Anyway, back to poor old Michael White.'
`There you are, you and Rick, thwarted over Witches' Hill. Good losers, so Kinture and White think, for you agree to play in the Murano Million, and Rick signs M'tebe, Urquhart and Andres in as well. Rick even comes up and plays a round with Michael White, who shows him his private changing room, and tells him about his habit of bathing in his Jacuzzi, rather than showering, after each round.
`You and Rick make your plans. You know about the practice round last Sunday, because Andres is playing in it. So Rick leaves the tour event last Saturday… same day as Richard Andrews goes off to have his piles done.'
He stopped as they stepped up on to the eighth tee, from which the clubhouse was in sight once more. Atkinson ripped off another deadly accurate drive down. the 430-yard hole.
Skinner, following, played cautiously with a three-wood to avoid the meandering stream.
They fell in step once more, coming close to the skirting crowd, hearing their shouts of encouragement. 'Last Sunday, while everyone is out on the course, Rick just wanders in to the club. He hides in the starter's hut, over there.' As he walked, Skinner pointed casually towards the square building on the horizon.
`While he's in there, he smokes a couple of fags. Unusual fags. Last week's sponsors were dishing them out at the event, to those and such as those, but you can't buy them in the shops yet. He left a couple of stubs. There's nothing we can match on them, but they certainly cut down our list of possibles. Cut it down to one, in fact, since Andrews was having his arse examined in Surrey by that time.
Eventually he sees the first match coming in and it's White and Cortes. He nips, unseen, into the clubhouse through the open door which is normally used only as an exit. He goes into White's changing room and through into the Jacuzzi.'
Skinner broke off to play his second shot, a three-iron which finished on the front edge of the green, then he and the champion, their caddies following a few yards behind, walked off towards another stone bridge across the stream.
A few minutes later, White comes in. He puts his watch and stuff on the shelf, and he's hanging up his towel beside it when Rick smashes him on the side of the head. He drops like a stone. The blow might have killed him, but Rick makes sure. He's as big and powerful as you, and he heaves him into the bath, so there'll be no mess. Then he cuts the poor bugger's throat.'
They reached Atkinson's drive. The champion's wedge-shot was poor by his standards, but still finished only twenty feet from the hole.
`Can you imagine anything as callous as that? Of course you can, you helped plan it! While the rest are gathering in the bar, Michael White is left dead in bubbling water turned pink by his blood. It doesn't bear thinking about, but it happened.' Skinner shook his head, and shuddered.
After he's done the business, Rick counts the rest in, then nips out by the door he used to come in. He takes White's wallet and wristwatch, in the hope that we'll assume it was murder associated with theft. Then he has his first piece of bad luck. He meets Hughie Webb, greenkeeper, nursing his Sunday hangover. Hughie, who's not too bright, takes him for you, and asks for an autograph. And Rick, desperate to be on his way, takes his grubby Gullane scorecard and signs on the back, 'Best wishes, Darren Atkinson'. From the quick glance that I had back on the first tee, his signature's quite like yours. Maybe he signs some of your photos, for you, eh?'
He stopped to play his approach shot, striking it rather too hard, and knocking it twelve feet past the hole. But, after another birdie attempt by the champion had missed by a millimetre, he stepped up and knocked in the putt for his eighth straight par.
As they crossed to the tee of the 540-yard par-five ninth, which, like the opening holes, curved round Witches' Hill and back towards the clubhouse, Skinner said, reflectively, 'It's quite a story, champ. And you know, if you'd left it at that, at White's murder alone, I'd probably never have caught on.
`Hughie Webb's a lousy witness. He doesn't know whether it's breakfast or Easter, so even if I'd found that connection, I'd probably have assumed that he'd made a mistake and had met you on the Monday. It was only when I started thinking in the context of all three murders that I tied you in.
If you'd just been a bit less greedy, a bit less ambitious. But not you and Rick. Suddenly you saw a chance to make the big jump you'd been dreaming about.'
They smashed two more crunching tee-shots down the ninth, but Atkinson's ball took a bad bounce and, to the groans of the gallery, was swallowed by a bunker 290 yards out.
