The Gilded Madonna Read online

  “You know, Harry, once I recovered my health after I’d been freed from the camp, the anger inside me was almost uncontrollable. That’s why I went to fight with the partisans … it was an outlet for the violence inside me, and …”

  “And?”

  I shook my head. I couldn’t bring myself to tell him how much I’d enjoyed getting my hands dirty. These days, I wasn’t proud of what I’d done, and, in normal times, there’d have been due process of law; but back then, with traitors and enemies still trying to hide in plain sight, there’d been no time for trials. There’d been times when I’d not been able to stand around and watch the ferocity of retribution and savagery of those who’d been betrayed. Locals had been given the go-ahead by the leader of my “unit”. The butchery performed by women and youngsters who’d been either raped or whose menfolk had been lined up against the wall and shot by fascists, and then later on by Nazis, had not been bearable to watch. My fellow partisans had stood by, their rifles slung over their shoulders, passively observing their mothers and sisters hacking away at traitors with knives, or shooting them in the legs, even cutting off their genitals. I couldn’t. I went away into the olive groves until the worst was over. I didn’t judge, I just couldn’t bring myself to see what went on.

  “Maybe one day I’ll be able to tell you,” I said, as I heard Tom climbing the stairs.

  “Maybe one day soon?”

  *****

  The Wiener schnitzel sandwiches were truly delicious. After one bite I knew it wasn’t veal but chicken, deliciously coated with breadcrumbs that had been mixed with the slightest amount of dill, which helped cut the taste of the fat. The mayonnaise was homemade too. I could have eaten another three just by myself.

  After lunch, we sat down to work out how to proceed with the rest of the day. I ticked off a few of the jobs that I’d put on the backburner before we’d left to go to Melbourne, mainly because I didn’t want to do them, but at five quid a shot, I was prepared to give Tom a commission of fifteen shillings for each of them. He was as happy as Larry, and as they were mainly paper-trail jobs, he said he could start this afternoon after he’d gone to pick up his new private investigator licence, which was ready for collection.

  I threw him my car keys and told him to drive carefully and not to use it to pick up girls on his way there and back. “You think I need a flash car like yours to pick up girls, Clyde?” he asked, to which I replied that I hadn’t seen him with one yet, so I had no idea.

  He winked at me and then said goodbye, telling Harry as he left that he’d check with the printer on the way back to the office to see if the new leaflets for the next adventure tour were ready yet.

  “What are you doing?” I asked. Harry had closed his office door. He picked up the phone and pressed a few buttons on the front—I still hadn’t got the hang of it.

  “Putting all incoming calls through to Brenda Brighteyes,” he said.

  “Uh huh?”

  “No, Clyde, as much as I find it hard to resist you, I think it’s time to talk.”

  “About?”

  “About our fight on Sunday night, and about me coming to live with you on weekends.”

  “What makes you think I want you to come live with me?”

  He ran his hands around the small of my back and wiggled his hips against mine.

  “Something down there’s telling me you don’t mind the idea one little bit.”

  I didn’t want to spoil the moment, but there was a certain tone in his voice or a look on his face that had me putty in his hands and incredibly aroused at the same time. Perhaps after we’d sorted out our argument and our new flat-sharing arrangements it might be time for me to tell him about what it had been like for me in the prison camp.

  The fact that he’d told his parents he was going away with me for the new year, and also that he wanted to spend three days a week living together, hadn’t gone unnoticed. Maybe the feeling that this was really it, and that I wasn’t living a fool’s dream, made me want to share the darkest parts of my life. He deserved to know what had made me who I was.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Not only was the luxury of Union, University & Schools Club unexpected, so was Howard Farrell, who was nothing like the very few photographs I’d seen of him.

  The dining room was longer than it was wide, but wonderfully proportioned, with windows all along one side, each a yard apart, and on the spaces between them a beautiful Australian landscape painting. Even from a distance, while standing at the doorway, waiting for the maître d’ to escort us to the bar where Farrell was sitting, I recognised two Albert Namatjiras, an Arthur Boyd, and a Streeton.

