Hole in One Read online

  ‘There was a notice outside the Clubhouse reserving the first tee for the ladies between certain times.’

  ‘And what if the men had wanted to play then?’ enquired Sergeant Perkins with genuine interest. In her usual world of battered wives and victims of rape and child abuse simple notices saving anything from men for women didn’t carry overmuch weight.

  ‘They have to start at the tenth tee and play the last nine holes before the first nine,’ said the Lady Captain confident that the rule of law applied at the Berebury Golf Course.

  ‘And,’ enquired the policewoman, ‘does the way to the tenth pass the sixth green?’

  ‘Oh, I see …no, no, it doesn’t. Nowhere near. Ah, here’s Ursula Millward now.’

  Sergeant Perkins took a statement from a pale but resolute Ursula Millward before turning her attention to Helen Ewell. Banishing all her audience save the Lady Captain, she pulled up a chair half beside, half in front of that young woman, announced that she was a police sergeant and waited in silence. This technique, honed on real victims of real injuries, worked in the end.

  The only trouble was that it didn’t add anything to what the police already knew.

  The first tee of the Berebury Golf Club was not the only place where news of the shutting of the course had not been well received. They weren’t happy in the caddies’ shed either. A course closed to players had unwelcome financial implications for some.

  ‘Had you been going to go out today?’ someone asked a tall thin man called Shipley. ‘Before they shut everything down to everyone, that is.’

  ‘Shut it down to everyone except Bobby Curd, you mean,’ growled Fred Shipley morosely. ‘I bet he’ll get in as usual.’

  Edmund Pemberton, still new to the game, piped up ‘Who’s Bobby Curd, then, that he gets to go out and we don’t?’

  ‘Bobby Curd,’ Fred Shipley informed him, ‘is the man who deprives you and me of our rightful perks on the course.’

  ‘I wasn’t told anything about perks,’ murmured Edmund Pemberton. ‘I thought I just got the money for caddying.’

  ‘Balls,’ said Shipley pithily.

  Edmund Pemberton was still of an age to flush and did so as only the young and freckled can. ‘Balls?’ he echoed uncertainly.

  ‘Golf balls, lost, stolen and strayed,’ explained Shipley. ‘Mostly strayed, and mostly into the Gulf Stream …’

  ‘But that’s in …’ began Edmund.

  ‘The Gulf Stream, boy,’ said another caddie, taking pity on him, ‘is the name of the wee tributary of the River Aim that runs across the fairway at the fifth.’

  ‘Which is not what golfers call it when their balls go in it, I can tell you,’ said Shipley. ‘You just wait until you hear some of ’em carrying on about it.’ He jerked his thumb in the direction of an older man sitting at a distance. ‘The only one who doesn’t mind what they say is old Belloes over there.’

  ‘Broad-minded?’ suggested Pemberton innocently.

  ‘Stone-deaf.’ He grinned. ‘His real name is Beddoes.’

  ‘So where does this Bobby Curd come in, then?’ asked Edmund Pemberton hastily. His capacity for sticking to the point had always stood him in good stead when writing his essays at College.

  ‘Where he comes in is through the bridleway beyond the sixth,’ said Shipley literally.

  ‘And when he comes in,’ said another man, ‘is during the night.’

  ‘To steal the balls, you mean?’ asked Edmund.

  ‘Quick, isn’t he?’ marvelled Shipley, who considered formal education a waste of time and money.

  ‘For a student,’ said the other caddie, straight-faced.

  Pemberton searched wildly for a new subject. ‘If Major Bligh beats Mr Hopland in this round …’

  ‘If …’

  ‘And then his match against Mr Gilchrist …’

  ‘A bigger “if”, that,’ said Dickie Castle, pursing his lips. ‘Gilchrist’s a good player.’

  ‘Got a lot on his mind, though, with things in the trade being what they are,’ said Bert Hedges. ‘I heard he was laying folk off at his plant.’

  ‘Will the Major then go on to win this Plate thing?’ persisted a terrier-like Pemberton.

  ‘Should do, young Edmund,’ said one of the men, ‘always supposing that Fred’s advice to him is better than yours would have been.’

  ‘And always bearing in mind,’ said someone else slyly, ‘that Fred here plays off four himself.’

