St Kilda Blues

by Geoffrey McGeachin

  The detective unfolded his arms. ‘You’re a strange bugger, Roberts, but you can have two minutes. And if you try to run I’ll bloody shoot you and that’s a promise.’ He pushed his jacket aside to show the butt of a revolver before stepping to the front of the van.

  Roberts lifted up his handcuffed hands. ‘Smokes and lighter are in my jacket pocket.’

  Berlin found the cigarettes and lit one for Roberts.

  ‘Hang on to the lighter for me would you, Charlie? Lots of crooks down at the remand centre if they take me there. And I don’t just mean the crims.’

  Berlin put the lighter in his pocket. ‘What’s going on?’

  Roberts took a deep drag on his cigarette. ‘I tried to keep a lid on things for as long as I could but stuff is happening and people at Russell Street are skittish. That first uniform on the scene at Derek’s place went running to Tony Selden, the little shit. The bastards were all over me before I could talk to anyone senior or hide the confession and the photographs. I tried to head them off and get to Scheiner first but they beat me here. Sorry mate.’

  ‘Berlin, here, now!’

  The voice came from Scheiner’s driveway. The senior officer with the braid and buttons was lighting a cigarette. He didn’t offer Berlin one when he walked up.

  ‘Just what the fuck are you playing at, Berlin? You were told to stay at home and keep your nose out of things that weren’t your concern.’

  ‘I was on the case and I thought Scheiner had a right to know we weren’t certain.’

  The officer leaned in close to Berlin’s face. ‘What case were you on exactly? This was Tony Selden’s case from the off and he’s the bastard who’ll get all the glory. And we weren’t certain? Who the fuck is this we? We, us, the police, have a confession. We also have photographs of the missing girls taken by the kidnapper, no thanks to you and your mate Roberts. In fact we have all the evidence we need and we are satisfied. This case is closed.’

  Berlin looked around at Bob Roberts in handcuffs then back to the house where Scheiner was getting almost the worst news of his life. He knew he couldn’t let it go. ‘We don’t have any bodies, apart from the Marquet girl, and you know what was done to her. If there is any chance young Gudrun or any of the others are still alive we owe it to them to keep searching.’

  The officer dropped his cigarette butt on the driveway and ground it out with the toe of his highly polished shoe. ‘There’s that fucking we again. Wake up to yourself, Berlin, they are dead and they are gone, long gone. Crab food at the bottom of the Bay according to the killer. And your career is down there with them, as it happens. Concealing evidence of a crime like this and insubordination is going to cost you your job and your pension. Your mate Roberts too, the bloody idiot. At least you probably won’t be going to jail with him.’

  ‘Jail? What did he do?’

  The officer smiled. ‘Silly bugger thought he was too smart by half and he bloody wasn’t. On top of sticking his nose into an investigation that was none of his business he’s been collecting bribes, taking payoffs, tipping off crims about raids and God knows what else.’

  Berlin glanced around in the direction of the parked divisional van again. A still-handcuffed Bob Roberts was smiling and chatting to the two plain-clothes detectives as if he didn’t have a care in the world. Berlin decided to play the only card he had.

  ‘Sergeant Roberts has been acting as an undercover informant for Justice Luscombe’s inquiry and I can provide evidence to back this up.’

  ‘Jesus Christ, Berlin, you’re not doing your mate any favours here. We say what the evidence shows, we say who’s guilty and who’s innocent, and we decide who’s an informant and who’s not. You’ve been around the bloody traps long enough to know how things work, and it takes a really, really stupid bugger to think he can change things. And it doesn’t matter if Roberts gets one year or five or ten, we both know what happens to ex-coppers who wind up behind bars in H Division. He’ll be lucky to last a week.’

  THIRTY-NINE

  St Paul’s Anglican Cathedral is located diagonally opposite Flinders Street Station at the intersection of Flinders and Swanston Streets, with Young and Jackson’s pub on the corner between them. A row of clocks over the station entrance show the next departure times on the various suburban train lines, and during the war years an invitation to meet ‘under the clocks’ had been considered rather romantic. Young and Jackson had no row of clocks but it did have beer on tap and a famous painting of a nude named Chloe over the front bar. St Paul’s had no nudes or romance but there was Evensong and just recently a hip young minister with long hair and a red velvet-lined coat who served up earnest chat, instant coffee and rock’n’roll music in a groovy cellar cafe in the hope of luring the young and lately faithless back to the flock.