  He rose from his stool as we approached and held out his hand to say hello. I could see why he always had some famous athlete or actor at his side—the man was too handsome for words. I found it hard to believe he was seven years older than I. He could have passed for a late twenties-something sportsman himself.

  “Clyde, Harry,” he said to each of us in turn as he shook our hands. His handshake was firm and his smile very friendly. I didn’t know what I’d expected, but certainly not the charming well-groomed man wearing a tailored suit that looked like it would have cost a year’s salary for someone like me.

  “Drink at the bar first, or would you like to have an aperitif at our table while we peruse the menu?”

  “Your call, Clyde,” Harry said.

  “Table?” I was mindful of my promise not to drink too much. I’d have one pre-dinner drink and then two glasses of wine over our meal.

  The conversation was mainly small-talk over dinner, a wonderful à la carte selection of dishes, presented in a handwritten menu, with suggestions of which entrée might complement a main course, or a dessert. I’d never seen such a thing and had been very impressed when the chef had arrived at our table to talk through the menu. The one thing that didn’t surprise me was the wine selection. Howard Farrell’s own vintages, both red and white, featured prominently. I felt a small pang of nostalgia and guilt when I caught sight of the familiar label—its black diamond shape with a white Croix-de-Lorraine in the centre, the brand name Zephyr in a lozenge below the diamond, white printing on a black background.

  The nostalgia was due to the Daley Morrison case, because of which I’d met Harry, and the guilt was because I still had a bottle of the murder victim’s bespoke fragrance that sported the same label on a shelf at the back of my wardrobe.

  It was during the cheese course, served in the continental style, before dessert, that the subject of the Diolis was first mentioned.

  “To avoid a scandal, he narrowly avoided being court-martialled and was asked to resign instead,” Howard said, quite out of the blue.

  “Who?”

  “Terrence Dioli. Lucky he didn’t get lined up against a wall and shot. It was 1918, a month before Armistice.”

  “What did he do?”

  “There were no witnesses, of course, but there were a few private depositions made in camera to protect those who’d come forward about some of his less savoury private punishments. He was a full colonel at the time. Two Frenchmen found dead in a barn, gagged, blindfolded, and shot through the head.”

  “And?”

  “And both of them face down, shirts pulled up around their necks and strides down around their ankles.”

  “You mean he …?”

  “No way of telling in those days, but their backs and arses were cut to ribbons. Riding crop the doctor said. No doubt the military wouldn’t have been involved except the father of one of the dead boys found an epaulet torn from a blouse at the scene. Crown and two pips.”

  “A colonel’s epaulet and a riding crop …”

  “Circumstantial, I know, but his adjutant conveniently said his uniform jacket had been stolen the night before and Dioli was wearing his spare.”

  “What pointed the finger at him?”

  “He’d already been disciplined for administering overzealous corporal punishment in the field—severe beatings and
whipping of young men—and the rumour was that he enjoyed the same sorts of pleasures as the Marquis de Sade, offering a few guineas to those who’d drop their pants, bare their arses, and keep their mouths shut.”

  “So he was a cruel bastard who got off on inflicting pain,” I said. “If it was him, that’s why the two Frenchmen were shot—tied them up under gunpoint, got his jollies by shredding their backs with his riding whip, probably brought himself off while he was doing it, and then silenced them in the most violent way possible. Roped, gagged, and blindfolded hardly sounds like he’d randomly run across two farm boys at the same time who happened to like being beaten … unless he found them already dead.”

  “Revolting,” Harry said.

  “Shame there was no proof …” I added.

  Unlike civilian murders, nothing much that happened at war shocked me. I’d seen far worse and had witnessed young men being raped by the Germans—sometimes with other things than Kraut penises—and then dispatched after the deed as a cruel and spiteful way of erasing the violation of other men’s bodies from the perpetrators’ minds. It was just another form of torture, perhaps with more degradation involved than with the use of pliers or hammers. I shook my head and shuddered slightly.

