Death on the Eleventh Hole (2 page)

This white-faced, determined girl apparently did not have this weakness. She was standing up to him, telling him she could leave him without coming back for her supplies like a whipped mongrel bitch. It would be the worse for her in the end: his masters wouldn’t let her get away with simply walking out on her job as retailer at the business end of the trade. Bad for discipline, that would be, if the word got round. But it would reflect badly on him if they had to take steps like that. He needed to protect his own back. And to do that, he needed to convince this silly young cow of the danger she was inviting.

Flynn went to the bar, got himself a double whisky and topped it up with the same quantity of water. He kept his eye on the stubborn, pallid girl at the table, ready to intervene if she made any attempt to leave. She stared down at the round table in front of her like one frozen in a nightmare. He brought a half-pint of cider back with him, banged it down hard on the table in front of her, so that the top inch of it slopped on to the table and down on to the thin cotton dress.

Kate felt the liquid cold and wet against the top of her thigh, seeping with an insidious tickle into the soft flesh around her crotch. Still she did not move, as if any sign of discomfort or annoyance would be a confession of weakness to this hard man with his narrow, despicable mind. What she was doing was the right thing: she clung to that through her confusion and misery like a lifebelt in the vast cold of the sea. She said in a voice which seemed to belong to someone else, ‘I’ll leave the area altogether. You won’t hear any more from me. And neither will the police.’

Flynn found himself struggling again to marshal any reasoned argument. He dealt in threats and force, and until now they had always been enough. He was obscurely aware that he needed to convince this girl that there was no future in what she planned, but he found it difficult to summon up the right words to do it. He said dully, ‘It’s not an option. They don’t allow it.’

She caught the frustration in his face, and drew from it a little surge of strength. ‘They will this time. They won’t have a choice.’

At that moment, as if to support the sudden optimism she had felt, two large men came into the room and walked slowly to the bar, leaning with elbows on it as they waited for their pints and surveyed the big, half-empty room. Plain-clothes coppers; Kate wondered if anyone in the pub was deceived by their too-bright sweaters and their too-clean jeans. She certainly wasn’t: one of them had arrested her eighteen months ago for soliciting. She wondered if he recognized her as he took in unhurriedly this exchange he could not hear between the unshaven man and the young girl in the corner of the saloon bar.

That didn’t matter to Kate. They were allies now, in this situation, and she must use them. She forced a smile at the intense, sinewy man on the other side of the small round table, stood up, pulled her coat around her and fastened it. ‘That’s it, then. I don’t suppose we shall meet again. Goodbye, Mr Flynn.’ She invested his title with the same sneer he had given to hers a few minutes earlier.

He thought for a moment she was going to offer him a handshake, but she turned abruptly away from him. He made a desperate grab at her wrist, missed it, and dropped his arm to his side as he saw the copper watching him.

Kate Wharton passed the policemen without checking her step, without offering them any sign of recognition. Then she was through the door and gone, without once interrupting the brisk pace of her walk.

Flynn knew he couldn’t follow her without exciting the interest of the two big men at the bar, who were watching him now without any attempt to disguise their interest. He made a show of sipping his whisky without haste.

That silly girl had just signed her death warrant.

Two

Superintendent John Lambert sniffed the air like a boy newly released from school. There were not many better places to be on a bright May evening than the golf course at Ross-on-Wye. He teed his ball on the tenth tee, fixed his eye on it like a malevolent hawk, and despatched it through the tunnel of trees and down the very centre of the fairway. Then he tried not to look surprised by this result. A beautiful spring evening had just become perfect.

His pleasure was in no way diminished when Sergeant Bert Hook, a fearsome cricketer but still a self-confessed novice in this infuriating game of golf, pulled his ball deep into the left-hand trees that his chief had just so triumphantly avoided. ‘Right shoulder coming over the ball,’ he said to Hook. ‘Common fault, but very destructive.’ Lambert strode off down the fairway towards his distant ball, his back seemingly unaffected by the glance of molten fury which Hook cast upon it.

Bert found his ball and hacked it savagely out of the trees to a point some way behind the spot where the Superintendent’s ball had come to rest. A cloud of energetic flies followed his sweating figure and buzzed gently around his head, as though preparing to mug him. He mused once again upon the paradox that John Lambert, by some way the finest copper he had ever worked for, could be such a patronizing prat on the golf course.

