A Hole in One E-Book

Catherine Aird

• Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Serie: Sloan and Crosby
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 222

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

When flirtatious golfing beginner Helen Sewell, goes in search for her wayward golf ball in the dreaded 'Hells Bells' bunker, she is not prepared for the horrible surprise that lies buried under the soft sand. When a body is discovered by two lady golfers buried in the steepest bunker on the course Detective Inspector Sloan and Detective Constable Crosby are called in to solve a murder mystery, with more twists and turns than a golf course. This is a gentle and finely constructed murder mystery, set on Berebury golf course in the fictional county of Calleshire. "The Sloan and Crosby" series have been beloved by fans and lauded by critics for their wonderful comic touch, intricate plotting and literate charm.

Leseprobe

Hole in One

CATHERINE AIRD

For Rachel and Douglas with love

The plot is based on the Old Testament story in the 2nd Book of Kings, Chapter Five, verses 1 – 27.

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Chapter One:One Down

Chapter Two:Bogey

Chapter Three:Unplayable

Chapter Four:Birdie

Chapter Five:One-up

Chapter Six:Loss of Stroke and Distance

Chapter Seven:Provisional Ball

Chapter Eight:Lost Ball

Chapter Nine:Halved

Chapter Ten:Penalty

Chapter Eleven:Wrong Ball

Chapter Twelve:Casual Water

Chapter Thirteen:All Square

Chapter Fourteen:Better-ball

Chapter Fifteen:Best-ball

Chapter Sixteen:Par

Chapter Seventeen:Eagle

Chapter Eighteen:Albatross

Chapter Nineteen:Dormy

About the Author

By Catherine Aird

Copyright

Chapter One

One Down

‘Are they safe now?’ asked Helen Ewell anxiously.

Ursula Millward peered forward, shading her eyes against the sun with her hand. ‘Quite safe, I should say.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘I don’t know how far you can hit,’ responded Ursula with spirit, ‘but they’re well out of my range already.’

‘That’s a relief,’ said Helen. She turned to face her friend. ‘Do I go first or do you?’ Both women were standing beside their trolleys on the first tee of the Berebury Golf Club.

Ursula Millward put both her hands out of sight behind her back. ‘Which is it in? Right or left?’

‘Left,’ said Helen Ewell at once.

The other player brought her hands back into view and opened them. There was a golf tee in the left one. ‘All right, you go first, then.’ Ursula knew she should have said ‘Your honour’ but it still sounded funny to her. And anyway honour wasn’t a word that came easily to mind when talking to Helen.

Helen Ewell carefully selected a number-two wood club from her golf bag, pressed a brightly coloured plastic tee into the ground, and placed her ball on it. Taking a deep breath she started to address it. After taking a couple of practice swings she stopped, grounded her driver and said again, ‘You’re quite sure I shan’t hit them, Ursula, aren’t you?’

‘Quite sure,’ said Ursula firmly.

She was right to be sure. Helen Ewell needn’t have worried at all about her drive from the first tee hitting the players ahead. Even though she managed to hit the ball at her first attempt, she did so with such a wild swing that she topped it badly. Her ball did no more than trickle off the tee and on to the fairway in front of it.

‘I’ll never ever get it right,’ she wailed. ‘Ever, ever, ever…’

‘Bad luck,’ said Ursula immediately.

She herself managed a rather better shot and knocked her ball nearly a hundred yards down the fairway of the first hole.

Ursula Millward might be the better player of the two but she certainly wasn’t the better dressed of the pair. From her stylish Tam O’Shanter headgear down to her elegant brown and white golf shoes, via a check shirt and shorts of exactly the right colour and length, Helen Ewell was perfectly accoutred for the game of golf. The fact that she could scarcely play the game was not nearly so important to her as looking the part.

‘But,’ Helen was still protesting, ‘after my last lesson Jock told me I was really beginning to get a good grasp of my swing.’

‘It’ll come,’ said Ursula Millward laconically. She refrained from remarking that all she had seen from the sidelines was the Golf Club professional, Jock Selkirk, getting quite a good grasp of Helen herself while trying to teach her that very same swing.

