The nurse was tall and brawny; anyone who made jokes about him might very soon be attended by him in his professional capacity. I had trouble keeping up with him as he strode down the corridor. I broke into an undignified trot, then checked myself.
“Slow down nurse,” I panted, “and tell me where we’re going.”
“Sorry sir,” he slowed imperceptibly, but he called me sir. “We’re going to the conference room on the fourth floor. It’s a sort of VIP room. We get business executives and politicians in here from time to time. In for check-ups and so on. They sometimes need facilities like telex machines, computers and tape recorders. We’ve got them here, got a computer terminal and all.”
“Great, what about the ones who have to stay in bed?”
“It’s a big room, the beds can be wheeled in and arranged with writing tables and so on alongside. The room will hold ten beds. The hospital can provide a stenographer.”
“I don’t think I’ll need that, but it sounds like a good set-up. You sound proud of it.”
He gave me a sideways look and grinned. “It’s interesting,” he said. “One gentleman died in there when he got some bad news on the telex. Very wealthy gentleman he was.”
“Serve him right,” I said.
“That’s what I say. Here we are.”
The room was all he’d promised. It looked like a boardroom except for some of the chromium fittings and it smelled antiseptic instead of cigars and good booze. There was a long table with slots in for the beds. When in place the person in bed was within reach of a cassette tape recorder, a set of earphones, a telex keyboard, a fresh writing pad and a row of sharpened pencils. A chair was drawn up to one of the slots, two others were occupied. Ailsa sat propped up by pillows, her arms were bare and her hair was shining like a burnished helmet. She smiled at me as I came into the room in the shadow of Nurse Mahony, it looked as if all was forgiven. Susan was opposite her slumped down in her bed. There was a huge lump under the bedclothes from the waist down which made her look like a victim of Dr Moreau. She looked peeved and anxious.
It wasn’t going to be easy.
23
Susan started on me right away.
“Hello Hardy,” she jeered. “What are we having here, a seminar? Professor Hardy is it?”
Her old self was showing as it always would. I knew I could expect to see a deal more of it before we’d done our business. It would abort the whole exercise if it got out of hand, so I had to be careful not to provoke her too early. I nodded to the nurse who gave a you-rather-than-me look and closed the door behind him. I checked my watch, sat down in the chair and tried hard not to be pompous.
“Hello Susan, Ailsa,” I said calmly. “It’s a bit much isn’t it? We could probably go somewhere less formal, but they think they’re doing the right thing. It’s in deference to your millions I gather.”
“Oh, it’s all right,” Susan snapped, “though God knows what good it’ll do. Why aren’t you out looking for whoever ran me down?” She jerked her head at Ailsa. “And bombed her.”
At least she was acknowledging Ailsa’s existence, that was encouraging for something coming of the session.
“I am in a way,” I said quietly, “I’ll be surprised if we don’t work most of it right here.”
“How, will we play charades? We’re a bit disadvantaged.”
I looked across at Ailsa who hadn’t spoken.
“Ailsa’s employing me. Maybe this is not such a good idea after all. She can call it off if she likes, or you can pull out Susan.”
She came to the hook like a hungry fish, the last thing she wanted in her starved, unhappy soul was to miss this show.
“No, no, you could be right Hardy. I’m sorry, I do have faith in you. I’m in pain, I feel so wretched…”
Ailsa had sat there looking interested in Susan’s emotional swoops and amused at my role as MC. Now she displayed her tact.
“We’re neither of us very well, Cliff,” she said, “I tire very easily and I expect it’s the same with Susan. Shouldn’t we get on with it?”
“I think so,” I said. “Susan?”
“Yes, I’ve been thinking back. I know what I know. The police weren’t interested from the beginning.”
I didn’t want her to have it all down pat. It was time to stop being bland and agreeable.
“Yeah, so you told me. I want to cover a bit more ground than that. I’ve got a few questions for you both that could be uncomfortable, but first I’ve got to deliver a monologue of sorts. I’m sorry.”
Ailsa winced at the pomposity of it, but nothing showed in Susan’s face that I could interpret. She looked old and strained, the actual relationship between the two women could have been reversed to judge from their appearance.
“Neither of you has been quite frank with me,” I began. “Perhaps you haven’t been honest with yourselves. This affair has reached a crisis point, you’ve both put some trust in me and I know a lot more about you and your affairs than anyone else. But we’ve got to go a bit further. Bryn knew a lot about you but he’s dead. Someone else knows a lot too and he, or she, is the person we have to identify. It could be Ian Brave, I don’t think so, but he’s a candidate. If we’re going to pin this person down you’re both going to have to come clean about some things. You know what I mean. It might be painful for you, but you’re both under some sort of threat of death, so the pain is relative to that. I want undertakings from you that you’ll be honest, to the limits of your knowledge.”
“And sanity,” said Susan. She was wrecking a fingernail with her teeth.
“Of course.” I smiled at her trying to lighten the mood a bit. “I don’t want either of you going back to Nanny and the wielded slipper, but short of that, can I have your word that you’ll tell it like it is, or was?”
They both nodded, Susan slowly and painfully, Ailsa with a neutral, sceptical smile.
“Right, Ailsa you told me that you thought Mark Gutteridge had been hounded to death, if not exactly murdered.”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“You believed Brave to be behind it. If it wasn’t Brave, or if it wasn’t only Brave, does that give you any other ideas? Is there anything else you remember as relevant? I mean about your husband’s conduct, his state of mind, apart from what you knew Brave was doing to him?”
Ailsa massaged her temples and drew her palms down the side of her face.
“God, I wish I had a cigarette,” she said, “but I’m giving them up. Yes, there is something. I didn’t mention it before because I thought Brave was all that mattered.” She looked across at the other woman. “It’s going to be hard on her,” she said.
“That’s inevitable,” I said, “let’s hear it.”
“Let me get the sequence right.” She paused for a full minute. Susan kept her eyes on Ailsa’s face and not a muscle moved in her own. Flesh seemed to be falling away from her bones, she wanted to hear it and at the same time she wanted to be far away.
“About a month before he died,” Ailsa began slowly, “Mark found out that Bryn was queer. An anonymous letter gave him all the details, so he said. I never saw the letter. Bryn hadn’t given Mark the slightest ground for suspicion, he acted very straight, macho even if you can imagine it. But he told Mark that he’d been queer since he was sixteen. Mark was devastated by it. He became impotent, at least he was with me and I don’t think there was anyone else. He was distraught about it, it was total. He’d been pretty active before, not a stud or anything, but enthusiastic. Well, he started reading about impotence and he came across the Don Juan complex thing, latent homosexuality and so on, you know it?”
“Yes.”
“Mark became convinced that he was tainted and responsible for Bryn being the way he is, was.”
“Is that all? Did he see a doctor?” I knew the answer before I asked the question — he wouldn’t, couldn’t, not Mark Gutteridge.
“No, he didn’t. I’m quite sure he only talked about it to me, and then only because he had to. But that isn’t all, there’s one thing more. About a week before he died Mark was involved in a fight, he had very badly skinned knuckles and he’d dislocated two fingers. He wasn’t marked on the face. I think he must have hurt the other person very badly. Mark was a powerful man.”