Bert still needed a wooden club for his third shot. Lambert seemed about to offer advice, so he swung the club savagely before he could receive it. The result was predictable, but in a strange, desperate way quite gratifying. He thinned the ball savagely, and it flew like a bullet, waist-high towards the man in front of him. For a not unpleasing moment, Bert Hook thought that it might pass right through Lambert. Instead, curling like a lethal banana, it narrowly missed the cringing John Lambert and disappeared comprehensively into the trees, this time on the right of the fairway. Hook regarded his visibly shaken opponent with some satisfaction. ‘Give you this hole, John,’ he said with a grim smile. He set off with his trolley towards the eleventh tee, with head held high, a model for all in his acceptance of the cruel blows of adversity.

John Lambert could have picked up his ball and followed, having won the hole, but he could not resist hitting a second shot after his perfect drive. He got his ball almost to the green, chipped it to six feet, watched his putt twist round the hole instead of into it, and mimed a theatrical anguish with his arms in the air. He found the gesture was wholly wasted on his sergeant, who had ostentatiously turned his back and was watching the movements of a vivid green woodpecker in the woodland beyond the green.

‘Should have had a par from that drive,’ said John Lambert with a rueful shake of his grizzled head, as he joined Hook on the eleventh tee.

‘Bloody stupid game! Don’t know why I let you talk me into it!’ growled Hook constructively.

‘Because you’re now too old for cricket and you still need the exercise,’ said Lambert equably. He found it easy to be philosophical about the charms of the game when he was striking the ball well.

‘Some bloody exercise! You don’t have to be an athlete for this. The fat boy in
Pickwick
Papers
could manage golf, for all the athleticism it demands.’ His comparisons had taken on a literary bent since his Open University studies.

Lambert resisted the comment that the game seemed at present to be demanding more of Hook than his highly tuned athleticism could deliver. Instead, he tried encouragement: his wife, a successful teacher, assured him constantly that the carrot was a more successful teaching aid than the whip. ‘You’re really the ideal build for this game, you know, Bert. Five feet eleven and powerfully built. Very few good golfers are as tall as me, you know.’

Hook looked up into his chief’s lined, experienced face. ‘I bloody know all that. That clever bugger Peter Alliss is always going on about it on television. In between encouraging poor mugs like me to take up the game. Runs a lot of people into needless expense, that twerp does, pretending the game is so easy. All right for him: he started as a boy. He doesn’t know what it’s like to get hold of a club for the first time in your forties, silly sod.’

Lambert had teed up his ball at the beginning of this diatribe. He waited patiently for it to subside, feeling a little as King Canute must have felt, for he knew that his sturdy sergeant could keep up this strain indefinitely. Taking advantage of a silence, but knowing it might only be a pause for the drawing of breath, he swung hastily at his ball.

Too hastily. His ball sliced low and right, just clear of the trees, but not long enough to reach the corner of the dog leg on the eleventh. Hook observed its progress with every sign of pleasure. ‘See what you mean now about the right shoulder coming over the ball,’ he said cheerfully. ‘You took it back all right, but you were a little quick in the downswing, I think.’

Lambert tried hard not to be irritated by this recent tendency of his protégé to impart advice instead of merely receiving it meekly and striving to implement it. He found that he slammed his driver back into his bag with a vehemence which was altogether too revealing.

Hook had already teed up his own ball. Lambert began to offer a useful tip, but Bert stilled him with a lordly raising of his palm which brooked no argument. Then he swung his clubhead easily through the ball and sent it bouncing well past the corner of the dog leg, to a point where he would need only a short iron to reach the green, a display of competence which was even more annoying to his mentor than his refusal to listen to advice.

Bert Hook made a stately progress to his ball, with his sturdy frame erect and his nose a little in the air. But pride, as so often in this infuriating game, went before a fall. He swung easily and confidently at his 7-iron to the green — and topped the ball horribly. He watched the ball unbelievingly as it flew low and ugly to his right, barely clearing the ditch which runs thirty yards in front of the eleventh green at Ross and clinging precariously to the far bank of it as it ran towards the hedge by the road. He affected not to hear Lambert’s cheerful, ‘Snatched at that a little, didn’t you? Lucky not to be out of bounds on the road!’ as he stamped angrily after his ball. The activity which had been a subtle test of skill a moment earlier was transformed in an instant back to a bloody stupid game.

