The Gilded Madonna by Garrick Jones (romance novel chinese novels .TXT) 📗

point six five millimetre round dug out of the ground,” Dioli said.

“Enfield No. 2 pistol comes straight to mind,” I said.

“Those were my thoughts too, 1932 military issue mainly and a few hundred to the Federal Police from memory,” Harry said. “Farmers and veterinarians could get them under licence for putting down animals.”

“Why a short arm?” Dioli asked. “I’d have thought farmers would use a rifle.”

“Rifles are long, you have to stand back. Close up and quick with a revolver,” Harry explained. “Especially with smaller animals. Put your foot on a snake and shoot its head off with a rifle? Too awkward. Easier to lean down and shoot the bastard between the eyes with a handgun in my experience.”

“So, what’s with the squiggles on the blackboard?” I asked, trying to supress a grin at Dioli’s reaction to Harry’s nonchalant description of dispatching snakes. It was something I’d heard a lot of the guys who’d served in Malaya and Borneo had become quite adept at.

“It’s my rough map of the Waverley district,” Harry said. “This part here, which looks like someone’s taken a bite out of it, is Coogee Bay and then above that, Gordon’s Bay, Clovelly, Tamarama, Bondi. Then to the south, there’s Maroubra. These blue crosses are all the public toilets. The red crosses are where the seven ritualised murders have taken place—we can ignore the council worker who was eviscerated at the scene of the last killing, I think we all agree he just got in the way. However, there were no two Silent Cop victims in the same park. They’re all in a three-mile radius from here,” he added, stabbing at the northern end of the outline of the beach he’d drawn.

“Which means he probably lives in the area, otherwise, why here?” Dioli said. “Most multiple murders are usually close to home—take the Jack Ripper cases, for example.”

Harry continued, “The longest distance between any of the toilets in which a murder takes place is four and a half miles, between the murder last night in South Coogee and your second murder three years ago, Clyde, behind the Boys’ High School in Moore Park. That means he most likely lives somewhere in-between.”

“Yeah, who’d walk nearly five miles for a root?” Tom said cheekily.

“You would,” I quipped, “if some sheila ever took pity on you that is.”

Harry, Tom, and I laughed. Dioli didn’t. I knew it in that instant—he didn’t do physical intimacy. I supposed I wouldn’t either, if what had happened to him had been my experience. No doubt he’d seen things, even when he was tiny, that would have frightened the shit out of him and turned him off sex for life.

Mark Dioli ignored us and began to draw lines connecting the red crosses. He then picked up a piece of green chalk and drew a circle around the centre where the lines mostly intersected. “Here,” he said, dotting the chalk on the board with an emphatic click, “somewhere around here—this is most likely where the killer lives, central to all of the murders.”

“Where would that be on the council map, Tom?”

Tom returned from my office a few moments later with a copy of Gregory’s Street Directory. I always kept one handy if I needed to check how to get somewhere I’d never been to before. He looked back and forth between the blackboard while leafing through the pages of the directory. “Here we are, in this area bounded by Alison Road, Carrington Road, Clovelly Road, and Avoca Street.”

“What’s this empty area bang in the middle?” Dioli asked.

Tom picked up the directory and turned it to the light, squinting. “It’s Glebe Gully,” he said.

The three men looked at me. I was the local. “It’s a storm water ditch, natural creek and bushland, about five acres in all,” I explained. “We were never allowed to go play there as kids, because my parents thought it was dangerous.”

“But I bet you a fiver you did though,” Harry said.

I chuckled. “Of course. I remember it mostly because of its few shallow sandstone caves. There were a couple of Indigenous paintings, but up high. Sailors’ scratchings on some of the rock ledges. Mainly lantana and a few cabbage palms. Pretty dense. Mum said a lot of people threw up humpies there during the depression, but I was a bit old in the early thirties to go clambering around those sorts of places.”

Dioli seemed very interested. “Do you think your mate, Colonel …?”

“Ball … Jeff Ball,” Harry said. “Would supply some more men to comb through the scrub?”

“Well, I know it would be stretching the friendship, Harry, especially since they didn’t find anything in the cemeteries, the rifle range, or the storm water drains.”

“I’ll give him a call, Mark. See what we can do.”

“Harry,” I said. “Do you mind if I have a quick word with you in private?”

“Sure, Clyde,” he said and then followed me into my office. “What’s up?”

I kissed him. “First of all that, and thank you for looking after Dioli.”

“He was such a mess, Clyde. Sitting on the floor pissed rotten, surrounded by half-started letters to his aunt and uncle in Holland. I didn’t know what to do, so I took him home. Mother just looked at what I had over my shoulder and said, ‘Spare bedroom, sweetheart’. I put him in the shower—Jesus, Clyde, the scars on that man’s body—and then she took over once I got him dry and into bed. He’s staying for a week until she and her pals can clean up his house.”

“Yes, I remember. I practically had to shuffle across the living room through piles of rubbish on the floor while Terrence Dioli was looking for the papers I’d demanded from him.”

“Do you think he’ll go back to live there?” Harry asked.

I shrugged. “If it’s all clean and tidy and looks different, maybe he will. But he’s on a detective sergeant’s pay, so he’s hardly going to be cash-strapped, especially now he knows about the bank account in his name. Maybe he’ll