Murder Knows No Season

by Cathy Ace

  ‘And?’ pressed Glover.

  Hill nodded. ‘And . . . there was pushing and shoving, and chairs being punted around the place. A couple of tables went over, so there was glass and beer everywhere, then some of the older ones started pulling people apart, and it all seemed to calm down. I mean, within just a few minutes, it had started from nothing, blown up and calmed down. Mind you, like I said, it was then that most people decided it was time to make their way home. I didn’t really have time to get involved, sir, and once it stopped, it wasn’t going to erupt again because people were leaving.’

  ‘And all this was because someone mentioned cockles and whores, eh?’

  ‘Well, it seemed so, sir, or could it have been “cockle wars”?’

  That made more sense to Glover; the Cockle Wars went back to the 1980s, just after GGR had retired, he recalled. At the time, the women who hand-gathered the tiny little shellfish – a local delicacy – from the sands of the Burry Estuary used donkeys and carts; nowadays men drove Land Rovers to do the job. There’d been a few particularly bad years back then; cockle harvests were down, and the families with the licenses to gather them began in-fighting – which was a horribly complicated business, because most of them were related, somehow.

  Often, one family member was set against another, sometimes severing marriages, or pitting children against their parents. There’d been a spate of nasty pub fights in the Penclawdd area right throughout one summer, Glover remembered, and the problems had simmered on for years. But he’d thought it had all finally been settled in the mid-nineties, when a co-operative had been formed between all the license-holders, and they’d invested in a jointly-owned modern processing facility for the lucrative, and by now, internationally famous cockle crop.

  If the Cockle Wars were still causing fist fights, might they have had something to do with GGR’s death? Glover had some vague recollection that GGR’s wife had at one time sold cockles on her stall at Swansea Market. Could she be connected to the Penclawdd cockle business somehow? You were only allowed to sell what you gathered, he knew that much. At least, that’s how it had been once upon a time. He’d get Stanley to check into the minutiae of the Swansea cockles business – it would be a learning opportunity for her that might produce a valuable lead.

  He looked at the young man in front of him; there was no comparison between him and Stanley, he thought. He’d trade five Hills for one Stanley any day. ‘Right-o – get out of here and get this all down on paper, Hill,’ he barked, annoyed at the man’s lack of insight and action, ‘and fill in every detail – names, times, actions, who said what, who did what, and so on. Everything you can remember. And get it onto Stanley’s desk before you even think about leaving the station.’

  ‘I won’t be much good with names, sir,’ replied Hill sheepishly. ‘I don’t know a lot of the people who were there . . .’ He looked terrified, then he brightened. ‘But I know who would, sir; Kevin Waters, the Brynfield Club’s general manager, he’d have lists of names and everything. I’ve got his phone number in my office.’

  Glover looked up at Stanley. Stanley nodded. ‘I have Mr Waters’ number here, sir,’ she replied efficiently; Glover reckoned even she was getting fed up with Hill. ‘Shall I bring the car around, sir?’ she asked, almost reading Glover’s mind.

  ‘Give me five, and I’ll meet you in the courtyard,’ replied Glover to Stanley, then he looked disdainfully at Hill and barked, ‘And what are you waiting for?’

  It was finally clear to Hill that he was dismissed.

  Glover grabbed his peppermints, jacket and keys, and walked with Stanley toward the stairs. ‘I just want to say hello to the team, though I expect they’ll still be getting themselves sorted out, then I’ll be with you. Phone the Brynfield Club and tell them we’re on our way; I need to see this Waters bloke and anyone else who can help. I’ll want names of attendees, and so forth – you know the drill. I also want to see that bar where GGR “disappeared from sight”.’

  Soon he’d escape from HQ, and any chance of being accosted by the media, and would be on the road to the Brynfield Golf and Rugby Club, which Glover expected to be populated by annoying little men with huge egos, wearing plaid trousers and unbecoming sweaters.

  As they made their way through the Swansea’s early-morning traffic, Glover asked Stanley to bring him up to date with her investigations. Stanley obliged as she drove steadily toward their destination.