  ‘Mine?’ squawked Pemberton in alarm. ‘I couldn’t advise anybody. I thought all I had to do was to carry a man’s clubs round. That’s what Matt told me.’

  ‘You thought caddying was a doddle, didn’t you?’ Fred Shipley pointed a bony finger towards Edmund Pemberton’s chest. ‘Well, let me tell you, young Ginger, that it isn’t. Especially when it’s a needle match like the Pletchford Plate or the Clarembald Cup.’

  Edmund flushed to the roots of his hair again. ‘But Matt said there was nothing to it …’

  ‘Ah, but Matt’s not here, is he?’ said Shipley. ‘Matt’s off enjoying his precious gap year in some God-forsaken spot …’

  ‘Lasserta, actually …’ said Pemberton, adding pedantically, ‘and as it happens they’ve got gods there, lots of them, actually. And,’ he hurried on, catching sight of Shipley’s expression, ‘it isn’t exactly a gap year either – it’s part of his degree course at Uni. He’s reading business studies and economics and he needs to get more language experience.’

  ‘ …That he said he wanted all his caddying money for,’ finished Shipley, showing an equal capacity for sticking to the point.

  ‘Gap year!’ exclaimed somebody else richly. ‘Never had one of them when I left school. It was straight to work for me the next morning, like it or not.’

  Edmund Pemberton decided against saying that things were different these days. He’d found that sentiment better left unsaid in his home circle, too. He sought clarification on another front instead. ‘What you’re saying then is that if someone I’m caddying for loses his match it’ll be my fault?’

  ‘It won’t be your fault,’ said Fred Shipley kindly, ‘but you’ll get the blame.’

  ‘And,’ another man said solemnly, ‘if nobody else sees to that Fred here will.’

  Edmund looked from one weather-beaten face to another and decided to keep his mouth shut.

  ‘Although,’ went Fred Shipley conversationally, ‘you might get let off a little on account of your not knowing the game.’

  ‘Or the course,’ threw in someone else.

  ‘So how did Matt manage then?’ asked Pemberton. ‘He isn’t a golfer.’

  ‘Quick learner was what he was,’ said Shipley. ‘Very quick.’

  ‘Talk himself out of any trouble, that lad,’ said a caddie at the back of the shed. ‘He might not have known anything about the game when he started but he still got to be a good man on the bag pretty smartly.’

  Fred Shipley finished tying his shoelaces and straightened up. ‘Bit of a clever-clogs, though, all the same.’

  ‘I can’t see where that comes into caddying,’ said Edmund Pemberton unwisely.

  Shipley gave a short laugh. ‘You will.’

  ‘Matt bet the farm on that old codger Garwood beating Gilchrist for the Matheson Trophy even though he wasn’t carrying for him,’ another caddie informed him.

  ‘And did he?’ asked Pemberton. ‘Beat him, I mean?’

  ‘How else did you think your friend was able to get off on that world trip of his so soon?’ asked Shipley.

  ‘But Matt wouldn’t bet on a certainty, surely?’ said Pemberton seriously.

  Several men who would have been very happy to do just that stared at him in silence.

  ‘Betting on a punter’s chance is a risky business,’ remarked Shipley after a moment.

  ‘Anyway,’ said Edmund, who wasn’t sure that he understood this, ‘I thought you said that Mr Gilchrist was a good player.’

  ‘Oh, he’s got the length and the discipli
ne,’ said Shipley. ‘I grant you that. What he didn’t have the day he played the Matheson Trophy was his ball.’

  ‘Lost?’ said Edmund.

  ‘Twice,’ said Shipley succinctly. ‘So Garwood won hands down, didn’t he?’

  ‘Funny, that,’ said someone else.

  ‘It serves Gilchrist right,’ growled Shipley ‘for going out without a caddie in a big match. Cheapskate. Taught him a lesson, though, that did. He had one all right in his round of the Kemberland Cup against Luke Trumper.’ He poked his finger at Pemberton’s chest. ‘Your friend Matt caddied for Trumper in that game and there was no funny business about losing two balls then.’

  Before Edmund Pemberton could ask what was so funny about losing two balls in a match, the door of the caddies’ hut swung open and a female voice shouted ‘Are you all decent? Can I come in?’