  At eight on a Thursday evening the intersection, the station, the pub and the church were all quiet. The city centre’s offices and retail stores had all closed at five-thirty sharp and the shoppers and city workers were long gone. An occasional W-class tram rattled through the intersection, its spring-loaded trolley-pole flashing and sparking at junction points on the high-voltage overhead electrical wires that powered its motor. In the long gaps between trams, drunks and the odd passer-by glanced up at the intermittent flashes of bright light that were still happening even though there were no trams in sight.

  The flashes were coming from inside the cathedral, where Rebecca was shooting an assignment with her newly suspended husband acting as her assistant. Berlin was standing next to a tripod-mounted camera at the back of the darkened cathedral holding a piece of heavy black cardboard and counting out loud. He was glad Rebecca had asked him to assist her, because he hoped the task would take his mind off his suspension from duty and the corruption charges pending against Bob Roberts, but mostly off young Gudrun Scheiner, now five days missing. With the case officially closed, any chance the girl might have had of being found was now gone. No one was looking anymore and if Gudrun was still alive he hoped to hell she didn’t know that.

  Berlin had learned the basics of photography as part of his training in Canada. RAF bombers used magnesium flares for illumination, and tonight Rebecca was using something equally old-fashioned – flashbulbs. ‘Lightweight, cheap, portable and powerful, Charlie my boy,’ was how she put it. The bulbs screwed into a tall cylindrical holder with a large, round, chromed reflector dish about the size of a dinner plate. Rebecca had carefully calculated it would take twenty flashes to illuminate the cathedral’s interior and she carried the bulbs in a wicker shopping basket, with a couple of extras in case of misfires.

  Each flashbulb was the size and shape of a household light bulb and, like all photoflash bulbs, good for only one use. After firing, the bulb was red hot, the glass cracked and shrivelled and its clear plastic protective coating melted. Each dead bulb had to be unscrewed and removed from the chrome reflector and Rebecca used an old tea towel to protect her hands from burns while removing just-fired bulbs. The hot bulbs would be left on the tiled floor to cool down and collected after the shoot.

  Berlin’s part of this project was fairly straightforward. Rebecca had arrived in the late afternoon to set up her camera. She had composed and carefully focused the image on the camera’s ground-glass screen under a black cloth. After stopping the lens aperture down and closing and cocking the shutter, she inserted a sheet of 4x5 film in its holder. Removing the dark slide, she had made an initial brief exposure just for the stained-glass windows lit up by the late afternoon sun. Once Berlin arrived to help they sat together in a pew, drinking coffee from a thermos while they waited for dusk and then darkness. They didn’t talk about missing girls, friends under arrest or suspensions and careers on the skids.

  When Rebecca had finally judged it was dark enough she’d opened the shutter on the lens and left it open. Berlin covered the front of the lens with his piece of black card. As Rebecca walked through the church finding the predetermined spots to fire her flash without being seen by the c
amera, Berlin waited. He counted the flashes out loud as they were fired, ticking each one off on the reference sheet Rebecca had prepared to keep track.

  There was still just enough streetlight through the cathedral’s stained-glass windows for Berlin to make Rebecca out. When she was hidden behind a pillar or a pew and he confirmed she was invisible to the camera she would yell out, ‘Ready, Charlie?’ and then, ‘Flash!’ At ‘Ready, Charlie?’ Berlin would lift his piece of cardboard clear of the lens and turn his head aside, his eyes tightly closed. Even so, the incredibly bright light of the bulb firing on the word ‘flash’ would still glow red through his eyelids. With his pupils widely dilated in the dim light of the cathedral, looking directly at the flash would have blinded him for a minute or two until his pupils slowly opened up and he could see again.