John Lambert managed to play his third shot into the middle of the green, but his comment on this modest triumph was stilled by the sight of Hook standing stock still to his right, looking down not at his ball but at something within the ditch beyond it.

There is something in the pose of a man frozen into immobility by what he sees which communicates itself to others around him, and Lambert knew in a moment that this was something serious, something which stretched outside the comfortable confines of men at play. He left his clubs and went slowly, almost reluctantly, through the long shadows thrown by the setting sun to stand beside his companion.

His arrival seemed to galvanize Hook into action. He moved cautiously to the side of the ditch. The thing within it had blocked the slow flow of the filthy drainage water, so that it was now half-floating, half supported by the sides of the narrow ditch. There was water beneath a patch of soiled green shirt, lifting it above the shoulders, making the figure seem bloated, obscene, inhuman.

The corpse lay on its back, but the face and most of the body had been hastily covered with reeds and coarse grass. Bert Hook knew better than to touch what he now knew must be human remains. But he turned and lifted the grass gently, almost reverently, with the club he still held in his hand. He did not attempt to alter the position of the body, but he lifted the covering just enough for them to see the face.

It was the face of a young woman, perhaps in her early twenties. It looked in death untroubled, almost serene. That was the worst thing of all.

Three

Superintendent John Lambert had a strange feeling as he took the familiar turning and drove his old Vauxhall Senator into the golf club car park.

This place had always meant pleasure for him, always been a relief from the tedium and the occasional horrors of work. Now that was no longer the case: he eased the big car up to the long wooden Terrapin building which had already been set up as a murder room. ‘Any identification yet?’ he asked Inspector Chris Rushton, who was recording the steadily accruing information on his computer.

‘No, sir. She certainly hasn’t been reported as a missing person locally. We’re checking the national MISPA records, but that will take some time.’

Normally there would have been surprise at a superintendent taking such a direct role in a murder investigation. The modern CID superintendent is an office man, keeping an overview of the various strands of a murder inquiry, deploying the considerable resources of a serious crime investigation in what he sees as the most effective way. But Lambert was a dinosaur among senior detectives, a man who insisted on being directly involved in a murder hunt himself. He was nearing retirement now, and perhaps seen as too old to change his ways; more importantly, he got results, and his superiors were prepared to indulge eccentricity in a man who did that.

Lambert strolled down the course to the spot on the eleventh where Bert Hook had discovered the body on the previous night. The fairways were busy on this bright spring morning, and it seemed strange to him to be walking here without a golf club in his hand. The birds sang joyously in the oaks and beeches and chestnuts on his right, as if they too were glad to be rid of the heavy rain which had ushered in May in the Wye Valley. High white clouds moved slowly across an intense blue sky. The unfurling leaves of the forest trees were fresh and moist, with that bright intensity of green which only spring growth seems to offer. It seemed a very odd place to be conducting a murder investigation.

The area where they had found the corpse was still cordoned off with plastic tape, and two constables were conducting a detailed search of the area around the ditch. But the body itself had been lifted into its plastic ‘shell’ and removed in the van policemen call the ‘meat wagon’ for its post-mortem examination. By this evening Sergeant Jack Johnson and his Scenes of Crime team would be away, having gathered whatever information they could from this innocent-looking place. Golfers were already playing the hole, giving the police activity on their right curious glances as they passed. By tomorrow, there would be nothing here to indicate the sinister discovery of thirty-six hours earlier.

Lambert looked at the gleam of water in the bottom of the ditch, which had been concealed by the girl’s body on the previous evening, and said to Johnson, ‘Anything interesting for us, Jack?’

They were old hands these two, of a similar age, and with a healthy respect for each other’s professional skills. If Johnson said there was nothing more to be discovered at the scene of any particular crime, he was invariably right, for he had evolved his meticulous methods over many years, had even contributed modestly to the SOC procedures laid down in the police manuals. He shook his head. ‘There’s not a lot for us here, John. Forensic might come up with a bit more from the clothes, but I doubt it. You’ve got a careful man here.’

They spoke automatically of the killer as a man, simply because it was overwhelmingly statistically probable. Lambert nodded slowly; he had disciplined himself over the years not to expect easy pickings at the outset of an investigation. ‘Was she killed here?’

