul the wood back. The carts also contained a jerry can full of the brackish artesian water because it was thirsty work.

  Three months into his stay at the mission the boy was sent out wood-gathering. Brother Brian was sick with the flu and there was no photographic work to be done so a task had to be found for him. Around mid-morning the boy strayed away from the main party without being noticed and a half-mile into the scrub he came upon a circle of half a dozen other defectors. With shorts around their ankles they were practising the solitary vice in concert and with a high degree of concentration. It seemed to be some kind of race. When he declined to join in he was instructed to keep his mouth shut about what he had seen. Jacka, the gang leader, the biggest boy in the group and the mission’s acknowledged head bully, decided to demonstrate what would happen to the boy if he told anyone.

  Jacka pushed the boy once, making him stumble backwards, then a second time, harder now when there was no sign of resistance. The total lack of reaction bewildered the bully, and a third shove landed the boy on his backside. At that point Jacka made the mistake of turning his head briefly to smirk at his laughing gang, missing the moment when the fallen boy regained his feet, scooping up a thick tree branch. Putting up his left arm to protect himself was what gave Jacka the broken arm. He was lucky, as the boy had fully intended to break his skull.

  Jacka rode back to the mission on the cart, crying and gasping as every jolt moved the broken bone in his left forearm. The smaller and weaker boys had been press-ganged into pulling the cart as usual, and on this trip they managed to find the very roughest parts of the rocky track. They also found many reasons to stop and start the painful journey, dragging it out to double its usual duration.

  The weeping Jacka was joined in the cart by a recent arrival at the mission, an orphan boy who had immediately been christened Fatso, though the Spartan diet of the mission was already beginning to eliminate the reason for the nickname. Fatso had told the brother in charge of the wood-gathering party that he was feeling unwell, so they’d let him ride on the wagon. He was worse by teatime and received a sharp smack for putting his head down on the dining room table. He groaned and suddenly vomited up his stew before sliding off the bench and under the table in a semi-comatose state. They put him in the sickbay next to a still-whimpering Jacka, who now had an arm in plaster. Fatso grew worse, sweating and delirious, and passed away around three in the morning after calling out once for his mother.

  The brother who fulfilled the duties of doctor was perplexed by the event, but as usual filled out a death certificate listing the reason as ‘natural causes’, which was in fact correct if snake venom is considered natural. Breakfast porridge
served in a badly washed bowl had given Fatso a bad case of the runs and the chronically shy youngster had crept away from the wood-gathering party to void his tormented bowels in private. Reaching behind to grab a handful of leaf litter to wipe his bottom, he had disturbed a hidden king brown, mistaking the snake’s lightning-fast strike for the sharp sting of a prickle, a mistake that doomed him.

  Fatso’s death certificate was typed up by a young Aboriginal girl in the mission’s records office and then sent along to Brother Brian to be photographed and filed with his birth certificate and other related documents. By now, the boy had taken on this task and as he put the dark cloth over his head and focused the image of the birth certificate on the ground-glass back of the camera, he realised that he and Fatso had been born just three days apart. This fact interested him and occupied his mind as he agitated the glass negatives in the developer to the tick, tick, tick of the darkroom clock with its luminous hands.

  In six or seven months’ time Fatso’s death certificate and other documents would be sent down to Adelaide together with other records from the mission. Brother Brian had recently suggested to the boy that he might be allowed to go along on the trip. The hinted-at price for accompanying Brother Brian was an expansion of the boy’s sexual repertoire in the locked darkroom. He had initially ignored Brother Brian’s suggestion but as he filed away the slender manila envelope that now held the details of Fatso’s short, unhappy life, he decided it might not be such a bad idea after all.