Murder at the Open

by Angus MacVicar

  “Damn your logic!” she snapped, her face grey beneath the powder.

  He shrugged. “Thomas Henry Huxley once referred to logical consequence as the scarecrows of fools and the beacons of wise men. I have a feeling he was right.”

  She lit a cigarette and dourly stared him out.

  Finally, he said, “How much was the brooch worth, do you know?”

  She looked down at the smoke jerking up from between her fingers. “It was a lovely piece of jewellery. Mr Lingstrom was always generous where — where Debbie was concerned.” She paused for a second to control her voice. “He bought it at Tiffany’s and had a special inscription put on the back. I helped him choose it and saw him write out the cheque.”

  “Yes?” prompted Aidan.

  “The price was three thousand dollars.”

  “Roughly a thousand pounds sterling. Quite a bauble!”

  “It gave Debbie a good deal of pleasure, I can tell you that.”

  “All women derive pleasure from diamonds, or so they tell me. But in this case they weren’t forever, were they?”

  “You have a point there, Professor. Though the way you put it sounds too callous to be really smart.”

  He was unperturbed. “In dealing with a callous murderer one tends to think along callous lines. Don’t you agree?” She disliked him. That was obvious. But she was afraid of him, too, so she willed all expression from her face and said nothing.

  *

  At about noon, the Inspector had news from Blackstock at the hospital.

  The first item, in which Aidan showed little interest, was that Gordon Cunningham had by now almost completely recovered and would be fit to appear in court on a charge of embezzlement the next day.

  The second item was worrying. Debbie was still very sick. The effect of the sedatives had worn off and she was fully conscious, but the doctors had decided she wasn’t yet in a condition to talk to anyone, least of all to the police.

  “However,” said Big Sam, glooming in the upstairs lounge, “they’ve discovered that whatever she swallowed contained elements of other poisons besides strychnine, and the treatment has been modified. They’re confident she’ll respond and be well on the way to recovery by this evening.”

  He tapped the table with his pencil. “There’s a suggestion in the lab report,” he went on, “that the mixture may have been a proprietary brand of weed-killer.”

  “Interesting,” said Aidan. “How are your men making out at the chemists’?”

  “They’ve been round them all. Most of the seedsmen and ironmongers, too. Nobody’s bought any plain strychnine in this respectable town for donkey’s years. Tins of weedkiller have been sold by the dozen, of course, but none of the purchasers appear to have any connection with Debbie Lingstrom.”

  It occurred to me that both Bill Ferguson’s firm and Gold Products, Inc., manufactured and sold large quantities of selective weed-killer for golf greens; but I didn’t bring up so obvious a line. Big Sam would have that side of it taped. In any case, it was my hazy impression that selective weed-killers contain no mineral poison.

  Aidan said, “Naturally you can’t trace all the tins?”

  “Not a hope,” agreed Big Sam.

  “Then I have one suggestion,” my friend went on, looking wiser than a flock of owls. “Ring up the Royal and Ancient. Get them to check their stocks of weed-killer. I should imagine they keep some tins in most of their tool-sheds.”

  “I’d thought of that. There’s a man on the job now.”

  “Great minds, Inspector. Great minds. I’ll be interested to hear the result.”

  I left them looking like two spiders at the centre of a web.

  After lunch I walked down to the Old Course.

  The flag above the Royal and Ancient Clubhouse was flying stiff; but conditions for golf had improved since yesterday.

  The first seven holes were still proving difficult against the westerly wind, however, and on the Daily Express ‘Hole by Hole’ score-board I saw that many of the competitors were taking 6’s and 7’s to the long and hazardous fifth. John Panton in particular had found this a bogey hole, but otherwise he seemed to be the only home-based Scots player still in with a chance. His second round score of 74, completed an hour ago, gave him an aggregate of 152. I reckoned this would just about enable him to qualify for the last day’s play, when the field would be reduced to those with the forty-five best scores and any tying for the forty-fifth place.