‘No. The duty surgeon confirmed that when he certified death last night.’

‘Cause of death?’

‘Almost certainly strangulation. The pathologist said he might be able to give us a little more on that after the PM.’ Johnson moved over to the hedge. ‘She was almost certainly killed somewhere else and brought here in a vehicle to be dumped. You can see where someone has pushed his way through the hedge and pulled it back afterwards.’

Lambert nodded, looking at the bits of twig and new leaf which the constables were collecting from the spot with tweezers and putting into plastic bags. Each of these fragments would be examined under a forensic microscope for any signs of fibre from a killer’s clothing. ‘Any footprints?’

Johnson shrugged. ‘The photographer’s taken shots of whatever’s there. Maybe something will emerge when he does his blow-ups. But I’m not hopeful. Come and look at this.’ He led Lambert over to the ground shadowed by the hedge, where sun rarely penetrated and the ground was still soft from the winter rains. Whilst they stood carefully outside this key area, so as not to contaminate it with any indentations of their own, Johnson pointed to what might well have been a footprint. It was smooth at the bottom, indefinite round the edges, with no sign of any useful sole or heel patterns. ‘That’s the kind of mark you make if you’re wearing these,’ said the SOC sergeant.

Lambert looked down at the white plastic bags which both he and Johnson wore over their shoes, the addition anyone venturing on to a Scenes of Crime area had to make to their footwear, to avoid contamination of the site and confusion with any marks that might have been left by the criminal or his victim. ‘You mean he was cautious enough to put something over his feet before he carried the body through the hedge?’

‘That’s what it looks like to me, John. Plastic bags are thrust at you everywhere these days.’

Superintendent Lambert was thoughtful as he strode back up the course to the murder room. A cautious killer, who killed when he was ready, hid the body in a predetermined spot, and took informed precautions with his footwear to disguise his presence.

The bright spring morning seemed suddenly a little darker.

The first suggestion of the victim’s identity came not at the murder room beside the golf course but at the police station at Oldford.

Lambert had reported to the Chief Constable, confirmed they had a murder investigation, and relayed to him the scanty details of the crime so far available. He was clearing his desk of other cases when the station sergeant’s voice informed him on the internal phone that a Mrs Eastham would like to see him in connection with the discovery of a female corpse at the Ross-on-Wye golf course.

The woman was a thin-faced woman of around sixty —he decided that her lined face probably made her look older than she actually was. Her hennaed hair was grey at the roots and her blue eyes were watery. Long experience told him that she was a drinker, though she seemed perfectly sober at the moment. She looked carefully to the right and left of him as he sat at his desk, as if she feared there might be other presences, even in this small, square room. She looked briefly at him, then down at his desk as she said, ‘This girl you’ve found. I think it might be one of my tenants.’

Though he had no reason to suspect her, Lambert’s instinctive reaction was to put her on the back foot. ‘No one has released anything yet about the dead woman’s age, Mrs Eastham. Can you tell me why you’re so sure it’s a young woman?’

The watery blue eyes looked up at him then, full of fear, which made him feel a little ashamed. ‘I’m not sure, am I? It’s just that I thought she might be one of my tenants. Young girl of twenty-one or twenty-two. Might not be her, for all I know. Just thought you should know, that’s all.’

There was a strange mixture of apprehension and truculence about this pathetic figure in a mackintosh which was too long for her. Lambert divined that she had been in trouble with the police in her time, that she was no stranger to police stations, but that she was perfectly innocent on this occasion. People like Liz Eastham did not come to see senior policemen willingly when they had anything to hide: their natural inclination was to steer well clear of police interrogation. He looked steadily into the lined, shifty face, wondering why a woman like this had come here today to volunteer information.

Her next words gave him the clue to that. ‘She didn’t come in to give me her rent on Sunday night, did she?’

He picked up a pen. ‘You’d better let me have this girl’s name, Mrs Eastham.’

‘Katherine Mary Wharton.’ She recited it carefully, picturing the words she had written so carefully at the top of the rent book. ‘But she called herself Kate. Everyone knew her as Kate.’

‘I see. And you’re telling me that she didn’t come to see you on Sunday night, and that you haven’t seen her since. When was the last time you did see her, Mrs Eastham?’