‘Jock said that it’s the way you take the club back that really matters,’ said Helen. Her series of golf lessons from the Club’s professional had come well after she’d made her many purchases in Berebury’s best fashion shops, to say nothing of those carefully colour-coded items she’d bought in the pro’s own shop beside the Clubhouse. Even the numbered covers on her wooden clubs matched the muted shades of her outfit.

‘I can well believe it,’ said Ursula dryly. She had also noticed that it had been while the golf professional’s pupil had been taking a practice backswing that her friend had appeared to be in most need of the man’s assistance. ‘I expect,’ she added a trifle maliciously, ‘he thought the back swing was where he could be most helpful.’

‘Oh,’ agreed Helen eagerly. ‘It is.’

‘What Jock told me,’ said Ursula, her tongue still well in her cheek, ‘was that getting your golf swing right in the first place is just like learning to ride a bicycle.’

‘I’m sure he’s right,’ said Helen Ewell prettily, ‘although it’s something I could never do. Ride a bicycle, I mean.’

‘That’s the funny thing about golf – one day you can’t hit a thing,’ mused Ursula, half to herself, ‘and suddenly the next day you can.’ When she herself had first taken up the game she had only been able to afford a very short series of lessons from the professional at the Club, Jock Selkirk, but in any case she hadn’t relished being pawed by the man.

‘It’s all very well for some,’ said Helen petulantly. ‘You seem to have picked it up all right, Ursula. Look at where your ball’s got to…’

‘Nevertheless,’ rejoined Ursula Millward sturdily, ‘there’s no getting away from the fact that we’re both still Rabbits.’

‘I’m not sure that I want to win the Rabbits’ Cup anyway,’ sniffed Helen after she’d hit her ball again but not very far, this time with a number-five iron club.

‘I don’t think that winning is something we need to worry about,’ said Ursula, well aware that her own second shot had not gone anything like as far as her first. ‘Either of us.’

‘You know, Ursula, I play so well when Jock is coaching me.’ Helen slung her club back into her golf bag in manifest disappointment. ‘It’s not fair.’

Her friend forbore to remark that Helen performed everything better when there was a man – any man – watching her.

Instead she glanced over her shoulder and said ‘I think we’d better keep going. There are some more Rabbits coming along behind and we don’t want to have to let them play through us, do we?’

This was something that Helen and Ursula might not have wanted but in the event they had no option. In spite of the pair of them hurrying after their balls and playing as speedily as they could, the couple playing behind them kept gaining on them. On the second hole they were driving off the tee before Helen and Ursula had even reached the green; on the third hole they had to linger behind while Helen took four putts before she sank her ball.

‘It’s no good, Ursula,’ Helen said in despair halfway down the fourth hole. ‘I just can’t play my best while they’re just standing there waiting and waiting.’

‘It is a bit unnerving,’ admitted Ursula, ‘being watched like this while we try to play.’

‘I’d no idea that competitions were so nerve-racking,’ moaned Helen as they panted up to the fifth tee.

Ursula grinned. ‘You wait till we get to play in the Sharks versus the Minnows tournament.’

Helen made a face. ‘I won’t do it.’ She glanced over her shoulder. ‘Look, the others are holing out on the fourth already…it’s not fair.’

‘We’ll wave them through on the sixth, shall we?’ suggested Ursula, adding by way of consolation, ‘They’re much better than we are, anyway.’

‘Good idea.’ Helen readily assented to this. She shuddered. ‘I couldn’t bear it if they shouted “fore” at us.’

‘Besides,’ said Ursula looking about her appreciatively, ‘it’s a lovely day and the course is looking beautiful.’

This was true. The Berebury Golf Course had been carefully constructed round a mound – hardly a hill – just outside the town known as The Bield because of the wooden shelter on top of it. The name of the architect of the course was not known by the members, although the words “James Braid” were sometimes mentioned in passing – but without great conviction. It is more likely that the course hadn’t had a proper architect at all, the holes having been created more by the lie of the land than by the hand of man.

