Disappointment hit me like an electric shock; I gaped and felt unsteady on my feet. Bettina Selby’s voice cut through the accumulated tension.
‘It’s not him.’ She stepped in from the passage and her husband’s eyes moved between us both as he got the connection.
‘Not who?’ Blood ran down Russell James’ face and spotted his cream silk shirt.
‘Yes, who?’ Selby got up and took a couple of steps out from the table. I moved and brought the Colt up to cover him but I was hopelessly unprepared. I’d let the gun drop while I’d watched the bandages come off and now I wasn’t sure enough where it was pointing; now there was an extra person in the room and one of the others was moving. These are excuses for the fact that I ended up with my back to a door which had opened. I knew that when I felt something hard and sharp bite into my neck.
‘Put the gun down, Hardy,’ Selby said smugly, ‘or he’ll blow your head off.’
I let the gun drop and turned slowly. The man holding the shotgun was nearly as tall as the one dabbing at his bloodied face. He had an enormous ballooning belly and three chins. His face still wore the idiot grin I’d seen in the health studio when he was cleaning a mirror but the light was better and my eyes were ready to see whatever there was to see — under the fat and behind the grin and the vacant, crazy eyes was Warwick Baudin.
He still wore the battered T shirt, he had old sandshoes on his feet and his jeans were unfastened at the waist to give extra room to his vast gut.
The room was dead quiet. Having made his entrance, the fat man didn’t seem to know what to do next; he looked at Selby and James who appeared to be as scared as I was.
‘I heard the noise,’ he said. His voice was slow and thick as if his tongue was too big for his mouth. He was in a bad way, his hair was lank and greasy and his skin pale and puffy. There was dirt in the folds of flesh on his neck and his pale grey eyes were bleary and rimmed with scum. He didn’t look much like a Chatterton now.
‘Nothing to worry about,’ I said quietly and I put out a tentative hand towards the shot gun.
He threw back his head and let out a high, giggling laugh, but the double barrel stayed where it would cut me in half. Selby who’d nominated himself master of ceremonies a minute ago had lost his confidence; he moved back behind the table and looked as if he’d have liked to crawl under it.
‘He’s ripped out of his mind,’ James said. He looked down at my Colt on the floor which was closer to him than me.
‘Easy,’ I said, ‘he could blast us both. This isn’t worth dying for.’
It was a crazy situation, like being bailed up against a wall by a child with a bazooka. Bettina and Verna Reid seemed almost uninterested, reserving all their attention, packed with malice, for each other. With an effort I called the old training into play and looked at his hands; in contrast to the rest of him they were clean and well maintained. It was a nice, sleuthly point but not of much use just now. Then I noticed something else and my breath started to come a little easier: only one of the hammers on the old gun was cocked and his finger was on the wrong trigger. That gave me all the time in the world.
Baudin turned his head a fraction to look at Bettina. ‘Who’s she?’ he said thickly.
I moved fast and punched his upper left arm and swooped on his right wrist with my other hand. The barrels swung down to the floor and his finger clawed convulsively: the gun roared and pellets sprayed up at us from the floor. I wrenched the shotgun free and dug Baudin hard with it in the belly. He went down with a grunt. I bent for my gun and then I was holding all the aces again. Also I was one of the three people not bleeding: Baudin had taken some pellets in the legs, Selby in the shoulder and James had both hands over his face and was moaning quietly. It was a bad day for James.
Bettina got busy. She dumped her bag and helped her husband and James into chairs. Baudin was shuffling back towards the wall and I let him get there and prop himself against it. I told Bettina to get some water and look for something to use as a bandage. I stood by the window and made and lit a cigarette. I wanted a drink. Bettina came back with a basin and a bottle of disinfectant and a shirt. She ripped and dabbed and swabbed and the wounded bore it stoically. Baudin had a few pellets embedded in the pudgy flesh of his right leg; Selby was only nicked; Russell James had taken a pellet in the face — it had ploughed up his cheek and veered off along the side of his head before reaching the eye. Lucky.
When she’d finished ministering, Bettina picked up her bag, opened it and pulled out the brandy. She cocked an eye at me and I nodded. She came back from the kitchen with five glasses and poured a generous slug into each. I hooked up a chair and sat in it with the shotgun across my lap and the handgun on the edge of the table. No one had spoken for some time and the grunters and moaners had fallen silent.
‘All right,’ I said. ‘All this is nasty but nothing fatal. I think it’s time we sorted this mess out.’
I looked across at Baudin who was staring down at his glass; he picked it up and drained it straight off. I motioned to Bettina to pour him another and he did the same again. He seemed uninterested in the proceedings, just keen to get as much alcohol inside him as was allowed.