She glanced into the long, alert face on the other side of the desk, then looked down at her knees and furrowed her brow, as if considering the question. She must surely have thought of this before she ventured into a police station, Lambert thought, as he gazed at the grey roots beneath the orange-red hair on the crown of the bowed head. ‘Last Thursday, I think. I saw her going out that night. About seven thirty, that would be. But she may have been around since then. I don’t spy on my tenants, you know!’

Lambert smiled into the defiant face. ‘No one accused you of doing that, Mrs Eastham. It might have been better for us if you did, in these circumstances. But I’m glad you’ve come forward to do your public duty.’

She looked at him sharply, as if she suspected the irony he had tried to keep out of his voice. ‘I ‘aven’t anything to ‘ide, ‘ave I?’ She dropped for a moment into both the argot and the manner of the petty criminal he was certain she had been in her time. ‘When will I be able to let the place?’

So this was why she had persuaded herself to set foot in a police station; the rent she was losing. He had the answer to the question which had puzzled him when she had first been shown into the room. ‘If Katherine Wharton is the girl who’s been killed, you won’t be able to let the room for some time, I’m afraid. Not until a team from here has been over the place very thoroughly.’ He watched the apprehension seep into her face as he reached for a second sheet of paper. ‘Where do you live, Mrs Eastham?’

‘Matthew Street.’

He could picture the houses now. Three-storeyed, with cellars beneath, in terraces which had been going slowly downmarket throughout the century after Victoria’s death. With their front gardens concreted over to allow the parking of as many vehicles as possible. Most of them now split into segments for cheap letting to tenants who could afford nothing better. No more than three streets from the place where the appalling Fred and Rosemary West had conducted their ghastly, unthinkable series of murders of young people. The police had not come well out of that grisly carnage, and no policeman could be happy with the thought of it. Lambert looked steadily into the tired, crafty face. ‘You let rooms?’

‘I let apartments.’ There was a pathetic hauteur about her correction. ‘I live at the back of the ground floor myself, and I have a little garden at the rear of the house.’ This small assertion of gentility was clearly important to her.

‘And the rest of the house is sectioned off for lettings?’

She nodded, mollified by his acknowledgement that they were more than just rooms. ‘There are four of them altogether, of different sizes. Three of them are single units, and the fourth one is a double.’ She spoke the words almost without a breath: it was plainly a spiel she was used to delivering to prospective tenants. There would be a high turnover in a house like hers. Not many people would stay for long — unless the area happened to suit their special requirements.

‘And which of these did Katherine Wharton occupy?’

‘Kate. We all called her Kate.’ It seemed suddenly important to assert the last threads of individuality that clung to the girl she was now sure lay dead, the girl whose body was perhaps at this moment being cut up like the carcass of a farm beast. ‘Kate had the double. On the first floor. They have a big living room and a bedroom each.’

‘Who do, Mrs Eastham?’ He kept the surprise out of his voice, delivered the question as if it were more dull routine. But this flatmate, not the landlady, should surely have come forward with the news of her missing companion. She would have been the first one to know that Kate had not come home, the first one to feel the pangs of anxiety about that.

‘Kate and Tracey. Tracey Boyd. They pay their rents separately, but they occupy the place together.’

‘So when did Miss Boyd last pay her rent?’

‘Last Friday. Regular as clockwork, they are, with their rents. Tracey every Friday, Kate every Sunday. They know I don’t stand for any nonsense.’ She folded her arms suddenly, as if asserting herself as the stern landlady.

‘And Tracey didn’t mention on Friday that Kate Wharton was missing?’

‘No. She may not have been missing, of course, on Friday. I told you, I last saw her on Thursday, but Tracey may have seen her after that.’ Liz Eastham’s instinct was to place the burden of answering on to this as yet anonymous contemporary of Kate’s, to extricate herself as quickly as possible from police questioning.

Lambert nodded. ‘We shall have to see her in due course, if the girl who’s been killed is indeed Kate Wharton.’ He opened a drawer in his desk and picked out the facial photograph of the corpse that he had selected for identification purposes. ‘Do you think that this is her?’

Liz Eastham’s thin fingers trembled a little as she took the photograph, handling it as carefully as if it had been a sacred relic. She looked at the serene, lineless face, with its eyes closed in the peace of death, for two long seconds. Then she said, ‘Yes. That’s Kate all right.’