The Dying Trade (19 page)

“Are we ready for Mr Hardy?”

He looked relieved at the reply and even more relieved when the door opened and a male nurse presented himself. The boss said, “Nurse Mahony will attend to you, Mr Hardy.” I said, “Thank you” and he pretended not to hear me.

The nurse was tall and brawny; anyone who made jokes about him might very soon be attended by him in his professional capacity. I had trouble keeping up with him as he strode down the corridor. I broke into an undignified trot, then checked myself.

“Slow down nurse,” I panted, “and tell me where we're going.”

“Sorry sir,” he slowed imperceptibly, but he called me sir. “We're going to the conference room on the fourth floor. It's a sort of VIP room. We get business executives and politicians in here from time to time. In for check-ups and so on. They sometimes need facilities like telex machines, computers and tape recorders. We've got them here, got a computer terminal and all.”

“Great, what about the ones who have to stay in bed?”

“It's a big room, the beds can be wheeled in and arranged with writing tables and so on alongside. The room will hold ten beds. The hospital can provide a stenographer.”

“I don't think I'll need that, but it sounds like a good set-up. You sound proud of it.”

He gave me a sideways look and grinned. “It's interesting,” he said. “One gentleman died in there when he got some bad news on the telex. Very wealthy gentleman he was.”

“Serve him right,” I said.

“That's what I say. Here we are.”

The room was all he'd promised. It looked like a boardroom except for some of the chromium fittings and it smelled antiseptic instead of cigars and good booze. There was a long table with slots in for the beds. When in place the person in bed was within reach of a cassette tape recorder, a set of earphones, a telex keyboard, a fresh writing pad and a row of sharpened pencils. A chair was drawn up to one of the slots, two others were occupied. Ailsa sat propped up by pillows, her arms were bare and her hair was shining like a burnished helmet. She smiled at me as I came into the room in the shadow of Nurse Mahony, it looked as if all was forgiven. Susan was opposite her slumped down in her bed. There was a huge lump under the bedclothes from the waist down which made her look like a victim of Dr Moreau. She looked peeved and anxious.

It wasn't going to be easy.

CHAPTER 23

Susan started on me right away.

“Hello Hardy,” she jeered. “What are we having here, a seminar? Professor Hardy is it?”

Her old self was showing as it always would. I knew I could expect to see a deal more of it before we'd done our business. It would abort the whole exercise if it got out of hand, so I had to be careful not to provoke her too early. I nodded to the nurse who gave a you-rather-than-me look and closed the door behind him. I checked my watch, sat down in the chair and tried hard not to be pompous.

“Hello Susan, Ailsa,” I said calmly. “It's a bit much isn't it? We could probably go somewhere less formal, but they think they're doing the right thing. It's in deference to your millions I gather.”

“Oh, it's all right,” Susan snapped, “though God knows what good it'll do. Why aren't you out looking for whoever ran me down?” She jerked her head at Ailsa. “And bombed her.”

At least she was acknowledging Ailsa's existence, that was encouraging for something coming of the session.

“I am in a way,” I said quietly, “I'll be surprised if we don't work most of it right here.”

“How, will we play charades? We're a bit disadvantaged.”

I looked across at Ailsa who hadn't spoken.

“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.”

“To read?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“What, what did you read?”

She played with the ties on her nightgown. The cigarette had gone out, she hadn't enjoyed it so maybe she was on the way to beating them.

“I can't remember,” she said.

“Good,” I said. “Now, I want you to write down on the pads the names of all the people you recollect as being on the spot that night. Include yourselves.”

“Oh Hardy,” Susan said, “this is so corny.”

“Just do it please, you'll be surprised.”

“What are you paying him to set up this nonsense, Ailsa?” Susan asked. Ailsa smiled, stubbed out the half-smoked dead butt and took up her pencil. The two of them switched on their recall apparatus. I pulled my pad towards me and started doodling and writing words that had nothing to do with the matter in hand. I looked up at them a couple of times over the next couple of minutes. Susan looked relaxed, as if the writing exercise was therapeutic for her. Ailsa sucked on the pencil, substituting it for a cigarette. She probably hadn't written anything without smoking in the last twenty years. I wrote down my version of those present—I had only four names and one unnamed servant. I was going on the newspaper reports. The two women looked up more or less simultaneously.

“OK,” I said, “let's have a look.”

I got up and collected the leaves torn off their pads. Ailsa's sheet read: Ailsa G., Mark G., Susan G., Bryn G., Mrs Berry, Verna, Henry, Willis. Susan's read: Gutteridge—Mark, Bryn, Susan, Ailsa. Cook (Mrs Berry), maid (Verna), driver (Willis), gardener (Henry), assistant.

“Good,” I said, “pretty close, one discrepancy. Susan says the assistant gardener was there, Ailsa doesn't list him. Was he or wasn't he, and what was his name?”

“He was around all right,” Susan said, “I remember because he was sick, he lived in quarters behind the garage. The light was on there and Bryn mentioned it to Mark. He said the young gardener was sick.”

“What else do you know about him?”

“He wasn't interviewed by the police in the house. I suppose they saw him in his room.”

Ailsa nodded. “That would be why I didn't list him,” she said. “I was going on the order of the police interviews.”

“What was his name, Ailsa?” I asked.

“I don't know. Do you, Susan?”

The thing was drawing them together a bit which was good.

“No, he was fairly new, I don't think I ever heard his name.”

“What did he look like? He was young?”

Susan thought about it. It was obviously difficult for her to think about servants other than in the abstract.

“He was young I think,” she said, “hard to tell, he had a beard.”

“That makes sense,” said Ailsa. “All men with beards look the same to me, the driver had a beard.”

“But Willis had a small beard, a gingery one, pepper and salt sort of. The gardener's beard was fuller and darker, like, like . . .” she giggled, “like Fidel Castro.”

Finding Castro funny was just her style, it explained a lot about how the rich are able to carry on merrily being rich. But she'd hit the right note and things came together in my brain and clinched and paid off like a perfectly executed piece of football play. It must have showed in my face because they both straightened themselves up in their beds and took on expectant looks. Ailsa said it.

“He's important, isn't he Cliff, the gardener? And you know who he is. Come on, tell us.”

I took a deep breath and pushed the things I'd been fiddling with away. It's a strange feeling when you've worked it out or got close enough, you become reluctant to surrender it. I went to a lecture once given by a guy who was an expert on the Tasmanian Aborigines; his expertise was mostly a matter of word of mouth, he hadn't published very much. He said practically nothing in the lecture, he couldn't bear to yield it up. It's like that.

“I told you it'd get harder,” I said. I looked at the woman with her lank hair, the bright eyes and the vast hump where her legs should be, “Where were you in May 1953, Susan?” I said.