Round one side of the Bield trickled a little stream. This configuration gave variety to the holes, some uphill and some down. From the highest tee of all there was a splendid view of the market town of Berebury. Better still, not even on a clear day could the factories of the distant industrial town of Luston be seen intruding on the pleasant landscape.

It was thus no hardship to Ursula Millward to stand aside to let the other players overtake them. The pair behind them were young women, too, but slightly older and playing a much steadier game. They accepted the invitation to play through Helen and Ursula with a gesture of thanks and hit their balls down the sixth fairway ahead of them noticeably farther than the other two had done.

‘If,’ remarked the one called Anna scornfully, ‘those two are Rabbits, Christine, then I reckon we’re practically hares.’

‘Speak for yourself…blast!’ The head of the other woman came up with a jerk after she’d taken her shot. ‘Look! I think my ball’s finished up in that awful bunker.’

‘Not the big one at the back, I hope,’ said Anna, peering ahead. ‘You won’t like that, I can tell you.’

Christine shoved her club back into her golf bag with quite unnecessary force.

‘No, not that one, thank goodness. It’s in the one to the right of the green. The shallow one, near the front.’

‘That’s not so bad then,’ her companion reassured her. ‘Colin says the men call the one at the back “Hell’s Bells” because if you get in it, you can’t get out…’

‘Like Hell itself, I suppose,’ said Christine soberly.

‘And it ruins your card early on,’ said Anna, ignoring this. The game of golf did seem to have a theology all of its own but she was still unsure what it was. ‘Mind you,’ she added judiciously, having already learned a little about the game, ‘you’d have to have over-hit in a big way to go over the back there and into it. It’s an enormous green and the slope’s all in your favour.’

‘David always says the sixth is the most difficult hole on the course anyway,’ said her friend. ‘And that I’d find that out for myself as soon as I started playing here at Berebury…’

Both women had announced that they were taking up the game purely in order to see more of their husbands. What they had neither admitted to aloud was that they were also doing so to make quite sure that some of the other lady players didn’t see even more of those same husbands than they did.

Although Christine’s ball was indeed in the shallower bunker – the one in front of the approach to the green – playing it out didn’t present too many problems to her and both women holed out with quite a respectable score for a couple of tyros at the notorious sixth hole.

‘I think playing the game does beat golf widowhood,’ grinned Anna as she picked her ball out of the hole, ‘but only just.’

‘And only in good weather,’ said Christine, scribbling on her card.

‘Remember, we shan’t be Rabbits for ever, either.’ Anna had had one really good shot already. This had sent a quite unexpected frisson of delight through her lithe figure. Something quite poetic about the marriage of club, mind and body flitted through her mind and was gone, unexpressed and unformulated, but it had been there and she had registered the feeling of real pleasure in the game for the very first time.

‘I’m not so sure about the pair behind us not staying as Rabbits for ever,’ said Christine looking over her shoulder. ‘Look, they’ve scarcely teed off yet and it’s ages since we passed them.’

‘Don’t forget that fable about the hare and the tortoise,’ Anna adjured her as they moved off towards the seventh tee. She wasn’t at all sure she could repeat the one perfect shot she’d just had.

‘Our Helen behind us may be a tortoise on the course,’ retorted Christine spiritedly, ‘but all I can say is that the woman’s no slowcoach off it.’

Helen Ewell was one of the unspoken reasons why Christine had joined the Golf Club: her husband, David, she knew only too well would be easy prey for a woman of Helen’s sort.

‘I suggested to Dallas Southon that she joined the Club when we did,’ she remarked with apparent inconsequence, ‘but she said she’d rather stick to collecting antiques than traipse round the course after Brian.’

‘Well, she has got a really lovely collection of old silver,’ said Christine.

‘Some of her pieces are beautiful and if that’s what interests her…’

‘I daresay,’ agreed Anna. ‘But antique silver comes expensive.’ She looked back over her shoulder. ‘Come along. We mustn’t forget the tortoise reached the end first because the hare got overconfident.’

‘And Helen can be fast enough when it suits her, I can tell you,’ said Christine ambiguously.

