Dead on Course

by J M Gregson

  By the time they retired to the adjoining lounge for coffee, the atmosphere was almost restored. Nash, treasuring his grievance in silence, replying with monosyllables to those who sought to divert him, appeared an unlikely, even a slightly ridiculous champion. This was partly because his damsel seemed far too sophisticated to be in any real distress. Watching Meg Peters smiling and unruffled, telling against herself the story of her ridiculous indecision over dresses earlier in the day, it was difficult to see her as vulnerable enough to necessitate the raw passion of Nash’s recent defence.

  Later, replete with good food and wine, they sat with liqueurs on the flat roof at the top of the old building. It was a still, velvety night, which they were reluctant to leave. The stars and a slim crescent of moon meant that they could just catch the great curve of the river, silver in the distance as it had been since before the days of man. As if cued by the balmy warmth, a nightingale sang below them in the woods by the river, the remote, ethereal beauty of its notes stilling the sporadic exchanges of the human company above.

  When they at last broke up, it was after midnight. Sandy Munro, who had rarely sat still for so long at a stretch, strolled alone through the night down the Wye Castle drive to the distant gates. The drive was almost three-quarters of a mile long; his practical mind diverted itself for a while with the cost of resurfacing it. For much of its length it was flanked by an avenue of two-hundred-year-old limes. Towards the gates, there was some undergrowth beneath these; the myriad scratchings of nocturnal wild life as he approached were unnaturally loud in the prevailing silence.

  He strolled over to the nearest green. He had been on thousands of golf greens in the last forty years, but never one by moonlight. The turf was soft as carpet beneath his feet, seeming in this light even more immaculately manicured than by day. The innocent place, so obviously man-made amid the natural features dimly visible all around him, seemed in its artificial rectitude almost threatening: it had the groomed, eerie stillness of a well-kept grave. With the thought, he turned and walked more briskly back towards the dark outlines of the main house and the lower shadows of its newly built accommodation lodges.

  As he entered the gravelled courtyard which was surrounded by the apartments, he heard the muffled sound of voices raised in argument. The flat roof was deserted now; the voices came from somewhere beneath it. At first, he thought Harrington and Nash had renewed their quarrel, and his spirits drooped at the thought of the implications for the rest of their week here. Then it seemed to him that the voices were male and female. He wondered if Meg Peters and Tony Nash were arguing about the vehemence of his reaction earlier in the evening. But there were other people staying here as well as their party, he reminded himself.

  He let himself quietly into his own room. To his surprise, it was empty. He hardly realised how much he relied on the comforting presence of his wife in all he did; perhaps he did not want to acknowledge such dependence. But he was not seriously disturbed.

  Alison’s absence did not at the time seem significant.

  3

  TUESDAY

  George Goodman had a disturbed night.

  Although it had been late when he crept between the sheets, he woke from an uneasy sleep to the sound of the dawn chorus. It began with a solitary thrush and swelled to a massive avian outburst as the different species added their contributions to the rich and varied sound, and he heard every detail. He knew now that he had overdone himself; he wasn’t as young as he used to be. On those mournful thoughts, he turned away from the light and tried desperately to sleep.

  Two hours later he accepted dolefully that there was no more rest for him. He sat on the edge of the bed for a moment, then padded through his first arthritic groans to the thin flowered curtains, drew them back, and surveyed the scene. Clear blue sky; the sun invisible somewhere to his right, but gilding the trees with its low morning rays. No human presence that he could see; rabbits busy at their eccentric play on the edge of the woods a hundred and fifty yards away. Whether God was in his heaven was debatable, but all seemed well in what he could see of the world.

  He set the electric kettle in the corner of the room to make tea, then shaved carefully with soap and water in the neat little bathroom. He looked with some distaste at the bishop’s face that others found so benign. He had not always looked like this. It was middle age which had whitened his hair and tonsured his dome: within this benign clerical figure he felt a lively and lustful young blood trying ineffectively to avoid eclipse. Why couldn’t the mind and the body keep more effective step with each other on their march through life? He sipped his tea and wondered how many more springs he would see.

  It was an unwelcome reflection, arriving unannounced to a mind that had not prepared defences against it. But at least it prompted him into activity, perhaps in an attempt to keep unwelcome reflections at bay. Through his window, he caught a glimpse of the most unlikely early riser in their party. With an abstracted air, Tony Nash, his yellow hair in uncharacteristic disarray, was wandering towards the course and the low eastern sun.

  Goodman went outside and sniffed the cool, clear air appreciatively. This was always the best time of day in spring and summer—once one had made the effort to get up and dressed. His days as a village boy in Norfolk came vividly back to him. Was it really half a century since those days when he had trailed behind farm labourers, who had seemed to his wide small boy’s eyes so magnificently, impossibly strong?

  He stalked his man softly, enjoying seeing him start when he called from ten yards or so behind him, ‘Glad to see someone else couldn’t sleep either!’

  Tony Nash looked even worse than George felt. His eyes were dark with lack of sleep beneath the dishevelled hair, his clothing in uncharacteristic disarray. He followed Goodman’s gaze, looked down and tucked away the light blue leisure shirt that was half in and half out of the band of his trousers. ‘Thought for a moment my flies must be undone!’ he said.

