Berlin moved in closer to the naked Lauren, who grinned at him. ‘This is fun, isn’t it?’
Berlin smiled and nodded in agreement and also in amazement at the girl’s total lack of self-consciousness. Lauren did have an amazing body to go with that face, that was for sure.
Rebecca walked back onto the backdrop and adjusted the way Lauren’s hair fell across her shoulder. ‘Charlie might be helping me with another shoot tomorrow night, Lauren, but I bet you he won’t be having as good a time as he is right now, what do you reckon?’
Lauren laughed and Berlin heard echoes of the easy way Rebecca and Sarah had sometimes joined forces to tease him over some meaningless transgression or forgotten birthday, or just for the sheer fun of it. He envied the relationship his wife and daughter had, and wondered what kept him and Peter from making the same sort of connection.
It took surprisingly little time for Berlin to forget the fact he was standing next to a very beautiful naked girl. The time passed quickly as it always did when he worked with Rebecca. He moved the reflector as instructed, helped with the lights and watched, intrigued as she suggested poses, adjusted lights, skilfully sculpting Lauren’s body with shadows and highlights, finding and revealing beauty. And he loved the look of joy on Rebecca’s face when she captured that beauty, pressing the shutter button at precisely the right moment, the right pose, the right attitude.
Rebecca was right on with her timing and was loading a fresh roll of film into her camera for one last shot when there was a loud knocking on the studio door. It opened before Berlin could get to it. The very young police constable standing in the doorway blinked at the bright light coming from the centre of the studio. Berlin saw he was breathing heavily.
He took off his cap. ‘Are you DS Berlin?’
‘That’s right, what can we do for you, son?’
The young constable was flushed and sweating. ‘Thank God. Sergeant Roberts said you might be here but the phone’s been busy so I ran all the way from Russell Street.’
Berlin crossed the room to the table and lifted up his overcoat. He must have knocked the telephone’s handset out of its cradle when he put the coat down.
‘What’s going on, why the rush?’
The young constable didn’t answer. His eyes had adjusted to the bright light and he was staring across the room at Lauren. The girl was eating an apple while she waited for Rebecca to finish loading the film.
Berlin stepped in front of the constable to block the view. ‘Why was Sergeant Roberts trying to get in touch with me?’
The boy was up on his toes now, trying to look over Berlin’s shoulder. ‘He telephoned in to Russell Street and said you have to get back to the flat in St Kilda right away and you’d know what I meant. It was about someone named Jane or James, I think.’
Berlin took the constable by the shoulders, turned him round and stood him with his back to the girl. ‘You should learn to write things down, son. Was the names Jones?’
The constable nodded. ‘That’s it, it was about someone named Jones. David, Derek, something like that.’
Over the constable’s shoulder Berlin could see Lauren watching him. ‘What about Derek Jones? What’s happened?’ he asked.
‘He’s dead, Sergeant Roberts said. Apparently he knocked himself off.’
THIRTY-SIX
The first firemen on the scene had done the right thing, turning off the gas at the downstairs meter while waiting for the police. The constable who kicked in the front door had opened all the windows so the smell of gas was almost gone from the second-floor flat by the time Berlin and Roberts arrived. The lock was hanging off the open door and fragments of splintered doorjamb littered the entranceway. The kitchen was to Berlin’s left and he could see a pair of legs and the upper torso of a man. Derek Jones’s head and shoulders were hidden inside the oven.
There was a typewriter sitting on the living room table along with a single empty glass and a less than quarter-full bottle of Scotch. The label on the whisky bottle indicated it was one of the blends packaged to sell cheaply through a supermarket chain. A crumpled brown paper bag and a torn soft foil seal suggested the bottle had only been recently purchased and uncorked. The typewriter held a single sheet of paper and there was a manila envelope on the table behind it. The flap on the envelope was open and Berlin could see there were photographs inside.
