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 and 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.”
