Peter Corris: The Dying Trade

I thought about that while I set down my drink and unfolded the deck-chair. It could mean a lot of things, including dishonest. I tried to look at ease in a deck-chair, which I wasn’t, and intelligent.

“What’s your trouble, Mr Gutteridge?”

He put the pistol down and sipped his drink. He was one of those people you describe as painfully thin. He had a small, pointed blonde-thatched head on top of shoulders so narrow they scarcely deserved the name. His bony torso and limbs swum about inside his beautifully cut linen clothes. He was deeply suntanned but didn’t look healthy. Under the tan there was something wrong with his skin and his eyes were muddy. He didn’t seem particularly interested in his drink so the cause of his poor condition might not be that. He was somewhere in his late thirties and he looked sick of life.

“My sister is being harassed and threatened,” he said. “She’s being goaded into killing herself- in strange ways.”

“What ways?”

“Phone calls and letters. The caller and the writer seem to know a lot about her. Everything about her.”

“Like what?”

“People she knows, things she does or has done, the perfume she wears. That sort of thing.”

“Has she done anything special with anyone in particular?”

“I resent that Hardy, the implication…” I cut in on him, “Resent away. You’re being vague. Is this private information coming through damaging to your sister’s reputation?”

He clenched his teeth and the skin stretched tight over the fine bones of his face. Letting my roughness pass exasperated him. He gave a thin sniff and took a tiny sip of his Scotch. “No, it’s quite innocent — innocent meetings, conversations reported back to her. Very upsetting, almost eerie, but not what you’re getting at. Why do you take this line?”

“She might be a blackmail prospect, the harassment could be a softening up process.”

He thought about it. The outward signs were that he had good thinking equipment. He didn’t ape the appearance of a mind at work by scratching things or screwing up his eyes. I rolled a cigarette and put my own tired brain into gear. I find that people are very reluctant to tell you the nub of their worries. Perhaps they think the detecting should start early, as early as detecting what they really have on their minds. The trick was to hit them with the right question, the one to open them up, but Bryn Gutteridge looked like a man who could keep his guard up and slip punches indefinitely.

“How’s your drink, Hardy?”

“Like yours, barely touched.”

“You’re direct, that’s good. I’ll be direct too. My father committed suicide four years ago. He shot himself. We don’t know why. He was prosperous, healthy, the original sound mind in the sound body.” He looked down at his cadaverous frame. He was saying he wasn’t sound himself, underlining the verbal picture of his father. There was something disembodied about him, fragile almost. I thought I had my question.

“How was his love life?”

He paid serious attention to his drink for the first time before he answered. He looked like Tony Perkins playing a suffering Christ.

“You mean how’s mine,” he said. “Or you mean that as well. You’re an uncomfortable man, Hardy.”

“I have to be. If I’m comfortable for you I’m comfortable all round and nothing gets done.”

“That sounds right, glib perhaps, but right. Very well. His love life was fine so far as I know. He’d married Ailsa only about two years before he died. They seemed happy.”

“Ailsa?”

“My stepmother. Ridiculous concept for grown people — my father’s second wife. My mother and Susan’s died when we were children. We’re twins by the way, although we’re not alike. Susan’s dark like our father.” I nodded to show that I was following him.

“My father was fifty-nine when he remarried. Ailsa was in her mid-thirties I suppose. As I say, they seemed happy.” He jerked a thumb at the house. “He bought this to live in after he was married and he bought another place down there for Susan and me.” He pointed down into the expensive air over the balcony. “He wanted us all to be close but independent.”

It sounded about as independent to me as the pubs and breweries but Gutteridge didn’t need telling. He finished his drink in a gulp and set the glass down. A real drinker, even if he paced himself, likes to have them end to end, gets nervous in the gaps. I knew the signs from personal experience and it was comforting to observe that Gutteridge wasn’t a drunk. He ignored the glass and went on with his story without the support of liquor, another sign. He crossed his skinny ankles which were bare and black haired above long, narrow feet in leather sandals.

“Mark made a lot of money. He was a millionaire a few times over. Death duties took a lot of it, but there was still plenty left over for Susan and me. And Ailsa. I don’t know why I’m telling you all this, we seem to be getting away from the matter at hand.”

“I don’t agree.” I said. My drink was finished now and the tobacco between my fingers wasn’t burning. I felt fidgety and ill at ease. Gutteridge’s personality had had a strange effect on me, his words were hard and economical. He’d be a terror in the boardroom when he was trying to get his way. He made me feel flabby and self-indulgent, this in spite of what I’d seen of his failings and the fact that it was he who had the million dollars. Or more. I felt about for the words.

“Things are connected,” I said. “It sounds obvious but sometimes the connections are extraordinary. I don’t mean to sound Freudian, but I’ve known men who’ve beaten the life out of other people because of what happened to them when they were ten years old. There’s a background, a connection to something else always. This trouble of your sister’s, you can’t expect to cut it out of your life, clean and simple. I’ll have to look around, look back…”

“You’re a voyeur,” he snapped.

We were way back. He was feeling intruded upon and that, with him, was dangerous as I’d seen already. I tried to slip sideways.

“Tell me how your father made his money,” I said. “And you could try thinking how it might link up with what’s happening to your sister.”

“Mark’s was real estate money, of course,” he said, sounding a bit too pat, as if he’d rehearsed the answer. “This place should tell you that. It’s the ultimate development, the ultimate spiel. He sold people on this sort of thing and he believed in it himself.”

“He was a developer then. Did he build houses himself?”

“Yes hundreds, thousands.”

“Good ones?”

“Fair, they didn’t wash away in the first rain.”

“He sounds like par for the course. What else did you know about his business?”

“I can’t see what you’re driving at.”

“Enemies, people with grudges, visiting the sins of the father and all that.”

“I see. Well, I don’t think Mark had enemies. He didn’t have many friends come to that, mostly business acquaintances, lawyers, a couple of politicians, senior administrative people, you know.”

“I get the idea. Pocket friends, just as good as enemies any day.”

“I don’t think you do get the idea.” He emphasised the words snakily. “My father was a warm and eloquent man, he won people to his point of view. He almost invariably got what he wanted. He pulled off some remarkable deals, some colossal gambles.”

“You liked him?” He looked down at the deck, the first evasive gesture he’d made.

“Yes,” he said softly.

It was beginning to look to me as if Mark Gutteridge and his manner of departing this life were more interesting than his children’s problems, but that wouldn’t pay the bills, so I just nodded, rolled another cigarette and snuck a look at my glass.