The Dying Trade by Peter Corris Read Free Book Online Page A

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.
    â€œDoctor, 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.
    â€œMiss Gutteridge, your brother hired me . . .”
    â€œBryn!” 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.
    â€œSusan, 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.
    â€œI’m sorry, Mr Harvey?”
    â€œHardy.”
    â€œHardy. 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?”
    â€œYes,” I said, “and other things.”
    â€œOther 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.
    â€œI 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”.
    â€œI’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.
    â€œYou 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