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

I kept clippings of everything that mentioned me or my business. It wasn’t hubris, it was part of my police training. Something niggled in the back of my mind and then I remembered what it was. Earlier in the year, when I’d taken the office and started my private investigations business, I’d been interviewed by Wilbert Curtis for an article for the local paper. It hadn’t been published, but later there’d been a feature article about the crime and conviction tribunal I’d been working on since March. I leafed through my files until I found it. September the seventeenth issue, a photo of me, Sam, Billy, and Harry standing on the steps to the entrance of the old lockup where we were holding our meetings. There it was, a bit about me:

Clyde Smith, local hero, son of well-loved local shoemaker, Alwyn Smith, who passed away four years ago …

It wouldn’t have been hard for someone newly arrived looking for a cobbler to repair the sole of their shoe, or to replace a heel, to hear about my da and his thriving business and how sad it was that since he’d passed away there was only one bespoke shoemaker left in the area. There was a possible reason Luka might have known about my handmade shoes. Perhaps it was there, in the back of his mind, like so many other bits of trivia we store away and then which rise to the surface without us remembering how we learned them in the first place.

It didn’t make me feel like he’d been a trickster, there was something too genuine about the man. It sufficed my inquisitive nature to imagine a logical reason that he knew my father had been a shoemaker, not to have “divined it” by some strange communication with the spirit world.

“Here you go, Clyde,” Tom said, throwing an envelope on my desk and then perching on its edge.

“What’s this?”

“Ten quid.”

“For?”

“Thirty shillings of it is mine,” he said. “Two pending cases solved, invoiced last week and then paid for this morning while you were out.”

I whistled and then opened the envelope. I gave him a fiver.

“I haven’t got any change, Clyde, I’ll have to give it to you later, or it can wait.”

“Christmas bonus, Tom.”

“But, Clyde, I’ve only been working for you for two weeks.”

“And in that time already you’ve brought a tenner through the door that I wouldn’t have had otherwise. Please, Tom …”

He sighed and then rolled us both a smoke while I told him about my meeting with Gălbenele and Luka Praz. I asked him to double-check the story of the missing child in Nowra and see if he could get a copy of the police or hospital report of Luka’s injury. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe them, but people tended to gloss over facts, either to save face or to avoid revisiting things that had happened to them. I told him it could wait until after Christmas.

“So what’s the plan for this afternoon?” he asked.

“I think we might give ourselves an early mark, Tom. I want to drive around and drop off Christmas presents. There’s a card in my out tray I’d like you to sign for the Bishop family, and one for Dioli.”

“Dioli?”

“No need to be uncivil, even if he is a shitbag … and to be honest, Tom, it will give me no end of pleasure to think of him sitting at home and wondering why his favourite queer wished him the best for the season.”

“What makes you think he suspects you’re … you know?”

“He kept looking at the way Harry and I interacted, Tom. Don’t forget he grew up in an orphanage with the older boys being touted to visitors.”

“Have you written anything on the card? Do I need to just sign it, or do I need to write my own message too?”

“Just sign it, Tom.” I chuckled.

“What’s so funny?”

“You asking about a message. I have to admit I was tempted to write, ‘oh, and by the way, Tom’s no poofter, but I reckon his arsehole isn’t as tight as yours is’.”

“Clyde Smith, has anyone ever told you there’s a dark side to your character?”

“On a daily basis, Tom, on a daily basis.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

“No underarm bowling!” Tom called out and then collapsed in a heap laughing when Harry turned around and threw the ball between his legs. It sailed over everyone’s heads and disappeared over the back fence.

I was about to climb over to fetch it from the neighbour’s yard, when it hurtled back from the other side of the fence in time for Vince to leap in the air, catch it, and throw the ball at the wicket, knocking off the stumps. A loud cheer erupted from us all, much to the annoyance of Trixie, who’d been caught midway between either end of our “pitch”.

I gave the thumbs up to the lad who lived behind Harry’s parents’ house and who’d thrown the ball back in a timely enough fashion to run Trixie out.

“Want to come join us?” I called out to him.

“No thanks, Mister. Mum is calling for lunch,” he replied cheekily.

“Talking of lunch,” Harry said. “We need to get things on the table.”

“You were very thoughtful,” I whispered to him on the stairs on the way back into the house. “I had a present for Billy, but not for Sam. We never gave Christmas gifts.”

“Well, I hope he likes it. It’s from us both; a gift card for David Jones.”

“A gift card? What’s that?”

“It’s a new way of giving a present without having to choose something for difficult people. He takes the card into the shop and he can redeem it for something he wants. You told me he was picky.”

“How much do I owe you?”

“Forget about it, Clyde. It was for a fiver, so he’ll be able to buy a few work shirts, or a couple of pairs of slacks.”

“Don’t tell me, it’s a new American idea …”

“Well, it’s a jolly good one, Clyde. I’ve done the same