  Then I noticed that Max Faulkner had done another 73, so that his aggregate was 146 — five ahead of Doug Sanders. Good old Max! The only aggregate which so far bettered this was Australian Bruce Devlin’s 144. It was a gesture of defiance from a veteran; and even though Max might fail to keep it up — after all, he’d had a serious stomach operation the previous October — he was showing the youngsters that golf, unlike most other outdoor games, can be played successfully to a mature age. Maybe I could still keep my own handicap at 5 for a year or two yet.

  I was sorry to see that such good players as Brian Huggett, Ken Bousfield and Neil Coles were all scoring badly — on their own standards — and would almost certainly be eliminated after the second round. The chancy wind had beaten them. Eric Brown, too, had started unhappily — considering his first round of 80 — and Cobie Legrange and Ronnie Shade were also out of the running.

  Then I saw two names — Jack Nicklaus and Roberto de Vicenzo. According to the board they were playing steadily and well, and a pattern of the Open began to form in my mind — the pattern, so often repeated, of overseas competitors mastering our men when the chips were down. I was depressed. I could have wished the pattern a little less obvious — even confused and indistinct like the pattern of Conrad Lingstrom’s murder.

  I left the board and stood against the rail near the first tee.

  Tony Lema was driving off, a graceful, tall figure in a grey sweater and dark flannels. His swing was smooth and beautiful, like the resulting flight of the ball, and I had a curious thought. Being entirely feminine, would the cantankerous Old Lady of Fife show favour to elegance rather than to power?

  Jack Nicklaus or Tony Lema? In spite of Max Faulkner’s heroics, in spite of the fact that Weetman, Garialde and O’Connor were again doing reasonably well today, I had a premonition even then that the Championship was going to be fought out between those two. Style or strength? The answer would come tomorrow.

  Oddly enough, Aidan and Big Sam were also in my mind at that moment — examples of style and strength in another sphere. Tomorrow might bring the final answer to their problem, too.

  Making my way towards the press tent through the crowds behind the Royal and Ancient Clubhouse, I found that my zest for golf was blurred by the ugliness of murder and its aftermath. Who would win the Open? Who killed Conrad Lingstrom? The second question overwhelmed the first and brought more depression. Depression and a strange uneasiness.

  Depression was understandable. Aidan and Big Sam — Aidan in particular — was probing the dark waters of death and stirring up strange motives and emotions; and the revelation of human evil is always depressing. But uneasiness? Why should I — an onlooker, a recorder, trained to observe rather than to become involved — why should I feel uneasy? Was this another premonition?

  I found Jock and the Scotsman correspondent eating hot pies and drinking beer outside the press tent, while they watched J. B. Carr and Tony Grubb holing out on the massive shaven greenness of the eighteenth. They, too, were inclined to be depressed. Not a sensational, par-busting circulation-boosting British score in sight. And now J. B. Carr, even with 75 today, leading all the glamorous amateurs out into wind-blown oblivion. The prospect of more bleakly factual reporting, on top of pies and beer, wasn’t conducive to enthusiasm.

  Jock said: “We’re concentrating on five suspects — Nick-Iaus, Lema, de Vicenzo, Weetman and O’Connor. What about your lot?”

  “By a coincidence, we have five in mind as well,” I told him.

  “What’s the la
test about the niece?”

  “She’s recovering.”

  The Scotsman reporter swallowed a hunk of pie. “Our respected colleagues in the crime corner seem to be suspicious of that secretary.”

  “I don’t blame them. But she’s a cioteach,” I added. “Keep that in mind.”

  “Cagey, eh?”

  “Very. For the simple reason that I’m even more at sea about this case than you are about the golf. However, I think Aidan has a theory, though he hasn’t divulged it to me. I hope it works out. Personally, I’m cheesed off at not being able to enjoy the Championship.”

  Jock offered me a sympathetic drink from his screw-top. He was smiling, completely unaware of my nagging uneasiness.

  Suddenly, as I took a mouthful of beer, I was very sad indeed. It’s a bad thing when you’re scared to confess fear to your son.

  *

  At about three o’clock I got back to the hotel and found Aidan pacing the hall.

  “Where the hell have you been?” he demanded.

  “Having a look at the golf and a word with Jock.”

  “Can’t you concentrate on the murder? I’m as keen on the golf as you are, but first things first!”

