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Authors: Catherine Aird

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BOOK: Hole in One
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‘Just a few questions,' said Detective Inspector Sloan comfortably.
‘What about?' asked Jock Selkirk. The professional visibly braced himself against his counter.
‘Visitors.'
‘Visitors?' echoed Jock Selkirk, warily eyeing the two policemen standing in the professional's shop. ‘What sort of visitors? Are you talking about players who've bought tickets for their rounds or teams from other Clubs playing against Berebury in matches?'
‘Non-members who have paid to play,' said Detective Inspector Sloan, taking in his surroundings of golf bags and clubs and balls and the smell of leather shoes. At the same time he was trying to take the measure of the man in front of him. The professional was not tall but decidedly well-built. He had a good head of wavy black hair, cut short, and the sort of jaw that women called rugged.
‘Or who should have paid but have gone out without tickets,' supplemented Detective Constable Crosby to whom the degrees of perfidy had not been spelled out too clearly in training.
‘You'll have records,' suggested Sloan persuasively.
‘No problem.' Selkirk rummaged about in a drawer behind
the counter and brought out a book of receipts.
‘Any of them stand out at all?' asked Sloan, pocketing the book.
The professional started to shake his head and then stopped and gave a short laugh. ‘No – wait a minute. There were a couple of guys last month who beat up the course.'
Crosby lifted his head. ‘Vandals?'
‘No. Scratch.'
‘Gave up?' asked the Constable.
Selkirk gave Crosby a hard look. ‘I mean really good players who play to the scratch score. It's seventy-one here at Berebury.' He tightened his lips into a wry smile. ‘Don't get half enough of those, not men who play to the scratch score. They're mostly Sunday morning types or old fogeys here who haven't ever played to bogey.'
Crosby began to look faintly interested. ‘Nothing to do with the march, I suppose?'
‘I wouldn't know about that.' The professional gave the Constable an even harder look. ‘I'm talking about par,' he said.
‘Quite,' said Detective Inspector Sloan pacifically. There were those who needed to have the differences between floribunda, rambling and climbing roses explained to them. ‘Anyone else who stood out at all?'
Selkirk frowned. ‘There was a south paw.'
‘A left-hander?'
‘You tend to notice them in my line of business.' The professional waved a hand at a display rack in the corner. ‘I have to stock clubs for those on the wild side but I don't reckon in the nature of things to sell that many.'
‘No,' agreed Sloan. It was too early for the pathologist to have told him whether the blow to the head of the man in the bunker had been struck by a left-handed man or not. Or, come to that, by a woman. He produced his notebook. ‘Any way in which you can tell who was the last player in the
bunker at the sixth?'
‘Well, I can tell you someone who was in there on Sunday morning,' said Selkirk briskly, ‘and that was Brian Southon because he came in here afterwards and wanted advice on shanking …'
Sloan reminded himself that non-rosarians didn't know about rugosa roses either.
The professional said ‘He wanted me to look at his grip but I reckon he'd been trying to green it and went too far. Lost the hole, of course.'
‘Is it a difficult one?'
Selkirk shrugged. ‘Not by my standards. “Tee it high and let it fly” is what I tell 'em. Four hundred and forty-five yards, par four. Bit of a dog-leg but easy enough if you let the wind be your friend. Never up, never in, of course.'
‘It's the wind that sorts out the men from the boys, isn't it?' said Sloan. It was the only bit of golfing lore that he knew.
‘A fair wind helps,' conceded Selkirk, ‘but I always tell beginners it doesn't turn a tyro into a player.'
‘Any promising youngsters taken up the game lately?' asked Sloan casually.
‘Nobody who's going to win the Open,' responded Selkirk tartly.
Sloan reminded himself that they had their own working shorthand of speech down at the Police Station too. Criminal argot was something that all policemen learned early on, too. “Let's be having you” didn't mean much outside of the world of cops and robbers but it meant plenty to them. He must remember that golfing argot would be something different.
‘When did the greenkeeper go off sick?' he asked.
‘Joe Briggs? Last Tuesday – no, Wednesday. That's right. They were worried about the greens for the weekend but some of the members on the Greens Committee got together and cut most of them.' The professional gave the police
inspector a meaningful look and said ‘You're not the only one round here asking questions.'
‘I don't suppose I am,' said Sloan equably.
‘There's a girl called Trumper, Hilary Trumper, wanting to get to know the course.'
‘She's not the only one,' said Detective Inspector Sloan. ‘Could you take us round sometime, too?'
Penalty
Detective Sergeant Polly Perkins might spend much of her time with some very off-beat members of her own sex but she was up to the style of the Ladies Section of the Berebury Golf Club, too.
Well up.
‘How kind,' she murmured, metaphorically donning the current youthful equivalent of twin-set and pearls, ‘a cup of coffee would be most acceptable. Tell me,' she said, ‘this Matthew Steele you are all talking about – is he a player here as well?'
The Lady Captain shook her head. ‘Just a caddy. Although,' she added quickly, more aware of the importance of political correctness than most, ‘a lot of the caddies play, too. Very well, some of them. Especially Dickie Castle. He beat me hollow in our last Ladies versus Caddies match. He's deadly round the green.' She shivered suddenly, her mouth drooping, ‘I shouldn't have said that, should I? Not now.'
