The Dying Trade ch-1 Page 11

  We proceeded in a huddle as close as we could to the main gate without being noticed. We decided to take Tickener’s car because that meant the reporter and photographer could go in with a maximum of cover. Maybe Evans was hedging his bet a little, but no one argued. Jones huddled down in the back of the FB, Tickener hunched over the wheel. We waited. The clinic grounds and the reception booth were almost floodlit, very bright. Evans eased a black automatic out of his holster and checked it. I patted my gun. There was no traffic within earshot and the quiet of Longueville at that moment was just the sort of quiet the residents had paid all that money for.

  The clinic blacked out suddenly as if it had been covered by an old-time photographer’s cloth. Evans and I sprinted for the reception booth. By the little moonlight and the street light we could see the guard flailing around pushing buttons. Evans fronted the glass cage and pointed his automatic at the guard’s nose. He reached for a sawn-off shotgun which rested against the wall of the booth but he was too slow. I had the side door open and my gun in his earhole before he could grab the weapon.

  “Easy does it friend, you don’t want to die for five hundred a month.”

  He saw the wisdom of it and let go the shotgun. Evans came into the booth and prodded the guard out. The guard walked towards the car, moonlight glinted on the barrel of a pistol which one of the detectives held out of the car window trained on his chest.

  The light came on again and Grant pushed a couple of buttons on the instrument panel in the box. The wide gates swung open. I grabbed the shotgun and went out and through the gates at a run. Evans took a swipe at the control panel and followed me. Tickener came burning up to the gate and we ran along beside him as the FB roared up to the clinic. He wavered on and off the brick path and the wheels churned furrows up in the smooth green grass on either side. There were three cars parked near the main entrance and I was shouting at Tickener to block them when a red and blue flash came from a window in the main block. Glass shattered in the car and I heard a yelp from Jones. Tickener stalled the motor and we crouched down behind the car. Another flash and a bullet whined off the Holden’s bonnet. I peeked around and snapped two shots at the window. Evans crouched double and ran for the porch. He went up the steps, fired twice into the glass doors and jumped aside. A bullet from inside splintered a panel on the door and I made it to the other side of the porch in six heart-in-the-mouth strides. Footsteps pounded up the path and the gun behind the window opened up and Varson dropped like a stone. I couldn’t tell if he’d been hit or not. Evans kicked the shattered door in and we both went into the lobby, almost on our bellies. It was empty. Then the door at the end of the room opened and Bruno fired a quick shot at Evans before ducking back. He missed and Grant took a chance. He rushed through the door and flattened himself against the wall. I went through and pasted myself against the other side. Bruno was half way down the corridor and his next shot whistled between us. Evans dropped to one knee, sighted quickly and fired. Bruno screeched and went down like the last pin in the lane and his gun skittered crazily along the polished floor.

  Two men came out of a door on the right. One of them snapped a shot at me and they jumped over Bruno and rounded the bend at the end of the passage. I was vaguely conscious of movement and sound behind me and took a quick look. Tickener was crouched down near Evans and slightly hampering his attempt to take a shot, his face white and his eyes wide and scared. Jones was standing up behind Evans, snapping and flashing. A man lumbered out of the door the other two had come from. He was big, dark hair spilled through the unbuttoned top of his pyjamas coat and he was groping at the tie of the pants. His face was heavily bandaged and the pistol he carried was pointed nowhere in particular.

  Evans shook Tickener away and bellowed. “Costello, police, let go the gun.”

  The blind-looking bandaged face turned slowly towards the sound of the voice. Jones stepped forward and snapped. The bulb went off and Grant threw up his hand to ward off the glare. Costello lined him up like an Olympic shooter with 20/20 vision. I swung the shotgun on him and fired. The charge hit him in the chest, lifted him up and slammed him against the white wall. He slid slowly down it, leaving a bloody trail behind him like a wolf shot high up in the snow country coming down the slope to die. Jones walked up and took a careful picture. His hands were as still and steady as Costello’s corpse.

