Making A Killing (The Romney and Marsh Files Book 2) (32 page)

‘Not very. He were just a big bag of wind. Like to strut around trying to be assertive. Full of bright ideas. Always thinking up something to make work for us.’

‘You didn’t like him, then?’

‘He were an arsehole.’

‘How about Elliot Masters, what did you think of him?’

‘Another arsehole.’

‘Do you like anyone at the golf club?’

‘Couple of the lads who work the course are all right.’

‘Were you aware that Phillip Emerson and Elliot Masters were planning a property development of land that belongs to the club? To be precise the row of cottages you live in and the land alongside it.’

‘I heard something.’

‘What would your position
have been, if they had managed to buy the land?’

‘I suppose I’d have
had to move out, wouldn’t I?’

‘Why is that?’

‘I reckon you know, or you wouldn’t be asking.’

‘Where would you have gone to live?’

‘That’s my business.’

‘You’d never find anywhere as cheap as the cottage
, would you, Mr Thatcher? It’s expensive, property these days. You wouldn’t find anywhere to rent in Dover for less than a hundred a week, I’d guess. Could you afford that in your retirement? There are always those bedsits down by the dock, of course. You might get one of those for seventy-five a week. Not much of a view though. And I shouldn’t think the neighbours are too savoury. And you wouldn’t have the golf course on your doorstep and to yourself to wander around at night, would you?’

Thatcher set his jaw at Romney and refused to allow the policeman to rile him. ‘You remind me a lot of Emerson,’ he said, breaking the silence that had fallen once again. ‘You’re an arsehole, too. You can charge me for that if you like. I’ll happily plead guilty to it.’

‘No need,’ said Romney, ‘just tell us where you were on the night that Phillip Emerson was battered to death?’

*

‘He didn’t deny that he was in the habit of walking the golf course at night. That was something, I suppose.’

‘We can’t arrest him for that though, sir. He denied everything else. If his prints were on the club, why did we let him go?’

‘I never actually said they were, did I?’ In response to Marsh’s look he added, ‘I was just seeing if I could get a reaction out of him.’

‘You got that all right, sir.’

Romney grunted at the memory. ‘Is it worth checking his alibi? If he says he was at home with his wife all night she’s bound to back him up. If she’s lived with him for however long they’ve been married she must be as tough as old boots.’

***

18

Romney was toying with the idea of opening another can when his mobile began trilling, flashing and vibrating around the coffee table. It wasn’t something he could ignore. He glanced up at the clock as he closed in on it. Work or play. The appealing possibility crossed his mind that it was Julie Carpenter, changed her mind about coming over, and he felt an erotic tingle. The illuminated display extinguished that prospect and his rising ardour, unless, of course, she was calling from the station.

He listened with one eye on the football still, then with two eyes on the wall and finally as he was moving hurriedly to get changed. He said, ‘Get hold of
DS Marsh and tell her to meet me up there.’

It wasn’t the first time Romney had been turned out of his house late at night in the line of duty. With practiced swiftness
, he changed into something respectable, killed the television and the lights, snatched up his keys and phone and hurried from the house, slamming the door behind him. He thanked his lucky stars his car was back on the road. His adrenalin flowing, he strapped himself in and turned the key in the ignition to a barely audible click followed by an engulfing silence, which was only broken by his outburst of profanity and the noise of the impact of his fists on the steering wheel.

*

By the time the patrol car had collected him and given him a fair-ground ride to his destination, Romney was just in time to be fashionably late. With two cans of fizzy lager and warmed up Chinese leftovers – a meal that had been pushing its consume by date – sloshing about inside him, he also felt a little queasy.

Up on the cliffs where the land was closest to the sky the air was heavy, pressured from above by the weight of a thick blanket of cloud. Six weeks of rain waiting for an excuse to fall. With nothing other than darkness to hinder the view across the channel those gathered on the heights of the White Cliffs were treated to intermittent explosions of energy behind the cloud screen over the northern coast of France. The extended summer had finally broken across La Manche and for the
present all those exposed on the golf course hoped it would stay there.

Temporary spotlights were in the process of being set up and two boiler-suited figures, reminding Romney of paramedics hunched over a coronary victim, fussed over a generator trying to bring it back to life. Real paramedics stood idly by waiting to do their job.

In the pitch black of the country with no moon to reflect an idea of the sun – and so far out of town as to make light pollution an irrelevance – torch beams were the only source of light and illumination. In so many uncoordinated hands the spectacle reminded Romney of an impromptu pyrotechnic display as the beams of light cut narrow channels out of the darkness. Voices called out to each other rolling across the open ground, noises that would have been, for the most part, unnecessary in daylight.

Romney borrowed a t
orch from a uniformed constable and went in search of Marsh. He located her, part of a select huddle and concentrated battery of torchlight, at the lip of an artificial hump on the fairway just off the green Phillip Emerson had been found dead on. As he arrived the generator chugged into life behind him, sounding like some old warplane, and an artificial sun lit up the circus.

Directing the torch beam down into the sandy hollow Romney located the body. A woman with short blonde hair lay face down in the bunker. As the torch beam played around her
, Romney caught the impression of a dark stain spoiling the finely raked golden sand. He guessed she had emptied most of her blood supply where she lay.

‘Do I recognise her?’ said Romney.

‘It’s Lillian West,’ said Marsh. ‘Evening, sir.’

‘Damn,’ said Romney, though why he did
, Marsh couldn’t be sure. ‘I suppose she’s dead?’