‘Colin,’ Anna quoted her husband again, ‘says you can never tell who’s won in golf…’

Christine giggled. ‘Not until the fat lady sings, eh?’ she suggested.

‘No. Not until the nineteenth closes,’ said Anna.

‘You wait,’ promised Christine. ‘One day we’ll beat Colin and David, too. And before the nineteenth.’ Her knowledge of the sociabilities customary after the game was still a little limited, too.

‘Mmm,’ murmured Anna thoughtfully. Beating her husband was not on her agenda.

‘I can tell you one thing, though,’ said Christine, she, too, looking over her shoulder, ‘and that’s that pair behind us aren’t even going to get as far as the nineteenth. Not today, and not at their rate, anyway.’

‘Why not…’ Anna turned too. ‘Oh, I see. One of them’s gone and got herself into the Hell’s Bells bunker. Oh, what bad luck!’

‘I wonder whose ball it is,’ said Christine, watching with interest to see whether it was to be Helen or Ursula who set off for the deep bunker behind the green.

‘Whose ever it is, I bet she won’t get out of there first go,’ said Anna, who had had to listen time and again to detailed accounts of his games from her Colin and who thus knew the course better than Christine – in theory, that is. The depth of the bunker behind the sixth green was a hardy perennial when she was being properly sympathetic in the matter of torn-up cards and lost matches.

‘It’s Helen Ewell’s,’ said Christine, shading her eyes and staring back at the sixth green.

‘Tough,’ said Anna, without any noticeable sound of regret. ‘You do realise, Christine, don’t you,’ she added mischievously, ‘that there’s not a single man in sight to come to her aid?’

‘Not even the greenkeeper, poor thing,’ said Christine. It was not clear whether it was the greenkeeper or Helen for whom she was expressing her sympathy.

‘Oh, the greenkeeper’s out of action, anyway,’ said Anna. ‘I heard he’s been off sick all week, which is why the fairway grass is a bit long just now.’

Christine craned her neck. ‘I can’t even see her now she’s in the bunker.’

‘So she’ll have to manage on her own, won’t she?’ grinned Anna. ‘Ursula Millward isn’t supposed to advise her.’ She noted with approval that Ursula had taken up a perfectly correct position by the flag, which she was now raising well above her head so that her friend in the bunker might have some idea of the general direction in which she should be aiming her shot.

‘Come on, Anna,’ Christine urged her friend from the safety of the seventh hole. ‘Now we’ve got a head start we might as well keep it. After all, Helen might give up and just mark Ursula’s card from now on. That’d make them a lot quicker and that could be a nuisance to us.’

‘Right you are,’ said Anna amiably. ‘Anyway, we’ll hear all about it with a vengeance when we get in.’

‘You bet we will. Our Helen likes an audience.’

‘Helen likes a male audience,’ Anna corrected her. ‘I don’t think we mere lady members’ll do instead when she tells us about her terrible luck today.’

She was wrong.

Anyone and everyone would have done for audience when Helen Ewell eventually got back to the Clubhouse of the Berebury Golf Club. The trouble was that by then her voice had been reduced to a totally incoherent babble that no one could understand.

Chapter Two

Bogey

Police Superintendent Leeyes checked his watch and not for the first time. He was standing impatiently at the long window of the Clubhouse that looked out on both the eighteenth hole and the first tee of the golf course. Catching sight of some movement near the latter, he turned to the man at his side and said ‘Great, they’ve opened the first tee to us at last. Come along, Garwood. It’s gone half-past already and those dratted women should be well out of the way by now.’

‘They’ll be slow,’ Douglas Garwood, a short spry man, warned him. ‘Very slow.’

‘Women usually are,’ grunted Leeyes.

‘Rabbits always are,’ said Garwood.

‘They aren’t the only ones,’ said Leeyes. He pointed at someone walking outside the window. ‘Look at old Bligh over there. He gets slower and slower.’

‘It’s his knee,’ said Garwood.

‘Hrrmph,’ said Leeyes, resuming his study of the course.

