‘Where do they sell tickets?’ Patterson asked.
‘What makes you think they will?’ I countered. ‘They might charge a few euro admission during the tournament itself, but not on the practice days.’
‘If this was Wentworth,’ he began, ‘even on a Monday . . .’
‘But it isn’t Wentworth,’ I pointed out. ‘It’s Spain, and in this country, golf is still very much a posh people’s sport. Sure, there are plenty of courses around but they’re mostly used by Brits, Germans and Swedes. You can walk up and play on them, but they’re not cheap. As for tournaments like this . . . when this starts properly, you’ll find that most of the spectator announcements will be in English.’
As I spoke I wondered whether I should have talked them into waiting until Wednesday or Thursday; but what the hell, I’d shown them the way. If they wanted to come back when the action started, they could. In the meantime, we were there, and there was nothing to do but go in search of whatever there was to be seen.
As we left the car park we saw that there was more bustle about the place than we had realised. Plastic seats were being fitted on the spectator grandstands, a television camera was being winched up on to a stand and a giant leader-board was under construction, beside what I guessed had to be the eighteenth green. The tented village was being set up just behind a big modern clubhouse, around which, happily, there seemed to be plenty happening. There were tables out front under a sun awning; all of them were occupied, exclusively by men, some in blazers like Patterson’s (I had begun to think of it as his uniform), others in what seemed, from a distance, to be designer golf gear. None of it, I reckoned, had been picked up for a couple of euro at the Palafrugell street market.
‘What do we do?’ Shirley asked.
‘Find the practice ground?’ I suggested.
‘How?’
I looked around for any sort of public information, but saw none, not even a layout of the course. Then I glanced back towards the clubhouse and saw three men appear. One, in a T-shirt and shorts, was carrying an enormous golf bag covered in logos, the second, who wore slacks and jacket, had a phone pressed to his ear and was in mid-conversation, and the third, in golf gear and with two-tone footwear that looked hand-crafted, had ginger hair tied back in a ponytail. I recognised him from telly as a pro.
‘Let’s follow them,’ I proposed.
We did, at a discreet distance. The path they took led past a bronze statue of a man straddling an enormous golf club . . . five or six iron, I guessed . . . and past a hotel complex on our right, before opening out into a wide field, at one end of which around a dozen golfers stood in a long rank, some with caddies, others with coaches as well, each with a bucket of balls at his feet, each engaged in whacking them into the distance.
‘This is more like it,’ Patterson beamed. ‘Practice range.’
Maybe so, but I felt instantly self-conscious. Although there was a small tiered grandstand behind the players, with half a dozen rows of seats, they were empty, and there was nobody else around who looked even remotely like a spectator, or who didn’t know what they were doing there. Someone else thought so too. A tall white-haired man with tanned, leathery skin came walking towards us. Fortunately he was smiling.
‘Morning,’ he began, in a refreshingly Scottish accent. ‘Can I help you? I’m Clive Tate, the practice ground manager. Are you looking for anyone in particular? If you’re media, your tent isn’t open yet, but I saw the Tour press officer on the clubhouse terrace with some of the early arrivals.’
‘No, no,’ I told him, hurriedly. ‘We’re not journos, God forbid.’
The smile became a chuckle. ‘I didn’t really think so; I know all the regulars. But occasionally we have people turn up at these Spanish events saying they work for ex-pat newspapers; websites too, these days.’
‘That’s not us, I promise. We’re punters, simple as that.’
‘In that case you’ll have the stand to yourself.’ He reached behind his back and pulled a rolled-up magazine from a trouser pocket. ‘Here,’ he said as he handed it to me, ‘on the house for a fellow Jock. It’s the programme for the week, with all the players listed. You won’t be able to buy one of these until Wednesday. That’s how early you three are. Still, if you stick around for a few hours, you should see quite a few of the top guys. This event has a high-quality entry field.’
He left us to it and headed back towards the Portakabin that seemed to be his office. We chose seats in the top row of the not-very-grandstand. One or two of the players glanced in our direction, but most of them stayed completely focused on what they were doing.