The comforting phrase ‘I know what you mean, though,' fell automatically from Sergeant Perkins' lips. The things that people felt that they should not have said but did say were meat and drink to the police. And very nearly as useful as those things which they should have said and didn't.
The Lady Captain did not so much change the subject as deflect it. Her skill in this respect was one of the reasons why she was Lady Captain. ‘I expect,' she said, ‘that Matthew will take the game up in a big way when he gets back. Most of the younger caddies do. It's a very good start to learning the game, caddying.'
‘Gets back?' queried the detective sergeant, a woman with an eye for essentials.
‘I'm told he's gone off to Lasserta as part of his degree
course.
‘When?' asked Polly Perkins rather more sharply than she had meant to.
The Lady Captain said vaguely ‘Some time last week, I think I heard someone say. Is it important?'
In different surroundings Sergeant Perkins might have said sternly, ‘The police ask the questions around here' but in the Ladies Clubroom she said ‘Oh, no sugar, thank you. Has he gone for long?'
‘That's something I don't know,' said the Lady Captain. ‘You'll have to ask Ursula Millward over there. She knows the Trumpers better than I do and she might have heard.' She cocked her head to one side and said ‘You could try asking Hilary herself, of course. She's sure to know.' The Lady Captain gave an indulgent smile. ‘I'm sure they'll be in touch on their mobile phones. Every one seems to be these days.'
‘Aren't they just?' agreed Polly Perkins politely, suppressing all mention of the trouble that stealing them had become to the police, let alone of how their use had facilitated the assembling of unlawful protest marches.
‘Mobile phones are the second great divide in the Club,' said the Lady Captain wryly. ‘After the new development and the driving range, that is.'
‘Whether they should be allowed on the course, you mean?' The policewoman, a veteran of many, many hours spent at the Accident and Emergency Department of the Berebury Hospital, where they had to be switched off, nodded understandingly. ‘Of course, these days you'll have members with pace-makers still playing.'
‘It's not that,' the Lady Captain shook her head. ‘It's if your opponent's phone rings while you're driving or putting that so upsets the members.'
Detective Sergeant Perkins said that she could see that it very well might and asked about the proposed driving range.
‘Oh, the Ladies are keeping well clear of that one,' said the Lady Captain immediately. ‘You know what men are like about that sort of thing. They get very worked up when there's money involved.'
‘Don't they just,' agreed Detective Sergeant Polly Perkins, who in her time had witnessed wives who had been beaten up for spending a man's money on food for the man's children.
‘I think male pride comes into it, you know,' murmured the Lady Captain, a woman clearly in no need of the odd penny. Detective Sergeant Polly Perkins, a woman still paying off her own mortgage, agreed warmly with her. Policewoman to the core, though, she made a few mental notes before setting down her cup and saucer, and taking her departure.
And seeking out Detective Inspector Sloan.
 
The Men's Committee of the Berebury Golf Club could have posed for a painting by Rembrandt van Rijn. The players looked as if they were assembled as set of purpose as did the bevy of men in the artist's famous depiction of
The Night
Watch of Amsterdam. A collection of solemn-faced golfers with their game in mind, they took up their positions in the Committee room in silence, taking in the presence of Detective Inspector Sloan and Detective Constable Crosby without comment.
‘I think we're all present and correct except for Eric Simmonds,' said the Captain, a former naval officer who'd served his time at sea. ‘How is he by the way? Does anyone know?'
‘Still as weak as a kitten,' said Brian Southon. ‘I dropped in there last night. But getting better slowly.'
‘Right.' The Captain clasped a sheet of paper firmly between two large hands.
‘Now, you all know about the body at the sixth …'
There were nods all round.
‘And that it was not an accident …'
More nods.
‘Deplorable, quite deplorable,' said Gerald Moffat automatically. ‘We've never had anything like this before in all the history of the Club.'
‘Not good,' agreed the Captain gruffly. He shot a glance in Sloan's direction before going on. ‘And which is worse, it would seem highly likely that the – er – perpetrator would seem to have been someone who knew the course well.'
‘We do have Visitors remember,' pointed out Luke Trumper. ‘Lots of them.'
‘The police,' said the Captain, ‘have details of all the Visitors, guests and Societies.'
‘What about Open Meetings?' asked Nigel Halesworth. ‘We get dozens of outsiders playing every time.'
‘The Secretary has the names and addresses of everyone who has played in our Open Meetings,' rejoined the Captain.
‘Players are not the only ones who know the course,' pointed out Brian Southon. ‘Don't forget that.'
‘I understand the police have taken that factor on board, too,' said the Captain.
‘When I was out East,' began Major Bligh, ‘we had a feller who went berserk with a kukri …
The Captain overrode this with practised ease. ‘Now, Detective Inspector Sloan here will tell you what he wants to know from us all …'
 
‘Ah, there you are, Sloan. Come along in. We've been waiting for you.'
