Peter Corris - The Dying Trade

The main bedroom presented a contrast to the rest of the house where the fittings were austere, almost plain. This room had a softer, sensuous feel. The double bed was low slung and springy, the sheets and pillow cases were black satin under a knotty Peruvian woollen cover. There was a large cedar wardrobe with two full length mirrors and a chest of the same wood which stood five feet high — both thousand dollar antiques. The right hand door on the wardrobe offered the first resistance I’d met with in the house. It had a double lock with the second mechanism low down and concealed by a movable panel. I had to work on it with two keys and a piece of stiff plastic to get it open. The hanging space inside was crammed with full length and street length dresses and nightgowns, they ranged from frilly, frothy affairs to sleek streamlined jobs. A set of shelves in the cupboard was occupied by layers of silk and satin underwear — panties, bras, petticoats, stockings and suspenders. A box on the bottom shelf was full of make-up — lipsticks, false eyelashes, brushes and pencils, eye shadow and other pots and tubes beyond my experience.

The bottom drawer of the set between the two full length doors also put up a struggle. I jiggled it open with a long key and a lot of quiet swearing. Ross Haines couldn’t have been more wrong about Chalmers; he was a homosexual alright, but about as repressed as Nero. The drawer was full of photographs, loose and glued into several albums. Many of the pictures were heavy stuff even in these permissive times. They showed a man whom I took to be Chalmers, in woman’s clothing, making love, sometimes in pairs, sometimes in threes and fours. Several of the pictures had been taken in the room I was in, some were outdoor shots, others were taken in what looked like motel rooms. One album contained photos of Chalmers taken over about twenty years. He was a medium sized man with a thin face and hair that time was harvesting. One picture was arresting: Chalmers stood, dressed in a suit cut in the style of twenty years before, alongside a woman with a fresh pretty face and a neat figure. From their accessories and the background it was clearly a wedding picture — Chalmers’ smile was a death mask grimace. There were a few blank leaves in the album following this picture and signs that others had been torn out. Later leaves held snapshots of men, sitting around tables, standing in streets or sprawling on grass or sand. Chalmers wore white, open-necked shirts in most of the pictures and he looked like the photographs you see of Kim Philby in Russia — not quite relaxed in front of the camera, but obviously having a good time.

I muttered “Good luck to you” under my breath and returned the photographs to their original places as carefully as I could. I looked around to make sure I hadn’t disturbed the room and left the house by the front door. Clipboard under my arm I walked to the car. I rolled a cigarette and smoked it down while staring through the windscreen. Walter Chalmers had his own deep secrets and I judged that this made him unlikely to trade in those of other people.

I was back in the hospital by five o’clock. The same crowd of visitors milled about in the lobby waiting to catch lifts up to the wards. There was a different receptionist at the desk but the same smell in the corridors. Ailsa was sitting up in her bed. She was wearing a little make-up and a different nightgown. This one had a loose tie around the neck, a sort of drawstring, and she was fiddling with the strings when I walked into the room. She looked outwardly better but inwardly worse. The hands she held out tentatively to me were trembling and cold. I held her hands for a minute and broke the silence clumsily.

“What’s wrong love, cigarette withdrawal or morphine addiction?”

“Don’t joke, Cliff,” she said, “just look at that.” She nodded down at the newspaper which was lying folded up on the bed. I picked it up and read the lead story. It said that Dr Ian Brave, who had been held in custody in connection with the sheltering of Rory Costello, had escaped from the hospital wing of the Long Bay Jail. Tickener had the byline and he’d made the most of the meagre facts he’d had to work with. Brave had been taken ill with severe vomiting and internal pain and had been escorted to the hospital. He’d been sedated and an armed guard had been set up outside his room. The room was inspected hourly and Brave had vanished between eleven o’clock and noon. The guard denied leaving his post and said he’d heard nothing suspicious from inside the room. Tickener described Brave as a “consulting psychologist” and mentioned obliquely that he had an intimate knowledge of drugs and had used hypnotism in the treatment of his patients.

Ailsa was gnawing at her nails as I read and she dug a jagged one into my arm as I put the paper down.

“I heard about Bryn on the news this morning and now this. What’s happening, Cliff? I’m scared, I don’t understand it. I don’t feel safe even in here with Brave out there somewhere.”

I poured her some water and tried to calm her down, but she was close to hysteria. She brushed the glass aside.

“I don’t want water. How could he escape from prison? How could he?”

“Easy love, you’re safe here. It could have been fixed for him. He’s had one cop in his pocket, why not more? The story doesn’t say whether it was a police guard or a prison guard. I don’t really think he could have used hypnotism on the guard, but it’s possible. It gives the guard an out anyway.”

“Jesus, it scares me,” she said.

“Me too,” I said, then mostly to myself, “I suppose he could have fixed it while he was inside.”

She jumped at it. “Fixed what?”

She was so edgy that it seemed better to give her something real to bite on rather than let her fantasise herself into nervous collapse. I told her about the attempt to kill Susan Gutteridge and worked back from that through her abduction and my part in Bryn’s death. I didn’t tell her that Susan wanted to hire me. She listened attentively and reached up to touch my face when I was finished. She seemed calmer. We went into one of our silent communings, looking at each other with foolish smiles on our faces.

I broke the mood by getting up to look at the chart clipped to the end of the bed. It didn’t make much sense to me but she told me that it meant that the intervals between them interfering with her were getting longer and that she was gaining strength. I nodded and smiled inanely and began to pace up and down in the narrow room. She let me make a few turns then she reached out for a paperback from the bedside table. It hit me on the chest.

“Will you stop that pacing. It’s making me as nervous as hell.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry, be open, be frank. Talk to me about it.”

I sat down on the bed again. “It’s hard to talk about,” I said, “there’s loose ends all over the shop, there are hints of connections but I can’t quite make them. Maybe I’m losing the touch.”

“Don’t be silly and don’t be pretentious,” she said, “and don’t look at me as if you’d like to cosh me. You just need more information. For instance, what do you make of Ross and Chalmers?”

“Haines is Mr Anonymous, orphan. Got where he is by application and a ton of ability, night school and so on. Chalmers is as gay as a goose, do you want the details?”

“No, he does a terrific job for me, I don’t care if he fucks sheep.”

I grinned. “He doesn’t. Do you know anyone who drives a red Volkswagen beetle?”

She thought about it. “Don’t think so. I know a girl who drives a red Audi.”

“No good, lower division.”

“No, why?”

“There was one around the day your car was bombed, one followed me after that and Susan says the car that ran her down was a red VW.”