Roberts leaned over the typewriter and studied the piece of paper. ‘The first constable to see this took one squiz and was smart enough to call me. I told him to turf everyone else out of the place and wait for us.’ He rolled the sheet of quarto typing paper up a little higher in the carriage. ‘Says here our Derek’s very sorry for what he’s done and all the pain that he’s caused. He’d like the families of the missing girls to try to forgive him. Nice of the bastard.’
Berlin was carefully looking round the room as he listened.
‘Anything else?’
Roberts pulled the sheet of typing paper from the typewriter carriage. ‘He says the last girl, Gudrun, was wrapped in chains and dumped in the Bay. It doesn’t say where. He hopes he’s going to a better place.’ He lifted his head and looked around the living room. ‘I reckon any place would have to be better than this shithole.’
The envelope on the table contained a dozen or so black and white prints and Roberts shuffled through them. ‘It’s the missing girls, Charlie, seems to be all of them. You want take a look?’
Berlin shook its head. ‘Not really.’ He took the photographs from Roberts’ hand.
The girls were naked, gagged, blindfolded and tied securely at the wrists and ankles. All of them had the knife-blade cuts he had seen on the body of the girl in the lake and it looked like they were all alive when the photographs were taken. Rope had been used to restrain them, except for one girl who had handcuffs around her wrists with what looked like shiny new chain running from the cuffs up towards the ceiling.
It was hard to be sure with the gag and blindfold but Berlin knew the girl in the chains had to be Gudrun Scheiner. Melinda Marquet had somehow slipped out of her ropes before escaping from her prison and the sick bastard holding her had learned his lesson.
Berlin’s eyes moved off the girls and on to what he could see of where they were being held. The place might have been a cellar, from the brick wall he could see in the back of the image, but apart from that there was not much information that would help in tracking down a location. He slid the photographs back into the envelope and put it down on the table. He was breathing in short gasps and he realised that he was probably about to be sick all over the evidence.
It was a very small kitchen so he had to step over Derek’s dead body to get to the sink. The stink of whisky was stronger now than the lingering smell of gas. The sight and smell of rotten food in an overflowing rubbish bin made his nausea worse. When he turned on the tap there was a loud hammering noise from the pipes. He ran the water until it was cold then splashed some on his face. Images of the girls, tied up and brutalised, crying, terrified, calling for their mothers, filled his head. Think about something else, he told himself.
Running his eyes around the filthy kitchen he noted a cleanish plate with a knife and fork on the sink next to a bottle of White Crow tomato sauce. One of the kitchen cabinets was slightly ajar. He opened the cupboard door using just the tip of a finger. The contents were a jumble of chipped and mismatched drinking glasses covered with the ubiquitous film of grime that seemed to characterise Derek’s short and nasty little life. Bob was right – any place would be better than this shithole.
There was a glint from the back of the cupboard as he started to close the door. He picked up the knife from the sink and used it to push several of the drinking glasses aside. The glass at the very back of the cupboard matched the one on the table next to the typewriter. Unlike all the other glasses sharing the space, this one was sparkling clean. He left the door open and turned back to the stove.
Berlin remembered hearing people complain about th
e size of the oven on the old Early Kooka kitchen stoves but this one seemed to have taken the young photographer quite comfortably. Derek Jones’s head was fully inside the oven with his torso resting on the open door and his legs splayed out on the greasy seagrass matting. Why the hell would anyone use seagrass matting in a kitchen?
There was an aluminium kettle on one of the stovetop burners. A filthy cast-iron baking dish sitting next to it held a folded-over brown paper bag. Berlin leaned across the body to touch the bag. The oval shape of the object inside and a shiny grease stain on the outside suggested it was probably a pastie. The paper of the bag was also dried out and slightly crisp-looking, and was black where it had started to char a little at the corners. He looked around the kitchen one more time before stepping back over the body and re-joining Roberts in the living room.
A police constable stuck his head in through the front door of the flat. ‘You reckon we can get the doctor in anytime soon? And the photographer’s waiting.’
Berlin was thinking and didn’t respond.
Roberts dismissed the constable with a shake of his head. ‘He’ll still be dead in half an hour so they’ll just have to bloody wait.’