Detective Inspector Sloan suppressed an automatic instinct to wipe his shoes on a mat before he entered the mortuary at the Berebury and District General Hospital. The place was convent-clean, the body of a sand-covered young man the only object not shining and polished.
‘Not a lot to tell you yet, of course.' The pathologist waved a hand that already held some arcane instrument whose precise use the detective inspector didn't care to think about.
‘Anything would be a help at this stage, doctor,' said Sloan. ‘Anything at all but especially a name.'
‘Much always wants more,' said the pathologist gnomically.
Sloan stifled an inclination to say that he only wanted information – no, that was wrong – what he really wanted was data. Data was information leading to a conclusion, which wasn't the same thing at all.
‘Burns here has everything ready and there's not a lot of clothing to hold us up.'
Pathologist and policeman watched as Detective Constable Crosby and the pathologist's assistant dealt with the young man's clothing, sealing it into separate bags for Forensics, marking each with a number as it began its long journey that would only come to an end in a court of law. That is, thought Sloan to himself, if ever it got to court. Full many a police case was born to bloom unseen and waste its sourness on the desert air.
'T-shirt, underpants, jeans and socks,‘enumerated Crosby. ‘That's all.'
‘Not a lot to be going on with,' said Sloan. ‘And from the look of them, all run-of-the-mill clothes.'
‘Mass market name tags, anyway,' said Crosby. ‘But no shoes.'
‘Pity, that,' said Sloan. That arch-observer, Lord Baden-Powell, had set out for all time how much you could tell about a man from his shoes. How, though, you could be sure that wearing out soles and heels equally denoted business capacity and honesty he didn't know. What he did know was that business capacity and honesty didn't always go together …
‘No distinguishing marks, either,' contributed the pathologist, ‘unless you count a small strawberry-coloured naevus on
the nape of the neck. It's very common there.'
‘I've got one of those,' announced Detective Constable Crosby unexpectedly. ‘A stork beak birthmark.'
‘Really?' said Sloan coolly.
‘Although all the pictures I've ever seen,' said Crosby, ‘have the stork carrying the baby by its nappy. It's pink,' he added.
It wasn't something that Detective Inspector Sloan needed to know at this moment.
‘And, judging by the marked lack of sunburn on a strip of his left wrist,' continued Dr Dabbe, ‘the deceased had recently been wearing a watch and been in the open air here or abroad quite a lot.'
‘You can tell quite a bit from a man's watch,' mused Sloan.
‘And a woman's,' chimed in Crosby.
‘Such as?' Sloan challenged him.
‘That they should be wearing glasses, sir.'
‘Right,' said Dr Dabbe, pulling an overhead microphone towards him, ‘let's get started.'
Detective Inspector Sloan turned over a new page in his notebook while Detective Constable Crosby drifted away from the body towards the window. He didn't like postmortems.
‘The subject,' began the pathologist, ‘is a normally nourished male of approximately twenty years of age. Of quite an athletic build with well-developed muscles.'
‘Not a couch potato, then,' put in Crosby from the sidelines. When it came to tackling young criminals he much preferred the couch potato to the well-built. They couldn't run so fast and far.
Or hit back so hard.
‘Definitely not,' said Dr Dabbe, continuing with his visual examination. ‘Think athletic.'
‘I have been,' said Sloan. It was one of the things that being on the golf course did for you. Thinking sunburn was another.
‘And, Sloan,' the pathologist waved his instrument like a baton in the policeman's direction, ‘you can note that there are no external distinguishing marks other than a surgical scar in the right
iliac fossa
, probably an old appendectomy. I'll confirm that later if the appendix isn't there.'
‘Yes, we have no bananas,' sang Crosby,
sotto voce
.
‘No marks? Not even a tattoo?' asked Sloan, a little surprised. Tattoos, no longer confined to sailors ashore, were now an important indicator of social significance in the police canon. There was a simple rule of thumb that applied: the more a man had, the lower down the totem pole he was. The same went for studs. Whether the same went for young women he wasn't prepared to say.
‘None,' said Dabbe. ‘And no evidence of body piercing of either variety.'
‘I don't quite …'
‘For drugs or studs,' said the pathologist, straightening up. ‘No puncture marks from needles and no holes from which gold ornaments might have been suspended.'
‘Ah, yes.' Sloan scribbled a note. This was something that it was a help to know: defaulting drug takers, too, had lives that were nasty, brutish and short.
‘Just your usual clean-living outdoor boy, then,' observed Crosby mordantly, ‘except that he got murdered.'
‘Victims come in all shapes and sizes,' said the pathologist.
Victims, in Detective Inspector Sloan's experience, were more often very young girls or harmless old ladies rather than healthy young men, especially the unpierced.
‘Nothing of immediate note under the fingernails,' went on the pathologist, ‘although Burns has taken samples. And the nails weren't broken – in fact there are no superficial wounds or scratches.'
Sloan put this into police shorthand. ‘No signs of a struggle, then.'
‘No. At this stage,' continued the pathologist, ‘I am prepared to state that the cause of death was consistent with the deceased having sustained a comminuted fracture of the parietal area of the left sinciput, and that this is also consistent with his having sustained a glancing blow from a heavy instrument.'

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