  ‘You’re obviously not a morning person,’ said George. ‘I don’t think I am, any more.’ They walked without further exchange around the edge of the bowling green, watching the dew sparkling as the low sun began to burn it off. Nash, versed in the ways of the city, checked automatically that his car had not been stolen overnight. The movement gave Goodman an idea. Their clubs were in the cars. ‘What about a few holes before breakfast?’ he said.

  Nash was lighting a cigarette and he half-expected him to refuse. Instead, the younger man accepted the suggestion eagerly. He looked exhausted, as though he had slept even less than Goodman, but he was full of a feverish energy which sought outlet in movement. In three minutes, they had their bags and trolleys out of the cars and were standing by the first tee.

  The course stretched appealingly before them, waiting to be conquered. Not a soul was in sight; there was just enough light breeze to flutter the distant flags and remind them that it was still not long after six. Their opening drives were well struck and bounced appealingly over the generous width of the first fairway. The world seemed a pleasing place, and they quite privileged within it.

  It could not last, of course. It did not take long for fallibility to creep into their play, and they played their usual quota of shots from rough and sand as they went along. But on a morning like this, playing without hindrance at their own brisk pace, it mattered less than usual. The only loud noise in their first hour was the call of a skein of wild geese over their heads at the highest part of the course. The two men watched the geese until they were almost invisible, studied for a moment the distant tower of the cathedral at Hereford as it emerged from the morning haze, and congratulated themselves upon their presence here at such an hour.

  As they played the eighth, two other residents crept sleepily on to the adjacent first tee, looking in awe at these two free-striding Titans who had been so far in front of what they had thought an early rising. Then there came the sound of the green keeper’s tractor moving from its shed within a copse of cedars; it must have been ha
lf a mile away, but it sounded unnaturally near in the prevailing silence. Soon they reached the part of the course that ran above the river, and a group of eight glistening black Labrador puppies provided them with much free entertainment as they ran in and out of the water on the far bank, shaking themselves enthusiastically around their philosophical owner.

  Tony Nash was the only smoker in the party of six. He must have worked his way through the bulk of a packet over their first nine holes; George Goodman had not realised that he was so heavy an addict. He twitted Tony about it as they went, with the cheerful self-righteousness of the reformed sinner; he had not touched tobacco now for seven years.

  Despite his smoker’s pallor and his unusually unkempt appearance, Nash was striking the ball quite well. They agreed that they would play to the twelfth, conveniently near the clubhouse, and adjourn for breakfast. Tony Nash looked forward to the bacon and eggs and the feeling of complacent virtue he would enjoy when eating among those who had not yet set foot outside on such a morning.

  The shout came as they were completing the eleventh. Away to their left, beneath the shadow of a huge beech, a young green keeper waved at them a frantic, unsteady arm. He stood on the edge of a small hollow in the ground, which had been an ancient dewpond before the area was drained to make the course. He had moved there to empty his cuttings after mowing the adjacent green: the mower box still dangled awkwardly from his left hand while he gesticulated with his right.

  They covered the hundred and fifty yards to the spot at no great speed, for the ground was uneven and they were beginning to feel the need of food to revive their flagging energies.

  And indeed, haste could have had no effect upon the thing that awaited them. They took in the young man’s white face, the limbs uncoordinated with shock, the voice that would not form words as he tried to explain his distress.

  Behind him, invisible until they entered the hollow, the body lay awkwardly across a small mound, like a boxer splayed unconscious across the bottom rope of a ring. It lay face upward, and that face was unnaturally dark, almost black in places: But it was the eyes which caught and held the attention. Wide and dark, with the pupils fully dilated, they stared unseeingly at the bright sun. Neither Goodman nor Nash felt any urge to move forward and close them.

  Guy Harrington was very dead indeed.

  4

  ‘Bloody golfers! What else can you expect from them but trouble?’ Sergeant Hook spoke with gloomy satisfaction, as if a single outburst of foul play among the patrons of the Wye Castle justified all his formidable prejudice against this absurd game.

  John Lambert drove the big Vauxhall carefully up the long drive and looked enviously at the placid green acres of undulating fairways beside him. Unlike the cricket enthusiast beside him, he played golf, and this was a morning to coax out even the rustiest swing. The sun was high now; they felt its warmth on their backs, even through the jackets of their suits, as they walked between the high walls of the hotel and the new residential lodges.

  They had no difficulty in identifying the place. Already the screens had been erected around the hollow where the body had been discovered. The Scene of Crime team were being briefed by Detective-Sergeant Johnson; in the face of a Superintendent arriving to take formal control of the case, they parted like the Red Sea to allow him entry to the enclosure of death.

  Lambert had been in court; he was later arriving here than he would have liked. He had an illogical, egocentric suspicion that he could spot something others might miss if he could be at the scene before hundreds of other feet trampled the area. The young PC with the clipboard looked anxiously towards the Scene of Crime Officer at the approach of top brass. Morris nodded and he recorded Lambert and Hook beneath the other names on his list, his careful hand shaking only a little as he wrote. If suggestive footprints or fingerprints were found around the body, theirs as well as others’ would need to be eliminated.