  Howard reached across the table and patted the back of my hand. “No proof? Maybe there was, Clyde.”

  “Really?”

  “You want to know why I believe he did it?”

  “Of course.”

  “His A.D.C. was Marvin Keeps.”

  I nearly fell off my chair. The corrupt chief superintendent of police who’d drawn a gun on me—and who Harry had shot and killed—not ten months ago had been Terrence Dioli’s adjutant?

  Farrell craned his neck to catch a waiter’s eye and then asked for two application forms for membership at the club. “Sign here, both of you,” he said after the man had returned. “I can invite two memberships a year, and you can consider this an early Christmas present. I’d like to think it’s a thank you for solving Daley’s murder. I liked him, you know.”

  “Everyone liked him,” Harry said. Daley Morrison had been one of the men Harry had been sleeping with before we’d met.

  While we attended to the paperwork, Farrell scribbled on the back of one of his cards, which he’d retrieved from a small silver case—I hadn’t missed the Zephyr insignia engraved on its front.

  “Take this. It’s the name of the man who was the supervisor at the orphanage when Dioli adopted Mark. If you can get him put away too, I’d be eternally grateful. Mark Dioli was a child who was abused in the most terrible way imaginable. Once Terrence found out through the grapevine of sadistic child molesters that the boy had been hardened to violence and wouldn’t offer up any resistance, Dioli senior basically bought him as a punching bag and a whipping boy.”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever heard anything so disgusting,” I said.

  “Come now, Clyde. I know all about what you got up to during the war. If that shudder you just gave wasn’t the memory of something far worse, I’ll eat my hat.”

  “Yes, but that was war, Howard. Not a whole bunch of supposedly civilised people abusing a child in a place that was supposed to protect him.”

  “Dioli’s still at it,” Harry said. “The grandfather, that is. Tell him, Clyde.”

  I explained what Clarrie’s son had reported to me. Farrell didn’t speak immediately, he played with his cigarette lighter, turning it up and down against the table, his fingers trembling ever so slightly. “That young man needs help,” he said after a long period of silence. “I’m prepared to do anything I can to assist.”

  “Why should you do that?” Harry asked.

  “He wasn’t the first child to be abused at that orphanage, nor will he be the last. Let me just say that although it would be satisfying to know that one perpetrator was forced to stop, I’d prefer it to be legally.”

  What people didn’t say as opposed to what they did was often the most important part of any conversation. I’d learned that right at the start in my early days as a detective. I’d prefer it to be legally, he’d said. What he’d meant was he’d really prefer to have Terrence Dioli found at the bottom of the Iron Cove bridge with this throat cut.

  “Why now, Howard? If you knew all this about Mark Dioli’s childhood, why is it now you want to do something.”

  “Because, Clyde, you’ve just told me it’s still going on, that’s why.”

  This time it was me who’d gone quiet. Harry and Howard continued to chat about what we could expect as guests at Zephyr, Howard’s property in the Southern Highlands.

  “Howard,” I said, suddenly interrupting them.

  “Yes, Clyde.”

  “I’m sorry, I’m a detective first and foremost, even if I don’t wear a badge these days.”

  “Go on,” he said.

  “I went to the library and read the account of the sinking of the Greycliffe and then the subsequent death of his mother. What puzzled me is the report said the whole family was lost in the tragedy. But, it doesn’t make sense. Who only has a mother and father and one sibling? What about grandparents, uncles, and aunts? Why didn’t one of them come forward.”

  “Ah, I was getting around to that, Clyde. I thought we needed a break. But, since you ask, Mark Dioli’s real name, as you probably discovered, is Pieter Strickland. The family had not long arrived from Indonesia, where his father had been the manager of a rubber plantation. The company went bust in the great depression. You are right of course to wonder about other relatives. At about the same time that Dioli heard of the boy in the orphanage, he also learned that an uncle and aunt had written from Holland to say they were prepared to take him on, but Dioli paid them off.”

