Hole in One (16 page)

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Authors: Catherine Aird

Tags: #Mystery

BOOK: Hole in One
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Eagle
‘Sorry to bother you again,' murmured Sloan to Alan Pursglove, ‘but I need another look at your scoresheets.'
‘No trouble,' said the Secretary amiably. ‘They're all up on the board over there.'
‘You kick off your season with the Clarembald Cup, don't you?' Sloan turned. ‘Make a note of that, Crosby, will you?'
‘It's the first of our major Club competitions,' agreed Pursglove. He added in deadpan tones ‘And as you can see from the chart your Superintendent Leeyes got knocked out very early on.'
‘There's no need to write that down, Crosby,' said Sloan.
‘No, sir.'
‘Both Doug Garwood and Peter Gilchrist had got as far as the third round.' Pursglove grinned. ‘The third round's usually the one to sort out the men from the boys.'
In the police force it was usually night duty that sorted out the men from the boys. And sometimes the girls from both.
‘You can see that Doug beat Peter Gilchrist and went on to play in the semi-final.' The Secretary ran his finger along the score sheet. ‘He didn't win that round, though. He met a real tiger coming up the other leg and got knocked out.'
‘Then?'
‘Then there's the Pletchford Plate. Everyone was meant to have played their second round of that by the end of last week.' Pursglove moved along the wall to another chart. ‘They're at quarter-final level now. Major Bligh had to play James Hopland and it was Peter Gilchrist versus Brian Southon. Brian was lucky there because he'd had a walkover from Eric Simmonds in the previous round. He's been ill, Simmonds, I mean, and couldn't play. Some sort of tummy trouble.'
‘Make a note of all this, Crosby,' he said quietly. So it was Simmonds whose name he had been trying to remember as having been taken ill as well as Joe Briggs, the greenkeeper. He didn't know whether this fact was wheat or chaff but he would soon find out.
‘Leeyes lost his match in that, too,' said Pursglove, straight-faced.
‘Forget that as well, Crosby,' said Sloan.
‘Yes, sir.'
‘And then there's the Kemberland Cup,' said Alan Pursglove. ‘It's a Stableford Competition. That's nowhere near finished yet but it was the last match Matt Steele caddied for before he …'
‘Quite,' said Detective Inspector Sloan. ‘Quite.'
‘How did the Superintendent do in that one?' asked Crosby with an air of innocence.
Pursglove consulted the score sheet. ‘Twenty-three points.'
‘Is that good?' enquired the Constable.
‘Well below average,' said the Secretary.
Crosby gently closed his notebook, his face suffused with a seraphic smile. ‘Fancy that,' he said.
‘Just suppose, Crosby,' said Sloan, sitting back in his chair, ‘that the illness of Eric Simmonds is as important as the illness of the greenkeeper.'
‘Who?' asked the Constable. Alan Pursglove had left the two policemen on their own in his room. The Detective Constable was standing at the window watching a foursome working its way towards the eighteenth green.
‘Eric Simmonds. The man who was taken ill and so had to concede his match to Brian Southon.' The operative word was “taken”: it might be too late now to prove that a noxious substance had been involved.
‘How could that be important?' asked Crosby.
‘His illness could have been engineered so that Peter
Gilchrist could play against Brian Southon.'
‘Or Southon against Gilchrist,' said Crosby idly.
‘That, too. I wonder …' Detective Inspector Sloan stopped and stared unseeingly at the various oddments on the Secretary's desk. ‘Gilchrist played against Garwood first and then against Southon and the deceased caddied for both matches.'
‘Nothing odd about that,' said Crosby, his attention still held by the players on the eighteenth fairway.
‘Southon works for Garwood, doesn't he? And doing well from all accounts.'
The Data Protection Acts never stopped anyone from asking around.
‘His number two,' said Crosby laconically.
‘What could make it important that Gilchrist played Southon?'
‘Or the other way round,' persisted Crosby without turning his gaze away from the window.
‘And what, if anything, could Steele have overheard when caddying for Garwood against Gilchrist that mattered?'
Displaying manifest disinterest, Crosby announced that one of the men playing the eighteenth had hit his ball into the wood.
‘Then he'll have to hit it out again, won't he?' said Sloan unsympathetically.
Detection was a more difficult game than golf. Detection was an uneasy marriage of logic and evidence. And at the moment they were rather short of both. What golf was a marriage of, he wasn't sure. Character and luck, probably.
‘He's having a go,' reported Crosby.
‘Bully for him.'
‘Oh, look, another of them's gone into a bunker.'
‘Whatever it was that Steele overheard,' declared Sloan insistently, ‘it must have told him that Gilchrist would lose to Garwood in the Matheson Trophy.'
‘So Gilchrist owed Garwood,' concluded Crosby with elegant simplicity. ‘Oh, good, that man's out of the wood.'
‘Which is more than we are,' Sloan came back with some asperity. ‘You do realise, Crosby, don't you, that Matthew Steele must have known it whatever it was.'
‘Or guessed,' said Crosby.
‘Or guessed. But that's what mattered.'
‘Yes, sir,' said Crosby. ‘Much good it did him if it led to him ending up in the bunker on the sixth.'
‘But you're with me so far, I take it?' said Sloan with elaborate politeness.
‘Steele wasn't the only caddy, sir.'
‘Ah, he was the first time. The second time the other caddy was the man they call Belloes. The deaf man.'
‘Doesn't get us very far though, sir, does it?' So far the Detective Constable hadn't taken his gaze off the fairway.
Detective Inspector Sloan tilted his chair back. Somewhere at the back of his mind an elusive thought was teasing him. There was a famous precedent, surely, for a man exacting something on behalf of his employer and coming to grief in the process. He ran his mind rapidly through such case law as he could remember but answer came there none.
‘They're on the green now,' reported Crosby.
Only it wasn't the servant of Calleshire Consolidated – Brian Southon in this case – who had come to grief but a bystander who might – or might not – have been innocent.
 
