Peter Corris - The Dying Trade

Room 38 was an expensively appointed sick room; there was a big low bed with a mountain of pillows and acres of white covers, assorted bottles on a bedside table, fruit in a beaten metal bowl, a streamlined portable TV set and a smell of money cloying the air. A woman, on the right side of forty but not by much, was sitting up in bed reading a paperback — Family and Kinship in East London. Her hair was dark brown, cut severely, her face was pale, puffy around the eyes. Bryn Gutteridge was right when he’d said that he and his sister weren’t look alike twins. This woman didn’t resemble him at any point. Reading, concentrating, she wasn’t bad looking, but she wasn’t interesting. When she looked up to see Brave standing at the end of her bed her face transformed. She swept her hand over her hair making it careless, pretty. She smiled a good wide smile and something like beauty flowed into the bones of her face. She held out her hands.

“Doctor, I didn’t expect to see you again today.” Brave moved around the bed. He took her hands, pressed them, laid them on the bed, not quite giving them back to her. “I’m sorry to disturb you, Susan,” he said. “This is Mr Clifford Hardy, he’s a private investigator.”

Her eyes flew open in alarm, she went rigid for a second then grabbed for Brave’s hand. She got it and calmed down, but she was strung up and stretched out and I doubted my ability to get anything out of her without having it filtered through Brave first. And he was making a lot of very strange moves. But I had to try. I stepped past Bruno and went up to the bed, facing Brave across it. I tried to keep roughneckedness out of my voice.

“Miss Gutteridge, your brother hired me…”

“Bryn!” Her hands shot up to her face and lines appeared around her mouth and neck which made her look fifty. She’d sweat and twitch if you said Santa Claus too loudly. Like Freud’s, most of my clients are middle-class neurotics, but some of them have real problems in a real, hostile world. Some don’t have any problem but themselves and I couldn’t be sure which category Susan Gutteridge fell into. Brave did some more hand-squeezing.

“Susan, you don’t have to talk to him if you don’t want, but he has been persistent and I judge that you should see him now, once and for all. I’ll stay right here and I promise I won’t let him upset you.”

Whatever he judged and promised would be fine with her. She relaxed and turned a scaled-down version of the smile on me.

“I’m sorry, Mr Harvey?”

“Hardy.”

“Hardy. I’m overwrought, one thing and another. If my brother and Dr Brave think it wise for me to talk to you then I’m sure it is. I’ve never met a detective before. It’s about the threats I suppose?”

“Yes,” I said, “and other things.”

“Other things?” She looked nervous. Susan Gutteridge’s rails were long and narrow and she had to summon all her strength to stay on them for very long. Maybe it was the surroundings — clinics, psychologists, threats — maybe a slight physical resemblance, but I found myself thinking of Cyn, my ex-wife. Cyn, beds, breakdowns, lovers, lawyers: I pushed myself back from it.

“I mean related things, Miss Gutteridge, family things mostly which might throw some light on the problem. Give me something to go on, you understand.”

Brave’s snort of derision underlined my own awareness of the cliched cant I was spouting, but cops have to say “it is my duty to warn you”, and doctors have to say “put out your tongue”.

“I’d like to hear your account of the threats,” I went on, “and your ideas and reactions. You’re a sensitive woman. The threats came from a woman and you might have picked out something that a man would miss.”

She looked blank. Wrong tack. I buttered her on the other side. “You have experience of people in need, social problems. Maybe you can guess at the disturbance in this woman’s mind, what she wants, what lies behind it.” That was better. Smugness crept into her face. She moved her hands away from Brave’s for the first time. She smoothed down the covers. It was hard not to dislike her.

“You are acute in your own way, Mr Hardy,” she said. “Of course, one of the worst things about this, for me, is the thought of how disturbed that woman must be to be saying those things. The person speaking to me on the telephone was emotionally disturbed. As you say, I have some experience in this area. The language was frightful.”

I suppressed an impulse to laugh. “Do you mean it was obscene?”

“Yes, horribly so. I had to burn the letters.”

“Were they obscene too?”

She started to look nervous again. “No, not at all, just awful.”

“Why did you have to burn them then?”

She plucked at the bedcover, shredding some of the raised nap and balling it in her fingers. “I meant that, well, the filthy language and the letters came from the same person. So I burned the letters.”

“You think the phone calls and letters came from the same source do you?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Why, of course?”

“They must have.”

“Tell me one, just one, of the objectionable phrases in the phone calls.”

“I can’t, I couldn’t say it.”

“What were the letters about? The same thing?”

“No — sickness, decay, death.”

“Come on Miss Gutteridge, one phrase from the calls.”

She glared at me, bunched her fists and hammered them on the snowy bedcover. “Fucking capitalist!” she screamed in my face.

There was a silence that seemed to let the words hang in the air forever. Then she started sobbing and Brave moved in with all systems go. He took her hands and clasped them inside his while murmuring comforting, animal-like sounds in her ear. He swayed above her like a mesmerised snake putting the music back into the pipe. She regained control very quickly. I knew that this kind of command over another person was extremely difficult to obtain and incredibly costly to bring about in time and effort. There was no short cut to it and I wondered why Brave had made an investment of this order in this pathetic woman. There was no time for on-the-spot investigation. At a nod from Brave, Bruno moved forward and took my arm just above the elbow. His grip hurt like a dentist’s drill on a nerve.

“You’ve had your time. Hardy,” Brave said, “I hope you’re satisfied with what you’ve done.”

If that was supposed to make me feel sorry for the woman it didn’t work. Her problems were mine only in a-strictly professional sense, but I had to stay with them. At this point I had to assume that Bryn had hired me for reasons other than those he’d stated. That isn’t unusual, but you have to sort the real reasons out fairly quickly if you don’t want to be the meat in the sandwich all the way. I had to fire a shot in my own war.

“Goodbye, Miss Gutteridge,” I said, “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

“Out,” Brave hissed the word like a jet of venom and Bruno swung me round and we trotted out of the room like big Siamese twins joined at the shoulder.

We made the same turns in reverse and Bruno shooed me into the room I’d surfaced in before. I sat down on a chair near the desk and started scooping my things up and putting them in my pockets. Bruno stepped forward and a puzzled look spread over his face as he tried to work out whether he was supposed to stop me or not. He couldn’t tell and he couldn’t think and hit at the same time. Not many muscle men can and it gives the weaklings a fractional edge sometimes. I made a cigarette as the Italian hovered in the middle of the room looking like a discus thrower turned to stone in the middle of his wind-up.

“Don’t worry, Bruno,” I said. “I’ll wait here for your master and in a little while you’ll be able to go off and do something about your face.” That gave him something to think of. He put a hand up to his face and pressed gently. “Harder,” I said, “maybe there’s something broken.” He worked his jaw and grimaced. I might have been able to get him to give himself a karate chop but there was no challenge in it. The door swung open and Brave walked in. He sat down primly behind his desk and the first colour I’d seen in his face appeared — high red spots in his cheeks like daubings on a clown.