Skinner’s round bs-4

by Quintin Jardine

  He chipped carefully on to the green, avoiding the direct line to the flag over a wide bunker, but making his par-five secure.

  It's quite a thought, isn't it?' he said as they walked on to the green. The Atkinson Twins, two psychopaths out to rule not just a chunk of some city, but the game of golf, both on and off the course.'

  He stood back and watched as the champion's eagle putt rolled just past the hole, and joined in the applause of the gallery as he tapped in to go three under par. 'Keep it up, Darren,' he said smiling as he walked away, having completed his own par. I'm backing you to shoot sixty-three, remember.

  Anyway, back to poor old Michael White.'

  `There you are, you and Rick, thwarted over Witches' Hill. Good losers, so Kinture and White think, for you agree to play in the Murano Million, and Rick signs M'tebe, Urquhart and Andres in as well. Rick even comes up and plays a round with Michael White, who shows him his private changing room, and tells him about his habit of bathing in his Jacuzzi, rather than showering, after each round.

  `You and Rick make your plans. You know about the practice round last Sunday, because Andres is playing in it. So Rick leaves the tour event last Saturday… same day as Richard Andrews goes off to have his piles done.'

  He stopped as they stepped up on to the eighth tee, from which the clubhouse was in sight once more. Atkinson ripped off another deadly accurate drive down. the 430-yard hole.

  Skinner, following, played cautiously with a three-wood to avoid the meandering stream.

  They fell in step once more, coming close to the skirting crowd, hearing their shouts of encouragement. 'Last Sunday, while everyone is out on the course, Rick just wanders in to the club. He hides in the starter's hut, over there.' As he walked, Skinner pointed casually towards the square building on the horizon.

  `While he's in there, he smokes a couple of fags. Unusual fags. Last week's sponsors were dishing them out at the event, to those and such as those, but you can't buy them in the shops yet. He left a couple of stubs. There's nothing we can match on them, but they certainly cut down our list of possibles. Cut it down to one, in fact, since Andrews was having his arse examined in Surrey by that time.

  Eventually he sees the first match coming in and it's White and Cortes. He nips, unseen, into the clubhouse through the open door which is normally used only as an exit. He goes into White's changing room and through into the Jacuzzi.'

  Skinner broke off to play his second shot, a three-iron which finished on the front edge of the green, then he and the champion, their caddies following a few yards behind, walked off towards another stone bridge across the stream.

  A few minutes later, White comes in. He puts his watch and stuff on the shelf, and he's hanging up his towel beside it when Rick smashes him on the side of the head. He drops like a stone. The blow might have killed him, but Rick makes sure. He's as big and powerful as you, and he heaves him into the bath, so there'll be no mess. Then he cuts the poor bugger's throat.'

  They reached Atkinson's drive. The champion's wedge-shot was poor by his standards, but still finished only twenty feet from the hole.

  `Can you imagine anything as callous as that? Of course you can, you helped plan it! While the rest are gathering in the bar, Michael White is left dead in bubbling water turned pink by his blood. It doesn't bear thinking about, but it happened.' Skinner shook his head, and shuddered.

  After he's done the business, Rick counts the rest in, then nips out by the door he used to come in. He takes White's wallet and wristwatch, in the hope that we'll assume it was murder associated with theft. Then he has his first piece of bad luck. He meets Hughie Webb, greenkeeper, nursing his Sunday hangover. Hughie, who's not too bright, takes him for you, and asks for an autograph. And Rick, desperate to be on his way, takes his grubby Gullane scorecard and signs on the back, "Best wishes, Darren Atkinson". From the quick glance that I had back on the first tee, his signature's quite like yours. Maybe he signs some of your photos, for you, eh?'

  He stopped to play his approach shot, striking it rather too hard, and knocking it twelve feet past the hole. But, after another birdie attempt by the champion had missed by a millimetre, he stepped up and knocked in the putt for his eighth straight par.

  As they crossed to the tee of the 540-yard par-five ninth, which, like the opening holes, curved round Witches' Hill and back towards the clubhouse, Skinner said, reflectively, 'It's quite a story, champ. And you know, if you'd left it at that, at White's murder alone, I'd probably never have caught on.