Roberts waited too, which Berlin appreciated. Had he always been this patient?
It must have been a good ten minutes before Roberts checked his watch and a minute more before he spoke.
‘Going to be a bit tough on the families, I reckon, Charlie. Where the hell do we look next? If he did dump them all in the Bay we don’t have a hope in hell of finding the bodies. We know they’re dead and we know who did it, which is good for us, I suppose, but bloody hard for the families. Losing a child has to be the worst thing, I reckon. But losing them and not knowing where they are, not having a body to bury, has to make it even worse.’
Berlin ignored the comments. ‘Tell me what you see here, Bob.’
Roberts glanced over at Berlin. He had spoken so softly that Roberts had missed it. ‘Sorry, what did you say?’
‘Take a good look around and tell me exactly what you see.’
Robert shrugged. ‘Okay, there’s a dead bloke in the kitchen with his head in the gas oven, suicide note on the living room table, a nearly empty bottle of Scotch and some pictures of a bunch of dead girls.’
‘Those girls weren’t dead when the pictures were taken, Bob, though they probably are now. You don’t see anything else?’
Roberts ran his eye around the room again and shook his head.
‘You remember Pete Whitmore up in Wodonga, Bob? The Military Police sergeant out at the Bandiana army camp.’
‘Bugger me, Charlie, that’s going back a bit.’
It was going back a bit, back to when Berlin was sent to rural Wodonga on a case meant to end his career. The border town was where he’d first met a young probationary constable named Bob Roberts and a smart-alec woman reporter named Rebecca Green who was out to make a name for herself. And Wodonga was where he’d met former commando Peter Whitmore. He had recognised the man’s demons as his own and in the end had become enough of a friend to help him end his own suffering. Young Peter Berlin was named for Whitmore, though they were very different people.
‘I still remember something Pete told me, Bob, something he learned fighting the Japs on the Kokoda Track. Pete said there’s a big difference between looking and seeing, a bloody big difference.’
‘I’m not sure what you’re driving at.’
‘What I’m driving at Bob is that you’re looking but you’re not seeing. Pete said doing that could get a bloke dead quick smart on the Track.’
‘Fair enough, but we’re not on the bloody Kokoda Track, are we? We’re in a shitty little St Kilda flat with some dead arsehole cluttering up the kitchen and all the evidence we need on a plate.’
‘That’s right, it’s all right there, served up on a plate. But humour me, take a good look around the kitchen and tell me what you see, apart from the dead arsehole.’
Roberts shook his head as he walked across the living room to the kitchen doorway and glanced in.
‘Fridge, stove, cupboards, kettle, teapot, cups, rubbish bin that needs emptying and all the usual stuff. It’s a bloody kitchen, Charlie.’
What’s on the sink?’
‘A plate, a knife and fork. And a bottle of tomato sauce.’
‘And on the stove?’
‘A kettle, like I said. Jesus, mate, what are you getting at?’
Berlin could hear the exasperation but he kept pushing. ‘Anything besides the kettle? Take a good look.’
Roberts stepped into the kitchen. ‘Yeah, there’s a baking dish with a pie or pastie or something in a paper bag. But I’m still not following, I’m afraid.’
‘Okay, there’s a cupboard over the sink that’s half open. Have a look inside, right down the back. Just don’t touch anything. I want to get the fingerprint boys in here. Then come back in here and have a look at the glass on the table.’
Roberts opened the cupboard and looked in then walked back into the living room and across to the table. ‘Right’oh, Charlie, it’s a glass, same as the one in the back of the cupboard. He had a whisky or maybe several. Half a bottle of that stuff should be enough to numb you up for the next step.’
‘Smell it, Bob.’
‘What?’
‘Smell the glass on the table, but don’t touch it.’
Roberts bent down and took a sniff. He shook his head. ‘Nothing.’
‘That’s right, Bob, nothing. There’s a whole lot of nothing here that should probably be telling us something. Think about it for a moment. You said it yourself, we’ve got everything on a plate.’