  I put the shotgun down. Evans was leaning against the wall. His gun was pointing at the floor and his lips were moving silently. He knew how close he’d come.

  “There’s more of them, Grant,” I said quietly.

  As I spoke the door behind us opened and Varson came through it sideways, propping it open with his back. He waved a man through with a quick gesture of his enormous, gun-filled right hand. Dr Ian Brave strolled into the passage.

  “I got him outside,” said Varson, “he was leaving.”

  “He stays,” Evans said.

  Brave looked at the crumpled, bloody ruin on the floor. His face had a vacant, other-worldly look — for my money he was floating high and free somewhere a long way off. Along the corridor Bruno groaned and tried to pull himself up against the wall; everyone had forgotten him.

  14

  The quiet tableau broke up after a minute or two. Jones backed off down the passage and took a quick picture of Brave with Varson looming over his shoulder. Brave was Varson’s prize, all he had to show for the night, and he kept close to him like a nervous spouse at a party. Evans, Tickener and I went into the room which Costello had come out of to die. The window leading out into the shrubbery at the side of the building gaped open.

  “He had two goons with him the other day,” I said, “one of them socked me but I guess they weren’t shooters.”

  Tickener scribbled on a pad and Evans grunted. “Looks that way.”

  “Two hopped it just after I shot the Italian. That makes four on the loose. I hope the boys at the gate got them, but it’s a lot to handle.” He brooded on this for a moment and then shrugged. “You didn’t quite level with me about the strength of the troops, did you Cliff?” I opened my hands apologetically. “Never mind,” he said, “we done OK.” Varson called his name and he went out into the corridor. Tickener looked at me inquiringly but I turned away from him and looked out through the window thinking my own murderous thoughts. Tickener walked out. I rolled a cigarette, lit it and followed him.

  Susan Gutteridge was standing in the corridor along with a woman with wild hair and eyes. They both wore severe calico nightdresses. Brave was trying to do his hand-holding act with Susan but Varson was shouldering him aside. Jones had left the scene and Bruno had passed out. The other patient was staring at the body on the floor. Suddenly she collapsed to her knees and pitched forward over it. Blood soaked into her nightdress and she daubed it over her face and body.

  “Sally,” she moaned, “oh Sally, Sally.”

  Evans started pushing the buttons. He told Varson to take Brave in and book him for harbouring an escapee. He pointed at Tickener who was still scribbling and poking his long thin nose into rooms off the passage. “OK, Tickener,” he roared, “you’ve had your ringside seat, now do something useful. Get on the first phone you see and call an ambulance. Call police headquarters and tell them I want a police doctor out here right away.”

  Tickener turned away obediently and Evans rapped out a few more words. “And a nurse or two, tell them about the women.” I was next. “So you know these ladies?” he snapped.

  “Take it easy, Grant. Yes, I know the younger one, she’s Susan Gutteridge.” He rubbed his hand over his eyes, then looked down surprised to see that the hand was still holding a gun.

  “OK, OK,” he said tightly. “Get her away somewhere. Jesus what a mess!” The older woman was still embracing the corpse and sobbing. I took the Gutteridge woman’s arm and led her down the passage.

  I didn’t remember where her room was, so I let her lead me. She plodded on not saying anything until we came to room 38. I pushed the door open an
d she walked in ahead of me. She still hadn’t spoken a word. I had nothing I wanted to say to her, but I felt an impulse to stir her from her trance if I could. Perhaps I didn’t want her to have the luxury of a cotton wool wrapping while people were dying around her.

  “Do you remember me, Miss Gutteridge?”

  “Of course I do,” she snapped, “do you think I’m crazy like Grace?”

  “Grace?”

  “Grace Heron, back there.” She jerked her head at the door.

  “No, no I don’t. But you’ve had a shock, I thought…”

  “I’m all right I tell you,” she cut in, “what’s been happening here? I heard shots.”