  `Hughie Webb's a lousy witness. He doesn't know whether it's breakfast or Easter, so even if I'd found that connection, I'd probably have assumed that he'd made a mistake and had met you on the Monday. It was only when I started thinking in the context of all three murders that I tied you in.

  If you'd just been a bit less greedy, a bit less ambitious. But not you and Rick. Suddenly you saw a chance to make the big jump you'd been dreaming about.'

  They smashed two more crunching tee-shots down the ninth, but Atkinson's ball took a bad bounce and, to the groans of the gallery, was swallowed by a bunker 290 yards out.

  `What you two want, Darren,' Skinner resumed as they walked on, 'is to make DRA Management, absolutely the number one, unchallenged leader in world golf management.

  You told me casually that your ambitions extended to America. Now I see how strong they are. The fact that Mike Morton made a half-hearted attempt to lean on you a few years back probably convinced you that you wouldn't beat SSC by business means, and the whole of Asia knows about Masur's Yakuza connection.

  `No, the game plan which the terrible twins drew up called for the elimination of the strong men at the head of SSC and Greenfields, each of whom held his business together. With them out of the way you'd move in. You'd sign up the top boys not just in Europe, but in the Americas, Asia and Australasia as well. You'd control the game. DRA would be Number One, worldwide.

  `That's the plan. Suddenly you see a chance to put it all into practice in one sweep. Masur and Morton are both here. Even better, they're at each other's throats over Tiger Nakamura.'

  Skinner's ball was only a few yards short of Atkinson's bunker. He thought about trying for the green but saw the sand lying in wait ahead, and hit a five-wood, leaving himself a thirty-yard pitch to the green.

  The champion's ball was plugged wickedly in the bunker. Even with his strength and skill he was able only to coax it clear by a few feet, the ball landing in straggly semi-rough, only its top visible. Looking at the lie, Skinner expected him to select a mid-iron and to trust to his wedge to save par. But he was mistaken. Three-wood, please, Mario,' said Atkinson. To the astonishment of the gallery, Atkinson took the club and, from that position, fashioned the finest golf shot Skinner had ever seen. The ball soared away, on a right-left drawn trajectory, rather than the usual professional's faded shot, flying against the line of the curving fairway, flirting with the trees of Witches' Hill, but plunging, as if wire-guided, into the centre of the green and rolling up to the very edge of the hole. The spectators in the small stand behind the green rose to their feet as one. The gallery around the golfers cheered wildly. As the ball came to rest, Atkinson glared across at Skinner with fire in his eyes, and his lips drawn back in a silent animal snarl.

  As they walked on down the fairway, the policeman said quietly. 'That was a sort of answer, Darren, wasn't it? You know, it's as well you use golf clubs, not firearms. Otherwise I think I'd have to kill you, and I'd hate that.'

  His tone changed and became conversational once more. As I said, I've encountered people like you two before. They've always perished on the sword of their own ambition. You guys have perished on your imagination. Just as no one else would have imagined that shot back there, so no one but Rick would have had the flair to fasten on that bloody stupid note by Hector Kinture's mother to the Scotsman.

  `The trouble is, once I found something out, it was like a signature. And what I discovered was that Rick, as Henry Wills's st
udent fifteen years back, had heard the vague, unsupported tale of the Witch's Curse.

  It was dismissed as colourful folklore by serious academics like Henry, but it stuck in Rick's mind, and when he read the old Lady Kinture's piece of nonsense in the newspaper, he had his brainwave. "Blade, Fire and Water", the old curse said, and here you were, with your potential victims, at Witches' Hill.' He paused to allow the champion to stride ahead on to the green, smiling and waving to the cheering crowds, and to tap his ball in for a fourth birdie.

  Then he played his chip, safely, to the green, and walked on to secure his par.

  `Four under at the turn,' said Skinner, as they stepped the few yards to the tenth tee. 'We need five more on the back nine if Maggie and I are to pick up our winnings.'

