The Dying Trade

by Peter Corris

  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 finger 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.”

  I thought about that while I set down my drink and unfolded the deck-chair. It could mean a lot of things, including dishonest. I tried to look at ease in a deck-chair, which I wasn’t, and intelligent.

  “What’s your trouble, Mr Gutteridge?”

  He put the pistol down and sipped his drink. He was one of those people you describe as painfully thin. He had a small, pointed blonde-thatched head on top of shoulders so narrow they scarcely deserved the name. His bony torso and limbs swum about inside his beautifully cut linen clothes. He was deeply suntanned but didn’t look healthy. Under the tan there was something wrong with his skin and his eyes were muddy. He didn’t seem particularly interested in his drink so the cause of his poor condition might not be that. He was somewhere in his late thirties and he looked sick of life.

  “My sister is being harassed and threatened,” he said. “She’s being goaded into killing herself—in strange ways.”

  “What ways?”

  “Phone calls and letters. The caller and the writer seem to know a lot about her. Everything about her.”

  “Like what?”

  “People she knows, things she does or has done, the perfume she wears. That sort of thing.”

  “Has she done anything special with anyone in particular?”

  “I resent that Hardy, the implication . . .”

  I cut in on him, “Resent away. You’re being vague. Is this private information coming through damaging to your sister’s reputation?”

  He clenched his teeth and the skin stretched tight over the fine bones of his face. Letting my roughness pass exasperated him. He gave a thin sniff and took a tiny sip of his Scotch. “No, it’s quite innocent— innocent meetings, conversations reported back to her. Very upsetting, almost eerie, but not what you’re getting at. Why do you take this line?”

  “She might be a blackmail prospect, the harassment could be a softening up process.”

  He thought about it. The outward signs were that he had good thinking equipment. He didn’t ape the appearance of a mind at work by scratching things or screwing up his eyes. I rolled a cigarette and put my own tired brain into gear. I find that people are very reluctant to tell you the nub of their worries. Perhaps they think the detecting should start early, as early as detecting what they really have on their minds. The trick was to hit them with the right question, the one to open them up, but Bryn Gutteridge looked like a man who could keep his guard up and slip punches indefinitely.

  “How’s your drink, Hardy?”

  “Like yours, barely touched.”

  “You’re direct, that’s good. I’ll be direct too. My father committed suicide four years ago. He shot himself. We don’t know why. He was prosperous, healthy, the original sound mind in the sound body.” He looked down at his cadaverous frame. He was saying he wasn’t sound himself, underlining the verbal picture of his father. There was something disembodied about him, fragile almost. I thought I had my question.

  “How was his love life?”

  He paid serious attention to his drink for the first time before he answered. He looked like Tony Perkins playing a suffering Christ.

  “You mean how’s mine,” he said. “Or you mean that as well. You’re an uncomfortable man, Hardy.”

  “I have to be. If I’m comfortable for you I’m comfortable all round and nothing gets done.”

  “That sounds right, glib perhaps, but right. Very well. His love life was fine so far as I know. He’d married Ailsa only about two years before he died. They seemed happy.”

  “Ailsa?”

  “My stepmother. Ridiculous concept for grown people—my father’s second wife. My mother and Susan’s died when we were children. We’re twins by the way, although we’re not alike. Susan’s dark like our father.” I nodded to show that I was following him.

  “My father was fifty-nine when he remarried. Ailsa was in her mid-thirties I suppose. As I say, they seemed happy.” He jerked a thumb at the house. “He bought this to live in after he was married and he bought another place down there for Susan and me.” He pointed down into the expensive air over the balcony. “He wanted us all to be close but independent.”

  It sounded about as independent to me as the pubs and breweries but Gutteridge didn’t need telling. He finished his drink in a gulp and set the glass down. A real drinker, even if he paced himself, likes to have them end to end, gets nervous in the gaps. I knew the signs from personal experience and it was comforting to observe that Gutteridge wasn’t a drunk. He ignored the glass and went on with his story without the support of liquor, another sign. He crossed his skinny ankles which were bare and black haired above long, narrow feet in leather sandals.

  “Mark made a lot of money. He was a millionaire a few times over. Death duties took a lot of it, but there was still plenty left over for Susan and me. And Ailsa. I don’t know why I’m telling you all this, we seem to be getting away from the matter at hand.”

  “I don’t agree,” I said. My drink was finished now and the tobacco between my fingers wasn’t burning. I felt fidgety and ill at ease. Gutteridge’s personality had had a strange effect on me, his words were hard and economical. He’d be a terror in the boardroom when he was trying to get his way. He made me feel flabby and self-indulgent, this in spite of what I’d seen of his failings and the fact that it was he who had the million dollars. Or more. I felt about for the words.

