“And if I refuse?”
I laughed. “That’s the sort of thing a man who’s been a perpetrator would say; never one who’s been on the other end of a brutal fucking or having the shit punched out of him.”
For a moment he tried to stand me down, but eventually his body relaxed ever so slightly. He’d been searching my eyes trying to find the truth of what I’d threatened.
“I need to tell my family—”
“You’ll tell them nothing. You can telephone from the lockup. That’s it.”
“But you’re asking me to do something that will have me in jail for the rest of my life.”
I let go of his braces. They twanged against his chest. “There’s always a deal to be done, Greyson, even for shitbags like you who deserve the rope,” I said as I smoothed down the front of his shirt with both hands.
“A deal?”
I nodded. “That little chat we were going to have? You remember? I said we were going for a drive?”
“I’m sure your definition of a little chat is something rather different than mine,” he said.
“That’s very perceptive of you, Lionel,” I replied. “But, I said there could be a deal. Don’t get your hopes up too soon … let’s say it all depends on you giving me what I want.”
“And just what is it you want? I’m not a rich man.”
I snorted at the idea. What I really wanted to do was slap him around the head, bend him backwards across the bonnet of my car and give him a few wallops, but there was a woman with her kid waiting for the bus on the other side of the street.
“Your family’s going to need your money, Greyson. That’s not what I came for. While we’re driving we’re going to talk—or rather, you’re going to talk. I’m going to listen. I’m sure you won’t need much encouragement, given the alternatives.”
“Talk about what?”
“You’re going to tell me all you know about two men.”
“Which two?”
“Marvin Keeps and Terrence Dioli.”
“Keeps is dead.”
“I know that, Greyson. I was busy pushing a dagger into the heart of Rinaldo Tocacci not five feet away from Keeps when he took a bullet through the eye.”
“You killed Tocacci?”
“With this hand,” I said, patting his cheek.
“The deal?” He was shaking by this point.
“You sign your confession, you come to testify at a Crown commission I’m sitting on, and nothing will happen to you.”
“Nothing?”
“Well, the document will always be there. Your confession will probably include quite a few well-known politicians and businessmen who turned up for a bit of fun with the boys under your ‘care’?”
He nodded. “They’ll kill me.”
I shrugged. “They might.”
“Prison sounds like a better option.”
I opened the passenger door of my car for him. He sat on the edge of the seat with one leg still outside on the curb and looked up at me.
“You know what they do to men who abuse children in prison, Greyson?” I said, standing with one hand resting on the top of the door frame, ready to close it. “Even seventy-year-old men? In the dark with a blanket over your head and your legs tied wide apart, they might start with a cigar case or a gloved finger or two—maybe even a broom handle—no one would stick their dick in you, if that’s what you’re thinking. Then they’d graduate to fists, maybe splintered table legs, wire coat hangers. You know how long it takes to die with a perforated bowel and how painful that might be?”
I slammed the door shut, hoping he’d managed to pull his leg inside quickly enough.
As I walked to the driver’s side of my car and opened the door to get in, I lifted my hat to the woman who was waiting for the bus and waved at her kid, giving him a wink as I did so. “Morning,” I said.
“Gidday!” the lad yelled back with a bright smile and a brisk returned wave. I took a shilling from my pocket and flipped it across the street. He jumped in the air and caught it.
“Howzat!” I yelled.
Both the mother and the boy laughed and thanked me. I liked to think that at heart I was a nice, caring bloke, despite what was probably going through Greyson’s mind at the moment.
*****
When I’d arrived outside the old lockup with Lionel Greyson in my passenger seat, Tom had been waiting outside, an army lance corporal and a private standing behind him. He’d been chatting to Dave, my beat copper mate, and they’d both waved as I’d drawn up next to the curb.
