The Gilded Madonna, Garrick Jones [best fiction novels txt] 📗

we’d get no leads from it, but asked Tom to contact the driver and get a statement from him, only to be told by the radio controller at the taxi company that the driver had since taken time off work and had gone away with his family. Early January was the time most families took holidays if they could.

When Tom asked for further instructions, I told him that as soon as the razor arrived, he should bring it up for Jack to have a look at. I thanked him and then after hanging up the phone went outside into the driveway and lit up a cigarette, waving to Dai as I saw him turn the corner, directed by a very flustered young policewoman.

“Hello there, Clyde,” he said, stealing my smoke from the corner of my mouth after having shaken my hand, and then he passed me the notebook. “This is for you, from Howard. He said you were to call him if there was anything further you needed to know.”

“Thank you, Dai. Smoking? I thought Howard said you didn’t.”

“What Howard doesn’t know won’t kill him, Clyde, and that includes more than cigarettes.”

I felt myself blushing.

“If you and Harry ever want company, I’d be very happy to spend time with you both.”

“Oh, sorry, Dai. As flattered as I am, I’m sure Harry is too, but—”

“What are you making up my mind about for me this time, Clyde?” Harry said from behind me. I hadn’t heard the door open.

“Clyde’s being a spoilsport, in the true sense of the word.”

“In what way?” Harry asked. I could hear from his voice that he had no idea what had been suggested just before he’d arrived.

“I get pretty excited after a race, Harry, and I’ve got three later today. I was just telling Clyde that I wouldn’t half mind working off my leftover energy in-between you two, if you were up for it.”

The inflection on the word “up” was unmissable.

“We’re still too new at this business—of being a couple,” Harry said. “And we haven’t had this conversation yet. However, if we do ever decide to share, I can’t think of anyone we’d rather invite into our bed … if it ever came to that, of course.”

I knew Harry Jones when he was being polite. Even though there was the teensiest bit of interest, I knew he was being gallant.

“Shame,” Dai said. “Maybe next year, when I come back to train for the Commonwealth Games?”

“Maybe,” I said. “I promise you we’ll keep it in mind.”

He shook our hands and wished us farewell. Harry and I stood side by side with our hands in our pockets, watching him saunter up the driveway and then turn around the building out of sight.

“You’re enough for me, Harry,” I said.

“Were you tempted?”

I shook my head. “Guess we’re going to be playing the swimming coach and the eager swimmer with a bulge in his Speedos tonight then, are we?”

“Too right, Clyde.”

“I might hold you to it then.”

He took one hand from his pocket and placed it on my shoulder. “You know how much I love it when you hold me to it.”

“You’re a dirty boy, Harry Jones.”

“Amen, Clyde.”

“Sorry, but I need to have a look at what Howard’s sent me—you could look over my shoulder if you want, there are no secrets that I know of, but you won’t understand any of it anyway—it’s in shorthand.”

“More strings to Howard’s bow than we knew of,” Harry said.

“And more men in his bed than just Dai, if you ask me.”

Harry chuckled. “Some men have all the luck.”

“Are you talking about you and me, Harry Jones?”

He gave my elbow a quick squeeze. “Perhaps I am, Clyde. I’ll see you inside in a moment—don’t be long, your tea will get cold.”

*****

I couldn’t say what shocked me more. What I’d read in Howard’s long, word-for-word account of his telephone conversation with the man who’d been at Dr. Bagshaw’s Home while Johnny had been there, and his interviews with some of Johnny’s contemporaries at the home, or when I returned to the forensic room to see Brendan Fox and Mark Dioli, who’d obviously returned from Kensington early, standing in the doorway sipping tea.

I bent down at Luka’s side to check him. He seemed to be sleeping soundly.

“I gave him a muscle relaxant,” Jack said. “He’ll sleep for a few hours yet. He was as tense as a coiled-up spring.”

“Hello, Brendan,” I said and then greeted Dioli, who seemed very subdued. I expected him to be furious with me.

“I’d have preferred it if you’d passed this by me, Clyde,” the detective inspector said.

“Pass what by you, Brendan? I’m a consultant, remember. Just gathering information ready to pass on to D.S. Dioli. It’s his case after all.”

His soft smile and slightly narrowed eyes said it all. Oh yeah, Smith, and I’m Ronald Reagan the movie star, too. I read it in his face. We’d known each other for ages.

“So did you learn anything from your friend?” he asked, nodding at Luka.

“Not yet, but we will, I’m sure.”

“Mystics? Really, Clyde?”

“Say that to your grandfather’s face, Brendan … if you dare.”

Brendan’s grandfather on his mother’s side was a member of the Sufi Khalwati sect, which had been banned in Egypt in the early part of the century. Nothing much was known about them except that they practised Islam mysticism and had close links to the Romany tribes in North Africa.

He stared at me long and hard and then said, “Touché, Smith.”

“Shukrân, Fox,” I said, using one of the few Arabic words I remembered from my time in North Africa. Please, you’re welcome, and thank you were the first words anyone learned in a foreign language.

His snort at my “thank you” in his grandfather’s language made me realise he’d understood that in good policing, we couldn’t afford to ignore anything, no matter how irrelevant or seemingly trivial.

“So, then, Smith,” Dioli said, “if you’ve been ‘consulting’, have you got anything to share with us? Or has it all been pissing into the wind?”

“You will