  He has some of the characteristics of a child. He needs company. He needs praise and encouragement. He needs someone to whom he can confide — someone who doesn’t object to his self-satisfied flights of fancy, and can stimulate him to action.

  “I hate this murder,” I told him.

  “So do I. So do we all. Everybody hates a murder — except maybe those who can sit back and merely read about it. But once you get involved, you’re morally bound to do your duty and see it through to the end.”

  “Rule Britannia!” I murmured.

  He glared at me through his horn-rims. “Since you ran out on us after lunch,” he said, “there have been developments.”

  “Oh?” I was interested in spite of myself.

  “Big Sam’s men have struck oil. One of the greenkeepers employed by the Royal and Ancient has reported a tin of weed-killer missing from a hut behind the Eden Clubhouse. Stuff with strychnine in it. Some of the contents had already been used — on the gravel paths around the Clubhouse — but enough weed-killer was left to kill a score of people.”

  “And now they’re trying to trace the tin?”

  “Yes. So far without success. They’ve searched all the rooms — Debbie’s own, Erica Garson’s, Cliff O’Donnel’s, Bill Ferguson’s, even Cunningham’s — but no dice. I could have told them.”

  “I bet you did, too!”

  “Why not?”

  “Why not, indeed! So what’s to be done now? I suspect you have something clever in mind.”

  His irritation died, and he looked at me with curiosity. “What’s got into you, Angus? If I didn’t know you so well, I’d say you were trying to be sarcastic.”

  “Sarcastic? Let me forestall you by quoting Carlyle’s dictum that sarcasm is the language of the devil.”

  “Quite.”

  For once he betrayed a poverty of words — but not for long. “Look,” he said, abruptly, “I’ve been waiting patiently for you to come back so that we could go and search the locker-room and the garage behind the hotel.”

  “Couldn’t you have done that by yourself?”

  His brow puckered, and he sighed. “I need a witness,” he said. Then, as if addressing a class of retarded aborigines, he went on, slowly: “I hope to discover something. If and when I do, I need a witness.”

  “I see.”

  “Very well, then. Come on!”

  We went out by the front door, approaching the rear of the hotel by way of the courtyard entrance. As we stopped by the locker-room door, Aidan produced a key.

  I borrowed this from Bill Ferguson. Said I wanted to have another look at Lingstrom’s clubs.”

  He opened the door and we went in.

  “Where’s Bill now?” I asked.

  “With Erica Garson and the accountants. Some kind of business meeting. Preparing figures relevant to the merger, I gather — for the benefit of Lingstrom’s lawyer when he arrives tomorrow. Debbie and Gordon Cunningham are in hospital, and Cliff O’Donnel went out some time ago — to watch the golf and save himself from going crazy, he said — so I thought this might be a good opportunity to investigate here.”

  “What d’you expect to find?”

  “We’ll see, Angus. We’ll see.”

  But though he searched the whole locker-room — and even poked into all the golf-bags in sight — he found nothing which seemed to interest him. Except maybe the right-hand golfing glove in a pocket of Erica Garson’s bag.

  He held it up to the dust-spangled light coming from two small windows. “She plays left-handed golf, so she wears a right-hand glove. Just as we, being right-handed, wear left-hand gloves. Has the paradox of golf ever occurred to you, Angus? In right-handed players the left is the master hand — and, of course, vice versa.”

  “It has occurred to me often. Some day an imaginative British father is going to teach his right-handed son to play golf the natural way — that is, with the left hand beneath the right on the shaft. Then we may produce a native Open Champion at last!”

  He glanced at me with the same look of surprised curiosity I’d seen in his face a few minutes ago.

  We came out of the shed.

  As he locked the door behind us, he said, suddenly, “Are you still resentful about last night?”

  “Not in the least.”

  “You understood what we wanted you to do and accepted the situation. At least, that was my impression.”

  “Of course.”

  We went towards the double row of cars, amongst which the big Cadillac towered like a bus.

  He said: “Well, then, what’s the trouble? Is it something Debbie said?”

  “Nothing like that. I can’t tell you what’s wrong with me. I’m scared, that’s all.”