Just before we’d turned into Coogee Bay Road, not a hundred yards from the cop shop, I’d pulled over to the side of the road for fifteen minutes and had filled up a few pages of my shorthand pad. I’d jotted down the salient points of the conversation I’d had with Greyson while we’d been driving from his house in Newtown to the old lockup. After reading back to him what I’d written, and satisfied I’d left nothing important out, I’d given him a cigarette and had watched it tremble in his fingers as he’d sucked the smoke into his mouth noisily.
He’d been so frightened of what I’d said could happen to him in jail that he’d been very forthcoming, and while I’d read my shorthand notes back to him, he’d been eager to correct my three purposeful inaccuracies. Those corrections had given me good cause to believe what he’d told me had been on the money—my “mistakes” had been a test to see how truthful he’d been. Liars often got caught up in their own falsehoods. It was something I’d learned early on as a detective. People under pressure often forgot their own fabrications or changed their stories—and only a few minutes after they’d made them.
“Jeff Ball here yet?” I’d asked Tom through my car door window while watching Dave and the two army men lead Greyson away.
“Not yet, Clyde. He’ll be here in a minute. He called a short while ago apologising. Said he’s been on the phone most of the morning.”
“Righto,” I’d replied. “Tell him I’ll call him from a public telephone when I get to Rozelle. I only want to double-check he’s been able to organise everything we spoke about on the phone this morning.”
“What shall I do?” Tom had asked.
“Sit a few feet in front of Greyson and use your nail file to clean your fingernails slowly, sigh a lot, look around, but never make eye contact.”
“To make him nervous?”
“I’ll make a true gumshoe of you yet,” I’d said, winking cheekily at his broad grin.
I’d stuck my arm out of the car window and given a lazy signal before pulling out into the road. The young bloke I’d forced to slam on his brakes had leaned on his horn, and I’d given him a cheery wave, smiling at his angry red face in my rear vision mirror, and then had put my foot down and driven off with a quick toot of my car horn.
*****
At a little after eleven, I parked my car in Clubb Street, Rozelle, opposite the house in which Terrence and Mark Dioli lived.
I’d phoned Jeff Ball in the morning just after I’d got back from my early morning run. Harry had still been asleep, snoring softly, so I’d closed my study door and put the call through. I’d needed to tell Jeff that I’d decided to visit both Greyson and Dioli senior and to bring them both in for questioning. I’d suggested he should interrogate Greyson and perhaps contact Howard Farrell before he started to see what information he could give him in advance. Jeff had thought it a very good idea, proposing he might ask Howard if he’d be willing to using an “open switchboard” during Greyson’s interrogation, so he could listen in and perhaps guide the line of enquiry. It would come in handy if Greyson was leaving things out, or tried to gloss over his own involvement, and easy enough for Howard to interrupt and correct any “accidental” omissions or straight-out lies.
He’d offered no objections when I’d explained how I’d thought it best to deal with Terrence Dioli, merely grunting into the phone and telling me he’d organise things at his end.
I quickly checked my watch and then lea
fed through my notepad once more. What Greyson had told me made for gruesome reading. Tocacci hadn’t been into children, but he’d sometimes arrived with men who were, and had sat in the office drinking wine and sharing hits of cocaine with some of the male staff while his friends had had their “fun” in other parts of the building. The information Greyson had given me of how Keeps, Dioli, and Tocacci were connected, and what they’d done at the orphanage between them, was enough to lock Mark’s grandfather up and throw away the key.
Satisfied I’d remembered everything I needed to, I locked my notepad in the glovebox, got out of the car, and then went to the phone box on the corner of Manning Street and telephoned the lockup as I’d told Tom I would do, hoping Jeff had arrived.
Dave answered the phone and I asked him if I could speak with Tom, who informed me they hadn’t started questioning Greyson, because Jeff had arrived perhaps ten minutes beforehand and was having a cup of tea and a smoke before they got stuck in.
“Did he get hold of Howard? Do you know, Tom?”
“Yes, Clyde. Seems your friend Howard Farrell insisted on driving down from Bowral himself. Hang on, Colonel Ball wants to speak with you.”