`What you two want, Darren,' Skinner resumed as they walked on, 'is to make DRA Management, absolutely the number one, unchallenged leader in world golf management.
You told me casually that your ambitions extended to America. Now I see how strong they are. The fact that Mike Morton made a half-hearted attempt to lean on you a few years back probably convinced you that you wouldn't beat SSC by business means, and the whole of Asia knows about Masur's Yakuza connection.
`No, the game plan which the terrible twins drew up called for the elimination of the strong men at the head of SSC and Greenfields, each of whom held his business together. With them out of the way you'd move in. You'd sign up the top boys not just in Europe, but in the Americas, Asia and Australasia as well. You'd control the game. DRA would be Number One, worldwide.
`That's the plan. Suddenly you see a chance to put it all into practice in one sweep. Masur and Morton are both here. Even better, they're at each other's throats over Tiger Nakamura.'
Skinner's ball was only a few yards short of Atkinson's bunker. He thought about trying for the green but saw the sand lying in wait ahead, and hit a five-wood, leaving himself a thirty-yard pitch to the green.
The champion's ball was plugged wickedly in the bunker. Even with his strength and skill he was able only to coax it clear by a few feet, the ball landing in straggly semi-rough, only its top visible. Looking at the lie, Skinner expected him to select a mid-iron and to trust to his wedge to save par. But he was mistaken. Three-wood, please, Mario,' said Atkinson. To the astonishment of the gallery, Atkinson took the club and, from that position, fashioned the finest golf shot Skinner had ever seen. The ball soared away, on a right-left drawn trajectory, rather than the usual professional's faded shot, flying against the line of the curving fairway, flirting with the trees of Witches' Hill, but plunging, as if wire-guided, into the centre of the green and rolling up to the very edge of the hole. The spectators in the small stand behind the green rose to their feet as one. The gallery around the golfers cheered wildly. As the ball came to rest, Atkinson glared across at Skinner with fire in his eyes, and his lips drawn back in a silent animal snarl.
As they walked on down the fairway, the policeman said quietly. 'That was a sort of answer, Darren, wasn't it? You know, it's as well you use golf clubs, not firearms. Otherwise I think I'd have to kill you, and I'd hate that.'
His tone changed and became conversational once more. As I said, I've encountered people like you two before. They've always perished on the sword of their own ambition. You guys have perished on your imagination. Just as no one else would have imagined that shot back there, so no one but Rick would have had the flair to fasten on that bloody stupid note by Hector Kinture's mother to the Scotsman.
`The trouble is, once I found something out, it was like a signature. And what I discovered was that Rick, as Henry Wills's student fifteen years back, had heard the vague, unsupported tale of the Witch's Curse.
It was dismissed as colourful folklore by serious academics like Henry, but it stuck in Rick's mind, and when he read the old Lady Kinture's piece of nonsense in the newspaper, he had his brainwave. 'Blade, Fire and Water', the old curse said, and here you were, with your potential victims, at Witches' Hill.' He paused to allow the champion to stride ahead on to the green, smiling and waving to the cheering crowds, and to tap his ball in for a fourth birdie.
Then he played his chip, safely, to the green, and walked on to secure his par.
`Four under at the turn,' said Skinner, as they stepped the few yards to the tenth tee. 'We need five more on the back nine if Maggie and I are to pick up our winnings.'
`Don't worry,' said Atkinson, solemn and deadly serious. `You're on a sure thing.'
I'm firing him up,' thought Skinner as he watched another monstrous drive leaving the champion with the shortest of second shots to the green 390 yards away. 'The harder I go at him the better he's playing. The man's an animal. And he's pulling me after him,' he added as an afterthought as his own drive split the fairway, soaring out 300 yards to astonished applause.
Golfer and policeman resumed their side-by-side march, and their parallel duel. 'You shouldn't have let Rick do that, you know. The problem you had was that the first note had something about it. The old lady had seen the real Witch's Curse. You see, it was a sort of family secret. Eventually I saw it too, and it was clear to me that the
