‘Might I ask exactly what sort of a dead body, sir?’
In Sloan’s experience there were bodies and bodies: old and new, for instance, and young and old, too. And male and female …
‘Difficult to say just from the head,’ said Leeyes, ‘and I’m afraid that’s as much as we’ve got to go on so far.’
Detective Inspector Sloan drew breath ‘A severed head?’ Now that was something that hadn’t often come his way in all his years in the Force.
‘No, no,’ said Leeyes tetchily. ‘The head’s only as much of the body as can be seen so far without disturbing the scene.’
‘I get you, sir.’ An image not unconnected with the grin on the face of the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland rose and then died aborning in Sloan’s mind.
‘At least the woman had the sense not to dig any further than she had done already.’ The Superintendent managed to convey that this restraint in a lady golfer had come as something of a surprise.
‘A clear field is always a help, sir.’ Actually it was a luxury not often enjoyed by his Department.
Leeyes shot him a suspicious glance. ‘You could do a lot of damage to a cranium, Sloan, with a mashie-niblick if you didn’ t know how to handle it.’
Sloan paused and said thoughtfully, ‘And probably even more if you did, sir.’ In his time he had seen weapons take many forms: for all he knew a mashie-niblick might well be one to add to the list. Knowing how to use it was something else.
‘It’s the best club of all for some lies – the really difficult ones,’ said Leeyes seriously. ‘Remember that, Sloan.’
‘I will, sir.’ He hurried into further speech before the golfer in the man completely overtook the policeman in the Superintendent. ‘I take it that there is good reason to believe we’re dealing with a non-accidental death?’
As far as he was aware golf was not a contact sport although he’d heard often enough of men having heart attacks on the course … He’d always supposed it was the frustration that did it. Perhaps this was something he should mention to his wife …
Leeyes sniffed. ‘All I can tell you, Sloan, at this stage is that we’re dealing with a non-accidental burial, which is usually the same thing.’
‘And in a bunker, sir, I think you said?’ Sloan had an idea that the Americans called those hazards “sand traps”. He opened his notebook.
‘The one behind the sixth green and of course it’s unlikely to be natural causes,’ said Leeyes, irritably. ‘Not out there.’
‘Nor suicide unless someone else has buried him.’ Detective Inspector Sloan started to spell out in his mind the NASH classification of the causes of death: Natural Causes, Accident, Suicide …
‘Which just leaves homicide,’ grunted Leeyes. He jerked his shoulder in the direction of the first tee where a little clump of men could be seen to have congregated. ‘Naturally I told them to close the course at once. Not popular, mind you,’ he said, bracing his shoulders as one who had only performed his painful duty. ‘But it had to be done. The Club Secretary agreed with me, of course, and put up a notice straightaway.’
Sloan nodded appreciatively. At the Police Station the Superintendent’s actions – however bizarre – did not require endorsement by anyone. It was obviously a different matter here at the Berebury Golf Club. He scribbled some names in his notebook. ‘I’ll alert Dr Dabbe, sir, and the photographers and the rest of the Scenes of Crime people …’
Leeyes wasn’t listening. He was looking back towards the Clubhouse. ‘Ah, there’s the Captain arriving now. I must have a word with him at once …you go on ahead, Sloan. And take Constable Crosby with you before the fool says the wrong thing.’ He screwed his eyebrows into a ferocious frown. ‘It wouldn’t do for that to happen, you know. Not here at the Club.’ He gave a little cough. ‘I’m up for the Committee, you know.’
‘Walk?’ echoed Crosby, the dismay in his expression almost comical.
‘Walk,’ repeated Sloan. ‘That is, Crosby, as in putting one foot in front of the other.’
‘But …’
‘Repeating as necessary,’ said Sloan. That had been the instruction on the last prescription he had had from his doctor and the phrase had stuck in his mind. ‘If you remember, that is what men on the beat used to do all the time.’
‘Only the PC Plods,’ protested the Constable, whose own ambition it was to be transferred to Traffic Division as soon as possible.