‘Very.’

‘How?’

‘It looks like her jugular has been punctured by the bunker rake. It’s possible that she landed on it.’

‘How did we find out about it?’

‘Follow me, sir, and I’ll take you to them.’

Marsh led the DI back towards the little community which had formed. She stopped in front of two teenage boys who were sitting on the damp grass. One was shivering, although there was nothing cold about the night.

‘These two were here when it happened.’

Romney’s mind boggled. ‘What were you doing out here?’

The fatter of the two, the one who wasn’t shivering said, ‘We come out here on our bikes now and again to look for balls.’

‘In the middle of the night?’ said Romney, incredulous.

‘Yeah,’ said fatty. ‘It’s illegal. And if the old git catches you he calls the police and pinches your balls.’

‘What?’

Fatty took a deep breath preparing to spell it out for an idiot. ‘We come out here at night to look for golf balls. We go through the water hazards. They’re just ornamental, not deep. If you time it right, like after a competition or something, you can get dozens, if the green-keepers haven’t had a look through them lately that is, which they do from time to time. They sell them in the pro-shop as second hand balls and keep the money. That’s why they don’t like anyone else doing it. You can make a few quid on a good night, just for getting your feet wet.’

‘Right,’ said Romney. ‘So tell me what happened tonight.’

‘We was over by the thirteenth in the little pond off the fairway. We see a car’s lights coming up the road by the course and it stopped. We thought it might be old bill. Sorry, the police. Thought maybe the old git had seen our torches and called you lot. So we turned them off and hid. Someone got out, climbed over the fence and went to the thirteenth green.’

‘How could you see them?’

‘We couldn’t, they was carrying a torch. They waited there for a bit and then we could see someone else coming, they had a torch too. I was crapping it then. I thought we’d been had in a pincer movement, you know? We soon realised they wasn’t interested in us and if you can afford a car and petrol you don’t have to go looking in ponds for your golf balls. There’s nothing else out here. I thought they might be out here dogging or something.’ Romney was glad that the youth couldn’t see his appalled expression that he should be so familiar and blasé with the concept. ‘So we crept up a bit closer. It was exciting really. I could hear it was a man and a woman, but I wasn’t close enough to understand what they was saying. They was soon arguing though. The bloke was shouting at her and she was shouting back at him. Then they started fighting.’

‘You’re sure about that?’

‘No. It was dark
so I couldn’t really see them. But I know what noises people make when they’re fighting each other. We get enough of that at school. One of them dropped their torch. Then it all went quiet. I’ve seen her. I know she’s dead.’

‘Did you see where the man went? Did he arrive by car?’

‘No, he didn’t have a car. He only waited for a bit. I suppose he was looking at what he’d done. Then he just walked off back over the course.’

Romney almost crossed his fingers. ‘Did you see him?’

‘No, like I’ve said it was too dark.’

‘OK. You’ve done well to remember that much. We’ll get you lo
oked after and taken home. You’ll have to attend the station with a parent and give us formal statements tomorrow.’

‘Don’t you want to know who he was?’ said fatty.

‘You said it was too dark.’

‘To see him, yeah, but I know his voice. He’s caught us out here before. He’s sneaky like that. He walks around the course at night trying
to catch us. It was the old git: the head green-keeper who lives in the cottages over there.’ The boy pointed in the general direction of Bill Thatcher’s home.

Romney and Marsh took two uniformed officers with them. Although the DI couldn’t imagine that Bill Thatcher, or his wife, would give them much trouble
, it was better to be safe than sorry and in Romney’s wide experience the sight of overwhelming numbers often did much to dampen the most ferocious of criminals, a category which the head green-keeper did not fall into in Romney’s opinion.

They walked across the golf course towards the dark patch of buildings. A light was on in an upstairs room guiding them on. Away from the bustle of the crime scene the darkness quickly swallowed them up and, despite the torches, navigation of the natural and man-made obstacles became awkward and hampered their progress. Romney collided with a gorse bush and swore as he heard the fabric of his trousers tear when he pulled himself free of its barbs.

Their progress became slower as they were forced to pick their way through the flora. They were not even halfway before Romney was chiding himself for not taking a car and going by the road. Still, there was nothing to be done about it now except put on a brave face and plough on. To turn around and walk back would have made them a laughing stock.

Then the first fat drops of water began their sporadic pattering of the countryside. Within a minute it had increased to steady rain. In light summer clothing all four officers were soon soaked to the skin.

By the time they arrived in front of the cottages the rain had turned to a deluge. It cascaded down from the heavens, like broken guttering. There had been no hurry for the final five minutes of their journey; none of them could have got any wetter.

Romney looked behind them towards the oasis of light they had left, but in the downpour he could barely make out anything. He also reflected that their cumbersome progress towards Thatcher’s front door must have been well advertised by their own approaching torch beams to anyone who had cared to be looking. And if Romney were in the property having fled a dead body
, he would have been looking. He told one of the constables to radio back for a car and then sent them both around to the back of the property as a precaution. But Thatcher didn’t strike Romney as the sort who would run and where would he go?

Romney tapped lightly on the wood of the front door. It was opened promptly by a small, round old woman. She stared up at him with a tight mouth.

‘Mrs Thatcher?’

‘Yes.’

‘Is your husband in?’

She took a moment considering what they would do to her floors and then said, ‘Come through. Took your time I noticed.’

‘It’s dark,’ said Romney, ‘and we don’t know the golf course like your husband does.’