  “About what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He smiled, as if relieved. “It’s that well-developed Celtic imagination of yours! That, and the lack of exercise. Wait till Saturday, when everything is over. Then we’ll have a round on the Old Course and shake up your liver.”

  “I hope everything will be over by Saturday.”

  “Put your shirt on it, Angus. And I can promise you this, too — I’ll tan the hide off you!”

  He was doing his best to put me in a better humour. But I felt no answering light-heartedness.

  By now he was prowling round the Cadillac. It wasn’t locked, though the ignition key had been removed and was now probably in O’Donnel’s pocket. He poked under the bonnet, into the front pockets, beneath the seats, behind the spare tyre and into the tool-box in the boot.

  He remained unsatisfied.

  At the end of the line was a smart Rover, dark green in colour.

  “That’s Bill Ferguson’s, isn’t it?”

  I nodded.

  He stood looking at it, his head to the side. “Yes,” he murmured. “Yes, it could be. I was forgetting the conjuror’s touch.”

  He opened the boot and rummaged about amongst its strange load of gum-boots, old windcheaters, golfing-umbrellas and odd golf-clubs. He brought out the tool-kit, which was wrapped in a canvas holder fastened with black tape.

  Then he whistled softly to himself and dived in again. This time he produced a gaudy yellow tin decorated with green and red stripes. Around its top ran the legend: KILLWEED — the Deadliest Weed-killer. And underneath, in bold, unmistakable type: DANGER — POISON.

  A shiver ran down my back. “The missing tin?” I said.

  “Almost certainly.” He prised off the lid. “There’s still some powder at the bottom,” he went on. “The lab boys will soon identify it.”

  “How did you know”

  “I didn’t know. I had a hunch, though at first it led me in the wrong direction. A matter of wrongful interpretation — I can see that now.”

  “But Bill Ferguson, for heaven’s
sake”

  “What’s going on here?”

  We swung round. Bill Ferguson himself was standing only a yard or two away. Our absorption had been so complete we’d failed to notice his approach from the back door of the hotel.

  He eyed the tin in Aidan’s hand. “Where the hell did you get that?” His voice was rough, as if he’d been smoking too many cigarettes.

  “In the boot of your car.”

  “What is it?”

  “You know very well what it is. A tin of powdered weedkiller.”

  “Why should I know?”

  “You’re close enough to read the label.”

  They faced each other across the tarmac, Aidan cool and quizzical, Bill red-faced, containing his emotions by an effort of will that was painful to watch.

  “Well?” he managed to jerk out.

  “Is it a sample of one of your products?”

  “That stuff! Of course it isn’t! I — ”

  “Then how did it get into the boot of your car?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t put it there. Anyway, what’s the point?”

  “There’s very little doubt that Debbie was poisoned with powder taken from this tin.”

  “My God! You don’t mean to tell me that — ”

  “Somebody stole it from a tool-shed behind the Eden Clubhouse. Somebody put a pinch or two of the powder into Debbie’s food — or drink. Then this same person hid the tin in the boot of your car.”

  Bill’s searing anger was tempered by a look of horror. “You don’t believe I put it there? For God’s sake, Professor”

  “Then you deny absolutely you’ve seen this tin before?”

  “Absolutely! Think what you’re suggesting, man! That I poisoned Debbie! Good grief, it’s ludicrous — fantastic”

  “We’ll see, Bill. The police will examine the tin for fingerprints, of course.”

  “But do you honestly believe”

  “I don’t believe or disbelieve anything. Though I must say a murderer — or potential murderer — would be incredibly stupid to try and conceal evidence of his crime in the unlocked boot of his own car.”

  The courtyard was silent, except for a remote rush of speeding vehicles on the road outside. Blank windows staied down at us from the cliff-face of the hotel. The in-animate lines of cars twinkled in the sun. No one seemed to be watching us, though I did catch a glimpse of police blue in the glass-walled porch at the back entrance. Here in this enclosed area, sheltered from the wind, it seemed to have become unusually hot and stuffy. As we stood there like actors in a film, alone, exposed and tense, the smell of warm tarmac tingled in my nostrils.