I drank some brandy. ‘What have you got to say Russ?’
He sipped his drink and didn’t answer.
‘No, well you wouldn’t want to say too much because you’re the boy who’s really in trouble.’
‘Why?’ There was a whining tone in his voice now and all the polish had rubbed off him.
‘Henry Brain, the old man in Darlinghurst. You hit him. He died.’
‘I didn’t hit him. We struggled and he fell.’
‘You sure as hell didn’t send for a doctor. Look, maybe you’re telling the truth. There’ll be a medical report that might bear you out but either way you look bad — hitting or struggling, what’s the difference. It depends how we play it. Have you got a record?’
‘A bit, not much,’ he said sullenly.
‘But you see my point don’t you? My client carries a fair bit of weight still and I want to keep her happy. I might leave you out if I get co-operation.’ I drank some more brandy and looked down at the sad fat man with the empty glass on the floor. ‘He’s the grandson, right?’
‘Don’t tell him, Russell,’ Verna Reid barked, ‘don’t tell him a thing.’
James looked down at Baudin who was playing with the glass in his big, meaty hands.
‘We think so,’ he said slowly. ‘It was all Richard’s idea.’
Selby opened his mouth to say something but I waved my glass at him and he shut it.
‘The way I see it,’ I said, ‘is that Brain spotted fatty here and blabbed something to you about his long-lost son. He told you that he’d been married to Mr Justice Chatterton’s daughter and you knew Selby here was married to her now and you thought he might be interested.’
James nodded and put down half his brandy. Bettina looked interested and hadn’t touched her drink yet.
‘That’s right,’ James said. ‘Richard took over then. We… he sent old Henry up to pressure the old lady but he made a mess of it. Then Henry dropped out of sight for a while, Richard had given him some money. Then the Judge died. We didn’t know what to do after that. Then Richard…” He stopped and took a nervous sip of his drink.
‘Richard came up with the idea of you latching onto Miss Reid,’ I said. ‘Dirty trick.’
Verna Reid’s face lost its boldness, her hands flew up and fluttered like the wings of a bird beating against bars. ‘I thought you…’ she said, ‘I thought that we…’
‘Charades, Verna,’ I said. ‘All charades. Do you know what Lady Catherine planned to do with the estate?’
‘Not really, she’s mad. One time she told me she’d leave it to me, another time she said she’d leave me nothing. She hinted that there was someone else, I knew she didn’t mean her.” She shot a look at Bettina who was nursing her drink and leaning forward as if she was watching a good play.
‘Just what did you have in mind then, Miss Reid?’ Bettina purred.
She didn’t answer; she looked at James who was staring down into his glass and at Selby who avoided her eyes. She seemed to know that she’d reached the end of things — a relationship, prospects, a job. Her eyes were empty and dull.
‘I slaved for that old bitch. The wages are a joke. She was always promising things, promising. Well, the place is pretty run down and she hasn’t got any money to speak of. The way things were going she’d have had to sell it sometime.’
‘I get it,’ I said. ‘You could help that process along a bit and Russell here could do himself a bit of good when the place came up for sale.’
‘Yes,’ she said softly.
‘What about Booth, the lawyer?’ Bettina said angrily. ‘He should have been able to protect her, he was my father’s friend.’
‘He’s an old fogey,’ Verna Reid said. ‘She had him completely bluffed.’ The tears that had flowed when I was heavying James had left streaks down her face and they got wet again as fresh tears started. ‘It would have worked, it would have. And then this fool had to play around with this grandson idea.’ Selby poured himself some more brandy and said nothing.
‘They had the grandson idea first,’ I said. ‘You were just a supporting act. They kept both ideas running and couldn’t decide which one to back. You’re a tough nut Miss Reid, you put James on to me and he tailed me down the coast.’ The words mortified me. Being tailed twice by amateurs and not picking it up is bad for the ego. I said: ‘What about the old lady?’ to James and some of the anger in my voice was for myself.
James jerked and held his hands out, palms up as if to ward me off. ‘I didn’t touch her, I swear it. I got scared and came back to talk to Richard and then you were all over the place. We didn’t know what to do.’
Selby had finished his drink and he reached across and took the bottle again. ‘Good on you, Russ,’ he said, ‘you always did drop your bundle. Well Hardy, what are you going to do about it?’
I was suddenly very angry, disgusted with them and part of the disgust was because there was nothing much I could do about them if I wanted to bring things out right for me. But I felt unclean just being in the same room as them. I suddenly wished I was in old Sir Clive’s shoes and had the power to send the whole crew of them to the slammer for a long, long time. But I kept my voice flat and unemotional. ‘You could go up on a series of conspiracy charges apart from Brain’s manslaughter. And there’s the drug angle. I could tie you in with Albie and put you right out of business. Health studios, weight-lifting, see what I mean?’
