The Dying Trade ch-1

by Peter Corris

The television hadn’t done him justice. He was of medium height and build and his smooth, olive-skinned face was alight with what you’d have to call piercing intelligence. His white coat was a thing of beauty and had certainly cost more than every stitch I had on. He was bald but he looked like he’d never given it a second’s worry. He frowned when I came into the room.

  “I’m sorry to intrude doctor, I know you’re busy but this is important. My name’s Hardy, a patient of yours is a client of mine — Miss Gutteridge.”

  That was stretching the facts but I wouldn’t get time for the niceties.

  “Ah yes,” he said, “the detective. She mentioned you. She seems to trust you. Please sit down.”

  I sat. He had everything the top Macquarie Street man should have — voice, looks and a fitness and vitality to him that gave you something to aim for.

  “I’ll come straight to it, doctor,” I said. “I want to arrange a meeting between Miss Gutteridge and her father’s widow, a Miss Ailsa Sleeman. She is only a few years older than Susan Gutteridge.”

  “Why?” he said as I drew breath.

  “To discuss the circumstances surrounding Mark Gutteridge’s death four years ago. Both women have been threatened and assaulted, the reason why lies back at that point I believe. I think such a meeting would be productive and help me to pursue the case more effectively.”

  “Can you give me some more details, briefly?”

  He wasn’t fidgeting or looking at his watch. I had his whole attention and had to make the most of it.

  “Not many. The police investigation of the death was less than exhaustive. Some facts are unclear, some things went missing, unexplained. There’s blackmail involved and intimidation. Susan Gutteridge’s insulin was tampered with for example.”

  He leaned back in his chair without taking his eyes off my face.

  “Yes, she told me that. I find it intriguing, I must say.”

  “You’ll authorise the meeting?”

  “Susan Gutteridge is an unstable person. I tell you this in professional confidence of course.”

  I accepted the compliment.

  “Her diabetes is in a mess from what she tells me, she needs a lot of rest and treatment. But a diabetic’s condition is affected by the emotions to a great extent. Susan Gutteridge is very worried and frightened. Have you considered the possibility that she is guilty of some crime?”

  I said I had and expressed the opinion that it might help if it all came out. He stroked his chin and let his eyes stray off to his bookshelf.

  “So they say,” he murmured, “so they say.”

  “There’s an old enmity between Susan Gutteridge and Ailsa Sleeman, this meeting might resolve it. Ailsa is an intelligent woman and a strong one, she could become a friend to Susan.”

  “That’s probably better psychology,” he said. “Very well Mr Hardy, I’ll authorise the meeting. Where and when? Susan Gutteridge is in hospital, you realise.”

  “I do, so is Ailsa, same place.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “What for?”

  I told him and that seemed to clinch it. He said he was going to the hospital early in the afternoon and would leave messages supporting what I wanted to do. I had no doubt that those messages would be treated like the order of the day. I thanked him and asked if he’d like to be present at the session. He looked ruefully down at his desk calendar.

  “I would like to be,” he said, “very much, but I simply haven’t the time. You must let me know how it works out.”

  I said I would, we shook hands and I went out. A fat woman in a coat much too warm for the day that was shaping up was sitting in the waiting room. I gave her my hard-boiled look and she squirmed a bit. Mrs Steiner was looking flustered and she pressed the wrong button on the intercom when Pincus buzzed her. She got it right on the second try.

  “Mrs Hamersley-Smith is here doctor.”

  Pincus said something inaudible to me and Mrs Steiner repressed a smile. She raised a finger which boasted a long, blood red fingernail. Mrs Hamersley-Smith waddled past me and reached the door just as Pincus opened it. Beautiful timing. I smiled at Mrs Steiner.

  “Can you tell me when Dr Pincus is due at the hospital and how long he’ll be there?”

  The twenty minutes of the boss’s time had done me a power of good in her eyes. She flicked at her desk calendar and ran the crimson nail down a page of the appointments book.

  “He’s there for an hour and a half,” she said, “from two o’clock until 3.30.”

  I thanked her and left. I carried the image of her dark, bottomless eyes with me all the way back to the street.

  I had a few hours to kill which isn’t supposed to happen to a private detective busy on a case but sometimes does. I could have killed it by doing some banking and writing cheques for people who could legitimately expect them, or I could have gone to my dentist for a check-up or I could have put the car in for a service. I didn’t. I walked across to the Public Library and ordered a batch of newspapers for the year 1972. They came on microfilm in fifteen minutes. I worked through the papers pretty fast looking at the business news mostly and checking the correspondence columns trying to get a feel for the shape of things as they were then.