  “Things are connected,” I said. “It sounds obvious but sometimes the connections are extraordinary. I don’t mean to sound Freudian, but I’ve known men who’ve beaten the life out of other people because of what happened to them when they were ten years old. There’s a background, a connection to something else always. This trouble of your sister’s, you can’t expect to cut it out of your life, clean and simple. I’ll have to look around, look back . . .”

  “You’re a voyeur,” he snapped.

  We were way back. He was feeling intruded upon and that, with him, was dangerous as I’d seen already. I tried to slip sideways.

  “Tell me how your father made his money,” I said. “And you could try thinking how it might link up with what’s happening to your sister.”

  “Mark’s was real estate money, of course,” he said, sounding a bit too pat, as if he’d rehearsed the answer. “This place should tell you that. It’s the ultimate development, the ultimate spiel. He sold people on this sort of thing and he believed in it himself.”

  “He was a developer then. Did he build houses himself?”

  “Yes, hundreds, thousands.”

  “Good ones?”

  “Fair, they didn’t wash away in the first rain.”

  “He sounds like par for the course. What else did you know about his business?”

  “I can’t see what you�
�re driving at.”

  “Enemies, people with grudges, visiting the sins of the father and all that.”

  “I see. Well, I don’t think Mark had enemies. He didn’t have many friends come to that, mostly business acquaintances, lawyers, a couple of politicians, senior administrative people, you know.”

  “I get the idea. Pocket friends, just as good as enemies any day.”

  “I don’t think you do get the idea.” He emphasised the words snakily. “My father was a warm and eloquent man, he won people to his point of view. He almost invariably got what he wanted. He -pulled off some remarkable deals, some colossal gambles.”

  “You liked him?”

  He looked down at the deck, the first evasive gesture he’d made.

  “Yes,” he said softly.

  It was beginning to look to me as if Mark Gutteridge and his manner of departing this life were more interesting than his children’s problems, but that wouldn’t pay the bills, so I just nodded, rolled another cigarette and snuck a look at my glass.

  “Would you like another drink?”

  “After you tell me some more about your sister’s problem. When it began and your ideas on it.”

  “About a month ago Susan got a phone call. It was from a woman with a foreign accent—French possibly. She talked to Susan about her underwear, what brands she bought and how much it cost.”

  “No heavy breathing?” I asked.

  “Nothing like that at all. She said things that upset Susan very much. Mostly about the money Susan spends on clothes and things. It’s rather a lot I suppose. Susan likes nice things, nice things cost money.”

  His silver spoon was shining; some nice things don’t cost money and some things that cost money aren’t nice.

  “It doesn’t sound particularly sinister to me,” I said. “It could almost be funny. Why was your sister so upset?” I could guess at what was coming next, but I wanted to hear how he put it.

  “Susan has a strong social conscience. She’s involved on Community Aid Abroad, Amnesty International, Freedom from Hunger. She’s very busy and devoted to these causes.”

  I could just bet she was. The sweat from all that devotion and business was probably running down into her crepe-de-chine knickers so fast that she had to change them three times a day. I was having trouble getting interested in Susan Gutteridge’s troubles and beginning to suspect that this investigation wasn’t going to bring out the best in me.

  “There was more than one phone call? And you mentioned letters?”

  “Yes, calls have come at all hours of the day and night. The Voice—that’s what Susan calls it—goes on and on about her private life, tells her how useless and parasitic she is, how meaningless her life is. It . . . she . . . refers to our father and tells Susan to do the same thing, tells her that she’s cursed and her suicide is ordained.”

  I felt more interested and asked again about the letters.

  “I only have one to show you,” he said. “Susan tore up another five or six, she’s not sure how many.” He stood up, six feet of bony, moribund elegance and took a folded sheet of paper from his hip pocket. He handed it to me and reached down for his air pistol.

  “Please don’t do that,” I said.

  He sneered at me. “You mentioned your fee and your terms on the telephone. You didn’t say anything about your sensibilities.” He slid back a lever on the pistol and checked a pencil-thin magazine of lead pellets. “Have another drink, Mr Hardy, and turn your attention to what you’ll be paid for.” He rammed home the lever. “Or piss off!”

  I shrugged. Big men were raping little girls, fanatics were torturing each other and people were going mad in cells all over the world. A protest here and now seemed a vain and futile thing.

  “I’ll take the drink,” I said.

  “I thought you might.” He moved along the deck to where it took a right-angle bend into what I supposed was the south balcony. His hand came up sharply and he squeezed the trigger six times. Fifty yards away the pellets rattled like hailstones against metal and glass.

