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

I’d heard there’d been a commotion down at the oval and I went up to the nick to see if I could find out anything.”

“It’s not that I don’t believe you, son,” I said in my most thinly veiled, growly voice. “But do you mind if I see the negative strip?”

“No, of course not.”

He returned a few minutes later with the strip of negatives and a proof sheet. It was as he’d said, there were only two pictures of Dioli and me in the sequence of snaps he’d taken.

Of course I asked him if he’d noticed anyone hanging around. I was also curious to know how the person who’d sent the photo to Howard Farrell even knew it existed, and I asked if it had been published.

“Didn’t you see the page three spread in Monday’s edition?” the reporter asked me with the most incredulous tone I’d heard in years.

I shook my head, so he moved behind the reception counter and proudly opened a copy of the edition, which came out once a week. It was, as he said, on page three. A photo of me on Anzac Day, standing next to Harry in our uniforms in front of the cenotaph, the composite photo of Dioli and me and then the third photo of Dioli in a set of tails, looking like a movie star, taken at the premier of That Certain Feeling at the Prince Edward Theatre in November.

Under the photographs was a welcome to Mark Dioli, written by the editor himself. The last paragraph asked the readers whether the newcomer could live up to the reputation of Clyde Smith, the toughest cop in town.

No wonder Dioli hated me.

*****

I was running late when I finally got to the office. I poked my head around Harry’s office door to ask Tom whether he’d arrived yet.

“There are two people waiting for you, Clyde.”

He looked very anxious. “In my office?”

“No, in the vestibule outside. I opened the front door for them and asked them to wait. They’ve been here since nine, just after I arrived … it’s the Bishops, Clyde.”

“What? What are they doing here?”

“My first instinct was to ring D.S. Dioli, but they said they wanted to talk to you first.”

I sighed and raised my eyebrows. I didn’t need this complication. Why had they come to me?

“Harry?”

“I’ve phoned him. He’s on his way.” He checked his wristwatch. “He’ll be here in about fifteen minutes. There are a few other messages for you from Brenda.”

“Anything important?”

“Nothing that can’t wait.”

“Can you make tea please? I hate to ask you this, but …”

“Already done, Clyde. All I have to do is put the kettle on the stove. Everything’s ready.”

“Thank you, Tom. I mean it. I think you need to come in with me. Just give me a few minutes to get them settled. I’d really like a witness, in case there’s any accusations of impropriety from the police later on.”

“I’ll put the kettle on now. That’ll give you a few minutes.”

“Ta, mate. Thank you.”

The Bishops sat quietly on the bench just outside my main office door. I took one glance and noticed how neatly dressed they were and carefully groomed, but I’d seen the look many times before in my life—they were dirt poor … and scared.

“Clyde Smith,” I said, introducing myself.

“I’m Cyril Bishop and this is my wife, Margaret,” the man said, returning my handshake. I noticed his palms were clammy, and his wife’s shake, even through her cotton glove, was tremulous.

“Come into my office and take a seat,” I said.

They took their time to settle and while they did I offered them a cigarette. She declined but he took one and began to puff furiously.

“Now, may I ask you why you’re here?” I asked.

“We’ve come to see you, Mr. Smith, because a package arrived this morning.”

“A package?”

“Show him, Maggie,” he said to his wife.

She reached into her straw shopping bag and withdrew a long rectangular parcel, loosely wrapped in brown paper. She placed it on the edge of my desk and carefully undid the bow of the string around the package. I watched transfixed as the outer covering of brown paper unfurled.

“I retied it, Mr. Smith,” she said nervously. “We didn’t look inside—”

“Tom!” I called out, interrupting her.

I heard him running down the corridor, and he burst into the room.

“Call Dioli, tell him to get down here right now.”

Inside the loose outside covering was another layer of brown paper, wrapped tightly, and covering what seemed to be a box. On it, written in elongated caps and in green ink, was my name.

“Wait, before you go,” Cyril Bishop said. “Just let us speak.”

“Let’s have tea. It’s nearly ready, isn’t it, Tom?” I asked.

“I’ll help,” Mrs. Bishop said, starting to rise from her chair.

“No, please. Tom’s a good lad, he won’t be a tick.”

In fact, the kettle must have been boiling, as he returned less than a minute later with our large tea tray laid out with cups, saucers, a milk jug, and our best “tennis teapot”, a large, white-enamelled affair that could hold a dozen cupsful.

“Please, allow me,” Margaret Bishop said, insisting it was her role to be “mother”.

“As you wish,” I said.

“We’d like to engage you to assist the enquiry, Mr. Smith,” she said. I noticed she was a milk-after woman, like my mother had been. I was a heathen; milk in first.

“We haven’t got much in the way of savings, Mr. Smith,” her husband replied. “I’m not sure what your fee is, but we have twenty guineas put aside for our eldest’s trousseau that would be best spent trying to find her.”

“Look, Mr. Bishop, I’m delighted you’ve come to see me, but I couldn’t possibly interfere with an ongoing police investigation—”

“We read your bit in the paper, on page two of the Mirror, Mr. Smith. The article about violence inside men … and women, and I made a circle in my red ink around the paragraph about you working hand in hand with the Victorian police. If it’s good enough for them,