  Mark Gutteridge got a fair bit of coverage as a canny and successful land developer, but there was nothing out of the ordinary about it — no shady deals hinted at, no subsidiary companies collapsing and ruining shareholders. His death got a big spread and there were follow-up stories over the next few days. I read this stuff closely to brief myself for the meeting later in the day. The reporters were starved of facts from the start. The cops were close-mouthed about their investigations and the coverage soon tailed off into human interest material about Gutteridge and his family. There were a couple of good photos of Ailsa, an indifferent one of Bryn and one of Susan that was so poor that it took imagination to relate it to the person I knew. There was no mention of robbery, no details on the gun or the wound, and the coroner’s verdict came in as smooth as silk stockings on shaved legs — “Death by his own hand while of unsound mind”. I made a few notes, tucked them away in my pocket and told the attendant that I’d finished with the papers.

  I left the library looking for somewhere to have lunch. I approached a cafe in a new chrome, concrete and glass building and a name on a directory board jumped out at me. Sleeman Enterprises’ office was on the fourth floor and I took the lift up just for the hell of it. The decor was all plastic, glass and middle-of-the-road wall to wall carpet. There were a few pot plants, not so many as to prevent the employees seeing each other, and a general air of work being done. A desk just outside the lift had a sign reading “Inquiries” hanging above it and a dark-haired girl looked up from her typing when she saw me peering keenly about. A good sign that, a receptionist who can type. She asked if she could help in a voice that suggested she was serious about the offer. I took out my wallet and extracted a card a little guy who’d come to my office a month ago had given me. He gave me the card but he knew I was a lost cause.

  “My name is Riddout,” I said, “Claude Riddout, I’m from Simon’s Office Furniture and Decor.”

  “Yes Mr Riddout?”

  “Well, I was just visiting a client on another floor and I thought I’d glance in on a few other establishments just to see if our services might be required.”

  “I don’t think…”

  I waved both hands in the air. “No, no, I can see that everything is very nice here, very tasteful indeed, I compliment you, it must be very pleasant to work in such surroundings, very pleasant indeed. You wouldn’t believe the drabness I see in some places.”

  I’d succeeded in boring her silly in half a minute which is good going.

  “Yes, it’s fine, now uhmm… is there anything…?”

  “No, no, if I could just look about a little, take a wander down a corridor or two? I promise I won’t intrude on anyone. I’d hate to interrupt the workings of such a smooth running organisation. Just a peep, just a pr
ofessional peep.”

  She grabbed the out although she had to cover herself. “Well, I really shouldn’t allow you to, but if you make it brief I suppose it’ll be all right. The stairs are at the end of that corridor.”

  She pointed, I ducked my head at her and set off down the passage. There were three offices off to the left along one passage, one on each side of a short connecting corridor and a further three or four on both sides of another passage. Some of the offices had names on the door, some didn’t. Some were partitioned to permit a secretary to work away out of sight of her master but within beck and call. Along one wall was a large map of Australia and the Pacific islands. Little pins with red heads were stuck in at various points — all the mainland capital cities as well as places like Geelong and Wollongong, and here and there among the islands — Port Moresby, Suva, Noumea, Pago Pago.

  The biggest office had Walter Chalmers’ name on the door. The next biggest was occupied by Ross Haines. I opened the door to Haines’ secretary’s cubicle and said “Oh sorry” to a startled blonde. I did the same to Chalmers’ secretary and got an ice cold look from a middle aged woman wearing violently dyed red hair and a Chanel suit. I went back to the lifts past the receptionist who saw me coming, put her head down and kept it there like Anne Boleyn on the block.

  I grabbed some fruit from a street stand and made do with that for lunch.

  At 3.45 I was at the hospital and as unpopular as a bikini in a nudist camp. I’d been shunted about from reception desk to waiting room and back again, but, given the size of the place, I’d made it fairly fast into the hospital director’s office. He had a couple of medical degrees, Harvard business administration ticket, a hyphenated name and he didn’t like me. He looked clean-cut like an American lawyer and he spoke in a clipped upper class voice like an English doctor.

  “This is all extremely irregular, Mr Hardy. Hospital routines are delicate things, not to be tampered with lightly.”

  I didn’t say anything, the fact that I was there meant that I was going to get what I wanted and if I had to take a little crap from him along the way I would. He ran his hand over his greying crewcut and riffled through some papers on his desk.

  “However, the two ladies are not dangerously ill, private patients of course so no one will be disturbed.”

  What he meant was that the two ladies were rich and rich people who’ve been well treated in hospital sometimes remember that when they’ve got their chequebooks out. I nodded.

  “Dr Pincus and Sir John concur in the matter,” he went on, “so I think it can be arranged.”

  I don’t know how hospital directors are fixed for status and prospects, but this one had elected to keep two medical heavies very firmly on side. That was fine with me. I grinned at him infuriatingly. He levelled up his papers and plonked a solid silver paperweight in the shape of a kidney on top of them. It was my day for making people glad to get me out of their sight. He flipped an intercom switch.

  “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.

  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.