Shirley and I sat on either side of Patterson, who seemed to know his stuff as he played ‘spot the golfer’. He named quite a few stars even I’d never heard of, proving himself right when in doubt with a quick check of the programme. I concentrated on the ponytailed chap we’d followed. He was one of the oldest on the range, built like a man who’d enjoyed a few good breakfasts in his time, and with a distinctive practice routine which I guessed that he had been following on other ranges for at least a quarter of a century, and probably more. He loosened up before every shot with a huge, furious swing of the club, but when he put a ball at his feet, he struck it with a slow, controlled rhythm, sending it off into the distance with a perfect left to right fade.
I watched him for a while as he worked his way through all the clubs in his bag, then switched to another player that I recognised, a former US Open champion no less. Patterson remarked that his very presence was a sign that the Catalan Masters event was being taken seriously, and that the prize fund was attractive. I studied his form for a while. At one point he turned to speak to his coach, and noticed us in the stand. He smiled, and I heard him say, ‘Hey, we’ve got a gallery already.’ He waved in our direction. I formed the conceited impression that it was meant specifically for me, and found myself smiling back.
‘He’s a new one on me,’ Patterson murmured, drawing my attention back to him. ‘I wonder who he is.’
I followed his gaze and saw a well-muscled young man of medium height with braided hair, and skin like shiny ebony, carrying a huge golf bag along the back of the range until he found a space between two players. ‘Yes indeed,’ I whispered, as he swung the clubs from his shoulders and planted it firmly on the ground.
‘No,’ said Patterson, ‘not him; he’s a caddie. I mean his boss.’ He pointed to a guy who was following him, a few paces behind. He was quite a bit taller than the other, and his tanned face was set in serious concentration.
If we hadn’t been sitting I’d have fallen over. I felt my heart hammer as it jumped from the normal sixty-something beats per minute to rather more than twice that. My head swam, and for a split second I didn’t know who or where I was. Bizarrely, I wondered if I was dead, like those cops in purgatory in that TV series, for it was as if I was looking at someone I knew better than any man in the world, only it couldn’t be him, for he really was dead, and anyway this version was only half the age he’d have attained if he hadn’t been. My right hand was at my mouth. I bit my fingers, hard, to restore a semblance of reality.
Shirley had been looking at me. ‘Primavera,’ I heard her call out, ‘are you all right?’
I gulped and nodded, but I was speechless.
Patterson had been oblivious to my near faint. He’d been too busy leafing through the programme. ‘Got him,’ he exclaimed. ‘It’s that new lad, the kid from the last Walker Cup team. He’s just turned pro and this is his first event.’ He thrust a page in front of me. ‘There he is. Sinclair, his name is: Jonathan Sinclair.’
I had worked it out for myself by that time. I’d placed him, even though I hadn’t seen him since he was a precocious, pre-pubescent youth, not since the days when I’d been married to his uncle, his Uncle Oz. I knew how his life had developed, though; his Grandpa Blackstone was vastly proud of him, and had kept me in occasional touch with his progress as a golfer. I knew that he’d gone to university in America,
on a sports scholarship, and that he’d made a name for himself on the amateur circuit. But I hadn’t seen Mac for a while, and so, while I’d been aware that turning pro had been on the cards, I’d no way of knowing that it had happened.
‘Jonny.’ I only whispered the name, but Shirley heard me nonetheless.
‘Who?’ she asked, loud enough to make the former US Open champion’s caddie throw a frown in her direction.
‘Jonny,’ I repeated. ‘I’d forgotten what his dad’s surname was. He’s Oz’s sister’s older boy.’
She stared at me, then at him, then back at me. ‘Oz’s nephew? The kid who was here when you and he were married? He’s turned into that?’ She looked at him again, a little more closely. ‘Now you tell me, yes, he does look like him. Not as much as Tom does, of course, but still . . .’
Of course. It came back to me; Shirley had met him, when Grandpa Mac, Ellie and her boys had come for Christmas to the house in L’Escala that Oz and I had bought not long after we were married. For several reasons, that place, that whole time, had been a disaster for us. The only positive had been Tom’s conception, just as his parents were falling apart as a couple. Things had been pretty bad also for Shirley then. But she hadn’t reacted by taking flight, she’d done so by correcting a mistake, and buying back the house she’d sold believing wrongly that she’d be happy somewhere else. Still, tough and all as she was, my instant concern was that being hauled back to those days wouldn’t be good for her.