‘Old Bligh may be slow,’ observed Garwood, ‘but he still hits a good drive.’

‘True,’ admitted Leeyes grudgingly.

‘And anyway it’s the third shot that counts as time goes by,’ said Garwood, ‘not your drive.’

Leeyes changed tack. ‘And Hopland isn’t quick either.’ He jerked a thumb in the man’s direction. ‘Look at the pair of them shuffling into the locker rooms.’

‘James doesn’t have to be quick,’ pointed out Garwood. ‘He’s as good as retired.’

‘I suppose he doesn’t play all that badly,’ conceded Leeyes.

‘For an old man,’ rejoined Garwood neatly. ‘And there’s Luke Trumper over there with Nigel Halesworth waiting to play.’

‘I do believe that they’re going to go out now, too,’ said Leeyes, irritated. ‘We’ll have to look sharp to get in ahead of them.’ He scowled. ‘What’s Trumper doing up here today anyway? He’s not usually around midweek.’

‘Ready when you are,’ said Garwood, leaving Leeyes’ question unanswered and suppressing any thought he might have had about it being possible to take the policeman out of the police station but not the police station out of the policeman.

‘Come along then,’ urged Leeyes. ‘We don’t want to have to play behind a pair of old dodderers let alone Trumper and Halesworth.’

‘Patience is good for the soul,’ said Garwood philosophically. ‘And the blood pressure.’

Leeyes shot the man a questioning look, decided he wasn’t trying to be funny, and so stayed silent. This was because the Superintendent, ever afraid of being seen in the wrong company, was always careful with whom he played. He never had any qualms in arranging a game with Douglas Garwood. Circumspection was not necessary with the man. Calleshire Consolidated, Plc., of which Company Doug Garwood was the chairman, had an impeccable reputation throughout the county for honest dealing.

And for making money.

A lot of money.

‘Unless, that is,’ continued Garwood politely, ‘you’re in a hurry to get back on duty.’

‘No, no,’ protested Leeyes at once. ‘Not at all. My time’s my own today.’ The Superintendent was up for the Men’s Committee – an important and necessary step on the way to the Captaincy – and was belatedly realising that election candidates had to mind their manners. He gave a deprecating little laugh. ‘One of the few advantages of being in the Force, you know, is the occasional daytime off-duty. Not that we don’t work when other men play, of course,’ he finished piously.

The two golfers left the Clubhouse, collected their clubs and strolled towards the first tee, passing as they did so the old Nissen hut that did duty as the caddies’ shed. Leeyes jerked his head in its direction. ‘Do you need one of those?’

‘Not today, thank you,’ said Garwood. He paused and said: ‘I do like to have a caddy in a competition, though. It’s all very well for you, Leeyes, but I’m not as young as I was, and a caddy does help on the hills.’

‘Golf isn’t like boxing,’ said Leeyes profoundly. ‘In boxing a good young one usually beats a good old one.’

‘I’m sure…’

‘In golf,’ expounded the Police Superintendent, ‘a good old one beats a good young ‘un. Not the other way round.’ He sniffed. ‘No use getting old if you don’t get cunning.’

Douglas Garwood was still following his own train of thought. ‘But I don’t like it when I’ve got a caddy and my opponent hasn’t, like I did the other day. I think if Peter Gilchrist had had a caddy when we played the third round of the Clarembald Cup last week, I wouldn’t have beaten him and got through into the next round. After all, fair’s fair.’

‘Quite,’ said Leeyes insincerely. A working life spent in the police force had left him uncommitted to the concept of fairness. ‘It’s just as bad,’ he added even more mendaciously, ‘when it’s the opposite way round and the other fellow has a caddy when you haven’t.’

‘Not really,’ said Garwood. ‘By the way, Leeyes, where do you stand on the Great Divide?’

The Committee of the Berebury Golf Club was presently trying to decide whether to build a driving range on site to attract more players, selling some land for development in the process to fund it. This had split the membership as nothing else had done since the furore over the admission of the Ladies before the war.

