you could still be Number One then.'
`Keep your eye on me. I haven't peaked yet. You wait till Sunday.'
Hector Kinture’s going to hate you do any worse damage to his course!'
Atkinson smiled and shrugged. 'He should have got himself a decent bloody architect then, shouldn't he, instead of Wild Colonial Boy.'
Skinner glanced across at the Marquis, but he gave no slign of having heard. He stepped to one side, and motioned Atkinson to follow. 'Darren,' he said, quietly. 'Remember that bloke Andrews, the one I didn't ask you about the other day?'
The golfer nodded. 'Mr Nice, yeah.'
`Can you remember if he's a smoker?'
Atkinson looked at him blankly. ‘Eh? Let me think. Yes, of course he is. I remember the first time I met him he was a chain-smoker. He's cut it down a lot since then, but, yes, he still smokes. How come you're concerned about his health, I wonder?'
`Like before,' said Skinner, 'don't wonder too hard. You just concentrate on the golf. Leave the detecting to me.'
Forty-two
‘He really is a nice guy, that Darren, isn't he?'
‘You're just chuffed because he made a fuss of your wean,' Skinner grunted.
‘Don't be silly. He's charming, and you know it’
`He's God's own golfer, I know that much. I've played two rounds with him now. In all that time he's hit one bad shot, and when he did that it just made him sharpen up even more.
Apparently today was his fourteenth successive round under seventy.'
`You didn't do too badly yourself today, honey.'
`That was the effect that playing with him had on me. Hideo and Norton reacted the other way. I was sorry for them.'
He put his arm around her as they sat on the bench, watching a group of children as they attacked the apparatus of the Goose Green playground. Jazz was dozing in his cradle, strapped to his father's chest.
`Tell you one thing, babe. You're right about Sue. She is smitten with the man. You should have seen the way she looked at him this afternoon. I hope she doesn't do anything daft.'
I shouldn't think she will. She likes being Lady of the Manor.'
Aye, but in golf, Darren's bigger-time nobility than a mere Marquis. He's King of the World.'
He squeezed her arm. `Come on, let's go home. It's getting near supper time for Bonzo here.. and I'm bloody starving too.'
They left their bench and walked back up the sloping village green towards their cottage.
`What was the autopsy finding on Masur?' Sarah asked, facing him as she stepped backwards up a grassy ridge. ‘You said we'd talk about it later.'
`Banged on the head, then drowned. Just like you thought.'
She nodded, with a look of professional satisfaction. 'I've been thinking some more too,' she said. 'About how it was done.'
`What d'you mean?'
`Try to picture it. There's Bill Masur walking back to Bracklands, across the golf course. He's full of the joys of victory. He's rubbed his arch enemy's nose in the dirt, in public. He's had a few drinks, but he isn't drunk. It's a pleasant moonlit night and he's as wide awake as he's ever been in his life.'
They had reached the cottage. Bob stepped aside as she opened the door with her Yale key.
'OK,' he said, 'so?'
`Well, for openers, it would not be easy to sneak up on this man. There are no trees around there. The fairway's wide open. No place to lie in wait.'
Skinner lifted Jazz from his cradle, handed him to Sarah, then headed off to prepare the baby's bath. 'Who says he was there?' he said, over his shoulder as she followed him.
`Couldn't he have been walking along the cart track close to the trees?'
`What happens to the buggies at night?'
`They're all locked up.'
'Did your people find any tyre marks on the fairway?'
'No.'
`Did they find any marks as if someone had been dragged across the fairway?'
`No.'
OK, Masur was a big, heavy guy. He could have been slugged on the path and carried across to the stool, but it would have taken more than one person to do that. A reasonable conclusion, yes?'
`Yes,' he said, hesitantly, as he filled the bath.
`Were there lots of footprints around the stool's mooring point, or around the place where Masur was loaded and tied to it?'
`No.'
OK. Now lets go back to where he's walking along enjoying the moonlight. He's walking towards Bracklands, remember. So what happens?'
`Someone softshoe's up behind him and banjoes him, yes?'
I doubt it. He'd have to be very quiet about it. It was a still night as well as a bright one. And the angle of the head injury was wrong.'
`What d'you mean?'
She smiled, and Skinner could sense her triumph to come. `Well if it happened like that, even if the guy had come up behind him like Marcel Marceau, he'd have been hit a downwards blow to the top of the head. He wasn't. He was knocked out by a sideways blow to the base of the skull.' She peeled off Jazz's ripe disposable nappy and wiped him clean, then lowered him carefully into the bath, trying in vain to keep clear of the splashes from his kicking legs.
I think,' she said, soaping the chortling child, 'and I'd stand in the witness box and say this, that someone walked right up to Masur.. someone he knew. Someone with whom he was relaxed, and off-guard.
`This person walks right up to him, coming, not necessarily from Bracklands, but from the direction of Bracklands, and says something like, 'Hi Bill, you out for a stroll too?' They strike up a conversation. They walk side by side in the moonlight. The newcomer falls just a pace or two behind. Masur doesn't suspect a thing… until the man whips out a cosh, or some such, and drops him where he stands.
`He's chosen his moment, so he doesn't have to carry him far to the stool. Or maybe he means to finish him off with the club, then sees the stool in the moonlight and indulges a sense of the theatrical.' She squeezed a sponge over Jazz's round tummy, triggering a new round of squeals.
`That's my story, copper, and I'm sticking to it.'
Skinner leaned against a wall and looked at her thoughtfully. 'He couldn't just have been overcome by a couple of guys?'
`Come on Bob, you don't believe that a mean sonofabitch like him could have been tackled straight on, even by two guys, without a battle. The head knock was the only injury, remember. This man would have got a few licks off himself. He'd have had scraped knuckles, and facial bruising. But the only marks on him were caused by the fishes.'
He sighed. 'Yes, you're right, as bloody usual. I'll buy it. it doesn't make things easy, though.
The only guy in the house party who isn't accounted for is Morton, and the way those two went at it, I hardly see him — or his fixer Richard Andrews — walking up in the moonlight and saying, 'Hiya Bill, how's it goin'?' So if Masur did meet someone in the middle of the eighteenth fairway, I have no tiny idea of who it was… unless one of Aggie Tod's witches flew in on a broomstick and zapped him!'