  Mrs Gwladys Davies had spent a fitful night, according to the officer who’d stayed with her; having been attended to by her doctor in the evening, she was now still heavily sedated. It was unlikely she’d be fit for more questions before noon, the doctor had estimated. Upon Stanley’s second set of enquiries, the family liaison officer assigned to GGR Davies’s widow had confirmed the presence of a set of golf clubs at the Davies house. She had told Stanley it was clear GGR had been a keen amateur player, and it appeared he belonged to several golf clubs in the Gower, Swansea, and Swansea Valley areas – something the liaison officer had deduced from a pile of membership cards and parking passes she’d found heaped on GGR’s desk. Stanley passed this information on to Glover.

  ‘I expect that simply being The Great One was enough to get him through the doors of most places, without a membership card,’ was Glover’s observation, but he noted – and complimented – the liaison officer’s endeavors in any case.

  The enterprising officer had also discovered, upon being encouraged to ‘check’ rather than ‘search’ the house by Stanley, that, other than the usual array of home medicines, GGR had no unusual phials of any sort, anywhere. She had, however, spotted a small, padlocked fridge in the cellar. She thought this strange.

  So did Glover. He wanted that fridge opened – if GGR had any steroids in his house they’d need to be kept cool at least; a locked refrigerator sounded ideal. He asked Stanley to arrange for the appropriate paperwork. Stanley replied it was already in hand, and that DC Hughes was following that up at the office.

  Glover further gleaned from Stanley that, so far, the team hadn’t been able to discover whether GGR had any enemies, though they could say with some confidence that he seemed to have no financial problems. That being said, when Stanley told Glover the Davies’s bank balance, he was shocked, especially when he considered how well-rewarded the young international rugby players were in an age of endorsements and sponsorships. He and Stanley chatted about how GGR would, no doubt, have been a multi-millionaire if he’d been playing in the twenty-first century, as they sat in the traffic jam that was the Mumbles Road.

  It seemed that most of the Davies’s income came from the small-holding, though Stanley and Glover agreed GGR probably had quite a good source of undeclared income – the Brynfield tournament being one example of how local organizations would probably hire him to exploit his fame, and reputation. Stanley had managed to discover from DS Hill that GGR had been paid five hundred pounds by the club to be their ‘guest of honor’, a fee that was the norm for one of his appearances, it seemed.

  It was clear to Glover that if GGR could manage just one such payment a week, he would have a nice little income that he and Stanley suspected the taxman wouldn’t know about; many organizations would be happy to cover his payment under some sort of ‘miscellaneous’ heading in their event’s expenses.

  Even so, it was clear that GGR and his wife weren’t living the high life; he’d stayed on at his job with the Fire Dragon Brewery until his sixty-fifth birthday, where he’d earned a fair salary for what didn’t sound like an onerous job. Indeed, Stanley told Glover she’d got the impression from GGR’s boss at the brewery that he hadn’t been so much a ‘salesman’ proper, but, rather, more of a ‘relationship builder’ – popping in to visit valued customers on a regular basis, and – likely as not – hanging around for a couple of pints of Fire Dragon Dark, his favorite tipple, so that the pub, restaurant, or club in question could boast to its clientele that GGR was a ‘regular’.

  It saddened Glover that th
is pattern of behavior fitted with GGR’s wife’s assertion that her husband was known to drink and drive.

  On that specific topic Stanley was brimming with information.

  GGR had no police record – not for drinking and driving, nor even a parking ticket. However, Glover had been pleased, but not surprised to gather, that Stanley had chosen to dig deeper than the official record. She’d carried out her own informal investigation across several local police stations throughout the Gower, Swansea City itself, and up into the Swansea Valley, and had discovered that GGR was pretty well known to a lot of the local uniforms. Stanley recounted how GGR had spent more than a few afternoons, evenings and even nights at several local stations, having been stopped for erratic driving.