I should have known better. ‘Wow,’ she whistled. ‘What a honey. What age will he be now?’
‘Hmmph,’ I snorted. ‘Trust you, Mrs Gash. Young enough to be your grandson.’ I did a quick sum. Jonny would have been . . . what? . . . eleven back then, so . . . ‘He’ll be twenty-two, I reckon.’
‘Well, if I can’t have him, what about his caddie? He’d look great in my garden.’
‘Hands off!’ I warned. ‘I saw him first.’
‘Actually,’ Patterson pointed out, affably, ‘I did.’
Shirley looked at him and raised an eyebrow.
He laughed. ‘Don’t worry. There’s nothing I haven’t told you.’ He turned to me. ‘What are you going to do, Primavera?’
I leaned closer to him, as if I was trying to make myself as inconspicuous as possible, which, in all probability, I was. ‘I don’t know,’ I murmured. ‘I don’t want to interrupt his practice, that’s for sure. God, I may be the last person in the world he’d want to see. There was a lot of shit happened between his uncle and me. His mother probably hates me, so he’ll have had his card well marked about me.’
‘If he has,’ he said quietly, ‘there was an up-to-date picture on it. He’s staring at you.’
‘You’re kidding.’
‘I wouldn’t, in these circumstances. No joke.’
I forced myself to look back towards the practice range. He was right; Jonny was gazing up towards the spectator stand, and there was nobody else he could have been looking at. He was frowning. Most of me wanted to be out of there. I thought about jumping off the back of the structure and legging it, but my dignity wouldn’t let me take that way out. So I let my eyes meet his.
And when I did, he smiled. ‘Auntie Primavera,’ he said. I could hear the laughter in his voice, and see my past in his wide, friendly smile. He started to move in our direction. I knew that if I stayed where I was he’d climb up to us. I didn’t want to involve Shirley and her man in such an unexpected reunion, so I rose and headed towards him, stepping over the empty seats in front and jumping down on to the ground.
‘Auntie Primavera,’ he repeated, as I stood in front of him, then he swept me up and off my feet, into unexpectedly strong arms and hugged me tight. And I hugged him back. I was feeling lots of things, but none of them was very clear to me at that point. I didn’t know whether I was happy or sad, whether I was really hugging him or whether he was a surrogate for the dead. I kissed his neck, the nearest part available, then whispered ‘Lovely to see you, Jonny. Now put me down. At least three Major champions are staring at us.’
I was overstating it; there were only two. Back on my feet, I took my first close-up look at Jonathan Sinclair as an adult. He was slightly taller than his uncle had been, and maybe not as naturally heavily built, but he had the sort of gym muscles that you find on young pro golfers these days, since power became all-important to many of their coaches. There was a slight facial resemblance to his father, a first-generation computer nerd who’d been more interested in his job than his family, until finally Ellie Blackstone had binned him, but mostly he took after his mother. Other than temperamentally, it seemed; my former sister-in-law is most kindly described as formidable, a woman given to making her point.
‘So Uche’s message did get to you,’ said Johnny. ‘The sod never told me you’d called him back.’
‘I didn’t,’ I replied. ‘Well, I did, but I decided not to leave a message, since I’d no idea who he was. Who the hell is he, anyway?’
‘He’s my caddie.’
‘You’ve got a caddie?’ I gasped, inanely, as if it was natural in my world for a pro golfer to carry his own clubs.
‘Of course I have, Auntie,’ he chuckled. He nodded, over his shoulder, towards the black guy, who had closed in on us. ‘This is Uche,’ he continued. ‘Uche Wigwe. He’s my mate really; we were at Arizona State together. He hopes to join the tour as well, but he’s caddying for me until we can both go to qualifying school.’
‘That’s if we both have to, ma’am,’ Uche intervened. ‘If Jonny makes enough money through sponsors’ invitations, he’ll earn a playing card automatically.’
He was beautifully spoken, much better than Jonny, much better than me for that matter. ‘Your accent,’ I began.
