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

white Croix-de-Lorraine in the centre, the brand name Zephyr in a lozenge below the diamond, white printing on a black background.

The nostalgia was due to the Daley Morrison case, because of which I’d met Harry, and the guilt was because I still had a bottle of the murder victim’s bespoke fragrance that sported the same label on a shelf at the back of my wardrobe.

It was during the cheese course, served in the continental style, before dessert, that the subject of the Diolis was first mentioned.

“To avoid a scandal, he narrowly avoided being court-martialled and was asked to resign instead,” Howard said, quite out of the blue.

“Who?”

“Terrence Dioli. Lucky he didn’t get lined up against a wall and shot. It was 1918, a month before Armistice.”

“What did he do?”

“There were no witnesses, of course, but there were a few private depositions made in camera to protect those who’d come forward about some of his less savoury private punishments. He was a full colonel at the time. Two Frenchmen found dead in a barn, gagged, blindfolded, and shot through the head.”

“And?”

“And both of them face down, shirts pulled up around their necks and strides down around their ankles.”

“You mean he …?”

“No way of telling in those days, but their backs and arses were cut to ribbons. Riding crop the doctor said. No doubt the military wouldn’t have been involved except the father of one of the dead boys found an epaulet torn from a blouse at the scene. Crown and two pips.”

“A colonel’s epaulet and a riding crop …”

“Circumstantial, I know, but his adjutant conveniently said his uniform jacket had been stolen the night before and Dioli was wearing his spare.”

“What pointed the finger at him?”

“He’d already been disciplined for administering overzealous corporal punishment in the field—severe beatings and whipping of young men—and the rumour was that he enjoyed the same sorts of pleasures as the Marquis de Sade, offering a few guineas to those who’d drop their pants, bare their arses, and keep their mouths shut.”

“So he was a cruel bastard who got off on inflicting pain,” I said. “If it was him, that’s why the two Frenchmen were shot—tied them up under gunpoint, got his jollies by shredding their backs with his riding whip, probably brought himself off while he was doing it, and then silenced them in the most violent way possible. Roped, gagged, and blindfolded hardly sounds like he’d randomly run across two farm boys at the same time who happened to like being beaten … unless he found them already dead.”

“Revolting,” Harry said.

“Shame there was no proof …” I added.

Unlike civilian murders, nothing much that happened at war shocked me. I’d seen far worse and had witnessed young men being raped by the Germans—sometimes with other things than Kraut penises—and then dispatched after the deed as a cruel and spiteful way of erasing the violation of other men’s bodies from the perpetrators’ minds. It was just another form of torture, perhaps with more degradation involved than with the use of pliers or hammers. I shook my head and shuddered slightly.

Howard reached across the table and patted the back of my hand. “No proof? Maybe there was, Clyde.”

“Really?”

“You want to know why I believe he did it?”

“Of course.”

“His A.D.C. was Marvin Keeps.”

I nearly fell off my chair. The corrupt chief superintendent of police who’d drawn a gun on me—and who Harry had shot and killed—not ten months ago had been Terrence Dioli’s adjutant?

Farrell craned his neck to catch a waiter’s eye and then asked for two application forms for membership at the club. “Sign here, both of you,” he said after the man had returned. “I can invite two memberships a year, and you can consider this an early Christmas present. I’d like to think it’s a thank you for solving Daley’s murder. I liked him, you know.”

“Everyone liked him,” Harry said. Daley Morrison had been one of the men Harry had been sleeping with before we’d met.

While we attended to the paperwork, Farrell scribbled on the back of one of his cards, which he’d retrieved from a small silver case—I hadn’t missed the Zephyr insignia engraved on its front.

“Take this. It’s the name of the man who was the supervisor at the orphanage when Dioli adopted Mark. If you can get him put away too, I’d be eternally grateful. Mark Dioli was a child who was abused in the most terrible way imaginable. Once Terrence found out through the grapevine of sadistic child molesters that the boy had been hardened to violence and wouldn’t offer up any resistance, Dioli senior basically bought him as a punching bag and a whipping boy.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever heard anything so disgusting,” I said.

“Come now, Clyde. I know all about what you got up to during the war. If that shudder you just gave wasn’t the memory of something far worse, I’ll eat my hat.”

“Yes, but that was war, Howard. Not a whole bunch of supposedly civilised people abusing a child in a place that was supposed to protect him.”

“Dioli’s still at it,” Harry said. “The grandfather, that is. Tell him, Clyde.”

I explained what Clarrie’s son had reported to me. Farrell didn’t speak immediately, he played with his cigarette lighter, turning it up and down against the table, his fingers trembling ever so slightly. “That young man needs help,” he said after a long period of silence. “I’m prepared to do anything I can to assist.”

“Why should you do that?” Harry asked.

“He wasn’t the first child to be abused at that orphanage, nor will he be the last. Let me just say that although it would be satisfying to know that one perpetrator was forced to stop, I’d prefer it to be legally.”

What people didn’t say as opposed to what they did was often the most important part of any conversation. I’d learned that right at the start in my early days as a detective. I’d prefer it to be legally, he’d said. What he’d meant was he’d really