  `Don't worry,' said Atkinson, solemn and deadly serious. `You're on a sure thing.'

  I'm firing him up,' thought Skinner as he watched another monstrous drive leaving the champion with the shortest of second shots to the green 390 yards away. 'The harder I go at him the better he's playing. The man's an animal. And he's pulling me after him,' he added as an afterthought as his own drive split the fairway, soaring out 300 yards to astonished applause.

  Golfer and policeman resumed their side-by-side march, and their parallel duel. 'You shouldn't have let Rick do that, you know. The problem you had was that the first note had something about it. The old lady had seen the real Witch's Curse. You see, it was a sort of family secret. Eventually I saw it too, and it was clear to me that the second note had a different author, someone who'd only heard the story of the curse, not the full version.

  `When we found Morton last night, I knew there'd be another. We had men outside all the newspaper offices this morning waiting for Rick, but he beat us to it.

  `The notes kept us off balance for a bit. They took up resources. The one thing I never bought for a second was the notion that there might actually be a local coven intent on fulfilling the curse, but it was still a line that had to be investigated.

  And it all turned on itself in the end. While at first the note was no lead at all to Michael White's killers, eventually it turned into one, when you two decided to ape it. And when we got lucky again, discovering that Rick attended Henry Wills's classes, man, it pointed me right at the pair of you.'

  They reached Skinner's ball. Again he took no chances with the sand on his left, or the waters of the Truth Loch on his right. He hit a low, punched shot, pitching the ball and sending it skipping on to the safe part of the green, making his par virtually certain. It had hardly come to rest, before Atkinson was ready. His ball almost split the flag as his sand wedge sent it spinning towards the hole. 'Five under, I think,' he said quietly.

  The Truth Loch was even more in play on the eleventh hole, biting a chunk from the fairway and forcing even Atkinson to play it as a dogleg, taking iron from the tee. He and Skinner hit safe tee-shots, then followed with three-wood approaches. The champion's shot reached the green easily, while the policeman's was short but safe.

  `So here we are,' said Skinner as they walked along the waterside. 'White's dead, and we're chasing our tails. Then Mike Morton does you a huge favour by picking a fight with Masur, right in front of me. It was such an inviting set-up that you just couldn't resist it. So there's Masur after the dinner, walking back, over there.' He pointed across the loch towards the outline of the ducking stool. 'He's even in the right spot. Rick comes out of the darkness.

  Probably Masur thinks that it's you, that you've decided to walk back too. He doesn't see the threat until it's hit him on the back of the head. He's out as he's tied into the chair. And even if he wakes tip as he's lowered into the water, all he can do is struggle, as the water fills his lungs.' He paused, with another slight shudder.

  `Next morning, the body's found, and of course we suspect Morton straightaway, as you planned. The silly bugger even compounds his predicament by going for a walk in the garden at Bracklands after dark and getting mud on his shoes!

  I have to admit, the murder of Masur was real creative thinking. Not your average assassination. And that was where it really started to go wrong for you, when you first over-reached yourself.

  `Because the trouble was, it was too creative for Morton or Richard Andrews. They're old-fashioned Mafiosi types. Their way would have been to take the back of Masur's head off with a silenced. 38, not something as flashy as that. I doubt if Andrews would have taken Masur off-guard, either.'

  He stopped, concentrating hard on his third shot to the par-four hole. Abandoning caution for once, he took his wedge and surprised even himself by hitting his shot to within a yard of the pin. He raised his club to acknowledge the crowd's applause, and walked on to the green, marking his ball to allow Atkinson to claim a safe par before completing his own.

  'Still, we had no choice but to treat Morton as our chief suspect,' he said as they walked to the tee of the 230-yard par-three twelfth. 'With Andrews unaccounted for, he was still the best bet we had.' He shook his head. 'Then Rick dropped that bloody note at the Herald, and I said to myself "Wait a minute!"

  The editor's a pal of mine, and he agreed not to use it. That didn't bother you, though. You weren't after publicity. You just wanted us to see it, without taking the chance of dropping it on our doorstep. You knew that Morton wasn't the murderer, so you saw the second note as a back-up, to forestall, you thought, any chance of us looking in your direction.'