‘African,’ he explained. ‘Nigerian, to be precise. My father is what the British media delight in calling a “princeling”, the implication being that our nobility isn’t nearly as grand or important as yours. It’s a slur that doesn’t trouble us, however, for aside from his old tribal title, he’s filthy rich.’
‘Uche was at Winchester School before Arizona State,’ Jonny added. ‘No scholarships, by the way. In theory we have the same manager, but it’s harder to get sponsors’ invites for him.’
‘Why?’ I asked, naively.
‘Why do you think? I played on the Walker Cup team; he didn’t.’
‘Jonny.’ The posh bag-carrier nudged him, gently.
‘I know,’ he said. ‘Auntie, I have to hit some balls. Stay and watch and we’ll talk when I’ve done. Can we have lunch afterwards?’
‘On one condition,’ I told him. ‘Stop calling me “Auntie”, will you?’
I climbed back up to my perch, and Jonny went to work. From that moment I wasn’t looking at anyone else, not at any of the champions on parade, only my nephew . . . technically he hadn’t been since Oz and I divorced, but I was claiming him anyway. I know a little about golf, from the telly and from playing myself. It didn’t take me long to work out that the swing I was watching wasn’t the one he had learned from his grandfather and his uncle, classic Scottish amateurs both, conditioned to hit the ball low, and under the wind. His flight was high, and long. At first I thought that his natural shot was a fade, until he started to hit it the other way, drawing from right to left.
I heard Patterson murmur beside me. ‘See how straight his back is?’ he whispered. That hadn’t escaped my notice; everything about him seemed perfectly balanced. ‘He hits it like a dream,’ he added. ‘I wonder what his short game’s like?’
‘If he’s anything like his Grandpa Blackstone, it’ll be deadly. Mac’s a bandit around the greens.’
‘You sound as if you’re still in touch with him.’
‘Why shouldn’t I be? He’s my son’s grandfather too. Mac’s a regular visitor.’
‘Why isn’t he here for Jonathan’s debut?’ he wondered aloud.
‘I can tell you that,’ I said. ‘He and Mary are on a long cruise, out in the Far East. He may
not even know about it.’ But if he had, would he even have told me? I wondered. A loose, unofficial pact had grown up between Mac and me. While he had given me occasional reports of Jonny’s golfing progress, we never talked about events past, and rarely about people from it. Tom was our shared future and we concentrated on him.
The thought was still in my head when I noticed that Jonny and Uche seemed to have been joined by someone else . . . at least I assumed they had, for she, the only woman on the range, was standing beside the caddie, talking to him, but watching Jonny, while filming him with a handheld camera. He stopped, to change clubs and to take on some water, and I managed a look at her in profile. She was well over thirty, maybe even my age. Her hair was blonde, without being lustrous, and her skin was brown, but weather-beaten rather than tanned. She was dressed in pale green trousers, golf shoes and a polo shirt. Although I couldn’t see the front, it looked a match for the Ashworth that the guys were wearing, and it had the same car manufacturer logo that was on their sleeves. I’d noticed her earlier, near the clubhouse, talking to a large blond guy and two kids. One of the team, I guessed, but who was she?
Once again, Patterson came up with the goods. ‘That’s impressive too,’ he remarked. ‘That must be Lena Mankell. She’s Swedish, a swing coach . . . the only woman doing that job on the men’s tour, so it’s got to be her . . . and she’s reckoned to be one of the two or three best around. If she’s working with Jonny, and it looks as if she is, that’s a statement in itself.’
From then on, I watched her as well. Two or three times she stopped Jonny to play him back the video she had shot, and once adjusting the position of his hands at the top of the backswing, but otherwise she seemed happy with what she was seeing.
They worked on; that upright swing never seemed to vary, but gradually I could spot the slight differences in the set-up that triggered the differences in ball flight. When the session ended, and Uche put Jonny’s driver back in his bag, I checked my watch and found that they had been at it for well over two hours. By that time I was on my own, Shirley having pleaded a combination of sore bum and hunger before dragging Patterson off to find refreshment in the clubhouse.
As Easy as Murder Page 4