“Are you sure about this, Jeff?” I asked him, once Tom had handed him the phone.
“Well, I’m not sure, but he was insistent. He said he needed to face his demons.”
“You know Greyson raped him?”
“Jesus! No! I knew there was physical abuse, but why would you want to confront someone who did something like that?”
“All I can say is that every day I think of those German guards in the camp and what some of them did to me, Jeff, I just wish I’d had the opportunity to face them when I was in a position of power.”
“I think I understand, Clyde. I’ll try to keep a lid on it.”
“Ring Billy if you need someone who’s got a good handle on abuse, Jeff. He saw enough of what went on while he was fighting his way through Italy.”
“How long will you be?”
“I’m just about to have the friendly chat with Terrence Dioli I told you about this morning, and then I’m supposed to be hosting a Boxing Day get-together of friends. I’ll call you at around two o’clock.”
“Sounds good. Farrell should be here from Bowral quite soon I think. He left not long after I phoned him at seven this morning.”
“Just make sure your men are here to collect Dioli at midday, Jeff, and keep Greyson on his toes please.”
“I’ve interrogated more than one arsehole in my career, Clyde. Don’t worry, I’ll manage with Greyson, and my men will be there at Rozelle waiting to collect Dioli, right on the dot of noon.”
*****
The curtain twitched in the front room of the house a second after I opened the gate. It squeaked.
There were dried bloodstains on the herringbone pattern of bricks placed down the centre of the gravel pathway. The smear started near the flagstone paving at the front door and finished on the path a few yards before the gate. I couldn’t imagine how that must have hurt.
I banged on the front door and waited. How many times had I done the exact same thing during my police career. There were several periods in my life as a detective when I’d gone from house to house for most of a day threatening and roughing-up crims and petty crooks to get what I wanted. I was out of practice. The session with Greyson in the car had left me feeling strangely vulnerable. I thought it odd to realise how much I’d changed since I’d said goodbye to the twenty-four-hour, seven-days-a-week life of a “tough” city detective.
“Open the door!” I yelled, pounding even more loudly. “I know you’re in there.”
“Go away!”
It was a rather timid reply; one that didn’t seem to go with type of person I’d imagined Terrence Dioli to be.
I squatted down and pushed the letter flap open with the barrel of my Luger. “You see what this is? Open the fucking door.”
“Put the gun away first.”
I was sick of being nice. I put my shoulder to the door, and when it only partially opened, stood back and kicked it. Hard. It flew open with a bang, hitting the wall of the hallway.
Terrence Dioli was standing at the end of the hallway holding a long piece of square metal rod in both hands, dressed in his pyjamas, with a cotton dressing gown hanging loosely open over them. He was tall and very thin, one might have said gaunt, but had obviously once been a powerful-looking man. One could always tell by the frame.
I marched down the hallway with my gun pointed at his face. “Drop the weapon,” I said, and then when he didn’t, I grabbed it with my left hand and wrenched it from his grip. It clattered onto the bare boards.
“Who the hell are you—”
I slapped him hard across the ear and then put my gun back in its holster. “Kitchen this way?” I growled, grabbing his pyjama collar and pushing him into the room behind. Bullies were invariably compliant when confronted by someone who acted tougher and showed no fear. He allowed me to push him backwards across the room until his arse hit the edge of the kitchen sink.
“What the—”
“Shut up!” I yelled, slapping him again. He spat in my face, so I pushed him so he was almost bent backwards over the sink and then walked to the kitchen door and turned away from him, trying to goad him into some act of foolishness, so I could hit him again.
“You think I’m afraid—?”
“I told you to shut your face, Dioli,” I said, glancing over my shoulder. He was scrabbling through knives and forks on the draining board with one hand, trying to find something to attack me with.
“Try the bone-handled butter knife there. It will give me a good reason to shoot you in the leg. Self-defence, I’ll call it, if anyone ever asks.”
“Fuck you!” he yelled.