  I was surprised at her composure. When I’d last seen her she was as fragile as a spider web, ready to be torn apart and dismembered by the slightest harshness, now she seemed to have put together a tough, no-nonsense personality. But it was hard to tell how real it was or how enduring it would be. She sat quietly on the bed while I gave her an outline of events as they related to what she’d seen in the hall. She nodded occasionally and once smoothed down the rough material over her thighs — they weren’t bad thighs — otherwise she kept still and attentive. I didn’t mention Ailsa in this explanation, but when she asked me directly who I was working for now, I told her, including what had happened to Ailsa that night. I didn’t bring Bryn into it. She said something reassuring and patted my arm so there must have been some indication of how I felt in what I said. It might have been the automatic, professional touch of the social worker, but it felt sincere.

  “Well, Mr Hardy,” she said, “you’ve really got yourself tangled up with the Gutteridges, haven’t you? Have you any idea yet who was threatening me and did these other things, I mean to Giles and Ailsa?”

  “I don’t even know if the same people are involved,” I said, “Ailsa thought Brave was behind it all.” I waited for her reaction to that. She bit her lip and pondered it so I decided to go on. I wanted a drink badly, but it seemed possible that this new woman with the mind of her own might help me do some reappraising of the case at this point. “That could be,” I continued, “if he’s fallen out with an accomplice. You saw a ferrety-looking guy out there?”

  She nodded. “Yes.”

  “He’s a reporter. A woman phoned him at his paper and tipped him off about Brave. She had an accent that sounded French. It could be the woman who phoned you.”

  Her face screwed up in distaste. “Yes, I suppose so, her voice could have had a French sound to it. I’m not much good at that sort of thing. I was rotten at languages at school.”

  I was liking her more. “Me too,” I said. “Then again, your brother might fit. He could have killed Giles himself and put the frighteners on you and arranged for the bomb in Ailsa’s car. But there’s one thing wrong with that line of theory.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Why would he call me in in the first place?”

  She gave it some thought. “It seems to me that in books, you know, detective stories, the guilty person sometimes hires the detective. Doesn’t it ever happen in real life?”

  “Yeah, sometimes it does, it can be a good blind. But Bryn seemed to be genuinely distressed about Giles, it didn’t look like an act to me. It’s still a possibility though, if he was tied in to some deal with someone else and they fell out.”

  “What someone else?” she asked.

  “God knows. I’m just trying the idea out. Brave maybe? But I get conflicting reports on Bryn and Brave’s relationship. I just don’t have any firm candidates.”

  “Well, I can fill you in a little there, on Brave and Bryn. God, it sounds like a stage act, doesn’t it? What do you want to know?”

  “For a start whether Bryn and the doctor were on good terms and whether Bryn trusted him. And secondly, who really advised you to come to this place and put yourself under Brave’s care?”

  The cigarette I’d lit fifteen minutes before was dead between my fingers. I fumbled for a match and lit it, it tasted bitter and stale and I crushed it out into an ashtray on the night table beside the bed. I rolled a new one and fiddled with it. She watched me with a look of concentration on her face. I lit the cigarette.

  “Bryn and Dr Brave became very close after my father died,” she said, “Bryn saw a lot of him socially and professionally. You know what Bryn’s like, his… orientation?” I nodded. “Well, he’s got it sorted out most of the time and Giles is… was good for him. He functions in business life very effectively and in private life pretty well. He’s been doing better at it in the last two years, but he does know some terrible people, vicious, depraved people. Dr Brave helped him a lot, trying to get Bryn to control and channel his impulses. Bryn can be very cruel. I’d be very surprised if there was any rift between them.”

  “Bryn told me there was,” I said, “and he also said that he was against you going into the clinic.”

  “That’s just not true.” She frowned and spoke quickly. “Ever since my diabetes started playing up and I began having these bad spells Bryn has urged me to rely on Dr Brave.”