‘I’m afraid I have to be neutral,’ said Leeyes virtuously, neatly ducking the issue, ‘being a member of the Force and all that. We have to police demonstrations all the time, you know, and nobody’s supposed to know what we think. And what about you?’

‘It never does to mix business with pleasure,’ said Garwood obscurely.

The two golfers continued on their way to the first tee while within the caddies’ shed talk turned to the pair coming along behind the two men.

‘Who are you going out with today, Dickie?’ asked Bert Hedges. He was sitting down on a wooden bench changing into his golf shoes.

‘Major Bligh,’ answered Dickie Castle, bending down to do up his own laces. ‘Second round of the Pletchford Plate.’

Bert Hedges stamped his feet well down in his shoes and nodded. ‘He’s always in with a fighting chance is the Major – unless he’s up against a real tiger, of course.’

‘What about you, mate?’ Dickie Castle asked him in return.

‘Today? A singles,’ answered Hedges. He shrugged his shoulders. ‘But only a friendly.’

‘It’s my belief,’ declared Dickie solemnly, ‘that there’s no such animal as a friendly match.’

Edmund Pemberton, a copper-nobbed new arrival as a caddy, said ‘A friendly match being a contradiction in terms, you mean?’ He was on vacation from the University of Calleshire and had both an enquiring mind and an interest in the meaning of words.

‘I don’t know what you mean, laddie,’ said Bert Hedges heavily, ‘but what our Dickie here meant was that friendly matches aren’t so interesting.’

Dickie Castle grinned, ‘And what Bert means, young Ginger, is that there’s usually nothing much riding on a friendly.’

Pemberton, who hated being called either young or Ginger, had the sense not to take his interest in semantics any further, and changed the subject ‘Is this Major Bligh going to win the Pletchford Plate then?’

Dickie Castle sucked his lips and said judiciously ‘Whether he wins the Pletchford or not really hangs on who he meets in the round after this one with James Hopland.’

‘For his sins,’ said Bert Hedges, who hadn’t been inside a church since he got married, ‘it’ll be either Peter Gilchrist or Brian Southon on account of Brian Southon having had a walkover from Eric Simmonds.’

‘Eric Simmonds still ill, is he?’ asked Hedges.

‘I can tell you that it’s Gilchrist who won,’ another man informed them. ‘I saw it on the board this morning, although how he’s got time to play I don’t know. They say he’s laying people off at his works as fast as he can.’

‘Those two played their match the other day,’ said a man called Shipley. ‘Matt went out with them just before he took off and so did old Bellows over there.’ He jerked his thumb in the direction of an elderly caddy sitting slightly apart from the others, head well down, and patently deaf to their chat.

Castle nodded. ‘I’m not surprised that it’s Gilchrist who won. He’s the better man, really. Plays a very steady game when he’s got his back to the wall.’

‘It was close, though,’ said the other man. ‘I heard they went to the twentieth.’

‘The twentieth?’ piped up Edmund Pemberton again. ‘I thought there were only eighteen holes on the course.’

‘When the match is all square at the eighteenth,’ Bert Hedges informed him in a lordly way, ‘you start again at the first hole though then you call it the nineteenth…’

‘But I thought the nineteenth was the bar in the Clubhouse,’ said Pemberton naively. ‘That’s what Matt told me…’

‘It’s that, too, boy,’ grinned Dickie. ‘Especially on Sunday mornings.’

‘And if you don’t happen to win the nineteenth,’ persisted Bert Hedges, ‘you go to the twentieth and go on playing until one of the players wins…’

‘And for your information,’ added Dickie Castle chillingly, ‘it’s called “sudden death”.’

‘Can you see where the pin is from where you are?’ Ursula Millward had called out after Helen Ewell had descended into the steepest bunker on the course. ‘I’m holding it up high to give you a bearing…’

‘That’s not the problem,’ Helen called back. ‘I’ve got a really horrible lie, though. I’ll have to take my eight iron at least…’ This was followed by the thudding sound of club hitting sand, succeeded by a muffled imprecation from the bunker. ‘No, this needs a lob wedge.’

Ursula Millward waited.

The thudding sound came again.

And again.

And again.