Whilst the game of golf meant different things to different players, to the most of the caddies it usually spelt one thing – money.
‘Might as well go home,' said Dickie Castle, although making no move to leave.
‘Nothing more doing here today,' agreed Bert Hedges, nevertheless continuing to stand in front of the window. ‘And if
you was hoping for a round today, young Ginger, you'll just have to go on hoping, that's all. Anyone who's going out today's gone out already notwithstanding the sixth being what you might call ground under repair.'
‘If you say so,' said Edmund Pemberton, making no move to go either. ‘I do wish Hilary had let me take her home, though. It's a bit worrying.'
‘She wasn't going home, remember,' said Dickie Castle. ‘Not never.'
‘Sounded as she meant it, too,' put in Bert Hedges. He sniffed. ‘You can always tell when a woman means what she says.'
‘There wasn't any “stop it, I like it” about her,' agreed Castle sagely.
‘If she wasn't going home, then where was she going?' asked Edmund Pemberton anxiously.
‘Don't ask me, lad,' said Castle. ‘Wherever it was she wasn' t telling me or you or anyone else.'
‘Mr Bigboots might know,' suggested Bert Hedges.
‘The Captain, you mean?' asked Pemberton innocently.
Castle gave a humourless laugh. ‘No, not him. I mean Mr Almighty Jock Selkirk, the professional. He thinks he knows everything about the game that there is to know.'
‘And the course,' chimed in Hedges.
‘And does he?' asked Pemberton, looking bewildered.
‘Course he doesn't,' said Castle richly.
‘Not even the half of it,' said Hedges.
‘But what is there to know?' Pemberton might be young and innocent but he wasn't stupid.
‘Like somewhere Hilary might have gone,' said Hedges, sucking his teeth. ‘Like someone Bobby Curd might have seen.
‘More like someone she might have gone to,' chimed in Castle. ‘Seeing as she's fallen out with her father like she has.'
He suddenly turned away from the window. ‘Look out, men. Here comes trouble in trousers.'
Police Sergeant Polly Perkins slipped inside the caddies' shed and said without any usual womanly preamble ‘I'm looking for Hilary Trumper. Anyone here know where I'll find her?'
There was a united shaking of heads followed by a silence that no one man seemed to want to broach. This was clearly a situation that Sergeant Perkins had met before. Many times. ‘All right then,' she said. ‘Tell me someone else who might know.'
‘You could try the professional, miss, – I mean, madam,' offered Hedges promptly.
‘Right,' she said, taking a quick look round the assembled men, ‘but before I go, tell me when any of you last saw a Mr Robert Curd up here.'
Achieving a concensus of opinion among the caddies on this took time but the general feeling was that it would have been at the weekend.
‘I think I saw him trying to sell the professional some old balls on Saturday morning,' offered one caddy cautiously, ‘but then I might not have done.'
‘For repainting,' said another.
‘And for using as practice balls,' said Dickie Castle. ‘He does it most weekends.'
‘With those he's picked up the Sunday before,' expanded someone else.
‘But if you'd really wanted to catch him after that,' said Bert Hedges, ‘you'd have had to have been around up here after dark.'
‘Someone was,' said Sergeant Perkins briefly. ‘Now, where will I find the professional?'
Eager hands pointed her in the direction of the man's shop.
‘Right,' she said.
By the time the policewoman got there it was locked and empty.
 
‘Hullo, there, Hilary,' called out the man who was walking across the car park as a disconsolate Hilary Trumper stumbled across the forecourt. ‘I'm just going home. Can I give you a lift anywhere?'
‘Oh, please,' said Hilary eagerly. ‘Would you?'
‘Hop in,' he said, opening the passenger door for her. ‘Where to?'
‘Anywhere,' she said, dropping down on the seat.
‘Home?'
‘Anywhere except home,' she said tightly.
‘Problems?' He started up the engine and engaged first gear.
‘Big problems.' Suddenly Hilary ducked her head down well below the windscreen. ‘Can you get a move on, please? Dad's just come out of the Clubhouse and I don't want him to see me.'
‘Like that, is it?' He gave her a sympathetic grin. ‘Happens to us all sometimes.' He steered the car out onto the open road and then said ‘It's all right. You can sit up again now. He's gone off towards the caddies' shed.'
‘Much good that'll do him,' said Hilary grimly.
‘If it's not home you want to go to, Hilary, then where is it?'
‘What I should really like,' Hilary Trumper said with unusual docility, ‘is to go to my grandmother's.'
‘Ah, yes, of course. I understand.'
‘So does she,' said the girl. ‘Granny knows everything.' She hesitated. ‘It's not too far for you, is it?'
‘Of course not. She lives out Larking way, doesn't she?'
‘That's right but you could drop me anywhere on the way.'
‘No trouble at all,' he said affably. ‘I've just got to make one
call on a chap on my way, if that's all right with you? Bit of unfinished business, you might say.'
‘That's fine with me,' she said, settling back comfortably in the front passenger seat. Presently she said ‘Look here, I'm not taking you out of your way, am I?'

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