  The question was greeted with total silence as an attractive young woman walked in without waiting for an answer. She was dressed in a short frayed denim skirt with a strappy halterneck blouse. In between these two garments a toned swathe of her navel and surrounding midriff was clearly visible.

  The physical temperature of the hut might have been far from warm before she arrived but as she came into the building the emotional temperature rose almost palpably.

  ‘What are you all staring at?’ she demanded. ‘You know what a woman looks like. You might as well get used to my face, anyway. You’re going to see a lot of it from now on.’ She stared round at the silent array of unresponsive male faces. ‘There’s no law about caddies not being female, you know. If you didn’t know, it’s called Equal Opportunities.’

  ‘Hello, Hilary,’ said Edmund Pemberton weakly.

  Chapter Five

  One-up

  ‘Not exactly a lot to go on, is it, Inspector? Half-a-face.’ The Consultant Pathologist to the Berebury District General Hospital, Dr Hector Smithson Dabbe, had arrived on the scene with a flourish on the greenkeeper’s truck. ‘Although I must say I’ve had less in my time. Much less.’

  Detective Inspector Sloan decided this was no moment to say that small was beautiful and waited instead while the pathologist’s assistant, a perennially silent man called Burns, unloaded the pathologist’s bags.

  ‘Wish we’d found that truck,’ said Crosby. ‘Riding beats walking any day.’

  ‘At least,’ said the pathologist, taking his first look over the edge of the bunker, ‘whoever it is in there isn’t going to be troubled by the clangour of the butterflies on the green any more.’

  ‘No, doctor.’ Sloan was non-committal. Butterflies – noisy or not – were not a problem on his roses.

  ‘And the face isn’t frozen, nor even chilled,’ observed the pathologist, still looking down into the bunker, ‘but ambient.’

  ‘Yes, doctor.’

  The golfers who had been standing sentinel were still keeping their distance on the fairway side of the green, as silent and attentive as mourners.

  ‘And I daresay, Sloan,’ said the pathologist with mock solemnity, ‘you don’t want me putting my great big feet anywhere near the deceased until you’ve examined the surroundings.’

  ‘No,’ agreed Sloan smoothly, ‘but I do want to know how long that head’s been buried in the bunker.’

  ‘And if there’s a body attached to it,’ put in Crosby from the sidelines.

  ‘That, too, and a good deal more, if I know the constabulary,’ murmured the pathologist. ‘Burns, my voice-recorder, please …’

  ‘The approximate date of death would be a good start, doctor,’ said Sloan. So, too, he thought to himself, would be a name but the subject’s identity was not the pathologist’s province. This medical man dealt only with dead bodies; a surgical practice that constituted an altogether different ball game from treating live patients. Names were a police matter and someone back at the Police Station would even now, he hoped, be checking their list of persons reported missing. None immediately came to his mind.

  ‘All in good time, Sloan, all in good time.’ The pathologist was staring down into the bunker. ‘What we could do with here are some archaeologists.’

  ‘It’s not an old body,’ protested Sloan. He winced. ‘You can see that from here.’ It wasn’t a pretty sight either but that was not for him, a supposedly case-hardened police officer, to say.

  ‘They’re the ones who know how to get bodies out of sand intact, though,’ said Dr Dabbe. ‘Otherwise it’s going to be something of a problem.’

  ‘So must have been getting it in,’ said Crosby. ‘Unless there’s just the head there under the sand.’

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that,’ said the pathologist casually. ‘Sand is easy enough to dig out. Beats soil any day for laboursaving. Remember that, Sloan.’

  ‘And in due course,’ said Sloan, nodding, ‘we’re also going to want to know the cause of death.’ In his experience, that was one of the quicker ways to narrow a field of suspects: each murderer to his own method, so to speak.

  ‘We won’t forget that, Burns, will we?’ responded the pathologist jovially.

  ‘No, doctor,’ said his assistant dutifully.

  ‘We need to know why a body has been put here, too,’ said Sloan, thinking aloud. He looked round at the deserted golf course. ‘Here of all places.’

  ‘If there is a body,’ said Crosby.

  ‘He’s as bad as Mr Dick, isn’t he?’ said the pathologist pointing at the Constable.

