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

eight o’clock this morning. Cyril was in the bathroom having his shower. I heard the doorbell go and when I got there, this was on the doormat.”

“Well, we’d best have a look then shall we?”

“If I might suggest that Mr. and Mrs. Bishop wait in the other office while we have a look, Detective Sergeant?” I suggested.

“Oh, yes, of course.”

“I’ll take them,” Harry said. He’d twigged right away. Wouldn’t be nice to open the box to find a severed limb or a piece of clothing belonging to one of their children.

Although they were reluctant to leave, eventually Harry was able to convince them. I took my camera from my desk drawer and began to take photos as Dioli unwrapped the second layer of brown paper and placed it into a large white envelope about the same size as an evidence bag. The inner covering was destined for fingerprinting. As we proceeded slowly, it stopped being about him and me, and soon became two detectives working as they should do. He seemed to know what he was doing and paused in all the right places to allow me to take photographs.

Finally, there remained just the inner cardboard box, pale grey in colour, of the type that rulers came in when they were ordered a few dozen at a time, but about three times the size. At a rough guess I’d say it was eighteen inches long, about seven wide, and perhaps the same in depth. He gingerly lifted the lid, which covered the top and fitted snugly over the sides all the way down to the base. I smelled it instantly.

“What’s that pong?” he asked.

“Urine,” I said. “First piss of the morning by the smell of it.”

A thick folded layer of white butcher’s paper lay over the contents. He removed the layer with tweezers and placed it into another envelope that Tom held open for him. Under that was a layer of greaseproof paper. He lifted it out by one corner, revealing the contents of the box.

“Holy cow!” Tom said.

Nestled into the box was a gleaming, golden statue of the Virgin and child; the lower half wound around with a length of fabric, soaked and reeking of urine.

“It’s a flag of Wales,” I said. Even though it was folded up, I recognised it. My da had had one in a frame over the mantelpiece of the fire in his study. I used to sit and stare at the green-and-white divided banner with its fiery red, black-outlined dragon rampart across the centre.

He looked at me. “A flag of Wales? As in the country?”

I nodded.

“I didn’t even know they had a flag.”

I carefully lifted the statue, using a loop of string around its neck, and held it high.

“Is it gold, do you think?” he asked.

“Not heavy enough,” I replied. “I’d say it was a cast bronze shell, coated with something.”

“Here,” he said and then took the scalpel from my toolkit and scraped at a small section of its hand as he carefully held it steady with one cotton-gloved finger. The gold covering came off on the end of the scalpel. “It’s gold leaf.”

I handed him the string and he held the statue aloft, dangling in the air, while I took a dozen or so photos.

“I bet there are no prints,” I said, as I rewound the film in my camera and went to look for another roll. I had seen no smudges as it had turned in the light.

“Why on earth would anyone send you something like this, Smith?”

“The question is not why they sent it to me, but to the Bishops with my name on it.”

“It’s a clue,” Tom said. “Just like the Morrison case.”

“Well, you and I both know it’s not the same people this time.”

“But the whole clue aspect to solving the case was all over the papers, even if they didn’t mention specifics. You were called the new Sherlock Holmes, remember?”

I rolled my eyes, picked up my phone, and pressed the button for Harry’s office.

“Tell the Bishops nothing’s wrong, but just get in here for a minute, will you?”

“Oh, hello, what’s this?” Harry said as he closed my office door behind him. “Stolen treasure?”

“It’s gold-covered bronze, Harry.”

“Who on earth would send you a gilded Madonna, Clyde? You’re an atheist.”

CHAPTER NINE

I gave Tom my car keys and asked him to drive the Bishops home. It was a thirty-minute walk to where they lived from my office, and during the cooler months of the year it would have been quite pleasant. However, four days before Christmas, Sydney was cooking up a stinker.

Before he left, I took him to one side and told him to ask whether he could look through the children’s room and to cast his eye around the house in general, especially to see if they had some sort of backyard from where the house could be overlooked. Who knows if the kidnapping had really been opportunistic. Perhaps someone had been watching the children for some time and had been spying on the family’s routine.

“I suppose you have some ideas about this,” Dioli said, indicating the figurine, after Tom and the Bishops had left.

“Not yet,” I said and was about to continue when Harry interrupted.

“Well I do,” he said. “Come into my office, I’ve had a decent-sized blackboard put up in the big room, and I can show you how we’d tackle something enigmatic like this.”

“We?” Dioli asked.

“Harry was a cryptographer during the war, and he still works part-time for Army Intelligence,” I explained. “He’s the one who worked out the gambling scheme in the Daley Morrison case, and it was from that breakthrough we were eventually able to implicate Marvin Keeps.”

I watched Dioli’s face. He didn’t react to the name. “Keeps, the chief superintendent who copped a stray bullet in that stoush in Alexandria?”

Harry and I exchanged quick glances. It was interesting that he didn’t seem to know Keeps, and therefore probably didn’t know he’d been his grandfather’s A.D.C. Neither did he seem to know that it