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

sexually, that was Keeps’ speciality. Dioli just liked to whip them and beat them up. Until Clyde just revealed it was still going on, I assumed that someone like Dioli would have become tired of Mark when he reached an age when he wasn’t so malleable.”

“But surely when you heard what Keeps was up to …?”

“Ah, I chose my tenses carefully, Clyde. What I said was ‘he wished he could still return’. The name I wrote on that card is of the man who not only sexually abused me as a young teenager before I was adopted but who also offered up Mark Dioli as a whipping boy to visitors. He’s retired now, and from what I can gather, since the change of staff, the abuse at the home no longer goes on.”

I lit another cigarette. Not only was what I’d heard immensely disturbing, but there was something else …

“Why now, Howard? I mean why did you call me on Saturday evening?”

He reached into his pocket and passed me a split-image composite photograph. On the left, yours truly, all tough-cop looking, and on the right, Mark Dioli in his smart business suit.

“This was posted to the editor of the Australian magazine, Clyde. He’s an old friend who lives in one of those big houses on the hill overlooking Coogee Beach. He knows my involvement with children’s charities, and interviewed me once about my work to help kids in need, so he rang me the moment it arrived on his desk, asking for advice, wanting to know who he should pass it on to. He had no idea I knew who you were and I didn’t let on that I did. Neither of us have any idea who sent it, but there’s an odd inscription on the back. I picked it up from him this afternoon, just after I arrived in Sydney from Bowral.”

I turned it over. Scrawled in elongated capitals in green ink was “Bishop, Smith, Dioli”. Along the bottom of the back of the photograph was the stamp of the local newspaper.

*****

At nine the following morning I was waiting at the reception desk of the local newspaper for the junior reporter to arrive. No one had been behind the desk when I’d arrived or had turned up during the ten minutes I’d been hanging around, returning at frequent intervals to tap on the counter bell. I’d even tried to open a locked glass door, knocking loudly and yelling out “hello!”

Along one side of the reception area was a large glass-fronted display case, separated off into several sections, each with its own door, and no more than about four inches in depth. Bored with waiting, I checked all the doors one by one and they opened freely, despite the mortice for a key in each one.

I did notice one thing, however. The very last display case I checked held a very conspicuous empty space where a photograph had been, but which was now missing. In the tightly packed rows of photographs in the display case in question, there were two six by fours of Dioli and me, taken at a distance, standing outside the door of the forensic lab, snapped before I’d kneed him in the nuts, when we’d still been relatively civilised and I’d been trying to give him some friendly advice. The empty space next to them stuck out like dog’s balls—especially as one could barely see the green baize lining of the cabinet to which all the other photos had been pinned, so close they were to one another.

I surmised it had held the side by side composite photo of Mark Dioli and me, and it was from this cabinet that the person who’d used green ink as his or her signature had taken it and then forwarded it on to Howard’s friend—if not, then they’d paid someone else to pinch it. However, in my years of detecting, I’d learned most people who sent mysterious letters, or indeed photographs, liked to have full involve­ment—they had their own cleverness to prove. I’d bet a fiver it was him or her who’d taken it from an unlocked display case in an unattended newspaper reception area.

I held up the photograph Howard had given me. It fitted perfectly into the empty space.

Eventually, the reporter arrived flustered, telling me he’d missed his tram. I gave him a rather curt bit of advice about keeping the display case locked and suggested he should tell his editor to never leave the front counter unattended.

It wasn’t unknown for newspapers—if you could elevate our local rag to that level—to sell photographs of local events to anyone who wanted to buy them. I’d often thought it must have been their major form of income after advertising, because the “news” content tended to be of the kindergarten dress-up day variety. Okay, maybe I was being uppity, I did remember sending them articles on surf carnivals, Anzac Day parades and the like when I’d first started out. That twelve shillings for every published column had sometimes been a welcome bonus.

“I was intending to write an article about the boss cock giving tips to the new rooster in our local cop shop, but the editor didn’t like the idea much,” the young man said to me.

“Neither would I have, had you bothered to ask. Now did you make this composite photograph?” I showed him the one Farrell had given me last night after dinner.

“Yes. It went missing last Tuesday.”

“Next time, when you match negatives like that, mask one of them with a filter when you’re doing the exposure, so that the contrast between them isn’t so strong.”

“Oh, yes, I never thought of that—”

“Now, these two in the display case of Detective Sergeant Dioli and me standing outside the forensic lab at Randwick police station. Are there any more from that session?”

“No, Mr. Smith. Honestly, I swear I only got those two snaps. It looked like you tripped and you both moved out of sight and that’s when my taxi arrived.