  “The drink’s on its way.” He weighed the pistol in his hand.

  “This is the most fun I have,” he said. He waved the thing at me like a conductor’s baton, signalling me on. “Get on with it!”

  I got on. The paper could have been hand-rolled or beaten out with steam hammers for all I knew. It was a bit smaller all round than quarto and the words on it were in red ballpoint ink, printed in capitals like things of this kind usually are:

  SUSAN GUTTERIDGE

  YOU DESERVE TO DIE

  Gutteridge hadn’t fired his pistol while I was studying the note. He moved back to where I was sitting. He was tense, stretched tight.

  “What do you think?”

  “I don’t know. I wish she’d kept the other notes. Did any of them mention money?”

  He put the pistol down on the deck again and slumped down into the canvas chair. He was about to speak when the rower came out onto the deck carrying a tray with the drinks aboard. Gutteridge nodded at him in the first friendly gesture I’d seen him produce. He took one of the glasses and sipped it. “Just right, Giles,” he said. Giles looked pleased in a well bred way and extended the tray to me. I took the glass and put it down beside me. I thought Giles was all right but Gutteridge seemed to think he was something more than that. He picked up the threads.

  “Money, no I don’t think so. Susan didn’t say and I think she would have. I think the other notes were in the same vein as this, getting more savage.”

  “In what way more savage?”

  He spread his hands and took a deep, tired breath. “I didn’t see them all. One I did see said that Susan was sick. Another one said she was rotten. That’s what I meant, sickness, rottenness, death.”

  “I see, yes. I still think this could be connected with your father’s death in some way. But I suppose you’ve thought of that too?”

  “No, I hadn’t, but you’ve had experience of this sort of thing I presume, and I can see why the thought suggests itself. I don’t think it’s likely though.”

  This was better. He was beginning to afford me some field of expertise and it looked as if I might get enough cooperation from him to allow me to do the job. The sister was an unknown quantity at this point and my prejudiced snap judgment about her on the basis of the little I’d been told might be inaccurate.

  “What do you think is likely then?” I asked.

  “A crank I suppose, someone who gets kicks from baiting the rich.”

  “Maybe. Any political angle?”

  “I shouldn’t think so, we’re not at all politically-minded, Susan and I.”

  Of course not, with their money you don’t have to be. You win with heads and you win with tails, one way or another. But it would be easy enough to check whether or not Susan’s actions had offended some part of the lunatic fringe.

  “I have to know more about your sister, obviously,” I said, “I’ll have to talk to her. Where is she now?”

  “She’s in a clinic at Longueville. I suppose I could arrange for you to see her if you think it’s essential.”

  “I do. She took all this so badly that she had to go into a clinic?”

  “Partly this business,” he said slowly. “Partly that, but there are other things involved. My sister is a diabetic and as I said she keeps very busy. She neglects her diet and regimen and her health suffers. She spends a week or so in Dr Brave’s clinic a few times a year to recover her balance.”

  I nodded. I was thinking that my mother was a diabetic and she often went off the rails, but she didn’t go into clinics, just ate apples and drank milk instead of beer for a while. But then, she died at forty-five. Money helps. “A diabetic clinic doesn’t sound too formidable,” I said. “No reason why I shouldn’t see her if they had some
notice.”

  He looked uneasy. “Dr Brave’s clinic isn’t exclusively for diabetics. It’s for people who need care in different ways. Some of them need mental care. I’m not wholly in favour of the place but Susan won’t hear a word against the doctor. She always seems rested and secure when she comes out so I go along with it.”

  He didn’t like going along with anything that wasn’t his idea, but his sister was his weak spot apparently. She was responsible for my being here talking to him and he didn’t altogether like it. He seemed anxious for our talk to end.

  “I’ll give you the address of the clinic and telephone to let them know you’re coming. When will I say?”

  “This evening, about seven or eight.”

  “Why not this afternoon? What will you be doing then?”

  They’re all the same, rich or not rich, when they’re paying for your time they want to see you running. Perhaps he thought I’d spend the day knocking down his retainer in a pub and doctoring the odometer on my car. I had a feeling that there was more to learn from him, perhaps just a point or two but they could be important. To get them I had to sting him.

  “I’ll be checking on things,” I told him, “including you. It’s standard procedure. Perhaps you could save me time and your money by telling me some more.”

  He bristled. “Like what?”

  “Like how do you keep this going? Like what share in it does your sister have? Like where can I find your . . . stepmother?”

  “Her? Why in hell do you want to know?”