“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 who’s 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 and 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.”