  That was how he had first seen Rebecca, he remembered, as a vision slowly materialising out of the darkness some twenty years earlier. He had been standing in the wreckage of a railway pay office in Wodonga not long after its ransacking by an armed gang. At the time he knew and understood he was also standing in the potential wreckage of his own career. Some things never change, he decided.

  Back then, as he’d bent down to scoop up and pocket the paymaster’s abandoned pistol from the floor, there was a noise from the doorway. He’d looked up and right into Rebecca’s camera flash as she took a photograph of him and there was that blinding light and then just darkness.

  ‘Ready, Charlie? Flash.’

  He put the card back in front of the lens and leaned down to tick off the exposure. He shouted, ‘Eleven.’ Ticking off each flash exposure was a mindless task and Berlin was glad of it. It was good to have a little time to not think. The suspension and possible loss of his job was on his mind. Was he suspended without pay? They hadn’t said. There was no money in the shots they were taking tonight but Rebecca had plenty of paying work lined up, she had told him.

  ‘Ready, Charlie? Flash.’

  ‘Twelve.’

  In the Wodonga pay office his vision had come back slowly and he still could recall that first sight of Rebecca. She’d been slightly tanned, with shoulder-length, dark auburn hair, full lips and prominent cheekbones. Probably in her mid-twenties, he’d decided, and quite beautiful. She had a canvas satchel slung over her shoulder and was wearing high-waisted, loose-fitting trousers with a matching jacket, and a figure-hugging argyle jumper underneath. Berlin had never liked trousers on a woman but Rebecca had changed his mind on that over time. She had changed his mind on a lot of things.

  ‘Ready, Charlie? Flash.’

  ‘Thirteen.’

  ‘Ready, Charlie? Flash.’

  ‘Fourteen.’

  After starting work at the Collins Street studio Rebecca had met the advertising and commercial photographers in the area, including many German and other European Jews who had settled in Melbourne either before or after the war. While the local photographers generally had a dismissive attitude to women, the Europeans seemed more open and welcoming. The St Paul’s photography was part of an ongoing privately funded project Rebecca had been invited to join that was documenting the rapidly changing face of Melbourne in photographs.

  ‘Ready, Charlie? Flash.’

  ‘Fifteen.’

  Though the cathedral itself was under no threat, many beautiful and historic buildings constructed in the gold rush days were being demolished as the city raced to become ‘modern’ and ‘international’. Scaffolding emblazoned with banners announcing ‘Whelan the Wrecker Is Here’, the sound of jackhammers and the sight of billowing clouds of dust and fleets of dump trucks were becoming a new symbol of Melbourne.

  ‘Ready, Charlie? Flash.’

  ‘Sixteen.’

  Rebecca had started at the far end of the church and had been slowly working her way back towards him, flash by flash. Her voice came out of the darkness somewhere to his right.

  ‘Lauren was pretty upset after she heard you get the news about Derek from that young copper. Are you ready? Here we go again. Flash.’

  Berlin waited ten seconds before opening his eyes. ‘That’s number seventeen and I’m pretty sure Lauren can cry on that young copper’s shoulder any time she wants. Anyway, she told me she didn’t like him – Derek, I mean. Said he was a shit. They only went out once and he was all over her, trying to race her off.’

  ‘Ready, Charlie? Flash.’

  ‘Eighteen.’

  He could just make her out as she crossed to the other side of the church, the shadowy, almost empty basket in one hand and a glint of light coming from the chromed flash unit held in the other. Her voice echoed in the cold, empty darkness of the cathedral.

  ‘She told me that too but she also said there was something a bit odd about it.’

  ‘Him trying to race her off? Like what?’

  She was out of sight behind a heavy curtain now and her voice was slightly muffled. Berlin had to strain to hear what she was saying. ‘Well, he was all over her, grabbing and stuff, but she said she got the feeling it was a bit like he was sort of just going through the motions, like he thought he should, like he had a reputation to live up to. Here we go, Charlie. Flash.’

  ‘Nineteen.’ He ticked off the second last box. ‘Maybe she scared him off.’