‘And incidentally,’ swept on Sloan, since this was a sore point at the Police Station, ‘what the Great British Public would like us to be doing a lot more of.’
‘It’s all very well for the Numpties,’ muttered Crosby, half under his breath. His own wish to be transferred to Traffic Division was only exceeded by the determination of Traffic Division not to have him join them.
‘But the public forget that walking the beat doesn’t get the villains caught,’ said Sloan absently, his mind now on an unknown body, buried up to the head.
National policing policy had never interested Crosby half as much as his own welfare. He looked round. ‘Don’t they have those little electric buggies here to take you round the course?’ he asked. ‘I’m sure I’ve seen old men riding on them like Presidents.’
‘Very possibly,’ said Sloan briskly, ‘although I must say I haven’t seen any
about so far. Come along now.’ He looked at his watch and started to time how long it took them to walk to the sixth green. It might be something that it would be useful to know: it was too early to say. There was a little huddle of men standing to one side of the large green as the policemen approached. ‘Douglas Garwood,’ one of the waiting golfers announced himself to them. ‘Leeyes asked me to stay here until you came. We were following the last of the Ladies in the Competition and Luke Trumper and Nigel Halesworth here were behind us. We’ve sent their caddies back.’
Nigel Halesworth, a tall cadaverous man, pointed in the direction of the green and said gruffly ‘It’s in the deep bunker at the back.’
‘She must have left her club – it’s still there, lying in the sand,’ said Garwood. ‘Leeyes said not to touch anything and we haven’t.’
‘I don’t blame her for forgetting her club,’ put in Luke Trumper, a compact figure who looked as if he could hit a ball a long way. ‘Done it myself sometimes and that’s without finding a body.’
‘Pity about all this,’ said Garwood, waving a hand. ‘Enough to put the woman off her game forever.’
‘Golf’s a difficult enough game as it is,’ chimed in Halesworth. ‘You have to concentrate so.’
Detective Inspector Sloan decided that this was something he must remember to tell his wife, too, although his own immediate priorities were different. He moved cautiously across the green until he reached a point above the bunker. It was indeed deep and steep-sided. Most of the surface was neatly raked but at one point, alongside a discarded club, there were footmarks in the sand. In front of these there was a little space clear of sand in which could clearly be seen the remnants of a human face.
But it was a solitary white golf ball resting a few inches away from that facewhich really added the Grand Guignol touch.
Chapter Four
Birdie
Sloan stood stock still on the green and set about committing the scene to memory, absorbing what he could of the spot’s surroundings before allowing his gaze to home in on the battered face protruding from the sand. His silent absorption, though, was not allowed to last long.
Detective Constable Crosby looked up and announced that the picture boys were on their way. ‘I bet it’s the longest they’ve had to walk in years,’ he said with a certain satisfaction as Williams and Dyson, the two police photographers, approached the sixth green on foot.
‘We’d have loaded our stuff onto a golf buggy if we could’ve found one,’ said Williams, panting up onto the high green.
‘Apparently they don’t have them here,’ chimed in Dyson. ‘Too hilly.’
‘You can say that again
,’ Crosby endorsed this.
‘So they have caddies instead,’ said Dyson. ‘The lucky ones, that is. Not us.’
‘Those cameras must weigh a bit,’ agreed Sloan moderately. The man was as hung about as an old-fashioned pedlar.
‘Can’t do without ’em, though, can you?’ challenged Williams.
‘No.’ Detective Inspector Sloan, veteran of many a court case, would have been the first to admit that photographs, suitably authenticated, weighed heavily in evidence – too heavily, sometimes – with juries. The camera might be able to lie -could and did lie – but it couldn’t look unreliable or sound shifty like some accused and a great many witnesses could.
‘There’s nothing to beat a good old-fashioned photograph for your album,’ declared Dyson, plonking his own equipment down on the green with scant regard for the precious Cumberland turf, ‘taken with a good old-fashioned camera. It doesn’t lie as easily as a digital one.’
‘Now,’ said Sloan, immediately getting down to business, ‘if you’d take some shots from up here first …’
‘That ball’s in a pretty difficult lie, isn’t it?’ Williams interrupted him. He, too, had been peering over the edge of the bunker. ‘Especially for a beginner.’
