Peter Corris - The Dying Trade

“I’m hanging up Hardy. Send a bill.”

“You’ve overpaid me. Have this for free — Giles’ murder and the threats to your sister are connected. You can’t run away from it.” He hung up.

That left me with Ailsa. I took another pill and finished my drink.

I went to bed. The street was quiet, no dog races so my head was spared the roar of punters’ Holdens and the purr of the bookmakers’ limousines. It was too hot for the street fighters and gutter drinkers to be out lending the area colour and Soames must have had the music down low. I drifted off to the quiet hum of my fan. I slid into a dream in which Ailsa Sleeman, standing tall, reached down for my hands and lifted them up onto her massive breasts.

I woke with a headache that was partly due to the crack I’d taken the night before. I looked out of the window across the rusting roofs of Glebe. The sky had a dull, leaden look — the day was going to be hot. A Sahara wind was already whipping the ice-cream wrappers and other crap along the gutters. I made coffee but it was bitter and I swilled it down the sink. About the only good thing I’ve ever heard of Mick Jagger is that he likes scrambled eggs and white wine for breakfast. I made my version of scrambled eggs, piled a glass up with ice and topped it up with hock and soda. I put the drink down fast, made another, and took it, the food and The News out to the courtyard, feeling better every minute.

The paper headlined the hunt for Costello, the police expected a breakthrough hourly, and there were pictures of beefy guys in shirt sleeves heavying honest citizens. Giles’ departure from this vale of tears didn’t get a mention. I ran my eye hopelessly over the cryptic crossword and consoled myself with the meteorological report — hot, high winds ahead of a thunderstorm. I skimmed the paper again and was surprised to find an idea forming in my mind. I let it take shape for a few minutes and then gave it another drink in case it went away hurt.

I shaved, took a shower and put on my other suit which is said to be lightweight but always makes me sweat like a pig if I move at a pace above a royal stroll. I was already hot when I slipped into the car. The radio aerial had been broken off just above the mounting and was lying in three pieces across the bonnet in the shape of the mark of Zorro. I swore and swept the pieces into the gutter. Insurance was supposed to cover things like that, but how do you insure yourself against insurance premiums? The car started cheerfully and I moved off towards the city.

I reached my office, two floors up above St Peters Street, close to 9.00. The Cross, or what’s left of it after the developers had their way, is just a block north. The whores were already at work, not doing any business among the winos squatting on the pub steps, but keeping in practice. My office opens straight into the corridor, no ante-rooms for people to wait or die in. I inherited it from a clairvoyant who fell under a train. The desk was covered with astrological signs and cabbalistic symbols in inks of various colours — I never had the nerve to rub them out and confined my own doodling to the blotter.

The knock came at exactly 9 o’clock. I sang out that the door was open and she came in slowly and tentatively like a schoolboy coming into the head’s study. She wore a light blue mottled smock over tight flared white trousers. Her fine breasts complemented the tailoring of the smock and that length of lean thigh in white denim was something to see. Her low-heeled sandals vaguely matched her tooled leather shoulder bag and there wouldn’t have been much change out of three hundred dollars for the set. Yesterday she’d been wearing a scarf or something over her head. Now I could see that her dark, reddish hair was cut short, almost cropped. It lay on her sleek head like a burnished metal cap. She wore yesterday’s sunglasses, or maybe she had a few pairs the same. A cigarette came out of her bag almost before she hit the chair and she was one of the fastest people with a lighter I’ve seen.

She took a quick look around the office which in colour scheme and layout is more like a railway waiting room than anything else. She didn’t react to it one way or the other, which probably meant that she’d been in worse places, maybe much worse. She drew hard on the cigarette.

“It must have seemed strange to you,” she said, “telephoning like that last night.”

“It did, but when people need help they do strange things.”

“Can I take up some of your time, Mr Hardy? I have a long story to tell. I’ll pay you of course, starting from now.”

“Before you start spending money I’d like to know why you’ve changed your mind about me. I was a fly on the wall to you yesterday.”

“That’s a fair question. Yesterday I was having a bad time with the man you saw. I’m sorry, it made me testy. Today I need help and I’ve been thinking. I don’t like Bryn Gutteridge, but he’s a good judge of people. If you’re good enough for him you’re good enough for me.”

She acted on the “if you have to ask the price you can’t afford it” plan and that was all right with me. I nodded reassurance on the point, rolled a cigarette and settled back to listen.

“Today is close enough to fifteen years to the day since I gave up being a dancer. I wasn’t bad, I can still do a bit. I’m pretty fit.”

“Yes,” I said, “you look fine. Put 90 % of people to shame.”

“Well, I gave up dancing and that sort of life, theatre and so on to get married. I married a man named Bercer. I was twenty-four, he was fifty-nine, I was poor, he was rich. It’s an old story and there was nothing very different about it except that it worked out all right. He was nice to me. I liked him and for about three years I thought I’d done the right thing. I read a lot, went to plays I wouldn’t have given a thought to before. I improved myself.”

“You did a good job,” I said, “but then…?”

“But then I met a man more or less my own age. I fell for him and we had an affair, a pretty hot one. He was married and I handled it all very badly. I got upset when I couldn’t have it all my own way when things went wrong. James, my husband, didn’t suspect that I was being unfaithful but he was worried about me and sent me to see a doctor, a counsellor…”

“Brave.”

“Yes. He was helpful at first, encouraging. I’d lost track of the friends I’d had when I was dancing and they weren’t much anyway, pretty wild. I had no one to confide in. Brave was sympathetic and available day and night. I came to rely on him absolutely and I told him about my lover. That was a terrible mistake.”

“He blackmailed you?”

“No, not me. He blackmailed James. He told James that there were things about me that would ruin him financially and socially.”

“What was Bercer’s business?” I knew but I wanted to know whether or not she did and what she felt about it.

“Property development, building, and he did big stock exchange deals. It all hinged on the people he knew, politicians, lawyers, top public servants, even a few military men. We went to hundreds of parties, had dinner engagements six nights a week, sometimes seven. There were lots of smoke evenings, the gentlemen with their cigars and the ladies talking trivia.”

I looked down at the frayed end of my cigarette and teased it with my thumbnail. “It sounds terrible.”

“It was, a lot of the time. But there were some good holidays, good trips, and the men weren’t all oafs and the women weren’t all vacuous. It wasn’t so bad. I went to a good school, my accent’s all right and I could hold my own. But James had to be absolutely clean for his deals to come through, no dubious connections.”