Berlin waited as Roberts ran through the sequence of events. He spoke to himself softly, ticking items off. ‘Okay, we’ve got a typed, unsigned murder confession and the nasty photos needed to corroborate it, a couple of freshly washed glasses and a dinner plate and some eating irons on the sink.’
‘And?’
Roberts was smiling now, looking at Berlin and nodding his head. ‘And we have the dead body of a bloke who brought himself a pastie home for tea. He sticks his dinner in the oven to warm it up and gets himself a plate and a knife and fork and some tomato sauce.’
‘That’s right, it’s all happy families, if the family lives in a pigsty. But then he decides to skip tea and kill himself instead. He opens a brand new bottle of whisky, drinks most of it, types a suicide note in a fit of remorse but forgets to sign it, then washes his glass sparkling clean, which must have been a first, given the state of this place. And for good measure he washes up a second glass and sticks it in the back of a cupboard. Then when everything’s all neat and tidy he takes his nice warm pastie out of the oven to make space for him to stick his head in instead.’
‘I guess you’re not buying it then, Charlie.’
‘Not the note, Bob, and not the suicide, not by a long chalk. Even back when I was a drinking man, three quarters of a bottle of that rotgut would have left me legless. I doubt young Derek would have been able to crawl to the kitchen, let alone figure out which was the right knob to turn on the gas to the oven.’
‘And you think if someone else was here we’ll find fingerprints?’
‘Probably not. Not on the typewriter or the sink or stove or the clean glasses. But whoever put that glass to the back of the cupboard to hide it would have had to move the others out of the way to do it, so we might just get lucky.’
‘So you think there’s a chance Gudrun Scheiner isn’t at the bottom of the Bay?’
‘I’m not sure, and I hope not, but I don’t think we should wrap this up in a neat little bow just yet. And I definitely don’t want anyone saying anything to Gudrun’s father till we know for sure. I’ll hang onto this photograph of Gudrun for the moment.’
‘That’s not going to be easy, Charlie. Keeping it quiet, I mean.’
Berlin picked up a blank piece of quarto paper and inserted it into the typewriter carriage. ‘The suicide note and the rest of those phot
os go into your folder and no one else gets to hear about them. For now it looks like Derek was going to write a note before bumping himself off but didn’t get round to it. Lean on the constable who called you and make sure the doctor and the photographer are in and out quick and convince them it’s just a suicide, nothing more. Same goes for the fingerprint bods.’
‘That’s a bloody big ask.’ Roberts was at the window by the trunk with the record player on top. He was looking out through the bamboo blind. ‘And there’s a couple of reporters out there amongst the gawkers.’
‘From what I hear around the traps, Bob, and from what you’ve been telling me, you can organise pretty much anything. So if you really do have friends in high places, or have any kind of favours owed to you because you know where certain bodies are buried or who’s rooting someone they shouldn’t, now might be just the time to call them in.’
THIRTY-SEVEN
‘Good Morning, Rebecca. My my, twenty years, a husband and two kids and you haven’t changed a bit.’
‘Actually I have, Warren. I’ve developed even less tolerance for dickheads than I once had.’
Rebecca had gone to the front door in response to brisk knocking and Berlin heard the exchange from the kitchen. He was rereading the file on the Marquet girl while waiting for a pot of tea to brew. Time was getting away from them and had to be quickly running out for Gudrun Scheiner if she was still alive. The Jones suicide provided a neat set of answers but no matter how he looked at it things didn’t add up.
He put the file down and walked out into the hallway. There was a strong smell of cigar smoke. At the front door he put his hand on Rebecca’s shoulder.
‘Look what the cat dragged in, Charlie. I knew we should have had that damn animal put down.’
The red Jaguar Berlin has seen on Honeysuckle Drive in Brighton was parked across the street. Warren Sunderland was wearing a different suit to their last encounter but the quality was the same. This went for the shirt and tie as well. The same puffy, pinkish face topped it all off, and he had a thick cigar clenched in the corner of his mouth.
St Kilda Blues Page 24
