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

street in the way they’d been taken? It seemed Mrs. Bishop wasn’t usually in the habit of sending them out by themselves. The boy, David, who was only five years old, had been unwell, and she’d thought perhaps treating him like a little grown-up and sending him to the shops without her, even if he’d been accompanied by his sister, with a threepenny bit tied in the corner of his handkerchief, might have cheered him up. She’d promised they’d even have some sweetened condensed milk in their tea when they returned.

The kidnapping—for that’s what we’d decided it had to be—had to be opportunistic. There’d been no ransom note, and the parents were barely able to make ends meet, so there was no money to extort from them. It left only very unsettling possibilities. There’d been a series of child murders in the 1920s, and during the war there’d been a string of young girls abducted and sold into what they called the “white slave trade” in the movies. There was also the most gruesome possibility, one that I really didn’t want to even consider at this stage, that the children had been kidnapped and then sexually abused and killed. It wasn’t as uncommon as most people believed, mainly because those cases were nearly always kept secret and details never disclosed to the public.

I had one hope. I called them “Mrs. Keepit cases”. Lonely women, unable to bear children of their own, were known to kidnap kids and try to bring them up as their own. This would be the best possible outcome in my opinion. As scary as it might be for the children, at least those sorts of women never harmed the little ones they’d kidnapped, and sooner or later nosey neighbours usually reported something strange going on. Shopkeepers who noticed their regular clients buying unusual items was another way we’d got to hear about youngsters who were being kept against their will.

Meow.

I smiled and removed the washcloth. I reached over the side of the bath, and despite the wetness of my arm, Baxter rubbed up against it and began to purr loudly.

Turning onto my side, I rested both arms on the edge of the bathtub, placing my chin on the backs of my hands. “What do you think, Baxter? Time for bed?”

He meowed again and then weaselled his way through the partially opened bathroom door. I knew where he’d be: curled up in a ball in the middle of my bed waiting for me.

I turned off the shower and dried myself while standing in the bathtub, before padding down the hallway to my bedroom, turning off the lights as I went. Baxter meowed again faintly as I tossed my bath towel into the laundry basket in the corner of my bedroom. I didn’t turn on the bedside lamp, but threw my bedroom window open and gazed out into the night over Coogee Oval.

Besides the case of the kidnapped children, there’d been something else eating at me most of the day. I hadn’t allowed myself to dwell on it. “Who sent me a photo of ‘no holes barred’?” I asked myself as I rolled a cigarette and then leaned against the window sill while I smoked it. The December night air was warm and balmy, just a gentle breeze running over my body.

I didn’t even remember who’d taken the picture of us. Johnny, the guy I’d had a crush on, and Billy, the man who still loved me with an intensity I’d never been able to return, and then, at the back of the motorbike, the quiet one of us four, Sonny Mullins. I hadn’t thought of him in years. Not because I didn’t care, but every time I did, I couldn’t get the image of how he’d died out of my mind—I’d been given the police report when I’d asked for it when I’d finally returned home and had had to prepare myself before I’d had the courage to read it. What I hadn’t been prepared for were the photos of his corpse.

He’d come home with the rest of the 9th after it had been ordered back to Australia, and poor, lovely, kind Sonny had been beaten to death with a brick by a gang of louts outside the Garden Island docks. They’d driven over his head in their car to make sure he was dead, all because he’d tried to stop one of them beating up a young sailor on leave, who’d been out walking with his girlfriend and had been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I’d still been in Italy when it had happened, and Billy had been fighting his way with Americans through Sicily, but when we’d got home, we’d heard that there’d only been three people at the funeral service. Two representatives from the army board and his mother, who’d relocated to Western Australia to be with her cousin almost immediately after the funeral.

The photograph of the four of us puzzled me. No note, posted with a return address of a post office box that didn’t exist. People didn’t do that sort of thing for no reason. I’d let it bubble away in the back of my mind. Maybe some connection would come, or a reason for it to arrive in the way it did would blink on in the recesses of my unconscious. However, what I did know was that dwelling on it late at night would get me nowhere.

I flicked my cigarette butt out of the window and then crawled into bed.

“Move over, Baxter,” I said and then angled my body around my cat, who, of course, didn’t move. I stroked his fur and wished my big man was here with me. The last thought I remembered was wondering if somehow the empty envelope with my name written on it in green ink was somehow connected to the photograph?

I snorted at the improbability and then snuggled into my pillow, booting Baxter back in the bed with my bum as I