  “When did this trouble start?”

  “Oh, fairly soon after my father died. Diabetes can be affected by emotional upset. I just couldn’t seem to stabilise myself again, and I’d been stabilised for years.”

  “When did the diabetes set in?”

  A shadow seemed to pass over her face which surprised me, but I was adjusting to the new personality and forgetting about the old, fragmented one.

  “I was sixteen when it started,” she said shortly. “After Mark died I started working harder and harder for charity and other causes. Dr Brave encouraged that too, but I got very tired and I came here more frequently.”

  She seemed now to have a completely different attitude to Brave from the one I’d seen before and it puzzled me. At the risk of breaking up her present helpful mood I decided to ask her about it.

  “You seem able to talk pretty objectively about Brave now,” I said. “Do you feel differently about him?”

  She nodded. “Yes, yes I do. I seem to recall thinking you were a perceptive man when I met you before.” I tried to look modest. “You are,” she went on. “I felt differently about him the minute I saw him in the passage with all that blood and that man standing next to him. Is he a policeman?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought so. Dr Brave doesn’t control him. He controls everyone here you see and he was controlling everyone at home — me, certainly, and Bryn to a large extent. I suppose not having the treatments for a few days might have something to do with it.”

  “What are the treatments?”

  “I’ve been on a course of injections, hormones. And I have hypnotherapy sessions with Dr Brave.”

  “What goes on in them?”

  “I don’t remember very clearly. They seem to be mainly about the day Mark died. I was the first one in the family to see him. Dr Brave seems to think my trouble is psychosomatic, stemming from finding my father like that. I had a sort of memory lapse, a breakdown, you know.”

  I knew. “And Brave questions you about this under hypnosis?”

  “Yes, at least I think so, it’s hard to remember when I come out of it.”

  “Does it do you any good do you think?”

  She wrinkled her forehead and drew a deep, slow breath; she was treating the question as if it contained a mint fresh idea she’d never heard before.

  “I thought it did at the time,” she said, “now I’m not so sure. No, that’s not true, now I don’t think it did. On and on about safes and things…”

  “Safes? Brave asked you about safes?”

  “I think so, yes. But I don’t know anything about safes. He said they were symbolic, the womb and all that. I couldn’t ever seem to satisfy him about it.”

  She was getting tired and all this forced recall was making her edgy. She still looked a lot better than she had when Brave was doing his Svengali bit all over her though. I told her to get into bed and she did it.
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  “There’ll be a nurse here soon. You might as well spend the night. Then in the morning, if you feel up to it, I think you should check yourself out and go see a good doctor. Get the diabetes straightened out. Will you?”

  She sniffed and wrinkled her nose before answering me.

  “What’s that smell?” she said.

  I lifted my hands. “Cordite, I’ve just fired a shotgun.”

  “Did you kill him, the man with the bandaged face?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He looked blind.”

  “He was meant to, he wasn’t though.”

  She nodded, then glanced across at the dressing table, on it was a white plastic case, about four inches tall, with a screw top, and a roll of cotton wool. She gave the kit a look I’d seen before — it was her lifeline and her cross.

  “Do you inject yourself?” I asked.

  “Mostly, not in here though. Do you know anything about diabetes?”

  “Not much. My mother was one, but she was a drinker. When she was on a binge it used to go all wrong and she’d get in a bad way.”

  “I’m not a drinker,” she snapped.

  “No, but you’ve got a problem with your condition just the same. Will you see another doctor?”

  She lifted the sides of her hair up and let her fingers slip through the soft waves. She still looked tired, older than she should, but there was some shine in her eyes that could just possibly be hope.

  “I don’t know why I should let you tell me what to do,” she said. “But yes, I will. I’m still interested in your investigations. Will you let me know how they proceed?” I said I would. “And I’d like to see Ailsa in hospital,” she went on, “if I can be of any help I will.”