The Gilded Madonna by Garrick Jones (ebook reader for comics TXT) 📕

agenda. When I’d proposed that maybe some of the other men had known about the glass marbles, he’d assured me that no one, apart from the British recovery squad and his C.O., knew anything more than the improvised bombs being in terracotta pots.

It was like me to dwell on tiny details like those. I kept wondering how Luka could have possibly known about the glass spheres, a detail known to only a few. I could understand why Billy had never mentioned it, because just before I’d left his office, I’d pressed him to tell me everything he knew. I wish I hadn’t—Johnny’s squad had been so shredded, the Pommies who’d recovered the bodies had written in their official report that they’d had to peel strips of flesh from the steel telegraph poles opposite where the explosion had taken place.

My legs had felt so weak while walking down the stairs, I’d had to stop on one of the landings and sit for a few minutes to recover my composure.

I’d never had that compartmentalising thing Billy seemed capable of, but once an initial shock was over, I could get my bum into gear quick smart. So after sitting in my car and having a smoke, my head back, staring above at the clouds for fifteen minutes or so, I drove down to the Café de Wheels and ate two pie floaters, after which I strolled across the street to the pub and had a schooner while trying to sort out the myriad of confused threads in my head.

After a while of sitting, staring mindlessly into the inch or two of beer that remained at the bottom of my glass, I drained it quickly and was about to ask for another, but then hesitated—I phoned Harry instead.

“Where are you, Clyde?”

“Come rescue me,” I said. “I’ve only had one so far, but I’m in the Tilbury Hotel in Woolloomooloo.”

“Have you eaten?”

“Two pie floaters.”

“Greedy guts.”

I laughed. “Harry, I think I’m about to go on a bender, but I’d prefer it if I didn’t.”

“Go outside, sit in your car. I’ll be there in twenty minutes. I’ll have something to eat with you and then we can go to the pub together and you can cry into your beer and tell me whatever it is that’s brought this about.”

I put my hand around the mouthpiece of the handset and turned my back on the bar. “I love you, Harry,” I said.

“And I love you too, Clyde. Now, you saying that over the phone in a public place tells me whatever it is going through your head is serious. Go outside and wait for me, okay?”

I did as I was told.

*****

“So Billy’s story about the Virgin Mary speaking to him was a way of telling you not to disbelieve, that strange and unexplainable things can happen to anyone?” Harry asked me half an hour later, tucking into his second enormous sausage roll, with a third yet uneaten in its grease-spotted, white paper bag.

I reached over and brushed his tie. There were pastry flakes all over it. “Messy puppy,” I said.

“I’ll see whether there’s a copy of both of those magazines in the military archives in the city, Clyde. However, for the time being you should work on the assumption that perhaps, no matter how the information came to you, or how much Luka’s drawings put the wind up you, that what he’s given you just might be correct, and, therefore, perhaps your life could be in danger.”

“I don’t really care about that, Harry—”

“Well, I do, Clyde! I think I should cancel the weekend away.”

“No! Don’t do that. You’re back on Sunday night. You have fifteen people who’ve paid five quid each for three days away in Capertee. I had to work wonders to get one of my mates to go up there on his weekend off work to teach them beginner self-protection skills and to help you out with the basics of bush survival. The killer has never struck within seven days, and I won’t be going anywhere that’s dangerous. If he’d wanted to kill me, he would have done it by now. He’s obviously trying to test me out in some way, trying to humiliate me over something to do with Johnny Edgar, but for the life of me I can’t think of any connection.”

“Just run through it with me, Clyde. Pretend I know nothing about your relationship with Johnny. Tell me all you remember about the last week before he died and then the two days after you got the news and before you shipped out.”

“Can we have a beer while we talk?”

“No we can’t. You have to call Vince and tell him what’s going on. You’ll need a clear head for that. Can’t have you half sozzled in the middle of the day. There’s a lot to organise before next week if you want to recruit the guys you want to use as lures, to find time to follow up on whatever Luka tells you next, and—”

“What do you mean, whatever Luka tells me next?”

“When you arrange for him to see what he can learn about whoever stole his statue, after you let him hold it again.”

“Aw, come on, Harry. Dioli would never agree to that.”

“He will, if you make him agree.”

“You’re assuming I believe there’s something to his psychometry.”

“Well, you can’t hide the fact from me that what he says about being a human computational device has got you intrigued. I know you well enough to see you believe that bit at least. And, there’s that other thing—what you told me about your reaction to what you and Billy discussed. I can see you’re struggling to make sense of the connection between the jerrycan, the flower pot, the Catseyes, and the name of the town. Far too many coincidences for it to be random, wouldn’t you say? Come on, Clyde Smith. What’s holding you back from at least opening up your mind to the possibility that Luka does have some gift—even if you or