by Peter Corris
I hadn’t established any clear connection between the threats to Susan Gutteridge and the suicide of her father, if it was suicide. Bryn Gutteridge hadn’t provided any connections out of his picture of his father—an honest, if forceful, businessman. Gutteridge’s ex-wife had a different picture of him—unscrupulous and dishonest, with a thousand enemies, any one of whom could be taking it out on the daughter. This view of the late Gutteridge appealed to me most, but that could have been my bank balance and prejudices speaking. Against Bryn’s story in general was that he had lied about his attitude to Dr Brave, or a lie was implied in what he’d told me. That is, if Ailsa Sleeman was telling the truth. She was a complex woman who’d seen two tycoon husbands off, but she had no obvious reason to lie on this point. It was easily checked, but that went for Bryn’s story too. He seemed to be in dubious control of his cool. Maybe he lied about everything. Maybe he was an eccentric millionaire who liked to send private detectives on wild goose chases. Suddenly, that seemed like a clean, uncomplicated thing to do—to chase wild geese in northern Canada. I ate, drank, smoked and thought until it was time to go and meet the stricken sister.
Leafy Longueville features trees and water glimpses. There’s some big money and a lot of middle-sized money around; the middling people are working to keep up with the big people who are looking across the Lane Cove river towards Hunters Hill, where everybody has big money, and wondering if they can afford the move. The people work outside the area, send their kids out of it to school and don’t talk to each other. They spend their time cultivating high, privacy-making hedges and looking the other way.
At 7.15 Longueville is quiet. Hoses sprinkle on lawns and the big cars are all sitting in their garages. Nobody and nothing moves in the front grounds of the houses. The terraces and swimming pools out back could be awash with gin and naked women, but you’d never know from the street. The clinic was a block from the suburb’s main road. That put it close to the river, and into the heart of the Hunters Hill envy zone. I didn’t lock the Falcon because there are no car thieves in Longueville and I didn’t take my gun because there are no muggings either. Longuevillians do their thieving in the city five days a week, nine to five, and they get away from it all at home. The Brave clinic was an assemblage of white brick buildings with tinted glass standing in an acre or two of lawn and trees. There were no fountains or benches of the kind that are supposed to soothe troubled minds. Rather the air was of tight security. There was a high cyclone fence with concrete-embedded posts and a glassed-in reception booth which looked a bit too well equipped electrically for the sort of place the clinic was supposed to be. Since my commando days I’ve always been tempted by cyclone fences—the sadistic instructors must have sent us over hundreds of the bastards at terrific risks to our virility—but not this one. It was wired up to blazes and looked as if sirens would wail if you touched it, while relaying TV pictures of your blackheads to the main block.
I walked up to the booth. Some distance from it a metallic voice bounced off my chest.
“Please state your business.”
The guy in the booth leaned forward to look at me through the glass. He wore a white shirt, grey jacket and black tie. Through the thick glass his face was a pale, distorted blob. No microphones were visible. He just spoke in my general direction and I heard him loud and clear. I had to assume he could hear me.
“I have an appointment to see one of Dr Brave’s patients at 7.30. My name is Hardy.”
He pressed a button, a pane of glass slid back. He put his right hand through and snapped fingers tightly gloved in black leather.
“Identification please.”
I fished in my pocket and pulled out the licence card. It looks like a student ID card and would get me into Robert Redford movies half-price if I looked twenty years younger and could stand Robert Redford. I handed the card over. More glass slid back and the guard looked me over critically like a Russian customs officer who can be satisfied as to your identification but is pretty unhappy that you exist at all. He nodded, handed back the card and pressed a button; a gate beside the booth swung open.
“Please walk up to the largest building ahead of you, Mr Hardy. Stay on the path all the way please.”
I went through. There were a few lights up on poles and some in hatches at ground level. They focused on the wide, intricately laid brick path. There was no excuse for slipping off it onto the velvet grass but I dawdled off to the left and took a couple of steps on the sward just for the hell of it. Closed circuit security TV is even more boring than the public kind, and I might just have made someone’s day.
Close up all the buildings had a severe practical look. The main block had heavyweight glass and timber doors at the top of a dozen steps. I went up, pushed them open with a featherlight touch and went into a cool, navy-carpeted lobby with a reception desk set at an artful angle. No blondes. A tall burly guy who looked like an Italian eased himself off the desk and stepped towards me. He was wearing a denim suit with knife edge creases and white shoes. His white silk shirt was open far enough to show a gold medallion nestling in a thatch of thick, black hair. His waist was slim, there was no flab on him and only a slight thickening of his features betrayed how many fights he’d been in. He looked as if he’d won most of them.
“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 me 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 the 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 Scot
s 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 whose 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.
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 an
d 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.”