  ‘What were we to do?’ Was the usual comment or question from the policemen Stanley had spoken to. ‘It was GGR, after all. We weren’t going to do him for drinking and driving.’ It seemed either the officers in question couldn’t bring themselves to do it, or else they’d never have been forgiven for it by their brother, father, uncle, or even mother, if they had.

  They claimed GGR was usually pretty much in control of his faculties, apparently, and none of them had even bothered to breathalyze him. Gwladys tended to collect him after a few hours, and, when he came back to the area the next day to collect his car, he’d sign autographs and pose for photographs and so forth.

  Glover saw a pattern emerging, but didn’t want to believe it; it looked as though GGR’s job led him to drink, and that the West Glamorgan Police Service couldn’t overcome its admiration of the man to the point where they’d take him off the roads for good.

  Glover wondered what he’d have done if he’d seen his idol endangering others by driving what was, after all, a lethal weapon when he’d been drinking. He hoped he’d have done the right thing, but had to admit to himself that he wasn’t one hundred percent sure. Maybe even he would have given The Great One just one more chance? And what then? Another? And another?

  Stanley called Glover from his unhappy thoughts as she announced, ‘Almost there, sir,’ and added, ‘any particular way you want to play this?’

  Glover replied sullenly, ‘Follow my lead, as per, Stanley.’ He stepped from the car almost before it had stopped moving.

  It was a beautiful morning – the sun was shining, the air was clear, and the clouds were bubbling on the horizon as Glover looked out across the sparkling sea.

  The Brynfield Golf and Rugby Club was one of the most prestigious in Swansea, and made no bones about being one of the most picturesque in all of South Wales; it sat atop a hill that rolled down to the seashore. The rugby pitch was on level ground at the club’s highest elevation and was surrounded on three sides by small stands, the fourth side being open to the sea.

  The golf course was largely ‘below’ the rugby field – an undulating links course where the weather, and wind, coming in from the sea meant conditions could change from minute to minute, let alone from day to day.

  Below the course was the stunning Brynfield Beach itself, from which the club took its name. The promenade was almost an anachronism, sporting, as it did, a row of dozens of identical wood-built Victorian beach huts, each with its own brightly-painted front door, and an appealingly raked and elaborately decorated roof.

  Each was the rental property of a fortunate and much-envied family; whenever someone new moved to the area they did their best to get their hands on one of the huts, but were always beaten back by the archaic rental agreements with the local authority, and the ever-lengthening waiting list.

  There were local jokes aplenty about who you’d have to kill to get your hands on a Brynfield Beach Hut. To Glover’s knowledge, no one had tried the murder route.

  Turning his attention from the sea and the shore, Glover was struck by two features of the clubhouse complex itself – the three smugly-gleaming Jaguars parked in the car park, and the ugliness of the modern redbrick-built extension that had been stuck onto what had once been a pleasantly proportioned, and delightfully symmetrical, Edwardian yellow-stone original building.

  Glover wondered how on earth they’d ever managed to get planning permission for the eyesore, then reminded himself there were probably more than a couple of club members on the local authority planning committee, and maybe they’d been able to influence their peers . . . or something along those lines. Exactly the sort of ‘golden inner-circle’ stuff that annoyed him.

  Glover was not only a man who had little time for politicians, he was also a man who cared not at all for institutions he judged to be rife with either politics or social climbing. Golf clubs came squarely under both headings in his mind.

  True, he’d belonged to a few rugby clubs in his time, but only when he was actually playing; he hadn’t hung onto them as the center of his social life once his knees had given out and his playing days were over – he saw them as organizationally necessary to allow a team game to take place, and often a good facility for team members and their friends to socialize beyond the boundaries of the game itself. But as for the ‘golf club’ and the ‘rugby club’ network – the committees, the titles, the vice-this and the immediately past-that – he couldn’t bear it.

  Glover told himself to put his negative opinions to one side as he strode toward the main entrance of the clubhouse, but, for all his good intentions, it only took a matter of moments before he was quite happily considering throttling a short, balding man, who accosted him and demanded to see his membership card while he was still in the car park.