  ‘She didn’t think so. Pretty girl like her gets the hard word put on her by experts and a lot of blokes don’t give up short of a knee to the tender bits. And with so many girls on the pill these days, men seem to think they must all be dying for it and any bloke is in with a chance. Ready, Charlie? Flash.’

  ‘Number twenty, Rebecca. That should be the end of it, right?’

  He waited with the black card covering the camera lens till she made her way back to the camera and closed the shutter. She slid the protective plastic dark slide cover carefully into place and took the film holder from the camera.

  ‘I should have this back from the lab by lunchtime tomorrow. Hopefully I didn’t do anything stupid. Can you find us some light?’

  ‘I’m still not sure I follow.’

  She turned to where he was standing. ‘Follow what?’

  ‘What Lauren was saying about Derek, about when they went out. What she told you.’

  ‘Sorry. What she said was she had this weird feeling that Derek was doing it, the aggressive pashing on, the groping, mostly for show. Like he was trying to prove something to her but underneath it all his heart wasn’t really in it. Does that make sense?’

  ‘Not really but then nothing about any of this makes a lot of sense.’

  He found the light switch and started to help her pack up. She handed him the flashgun with its shiny silver reflector.

  ‘Unscrew that last bulb, would you, Charlie?’ She tossed him the old tea towel. ‘Use this, it might still be too hot to handle.’

  Berlin recognised the tea towel as one of the many she used in her darkroom by the brownish chemical stains. He had just started to unscrew the bulb, feeling its residual heat through the fabric, when he stopped.

  ‘Jesus, I’m an idiot.’

  Rebecca’s voice came from in the middle of the cathedral, where she was gathering up the used flashbulbs. ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘I said I’m an idiot.’ He finished unscrewing the bulb and held up the tea towel. ‘It was there right in front of me and I didn’t see it. Will you be able to get the gear packed and out to the car by yourself? Sorry to leave you in the lurch but I have to go.’

  FORTY

  There were several taxis waiting at the rank outside Flinders Street Station. Berlin slid into the front seat of the first in line.

  ‘St Kilda, Burnett Street and I’m in a hurry, so just do a U-turn.’

  The driver looked at his passenger. ‘Fair go, mate, what about the cops?’

  ‘Don’t worry about it, I am the cops, so just get on with it.’

  When Berlin reached the flat the front door was open and there was a pile of Derek’s belongings out on the landing, including the TV and stereo. He wa
lked inside and bumped into a man coming out of the bedroom. The man had a bundle of clothes in his arms and he looked at Berlin over the top of the pile.

  ‘Who the fuck are you? The place is let anyway.’

  ‘I’m the copper in charge of investigating a murder that took place on these premises and to me it looks like you’re removing evidence.’

  The man was about fifty with falling hair, bad teeth and a five o’clock shadow. He was wearing khaki King Gee overalls over a plaid shirt and a pair of battered, elastic-sided riding boots.

  ‘That’s bullshit. I own this building and no bugger said nothing about a murder, they said Derek killed himself. He could have blown up the whole street, leaving the gas on like that, the stupid idiot. And if you’re a cop you should be able to tell me who’s going to pay me back the cost of putting in that new front door and lock.’

  ‘You probably got off lightly – I’ll bet you don’t carry insurance on this rat hole of a place. Or maybe you do and you’re sorry Derek didn’t blow it up.’

  ‘I’m not here to be insulted, even by a copper, and I’m busy. I have to get the place cleaned out. I’ve got a new tenant moving in tomorrow.’

  Derek’s posters had been torn down and the water damage on the walls was more visible than before, making the place seem even more squalid.

  ‘I guess you’ll be up all night painting and recarpeting this palace.’

  ‘Very funny. You get what you pay for and if people want freshly painted walls I’ve got no objections to them having a bash themselves. Now, can you get out of my way? That TV and stereo will disappear off the landing quick smart if I don’t keep an eye on them. Derek owed me close to a month’s rent so they’re mine to sell.’

  ‘I guess you get what you pay for in the way of tenants too. But as I said, this is the scene of a crime so you’re going to have to buzz off until I finish.’