‘So you play golf, too, do you?’ divined Sloan swiftly.
‘Too right, I do, Inspector,’ grinned Williams. ‘I play, but not at your precious Royal and Ancient Club here at Berebury.’
The detective inspector waved at the bunker. ‘I daresay we could do with a golfer on the team, things being what they are here.’
‘But you’ve got the Superintendent, Inspector, haven’t you?’ said Williams, tongue well in cheek. ‘He’s a member here, surely.’
‘Not the same thing at all,’ replied Sloan sedately. Somehow he didn’t think the fact the Superintendent played was going to be a great help. On the contrary, probably. ‘Even though he was first on the scene.’
‘After the wailing woman,’ put in Crosby.
‘And where do you play?’ Sloan asked the photographer. He was clearly going to have to get to know something of the game himself. This would please his wife, if no one else.
‘Over at the Links at Kinnisport, thank goodness.’ Williams started to set up his camera.
‘Isn’t that the same thing as a course?’
Williams shook his head. ‘Not quite. Links is a Scottish name for sand which has ceased drifting and become more or less solidly covered with turf.’
‘Hoots, mon,’ muttered Crosby.
‘And good for golf, I take it?’ said Sloan, ignoring this.
‘I’ll say,’ said Williams. ‘Besides they aren’t so toffee-nosed over there as they are here at Berebury. We play against this lot in matches and that sort of thing, of course, but we get the feeling that they look down on mere tradesmen such as the likes of us.’
‘Craftsmen, if you don’t mind,’ interjected Dyson, setting up a tripod. He smirked. ‘Although on a good day I don’t mind being called a specialist.’
‘Even when you beat them?’ enquired Crosby with genuine interest.
‘Especially when we beat them,’ said Williams cheerfully. ‘Now, what exactly do you want pretty pictures of, Inspector?’
‘The bunker first,’ began Sloan, ‘including all the footprints in there.’
‘What on earth did she use to hit that ball with?’ asked Dyson, leaning over the edge of the green as well and regarding it with the detached interest which went with his calling. ‘A shovel?’
‘A wedge,’ Williams answered him absently. ‘Can’t you see? It’s lying in the bunker over there near the grass. I reckon it’s the only club that would get you out of a bunker this deep.’
‘Only it didn’t, did it?’ said Crosby.
‘Someone hasn’t half made a mess of trying, though,’ observed Dyson. ‘Churned the sand up good and proper.’
‘That’s because when you’re in a bunker you have to hit about two inches behind the ball to get the lift,’ explained his fellow photographer, starting to focus his lens on what was visible of the victim’s face protruding through the sand. ‘You chop the plugged ball with an open blade and take a lot of sand. It’s called a poached egg shot.’
Crosby looked disbelieving, while Sloan realised that like it or not he would now have to take a proper interest the game until the case was cleared up.
If it ever was.
Jack the Ripper had had his way with young women without ever being caught: something never forgotten inside – or outside — police circles.
‘And when you don’t get it out the first time,’ carried on Williams mordantly, ‘you have to do it again. And again. And again.’ He waved a hand. ‘Soon spoils your card, I can tell you.’
‘I can well believe it,’ said Sloan, thankful that his own hobby was growing roses. What spoiled those were more manageable black spot and greenfly.
The camera shutter clicked again and again. ‘Now, what?’ asked Williams.
‘Some close-ups of the grass beyond, next,’ said Sloan. ‘And anywhere where there might be extra sand. It must have been put somewhere while a hole was dug for the body.’
‘And the body parked somewhere else,’ contributed Crosby.
‘Will do,’ said Williams obligingly.
‘If there is a body, that is,’ added Crosby.
‘And there may still be footprints in the grass.’ Detective Inspector Sloan persisted with his requirements in spite of Crosby’s unhelpful coda. There had been stranger things than bent and broken blades of vegetation that had come to the aid of an investigation: there had been forensic entomologists and their decay-hungry little beetles whose evidence had clinched a case.