  Glover held up his police ID with great satisfaction, and formally introduced himself and Stanley. The pompous little man then insisted he would personally accompany Glover to meet the golf club captain and the club’s general manager. They located the two men in the bar-restaurant, nursing coffee mugs as they examined a large selection of photographs spread on the table before them.

  ‘Good morning, gentlemen.’ Glover moved past the small, scampering man and showed his credentials once again. ‘I am Detective Inspector Glover and this is Detective Sergeant Stanley. Following our enquiries surrounding the death of GGR Davies, we have discovered he spent the majority of Sunday here, at the Brynfield Club. We have some routine questions we’d like to ask. I take it all three of you gentlemen were here for the tournament?’

  Although clearly taken aback by Glover’s appearance, it was the Brynfield Golf Club captain who pulled himself together first, and spoke with an over-jovial tone, which perfectly matched his over-jovial attire. Personally, Glover couldn’t imagine how a man in his sixties, and measuring somewhere in the fifty-inch range around his middle, could possibly think that a canary-yellow, V-necked sweater would be becoming under any circumstances, except if the clothing were designed to serve as a safety garment, allowing the wearer to be spotted at a great distance, presumably when in peril. Glover was saddened that people so often managed to live down to his expectations.

  ‘Ah, Detective Inspector – yes, what a tragedy,’ the club captain cooed unctuously. ‘The Great One, indeed, graced us with his presence on Sunday. I believe I am correct in saying it was his last public appearance. Indeed, the local television people have already been in touch with me about any photographs of him we might be able to make available to them, something our wonderful general manager is helping me to discern at this very moment.’

  Glover controlled the gag reaction pricking at the back of his throat. More likely you couldn’t get onto the phone quick enough when you heard the news, was running through his mind, as he eyed up all three of the men now clustered around the circular table.

  ‘And you are?’ was what he said aloud to the obsequious man in yellow.

  ‘This is our golf club captain, Mark Edwards,’ piped up the annoying little man who’d ‘greeted’ Glover at the front entrance, as though the man in yellow couldn’t possibly be expected to account for himself – it would clearly be too much trouble.

  ‘And you?’ barked Glover at the little man.

  ‘
Why, I’m the assistant captain, Frank Cuthbert.’ He seemed taken aback that Glover wouldn’t know. ‘And this,’ he continued, clearly intending to do a complete job, ‘is our general manager, Kevin Waters.’

  Stanley wrote down the names while Glover labelled the men in his mind; the Canary Captain, the Argyle Assistant, and – for the man named Waters who sported a network of mottled veins on his enlarged nose – Very Little Water.

  With the Canary Captain leading, supported by the Argyle Assistant, and with Very Little Water nodding in silent agreement, Glover asked questions which allowed him to piece together what GGR had done for most of the day in question.

  It appeared he’d arrived at about ten a.m., had eaten a hearty cooked breakfast in the restaurant, then had played a ‘courtesy round’ of golf behind the tournament competitors; GGR had paired with the captain of the rugby team, and the Canary Captain had been joined by the club’s resident medic, Dr Bill Griffiths to complete the foursome. They’d been last in from the course for lunch, by which time some people were beginning to drift out to get good seats for the rugby match. GGR had partaken of a bar meal, then had a few drinks while chatting to various members, and had, the threesome believed, finally taken himself off to watch the game, though none of them had actually seen him there.

  None of the trio could recall seeing GGR again until the pre-dinner drinks at six p.m. After mingling at the bar, GGR had provided entertaining company at the top table. The Great One had delivered a well-received after-dinner speech, presented the awards and, finally, the much prized Howells’ Cup. He’d then enjoyed a few more drinks before being taken home in a taxi around midnight. It seemed that GGR had been thoroughly entertaining, and the life and soul of the party. The word ‘tragedy’ was repeated until it almost lost all meaning for Glover, and he was glad when the Canary Captain finally shut up.

  No mention was made of the after-dinner fracas Glover had been told about. He wasn’t surprised; in fact, he rather looked forward to winkling the information out of the men.