  ‘Mr Dick?’ asked Sloan, his mind on the job. Why the body had been put there was his problem, of course, not the pathologist’s. Dr Dabbe, of all people, took bodies as and where he found them.

  ‘“King Charles’ head” was always very much on the mind of David Copperfield’s friend, Mr Dick,’ said Dabbe.

  ‘Really?’ said Sloan politely. At least there was nothing mysterious about the way in which King Charles had lost his head, which as far as he was concerned gave it the edge – so far - on the one in the bunker.

  The pathologist wasn’t listening any more. He was peering as far over the edge of the green as he could without toppling over. ‘I can advise you from here, gentlemen, that the injury said to have been inflicted by your lady golfer – what might be called a traumatic enucleation – was performed post mortem, although I daresay you didn’t need me to tell you that.’

  ‘No,’ agreed Sloan, who really wanted to be told something he didn’t know or hadn’t guessed. ‘So we’ve got to wait, have we, doctor, for any more definite information about the deceased?’

  ‘Don’t rush me, man,’ the pathologist, thus challenged, wriggled forward and peered down. ‘I think I can see …yes …I can. The supra-orbital ridges, or rather, what’s left of ’em, are just visible.’

  Detective Inspector Sloan reached for his notebook and waited.

  ‘They’re more pronounced in the male than in the female,’ said the pathologist.

  ‘So?’ said Detective Constable Crosby, in whom his superiors had so far failed to instil the correct police protocol for interaction with their professional colleagues.

  ‘I should say that your body is male,’ said Dr Dabbe, in no way put out by this informality.

  Sloan was obscurely relieved to hear this. He’d seen altogether too many bodies of young girls for his liking who had come to grief in remote spots in the countryside. They’d often had shallow graves, too.

  ‘Male?’ muttered Detective Constable Crosby under his breath. ‘That’s a great help, that is. Might as well talk about fifty-fifty.’

  Detective Inspector Sloan decided he hadn’t heard that.

  ‘Male,’ repeated the pathologist. ‘It has to be either rouge or noir on the roulette table, of course, but I agree matters are not always as clear-cut as once they were, transsexuals being what they are.’

  Detective Inspector Sloan decided that he hadn’t heard that either.

  ‘Or had been,’ said Dr Dabbe.

  Or that.

  It was easier.

  Chapter Six

&n
bsp; Loss of Stroke and Distance

  It being an exceedingly ill wind that blows no one any good, the bar of the Berebury Golf Club was doing a brisk trade. Golfers deprived of a game had only three places to turn. Since two of these were the practice hole and the putting green, the other – the bar – was busy.

  ‘Two halves, please, Molly,’ said Brian Southon to the woman behind the bar, ‘and have something for yourself.’

  Molly, a calm, statuesque woman built on generous lines, acknowledged this with a quick smile of thanks, and busied herself at a beer engine, at the same time as skilfully catching the eye of the next person waiting for her attention.

  ‘What are you doing here on a weekday morning, Brian?’ a man nearby asked. ‘I thought you worked for a living.’

  ‘Client meeting.’ Brian Southon, a short, stocky man, grinned and pointed to his neighbour. ‘Got to talk turkey with my friend Gilchrist here.’

  ‘As long as the boss doesn’t catch you out and about, that’s all.’

  ‘I’m told my revered employer’s out on the course just now,’ said Southon, quite relaxed. ‘And he won’t mind because I’m doing really great business for Calleshire Consolidated. That’s right, Peter, isn’t it?’

  ‘It sure is,’ said Peter Gilchrist warmly.

  ‘There you are then,’ said Southon, looking round and smiling. ‘Everyone’s pleased. That’s what I like.’

  ‘It’s what they will persist in calling a “win-win” situation, I suppose,’ said a man called Moffat sourly. He was a retired schoolteacher and English had been his specialist subject.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Brian Southon, ‘and that’s what every salesman likes.’

  ‘Mind you, Brian,’ Gilchrist said, ‘I shall have to go back to the office and do my sums before I sign anything.’

  ‘Even his card?’ called out some wag.

  ‘I might start to worry if he got too many birdies,’ admitted Gilchrist, looking wryly at Southon. ‘But I don’t think he will, somehow. After all, he’s not that good a player.’