  “Paid them off? What sort of people were they?” I felt outraged.

  “Poor people, who had been left with nothing after the Great War.”

  “Does Mark Dioli know they even exist?”

  Farrell shook his head. “I’ve no idea, Clyde. I’m just telling you what I’ve heard.”

  “I’m sorry, Howard, how did you come by this information?”

  He tapped on the business card that still lay on the table between us with his forefinger. “Ask him. I only know so much myself, but this bastard knows about Mark Dioli’s abuse and will have seen Terrence ‘testing him out’. I heard there were parties for such minded men in private rooms … for a price.”

  The conversation moved to other subjects the moment the waiter arrived with our dessert, which was followed by coffee and petit fours. While coffee was being poured, I casually mentioned how well Howard Farrell had done in life, moving up to be among the more important members of General Macarthur’s entourage during the war.

  He glanced at the waiter and said, “Let’s go upstairs and have a cigarette after coffee and before a brandy, shall we?” I thought his eyes held a melancholy look, and his smile was wistful rather than one of pleasure.

  “Upstairs?” Harry asked.

  “Yes, there’s a rooftop garden and it was a lovely warm evening when I arrived. Besides, I do like the feel of the Sydney air at this time of year.”

  “Sounds wonderful,” I said, fully aware that he was going to tell us something that should not be overheard.

  The view from the outside terrace on the roof, although somewhat obscured by city buildings, was very interesting. To the west one could see the clock tower of the G.P.O. and to the east the edge of the Botanical Gardens and the portico of the Mitchell Library.

  “Not many people know I came from an orphanage—the same one as Mark Dioli as it happens, but long before him. It’s something I don’t normally like to talk about. My parents emigrated from Ireland and I was born on the steamer, just as she came through the heads of Sydney harbour in 1910. They died of typhus not long after we arrived, and they were dirt poor from all accounts, at least that’s what I was told. Like Mark Dioli, the staff kept all knowledge of where we came from secret, in case we ran away looking for family members.”

>   “Why on earth would they do that?” Harry asked.

  “Twenty pounds a year for each of us from the government, and another ten from private charities.”

  “I suppose you children didn’t get to see much of that money spent on you?”

  The look he gave Harry said it all. “I was one of the very lucky ones. I was adopted as quite an old child, just a few weeks off my fourteenth birthday, by a wealthy industrialist and his wife. He groomed me of course, without me knowing it, and I found myself seeking out his bed on the evening of my twenty-first birthday. There was no coercion, just opportunities—he never laid a hand on me until after I made the first move. They are still alive, you know, the couple who adopted me. I see them frequently, and that’s how I manage to live the lifestyle I do, with my big house in the country, my racehorses, and my parties, not to mention my apartment around the corner in College Street.”

  “I was wondering how you came to know the details of Mark Dioli’s treatment,” I said.

  “I tried to have the place shut down, Clyde. But that bastard Keeps had too much power. He threatened me on more than one occasion by saying he could trump up charges and have me thrown in jail.”

  “Despite your connections? You must be protected, surely?”

  “Keeps had so many people in his debt he could have forced any number of well-placed men to reveal details of what my guests get up to at some of my weekends. It was one night, not long before you killed him, Harry, that Keeps confessed he wished he could still return to the orphanage with his friend, Terrence Dioli, to find ‘fresh meat’ as he put it.”

  “How disgusting!” Harry said.

  “It was on that night he admitted his relationship as Dioli’s A.D.C. and told me about Mark—the boy his old colonel had adopted and had abused. I should mention that I never heard talk of Terrence using boys sexually, that was Keeps’ speciality. Dioli just liked to whip them and beat them up. Until Clyde just revealed it was still going on, I assumed that someone like Dioli would have become tired of Mark when he reached an age when he wasn’t so malleable.”