Peter Corris - The Dying Trade

“Please come with me, Mr Hardy. Dr Brave is waiting for you.”

He inclined his black pompadour towards a teak door at the end of the room. He’d said it before, more or less, but he was still having trouble wrapping his western suburbs Italian accent around the polite words He was built for action and it was a pity to make him talk. He ushered me through the door and down a long corridor done up in the same style as the lobby. Glass-panelled doors opened off it at frequent intervals and the Italian plucked at my sleeve when I slowed down to take a look through one. The place was getting to me — it looked like a jail for people who were very rich and very sorry for what they’d done. I passed him on the left and pulled open the next door on that side.

“Interesting place this,” I said, sticking my head into the room. Empty, sterile; with bars on the windows. A hand fell down on my shoulder and the fingers closed vice-like around the bone. He pulled mc back as easy as a kid pulling on a wad of gum.

“Don’t do that again, Mr Hardy.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Just curious.” I had a feeling that he was trying to hurry me through this part of the building. I wondered why.

“Don’t be.”

We were side by side when we reached die next door on the right. I hunched myself and cannoned into him blasting him against the wall. I opened the door and stepped in. He recovered fast and moved towards me. When he was half-way through the opening, I swung the door back full into him. He took some of it in the face, some at the knee and the handle in the solar plexus. He collapsed like a skyscraper in an earthquake. I turned around to look at the room. I caught a glimpse of a man with a bandaged face sitting on a bed before I felt like I’d been dumped by a gigantic wave: a ton of metal tried to tear my head from my shoulders and sandbags crashed into my belly and knees. I went down into deep, dark water watching a pin-point of light which dimmed, dimmed and died.

Everything hurt when I swam up out of the dark. I tried to slide down into it again but I was slapped hard across the face and pulled up into a sitting position on a short, hard couch. I turned my head painfully and saw the Italian dusting off his hands. He looked bad — one side of his face was a purple smear and he stood awkwardly, favouring one leg. But he was on his feet and in better shape therefore than me. Sitting behind a table in the middle of the room was the man I’d seen pulling into Gutteridge’s driveway in the Bentley. His face had the colour and texture of chalk. His hair was jet black and there was black hair on the backs of his hands. His eyebrows were thick, black bars that met in the middle; he looked like a chessboard come to life. His voice was soft with a burr that could have been Scots but might have been the echoes and rings inside my head.

“You have been very foolish, Mr Hardy. You were asked to observe certain civilities. May I ask why you did not?”

“I wasn’t asked, I was told.” My voice seemed to come from somewhere behind me but it would have hurt too much to turn and look. “This place made me feel rebellious.”

“Interesting. It’s supposed to have the opposite effect. But never mind. The question is, should you be allowed to see the person you’ve come to see after this behaviour? I have my doubts.”

I swung my legs off the couch and wrestled myself into a less invalid position. I felt in my pocket for my tobacco, then I noticed that Brave had the contents of all my pockets neatly arranged in front of him. He waved a hand at the Italian who reached over to the desk top, picked up my tobacco and matches and tossed them into my lap. I rolled a cigarette, lit it and drew the smoke deep. It caught halfway down where everything felt loose from the moorings and I gasped for breath and spluttered. The Italian clouted me hard enough on the back to clear the smoke and rearrange some organs.

“Gently Bruno,” said Brave, “Mr Hardy’s had a nasty fall.”

My voice was wheezy and thin. “You can’t stop me seeing her,” I said, “not when her brother’s OK’d it.”

Brave smiled. “Her brother’s not her keeper,” he said.

“Who is? You?”

“In a way, but not as you may think. Miss Gutteridge is in poor health physically, and she has been under severe strain. Being questioned by a roughneck detective could do her great damage.”

Bruno cracked his knuckles to remind me that I wasn’t the only roughneck around. I had been out-muscled and now I was having professional rank pulled on me. It seemed time to fight back.

“You’re not a medical doctor. I checked the register. What are you, a PhD? They’re drip-dry on the hook I hear, at some places,”

It upset him. He lifted a hand to his ear and pulled the lobe gently down. He dropped the hand to push my things contemptuously around on the desk.

“Your qualifications are here,” he said. “Sleazy and sordid. And your physical powers seem ordinary. What point are you trying to make by insulting me”

“At the most,” I said, “you’re a psychologist. You may not even be that, reputably. You’re not a psychiatrist, that needs a medical degree. I question your professional and legal right to prevent me seeing anyone at all, especially someone who’s nearest of kin has endorsed me.”

He gave it some thought, then spoke rapidly, the accent now twanging angrily in his voice. “Who told you that I was a psychologist?”

“I could have worked it out myself,” I said, “but since you ask, Ailsa Sleeman.”

“I see. Did she know you were coming here?”

“Yes,” I lied.

“Who else?”

I kept lying. “A guy named Ross, Miss Sleeman’s boyfriend; my answering service; a petrol station attendant I asked directions from; maybe Giles, Gutteridge’s man.”

Brave looked like the subtle type. I didn’t think he really intended to have me dumped in the harbour and he knew I didn’t think it, but if he found the threat worth implying I could find it worth countering. But I was getting impatient and didn’t want to lose the initiative, if that’s what I had.

“How about it, doctor? Do I see her now or come back with a court order?”

“You’re being foolish again. Bryn wouldn’t take out a court order against me. He wouldn’t go against my advice on this.”

“You’ve convinced yourself, you haven’t convinced me.”

He ignored me. His eyes were as dark as an arctic night under the heavy brows and they seemed not to be registering my presence in front of him at all. I didn’t look much. My hair was matted around a wound on the back of my head that was seeping blood and I had the general look of a man who’d been sick for a week and hadn’t changed his clothes, but to be looked through quite so devastatingly was disconcerting. He spoke slowly as if talking to himself. “However, they’ve all been through a lot and it might be best for you to do your clumsy act and run along.”

He got up, tall and spare and snapped his fingers at Bruno. “Take him through to Room 38. I’ll be along in a minute. He’s not to see her until I’m there. Fifteen minutes Hardy!”

“For now,” I said.

Bruno opened the door and I followed him shakily out into the corridor. We walked warily, taking a couple of turns to right and left, not chatting. Bruno stopped outside a bolted door which had 38 painted in gold on its smooth black surface. He put his back against the door.

“We wait,” he said.

I didn’t argue. Balanced and braced like that he was about as movable as Gibraltar and I wasn’t feeling rebellious any more. I needed time to think out an approach to the woman whose problems had brought me here, and my condition for thinking wasn’t good. I’d come up with exactly nothing when Brave came round the corner. He’d put a fresh white jacket on over his white shirt and dark trousers. His eyes were dark, shining obsidian spheres and he seemed to be carrying himself very stiffly. He might walk and look lit up like that all the time, but there seemed a better than even chance that he’d given himself a shot of something. Bruno stepped aside, Brave drew the bolt, pushed the door open and I followed him into the room.