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

never seen this side of you before. Sure, you can get annoyed, and you’re even a cranky bastard sometimes, but unless you’ve been pushed, I’ve never seen you get violent with someone who didn’t deserve it.”

I shook my head. I’d been feeling guilty ever since I’d left the police station. It was the vision of Dioli squatting on the ground trying to control his emotions that had made me feel bad.

“I told you I didn’t like him before he even turned up in my office. It’s that whole nasty thing of using Tom as a verbal punching bag had me offside right from the start. You know, the books I’ve studied on the psychology of crime are pretty specific about that sort of behaviour; the I have to be the best boy in the class syndrome. Men who are so insecure about themselves, they pick on a quieter, more vulnerable person to reinforce their inner need to be leader of the pack. Fuck him, Harry! The truth is I really loathe and detest bullies.”

“Were you ever …?”

“Who me? No, not me. But there was this one guy in my unit during basic training. Tom reminds me of him—that’s why I’ve sort of taken him under my wing. I feel protective of someone so kind and well-meaning …”

“What happened to your mate in the army?”

I sighed. “Same sort of thing. He got harassed under the showers, they short-sheeted his bed, made him fail at exercises, sabotaged his chances. He wore his vulnerability on his sleeve, and all those men went for the jugular. You know what they called him, Harry?”

“No, what?”

“Spunkface Gobbieboy.”

“Was he …?”

“No, Harry, and that’s the worst of it all. He had a girlfriend. I even met her once. But one night he was found dead, hanging from the rafter in the ablutions block.”

“You’re not going to tell me those blokes—”

“No, no—he wrote a letter to his girl and his parents apologising, telling them he couldn’t go on, he couldn’t take the brutal razzing … you know what the pressure was like to fight when we first went to war. It was shameful not to put your hand up, and even worse to fail at it.”

Harry draped his arm around my shoulder and squeezed my bicep. There was no need to say anything. Despite every dreadful, rotten, inhuman thing I’d seen during the war years, apart from the incomprehensibly perfunctory and unwarranted shooting of my Kiwi friend, Reg Gibson, in the camp, the death of that young man I’d trained with had lived on with me all this time, and even now, seventeen years later on, I still beat myself around the head about not stepping up to try to do something to stop the bullying.

“Let’s go in the water,” Harry said.

“I’m sorry. I went too far with Dioli and now I regret it.”

“What can he do to you, Clyde?”

“Nothing really. If he was mean he could probably follow me, kick the tail light out on my car or something minor like that and then give me a ticket. But—”

I was interrupted by a loud whistle. Tom was standing in the shallows holding a tall black inflatable surf board. They rented them out on the beach for sixpence a session. He waved at me, beckoning us to come into the water.

“Wrap the chips in my towel and put them in your bag,” Harry said to me, getting to his feet and brushing the sand off his togs.

“They’ll go all soggy,” I said.

“I like them soggy.”

“If I’d known that, I’d have picked up half a loaf of bread.”

“What for?”

“Honestly! You boys who didn’t grow up on the beach. You eat the white out the half-loaf and then fill the cavity with your soggy, greasy chips. That and a Chiko roll, and Bob’s your uncle.”

“How the hell you still have a thirty-four-inch waist, Smith, I’ve no idea.”

“Will you two stop whatever you’re talking about and come join us?” Vince said. He’d run up from the surf while we’d been standing talking about food … yet again.

“Last one in’s a rotten egg!” I shouted and then took off, hooting at the top of my voice, Harry on my heels.

The water was cool and the surf light. I struck out, heading into the ocean, beyond the breakers, my ginger-bearded man at my side, matching my stroke.

*****

The beauty of cricket is its pace. It can be fast and exciting, but it can also be leisurely and relaxing to watch. Sometimes long periods go by when nothing much seems to go on at all. It made a perfect opportunity for us to throw around ideas about the Bishop case. Today I was supposed to be focused on how to help Vince; however, I couldn’t get my mind away from fleeting thoughts about the sudden and unwelcomed reappearance of the Silent Cop killer.

At first I’d been surprised to see the cricket match hadn’t been cancelled. Forensics had obviously cleaned up what they could and had locked the gate of the men’s toilet—something that should have happened as a matter of course when the oval wasn’t in use. Had it been locked every night, a young man might still be alive. There was a public convenience down in the small park opposite the beach a few hundred yards away. Taxi drivers used it while waiting for fares from the R.S.L. There was no need to have yet another toilet open all night.

Of course, once I’d told Vince and Tom about why I’d been summoned to the forensic lab that morning, they’d wanted to know all about it. Both of them had started well after the case had been shelved. It took a good half-hour to explain how the investigation had stumbled from one false lead to another, and only a matter of days after I’d visited one set of grieving parents to tell them how their son had died, another murder had taken place.

It’s immensely hard for a cop to break the news to any family of