Peter Corris - The Dying Trade

I was feeling fresh as a rose that Monday at 9.30 a.m. My booze supply had run out on Saturday night. I had no way of replenishing it on the Sabbath because we still had Sunday prohibition in Sydney then. I didn’t have a club; that’d gone a while before, along with my job as an insurance investigator. I also didn’t have a wife — not any more — or friends with well-filled refrigerators. Unless I could be bothered driving twenty-five miles to become a bona fide traveller, Sunday could be as dry as a Mormon meeting hall. I didn’t travel. I spent the day on Bondi beach and the evening with tonic water and Le Carre, so I was clear-headed and clean-shaven, doodling on the desk blotter, when the phone rang.

“Hardy Investigations?”

“Yes, Cliff Hardy speaking.”

“Good. Mr Hardy, I need your help. You’ve been recommended.”

I could think of perhaps ten people who’d mildly recommend me. None of them would know the owner of this voice — eight hundred dollars a term, plenty of ordering people about and international travel.

“Yeah, who by?”

He named a name and I heard a faint bell ring. An insurance area boss or something, a hundred years ago. Still, it was a better start than the faded wives whose husbands had taken a walk or the small businessmen with payroll panic.

“Who am I talking to?”

“My name is Gutteridge, Bryn Gutteridge.”

That didn’t mean anything to me. There are three million people in Sydney, maybe a hundred are named Gutteridge and I didn’t know any of them.

“What can I do for you, Mr Gutteridge?”

Mr Gutteridge didn’t want to say too much on the phone. The matter was delicate, urgent and not for the police. He said he wanted advice and possibly action and asked if I could come out to see him that morning. Maybe he wanted to see if I was the advising or the active type. I felt active.

“I ask for a retainer of two hundred dollars, my fees are sixty dollars a day and expenses. The retainer’s returnable if nothing works out, the daily rate starts now.”

He spoke as if he hadn’t heard me.

“I’m glad you’re free. The address is 10 Peninsula Road, Vaucluse. I’ll expect you in an hour.”

“The money’s OK then?”

“Oh yes, fine.”

He hung up. I leaned back in my chair and dropped the receiver onto the handset. I traced a dollar sign with my little finger in the dust beside the dial. Money would be no object to that voice; it came from a world of Bible-fat cheque books and credit cards that would get you anything, anytime.

I left the office, went down two flights of stairs and out into St Peters Street. It was hot already, and a dry wind was pushing the exhaust fumes and chemical particles down the throats of the people in the street. I went round the corner, down a lane and into the backyard behind the tattoo parlour. The tattooist lets me park my car there for ten bucks a week. I backed the Falcon out into the lane and headed north.

Gutteridge’s address fitted his voice. Vaucluse is several million tons of sandstone sticking out into Port Jackson. The sun always shines on it and the residents think it vulgar to talk about the view. I permitted myself a few vulgar thoughts as I pushed my old Falcon along the sculptured divided highway which wound up to the tasteful mansions and shaven lawns. Mercs and Jags slipped out of driveways. The only other under-ten-thousand-dollar drivers I saw were in a police Holden and they were probably there to see that the white lines on the road weren’t getting dirty.

Bryn Gutteridge’s house was a steel, glass and timber fantasy poised on the very point of a Vaucluse headland. It stretched its sundeck out over the sandstone cliff as if rebuking Nature for lack of imagination. The Falcon coughed its way through the twenty-foot high iron gates which were standing open and I stopped in front of the house wondering what they’d think about the oil on the drive after I’d gone.

I walked up a long wood-block path to the house. A gardener working on a rose bed looked at me as if I was spoiling the landscaping. I went up fifty or sixty Oregon timber steps to the porch. You could have subdivided the porch for house lots and marched six wide-shouldered men abreast through the front door. I stabbed the bell with a finger and a wide-shouldered man opened the door while the soft chimes were still echoing about in the house. He was about six feet two, which gave him an inch on me, and he looked like he’d been the stroke of the first rowing eight maybe ten years before when the school had won the Head of the River. His suit had cost five times as much as my lightweight grey model, but he still wasn’t the real money.

“Mr Gutteridge is expecting me.” I passed a card across into his perfectly manicured hand and waited. He opened the door with a piece of body language which stamped him as a man of breeding but a servant nonetheless. His voice was a deep, musical throb, like a finely played bass.

“Mr Gutteridge is on the east balcony.” He handed the card back. “If you wouldn’t mind following me?”

“I’d never find it on my own.”

He let go a smile as thin as a surgeon’s glove and we set off to discover the east balcony. The rich always have lots of mirrors in their houses because they like what they see in them. We passed at least six full-length jobs on the trek which put expensive frames around a thinnish man with dark wiry hair, scuffed suede shoes and an air of not much money being spent on upkeep.

The rowing Blue led me into the library cum billiard room cum bar. He stepped behind the bar and did neat, fast things with bottles, ice and glasses. He handed me two tall glasses filled with tinkling amber liquid and nodded towards a green tinted glass door. “Mr Gutteridge is through there sir,” he said. “The door will open automatically.”

That was nice. Perhaps I could have both drinks and take the glasses home with me if I asked. The oarsman shot his cuffs and went off somewhere, no doubt to fold up some untidy money. The door slid apart and I went out into the harsh sun. The balcony was got up like the deck of a ship with railings and ropes and bits of canvas draped about. I started to walk towards a man sitting by the railing in a deck-chair about twenty feet away. Abruptly I stopped. He was a picture of concentration, resting his arm on the railing and taking careful sight along it and the barrel of an air pistol. His target was a seagull, fat and white, sitting on a coil of rope ten yards from his chair. He squeezed the trigger, there was a sound like a knuckle cracking and the seagull’s black-rimmed eye exploded into a scarlet blotch. The bird flopped down onto the deck and the man got up quickly from his chair. He took a dozen long, gliding strides and kicked the corpse under the rail out into the bushes below.

I felt sick and nearly spilled the drinks as I moved forward.

“That’s a shitty thing to do,” I said. “You Gutteridge?”

“Yes. Do you think so, why?”

Despite myself I handed him the drink — there didn’t seem to be anything else to do with it.

“They’re harmless, attractive, too easy to hit. There’s no sport in it.”

“I don’t do it for sport. I hate them. They all look the same and they intrude on me.”

I had no answer to that. I look like a lot of other people myself, and I’ve been known to be intrusive. I took a pull on the drink — Scotch, the best. Mr Gutteridge didn’t look as if he’d be nice to work for, but I felt sure I could reach an understanding with his money.

Gutteridge stabbed a block of ice in his glass with a long finder and sent it bubbling to the bottom. “Sit down Mr Hardy and don’t look so disapproving.” He pointed to a deck-chair, folded up and propped against the railing. “A seagull or two more or less can’t matter to a sensible man and I’m told you are sensible.”