  He stopped as Atkinson lined up his two-iron and smacked the ball greenwards, over the guarding bunker, to land eight yards from the flag. Skinner's three-wood was high, so high that he thought for a moment, as he watched it against the now threatening clouds, that it would drop into the sand, but, willed on by striker and crowd, it carried safely to the fringe of the green.

  `You poisoned Bravo for the same reason, of course,' he said as they walked on. 'Right about here. With me on the scene as the perfect witness to an attempt on your life. I thought "What a stoic you are, Darren," as I watched the way you played on after it, as if you were in no danger. Which of course, you weren't, other than from me, eventually.

  `Yes, that spiked drink was intended for poor old Bravo all along. I'd asked you about Mr Nice by that time, and you thought, "What a good idea to make the coppers think that he's after me as well!" A nice wee piece of insurance against the silly polis looking too hard at other people's motives for murder, including yours.'

  He reached back and accepted his putter from McIlhenney as they reached the green. His ball was just off the putting surface, but the grass was even and he was able to roll his approach smoothly and safely up to the side of the hole, for a slightly fortuitous three. Atkinson's eight-yarder across the slope of the green was beautifully judged, curving down from the right to finish three inches behind the hole.

  `Lovely putt, Darren,' said Skinner as they walked through a small coppice to the raised tee of the 565-yard par-five thirteenth, a monster of a hole with a narrow tree-lined fairway for the first 250 yards, opening out into a bunker-fringed hogsback. 'That must have been hellish difficult to read. But then you're at your best under pressure, aren't you?'

  As he had done on the first three days, Atkinson took a three-wood from the thirteenth tee, avoiding the dangers of the hogsback. Skinner played even safer hitting a two-iron for accuracy, low between the corridor of trees.

  `That was Rick at the side of the tee, wasn't it?' said Skinner as they walked on. 'Rick gave that wee boy the drinks, done up in his rain gear, in glasses and a floppy hat, so no one would recognise him and think they were seeing double. Of course you couldn't risk the spiked drink going astray. So you had that in your bag all along. The drinks that were handed out, so publicly, were clean, but you did a double shuffle with the bottles.'

  He tapped Atkinson, convivially on the arm. 'Hey, maybe you dumped the spare one on the course. The bins are all emptied daily, but just maybe, if I used enough people to sift through the public refuse tip, I might get lucky and find something odd; a full, u
ntainted bottle of isotonic thirst quencher, with your prints on it, and Rick's, and those of that wee boy. Doubt it, though. I'll do you the courtesy of assuming that you wiped it.'

  They reached their tee-shots. Skinner used his two-iron again, clearing the hogsback and finding a flat piece of fairway 100 yards from the green. Atkinson put his ball thirty yards closer, with a four-iron.

  `That was an awful thing to do to Bravo, Darren. He thought he was your pal as well as your caddy.

  It was an awful thing you did to Oliver M'tebe too, having his father kidnapped by those two Australians, just to put him off his game this week. That boy must be the goods right enough.

  They say he's approaching your class already, and that he'll be the next Number One.'

  Eventually,' said Atkinson, evenly. 'That's why we signed him up. But the time isn't here yet, Bob, not yet.'

  `No, but he's enough of a threat now for you to do something about it. After all there's a million pounds in the pot this week. The biggest prize ever, and you weren't going to let anyone else lift it, were you, not even if you picked up your manager's thirty per cent as a consolation.

  `So you had Mr M'tebe picked up. You hired those two Aussie caddies, guys you knew would be linked to Masur, not you, and they picked him up off the street, just like that. The South African police hadn't a clue where to look.'

  The thirteenth green was on a rise, like the tee, and guarded by two bunkers. Skinner judged the distance carefully, and hit a full shot with his wedge. Polite applause from around the green told him that he had found the putting surface. Atkinson's feathered shot, hit with his third wedge, was a dream of a shot, all softness and touch. It followed the flag unerringly, and drew a roar from the gallery. The two strode up the slope to the green.