‘Consider it done,’ said Williams largely. ‘And then?’
‘The general layout of the green and bunker,’ said Sloan.
‘Oh, and the pattern of the raked sand in the other bunkers round about here as well as in this one.’
‘Good thinking for a non-player,’ nodded Williams approvingly. ‘Someone must have smoothed this one over afterwards. Mind you,’ he added righteously, ‘in theory a player is supposed to leave the bunker in as good a condition as he found it.’
‘“Please remember, don’t forget”,’ chanted Crosby, ‘“Never leave the bathroom wet”. My landlady’s got that hanging up on a card behind the door …’
‘What we don’t know yet,’ said Sloan, leaving aside the educational works of the late Mabel Lucie Attwell, ‘is whether whoever disturbed the bunker in the first place is a golfer or not.’
‘Or who it was who’s in there,’ volunteered Crosby helpfully.
‘Pix of an unidentified head, then,’ said Williams, unpacking something like an archaeologist’s measuring stick. ‘Make a note of that, Dyson.’
Dyson, who was busy changing a camera lens, nodded.
‘And first views of crime scene.’ Williams jerked his shoulder. ‘How much of the course do you want, Inspector?’
‘The approach, for starters.’
‘As any good golfer will tell you,’ the photographer said neatly, ‘it’s the approach shot that counts. Never up, never in, of course, too.’
Detective Inspector Sloan didn’t need telling. A lot of good policing came down to the right approach. Especially at domestics.
Williams pointed his camera down into the bunker. ‘No use asking this one to watch the birdie, though, is it?’
‘None,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan repressively.
‘Nothing to watch it with,’ added his detective Constable unnecessarily. ‘Not now.’
Woman Police Sergeant Perkins, familiarly known at the Police Station as Pretty Polly, pushed open the door in the Golf Clubhouse marked “Lady Members Only” without ceremony. She was dressed in mufti and looked as if she could have swung a golf club with the best of them. She didn’t need to ask for Helen Ewell. An incoherent, tear-stained young woman was very much at the centre of a circle of would-be comforters.
The on
ly woman who looked up as the policewoman came through the door was older and had been standing attentively to one side of the group. She advanced, hand outstretched. ‘I don’t think I know you. Are you a new member?’ she said to Polly Perkins. ‘If so, welcome, although I’m afraid you’ve arrived at a rather awkward moment.’
‘Sergeant Perkins,’ said Polly. ‘Police.’ As job descriptions went, she found that was usually enough.
It was quite enough for the Lady Captain. ‘Thank goodness you’ve come,’ she said fervently. ‘We can’t do anything with Helen …’
Sergeant Perkins was unsurprised. Her daily round was fairly evenly divided between those who were very glad indeed to see the police arrive and those who most definitely weren’t. As far as she was concerned both groups meant work.
‘And whatever we say to her,’ said the Lady Captain, ‘she won’t stop crying.’
‘I understood,’ began Sergeant Perkins, looking round, ‘that there were two women players involved …’
The Lady Captain pointed to another door. ‘Poor Ursula Millward is in the cloakroom, being sick. She saw the face, too.’ She shuddered. ‘Or, rather, what was left of it.’
‘But no one else has seen the – er – deceased?’
‘No other Lady member,’ the Lady Captain assured her. ‘I can’t tell you about the men.’
Polly Perkins took another look at Helen Ewell. Her comforters, like those of the unfortunate Job, didn’t appear to be having much success. ‘Did everyone know that the ladies would be playing this morning?’ she asked.
‘Oh, yes,’ said the Lady Captain intelligently, ‘but most people only knew that it would be ladies playing, not that it would be the Rabbits’ Competition.’ She gestured out of the window in the general direction of the course. ‘It’s for absolute beginners, you know. Very few experienced players risk getting in the bunker behind the sixth. They usually play short to be on the safe side.’
‘And how exactly would everyone else know it would be the ladies playing?’ Sergeant Perkins contrived to keep a weather eye on the door to the cloakroom, while from time to time watching the face of the young woman still babbling incoherently to her audience.
Hole in One Page 3