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.
“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.”
I had some red Codrals from the night before in my pocket and I offered them to her as a sedative. I thought she might need them to get to sleep in a building where a man had died the hard way. She took them.
“Thank you, Mr Hardy. Dr Brave would never allow any kind of sedative. I’d lie here for hours some nights. Thank you.”
“Good night Miss Gutteridge.” She swallowed the tablets with some water and let herself slide down the bank of pillows. “Susan,” she said. “Goodnight, Mr Hardy.”