“Fuck me?” I saw red. I strode into the hallway and returned with the metal rod. “Fuck me? Is that what you just said? Tell me, Dioli, is this what you hit him with? Is this what you beat your grandson with, you miserable old—”
“He’s a bad boy. He won’t—”
For the life of me I couldn’t stop what happened next. I pulled him from where he was, his bum pressed against the edge of the sink, threw him on the ground, and began to whack into his back with the metal rod. He screamed, but I didn’t listen. I was too busy yelling my head off and thrashing at his shoulders, buttocks, and over the backs of his legs.
“You like this, Dioli? Does it feel good? How about I fucking break this over your neck, you …”
And then the red mist slowly cleared. Disgusted with myself, I threw the metal bar onto the floor and sat down heavily in a kitchen chair with my head in my hands. For the briefest of moments I’d seen the face of the Kommandant I’d beaten to death after we’d been liberated in the camp, with a hundred men standing around cheering me on. That’s what had stopped me from almost killing Terrence Dioli. I was profoundly and instantly ashamed of losing control to such a degree, but I’d deal with that later.
“Get up,” I growled.
He pulled himself across the floor, snivelling, trying to stand, but couldn’t. I jumped up from the chair and hauled him to his feet, my right hand clenched around his throat.
“You like that do you? Being on the other side of a beating. What should I do now? Pull down my pants and masturbate on you? Is that how you get off, Dioli? Ejaculating on your ‘willing’ victims?”
“I don’t—”
“Don’t fucking lie to me. I know all about you and what you get up to. I spent the morning with Mark in hospital this morning. I know about the years of beatings, of the torture with cigarette burns, of the thrashings with fence palings, your riding crop, and the razor strop …” For the briefest of moments I saw the beginnings of a glimmer of defiance in his eyes. “If you fucking dare tell me he enjoys it, I’ll screw your scrawny neck and I’ll throw your body out into the middle of Victoria Road for the cars to run over.”
He covered his face in his hands and began to keen, alm
ost crying, but childlike. “What do you want from me …?”
“Sit!” I ordered and then when he staggered to a chair clutching his ribs, I filled the kettle and lit the gas, rinsed out the teapot and found the tea canister. “You and I are going to have a little chat, Terrence Dioli, not only about your activities at the Petersham Boys’ Home but your involvement with Rinaldo Tocacci and your time both during the Great War and after with Marvin Keeps.”
He raised his hand to protest, but I put my fingers to my lips and shushed him.
“I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t have not only photographs as proof but also first-hand testimonies—”
“Mark would never say anything about me,” he whined defiantly.
“Mark is the least of your worries, Terrence. You know the difference between military justice and civilian crime? There’s no statue of limitations with war crimes. Remember those boys in the barn in France, blindfolded, their backs shredded to ribbons, shot in the head, and then desecrated after death with a sadist’s semen?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I bet you didn’t know your A.D.C. kept a journal either. It’s called insurance.”
Terrence Dioli went as white as a sheet. Keeps did keep a diary; several in fact. We’d discovered everything he’d locked away in a safe deposit box in the bank while we were investigating his criminal activities. I didn’t know whether he did actually mention Dioli or not, because we hadn’t got around to going through his early diaries, only those pertinent to the time he was in cahoots with Tocacci, but Dioli gaped. He was rattled, staring at me open-mouthed, until a long stream of saliva fell from the corner of his mouth and onto the floor.
“Now, Terrence. You and I are going to have a cup of tea and a chat and then, after that, you’re going to go away for a while. Maybe you’ll return, who knows? But in case you do … if I ever, and I mean ever, see so much as the hint of a bruise on your grandson’s body, no matter how well you think you may have hidden a beating, I’ll come after you. And it won’t be a bit of rough-housing or the taste of my fists next time, I promise you. It will be weeks of torture, kept barely alive but in constant pain until I decide I’ve finished playing with you and I put you out of your misery, in the most gruesome, painful, and ignominious way a human being can die. Understood?”
The Gilded Madonna Page 23