  Resignedly, Lambert donned a disposable white paper overall and overshoes. Much as he might mumble about resembling an astronaut instead of the detective he had been when he joined the CID twenty years ago, he knew the strange accoutrements would prevent him from contaminating the area with his own fibres and dust.

  He watched the police photographer take the last of his pictures of the body in situ. Then he moved down the narrow path between the white plastic tapes to inspect what had recently been Guy Harrington. He looked down at the corpse dispassionately, too well versed in the appearances of death to flinch from those wide, unseeing eyes that would never blink again. There was an old superstition that the eyes of the dead retained the image of the last thing they had seen in life. If only that were so! He stood for a moment without speaking, watching the careful movements of the silver-haired man who crouched beside the corpse.

  ‘Here before you, for once, John.’ It was the first moment when Lambert knew that the pathologist was aware of his presence. ‘Very interesting.’

  Lambert sighed: he knew exactly what those words presaged. ‘Natural causes?’ he inquired, without any feeling of hope. He had already seen the great patch of blood from temple to neck on the left side of the head, almost black now that it had been dried to a thick crust by sun and breeze. Tiny specks of gravel were trapped amid the congealed gore, peeping out of the sticky surface like nuts on the top of a fruit cake. Wisps of dried grass, trapped in the wound as it dried, moved gently in response to the light wind; an insect crawled unchecked over the matted hair. So soon did a living man, who had yesterday responded to the world around him, become an object with less volition than a fly.

  ‘Oh, I doubt this one is natural causes!’ said Burgess with relish. He rebuttoned the single shirt button he had gingerly undone on the thing beneath him. He intoned in the manner of what he took to be an official police announcement, ‘Foul play is certainly suspected.’ He rose from his preliminary examination of the remains and turned the blandest of smiles on Lambert. He was an erect figure still, despite being now around sixty. He looked round the twenty or so people within earshot to check that there were no relatives or media representatives, then said in his most bloodthirsty manner, ‘I shall be more certain when I have cut him up on my friendly slab.’

  Lambert thought he could scarcely imagine a place less friendly than the mortician’s workshop where Burgess was in his element. It had the abattoir accompaniments of the operating theatre—the gleaming instruments of incision, the sterile metres of stainless steel, the channels to sluice away streams of blood without the hope of prolonging life which was the hospital’s ultimate redemption. Burgess had dabbled with surgery in his youth; Lambert recalled his contention that only pathology had afforded him the un-hurried conditions, the chance to pursue and confirm his findings, which his tidy scientist’s mind demanded. The dead felt no pain, and they were never in a hurry.

  Lambert looked around at the men beginning to comb the area systematically, the photographer putting away his equipment, the plain van easing its way slowly over the turf from where the road ended by the clubhouse. He was the centre, the controller, of all this activity. That was a situation that would have been reserved for his fantasies when he set out on the paths of detection. There was enough of the old Adam in him for him to savour the thought.

  He could never voice it, not even at home; especially not at home. Christine, to whom ambition and status were the most ridiculous of human pretensions, would mock him mercilessly for it. He looked down again at the thing which had provoked all this activity. ‘Beaten to death with your old favourite the blunt instrument?’ he said.

  Burgess was not at all put out by the Superintendent’s view that he read far too much crime fiction. He pursed his lips, deliberately prolonging the moment he had looked forward to. ‘It’s possible. Unlikely though, I’d say. Be able to tell better when you let me get his clothes off and take a proper look at him. Would you like me to thicken the plot a little for you, even at this early stage?’

  ‘No, I wouldn’t. But I presume yo
u have a complication to report.’

  ‘You could call it that, I, suppose. You’re more prosaic than I am: I prefer to see it as a thickening of the plot. You noticed the blackening of the face and the palms, no doubt?’

  Lambert nodded. He had assumed bruising until now, though perhaps he should have known better. Because suddenly he knew what Burgess was going to say.

  ‘I won’t hazard a guess about the cause of death yet. That wound on the side of the head looks nasty. But it wouldn’t kill a man, of itself. I think there are fractures, but I didn’t want to remove any clothing until you and your team had finished here. The really interesting thing is that blueing of the skin on the face and forehead; I’ve just stolen a look at the chest and the same effect is quite clear there. For some considerable time after he died, this chap was lying face downwards.’

  Bert Hook, who was less squeamish about these things than his chief, looked at the corpse and the ground around it with renewed interest. ‘So someone came back and turned him over, several hours after his death?’ He looked for the outline of a corpse in the rough grass of the hollow, began calculations about the heaviness of the overnight dew.

  ‘Or dumped him here after he had been killed somewhere else,’ said Lambert. The three of them turned automatically to look over the heads of the bent figures who were systematically combing the area around them. The old house was in bright sunlight now, with high white clouds moving slowly above it, but from two hundred feet below, its ivy-clad gothic elevations still suggested hidden horrors and sinister passions.