Selby looked glum. Bettina was showing no interest in him at all and I had the feeling that he’d be a back number pretty soon. She was sipping her drink, not desperately, and looking curiously at Baudin.
‘That brings us up to him.’ I inclined my head at Baudin. ‘What drugs is he on? Don’t tell me you don’t know about that, James. Albie says different.’
‘Speed, lots of pills, Mogadon, Largactyl, you know. Plenty of grog as well. He’s a hopeless case.’
‘You helped him along. Does he know anything about this? Does he know who he is?’
‘I don’t think so. He was on the skids when old Henry saw him. We tried to smarten him up at one stage, Richard had some idea of using him some way, but it fell through. He’s been pretty well out of it since then.’
‘Bit of a Svengali are you, Dicky?’ I said to Selby.
Selby pulled cigarettes out of his shirt pocket and lit up, struggling for nonchalance. ‘I’m not saying a word until I speak to my lawyer.’
‘Lawyer!’ I had to laugh. ‘You haven’t got a prayer there, Dicky boy. When he hears who you’ve been up against your lawyer’ll take his holidays.’
‘Christ,’ Selby said. He puffed hard on his cigarette and looked at Bettina. She studied him as if she was making plans to have him mounted. He looked very uneasy but he still had a bit of fight in him. He pointed to Baudin on the floor.
‘That’s your son, Bettina dear, the one you never told me about. What d’you think of him?’
Bettina didn’t take her eyes of his flushed, angry face.
‘You always were pathetic, Richard,’ she said evenly. ‘I never knew anything you planned to come out right and you’re still at it. If you think I’m going to break down you’ve got another thing coming. Henry Brain was a slug — he’s no loss, by the way, Hardy. Being pregnant to him was like having a belly full of maggots. I just got it over with and tried to get on with my life. I thought about the child a bit at first, but it was all tied up with Henry. I wanted to forget about all that and I did. I’m sorry for him, that’s all.’
Selby shook his head wildly and James gave a thin, bitter smile and winced when the movement hurt his face. He seemed to have accepted the new turn of events. The trouble was, the shape of those events had to be determined by me and I was confused. I had some ethical questions to sort out. I broke the shotgun open, took out the shell and leaned the gun against the wall. That seemed like an appropriate move towards finding a civilised solution. Among the living I had five people to consider — myself, Baudin-Chatterton, Lady C, Bettina and Dr Osborn. There were Brain and the nurse to consider, too; slamming the door on James, Reid and Selby wouldn’t do them any good and maybe there was a nice irony in Henry Brain’s son inheriting the Chatterton estate. As for Gertrude Callaghan, perhaps her memory would best be served by the proper preservation of the doctor’s records. I could help with that.
Bettina finished her drink and rapped the glass on the table.
‘Deep thoughts, Hardy — problems?’
‘I think I’ve got them sorted out. What about you?’
She looked at Selby. ‘I’m going to divorce him. Will he go to jail?’
‘I don’t think so, I think he should go back to his business and concentrate on supporting you and the kids.’
‘So do I.’
She jerked her head at James. ‘What about him?’
‘He should be in a cage but bringing it all out will do more harm than good. I can sew him up in a drugs charge and that should keep him quiet. Besides,’ I looked at James’ cut and bruised face, ‘he isn’t going to be so pretty any more. Miss Reid here is going to resign her post, aren’t you?’
She nodded; she was passive now, which was an unnatural state for her. I wondered how long she’d stay that way. I had a feeling that she would bounce back but there was nothing I could do about it.
That left the grandson and heir, the question was how much of a man was left in him after the drugs and the booze, given that he hadn’t been such promising material to start with.
‘Can you help him, Hardy?’ Bettina said softly.
‘I have to. He’s worth money to me and a bit to a lady in Darlinghurst who needs it.’ I spoke directly to him for the first time. ‘You remember Honey don’t you, Warwick?’
He looked at me for what seemed like an hour and then he nodded slowly.
‘Sure you do. Great days. I’ll give it a try. I’ll need a doctor and some time. I can’t give him to grandma like this.’
‘Goodbye money,’ Bettina said grimly.
‘Maybe not. It looks as if you and yours were out of the picture anyway. Maybe you can get round her if she’s doting on your son. You can try if you feel like it. Anyway, you’ll have Richard here with his nose to the grindstone.’
‘It’s a nice thought,’ she said.
Warwick Baudin started to shake, flesh wobbled on his big frame as his shoulders heaved convulsively. He lowered his head and big, fat tears fell on the floor.
Bettina moved over and put her arm across his shoulders, ‘There,’ she said, ‘there, there.’