Peter Corris - The Dying Trade

“Ailsa’s employing me. Maybe this is not such a good idea after all. She can call it off if she likes, or you can pull out Susan.”

She came to the hook like a hungry fish, the last thing she wanted in her starved, unhappy soul was to miss this show.

“No, no, you could be right Hardy. I’m sorry, I do have faith in you. I’m in pain, I feel so wretched…”

Ailsa had sat there looking interested in Susan’s emotional swoops and amused at my role as MC. Now she displayed her tact.

“We’re neither of us very well, Cliff,” she said, “I tire very easily and I expect it’s the same with Susan. Shouldn’t we get on with it?”

“I think so,” I said. “Susan?”

“Yes, I’ve been thinking back. I know what I know. The police weren’t interested from the beginning.”

I didn’t want her to have it all down pat. It was time to stop being bland and agreeable.

“Yeah, so you told me. I want to cover a bit more ground than that. I’ve got a few questions for you both that could be uncomfortable, but first I’ve got to deliver a monologue of sorts. I’m sorry.”

Ailsa winced at the pomposity of it, but nothing showed in Susan’s face that I could interpret. She looked old and strained, the actual relationship between the two women could have been reversed to judge from their appearance.

“Neither of you has been quite frank with me,” I began. “Perhaps you haven’t been honest with yourselves. This affair has reached a crisis point, you’ve both put some trust in me and I know a lot more about you and your affairs than anyone else. But we’ve got to go a bit further. Bryn knew a lot about you but he’s dead. Someone else knows a lot too and he, or she, is the person we have to identify. It could be Ian Brave, I don’t think so, but he’s a candidate. If we’re going to pin this person down you’re both going to have to come clean about some things. You know what I mean. It might be painful for you, but you’re both under some sort of threat of death, so the pain is relative to that. I want undertakings from you that you’ll be honest, to the limits of your knowledge.”

“And sanity,” said Susan. She was wrecking a fingernail with her teeth.

“Of course.” I smiled at her trying to lighten the mood a bit. “I don’t want either of you going back to Nanny and the wielded slipper, but short of that, can I have your word that you’ll tell it like it is, or was?”

They both nodded, Susan slowly and painfully, Ailsa with a neutral, sceptical smile.

“Right, Ailsa you told me that you thought Mark Gutteridge had been hounded to death, if not exactly murdered.”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“You believed Brave to be behind it. If it wasn’t Brave, or if it wasn’t only Brave, does that give you any other ideas? Is there anything else you remember as relevant? I mean about your husband’s conduct, his state of mind, apart from what you knew Brave was doing to him?”

Ailsa massaged her temples and drew her palms down the side of her face.

“God, I wish I had a cigarette,” she said, “but I’m giving them up. Yes, there is something. I didn’t mention it before because I thought Brave was all that mattered.” She looked across at the other woman. “It’s going to be hard on her,” she said.

“That’s inevitable,” I said, “let’s hear it.”

“Let me get the sequence right.” She paused for a full minute. Susan kept her eyes on Ailsa’s face and not a muscle moved in her own. Flesh seemed to be falling away from her bones, she wanted to hear it and at the same time she wanted to be far away.

“About a month before he died,” Ailsa began slowly, “Mark found out that Bryn was queer. An anonymous letter gave him all the details, so he said. I never saw the letter. Bryn hadn’t given Mark the slightest ground for suspicion, he acted very straight, macho even if you can imagine it. But he told Mark that he’d been queer since he was sixteen. Mark was devastated by it. He became impotent, at least he was with me and I don’t think there was anyone else. He was distraught about it, it was total. He’d been pretty active before, not a stud or anything, but enthusiastic. Well, he started reading about impotence and he came across the Don Juan complex thing, latent homosexuality and so on, you know it?”

“Yes.”

“Mark became convinced that he was tainted and responsible for Bryn being the way he is, was.”

“Is that all? Did he see a doctor?” I knew the answer before I asked the question — he wouldn’t, couldn’t, not Mark Gutteridge.

“No, he didn’t. I’m quite sure he only talked about it to me, and then only because he had to. But that isn’t all, there’s one thing more. About a week before he died Mark was involved in a fight, he had very badly skinned knuckles and he’d dislocated two fingers. He wasn’t marked on the face. I think he must have hurt the other person very badly. Mark was a powerful man.”

“You don’t know who he fought with?”

“No, he wouldn’t tell me. The way he said ‘he’ and ‘him’ made me think it was someone he knew, not a stranger. But that was just an impression, I could be wrong.”

“You could be right. Is that all?”

“That’s all. He couldn’t make love for the last month of his life. But I never heard him sounding suicidal about it. If he did kill himself it could have contributed, but I still think Brave put the real pressure on.”

“Maybe. No unusual letters found after his death?”

She considered it. “No, the executors took all the business correspondence of course. I looked through the personal letters, photographs and things. It all harked back a long way, before my time mostly. I turned it over to Bryn.”

“Why?”

“Oh, you know, father and son and all that. It seemed like the right thing to do.”

“Yeah, I suppose so. It all ties in with some of my ideas. Not easy stuff to talk about.”

“It’s not easy to listen to either.” Susan spat her words out as if they had a bad taste. “God, what muck! It’s probably true though, we’re a degenerate lot.”

“What do you mean, Susan?” I said softly.

“You’re the detective, you work it out.”

She was going to get full mileage from the situation, I was going to have to play her very carefully. She had to have an atmosphere of intrigue and trauma to work in if she wasn’t going to hold back.

I made a cigarette and Ailsa asked me for one and I made another and gave it to her. I lit the cigarettes and pulled the heavy crystal ashtray over to within Ailsa’s reach. Susan jeered again.

“Love is it? Scarcely young though.”

“What would you know about it?” Ailsa said icily.

“You’ll see. What are you going to ask me, Hardy? What’s your first probing question?”

“I think we’ll switch for a minute to the more straightforward stuff. I want to know who was living within the grounds of the Gutteridge house on the night he died. You were both there?”

“Yes, I was there,” Susan said. “I’d come up to visit my father, Bryn was there too, I don’t remember why. Anyway, we stayed for a meal and then I felt a bit ill. I stayed the night, so did Bryn.”

“Why? Was that unusual?”

“No, we did it fairly often. Mark liked us to stay and see him at breakfast before he went to work. Plenty of room in the house of course.”

“Bryn got drunk that night,” said Ailsa.

I was surprised. “He seemed a pretty careful drinker to me.”

“He was,” Ailsa replied. She looked at Susan for confirmation and got a slight nod. “So was Mark, but they both went at it a bit that night. After dinner they got on the whisky. I don’t drink so I went to bed.”