As Easy as Murder (14 page)

I
’m not going to sit here and claim that by next morning I’d forgotten all about the man with no face; I’m probably as squeamish as you are. I’ve been able to hide it when necessary, but no kidding, my close-up view of that guy is still burned into my brain, and it always will be.

However I did have a diversion, to stop me from dwelling upon it. Jonny had to be fed, watered and got ready for the first day of his new professional life. His ‘new boy’ late starting time was something of a blessing, in that we didn’t have to be up and about any earlier than was normal on a school day. In fact, Jonny might have been better staying in bed until Tom had left for school, for he was quizzed mercilessly over breakfast about his chances, so much that I could see faint cracks appearing in his super-confident image, and told my son, fairly sharply, to shut up and concentrate on his own forthcoming day at the office. I did give him one concession, though. I wanted to stay with Jonny right to the end of his round, and so I told Tom that he could take Charlie along to Vaive after school, and stay on the beach until seven, under the careful and caring eye of the xiringuita owners, friends of ours. After that, if I
wasn’t there when he got home, he could set the table for dinner.

Jonny left for the course at nine thirty; my plan was to go down around midday, meet Patterson and Shirley for lunch, and then with or without them, as they chose, be my nephew’s gallery for the whole of his round . . . or until my presence started to make him nervous and he asked me to leave. (I’d made him promise that if that happened, he would.)

I busied myself with housework (a word you don’t hear me use too often, but I’m not a slut, honest) for a couple of hours, did some preparation for the evening meal, then went down to the beach and swam for a while. I was ready to go, when the house phone rang.

‘Primavera.’ It was Alex. ‘How’re you doing? I thought I’d give you a call to let you know how badly we’re doing. We can’t find a trace of our murder victim, not anywhere. The post-mortem’s been no help either. Other than the scar, the man had no distinguishing marks and no signs of any medical interventions during his lifetime, no surgical history to offer any leads. The only thing that’s definitive is a report by a forensic dentist. Judging by his teeth, his opinion backs up Tom’s, that the man wasn’t British . . . or, to be more precise, that his dental work wasn’t done there.’

‘That’s no help at all, is it,’ I sighed ‘if it means you can’t identify him by his dental records.’

‘There never was any chance of that,’ he replied. ‘Our expert didn’t have a complete mouth to look at. He couldn’t say where the guy’s dental work had been done, only where it hadn’t. Not Britain, not Russia, not Spain, but we’re left with the rest of Europe as a possibility. No blame to him. The upper left jawbone
was missing completely, and there was other damage. You saw that for yourself.’

‘An unwelcome reminder,’ I murmured. ‘So what’s next?’

‘We’re going with the little we have. We’re going to ask all our Catalan newspapers and TV to publish the picture. With luck, that will be done over the next twenty-four hours.’

‘Only in Catalunya?’

‘Primavera, do you have any idea how many open murder cases there are in Spain with unidentified victims?’

‘No,’ I admitted. ‘You realise what’ll happen, even with that limited circulation? You’ll have a thousand candidates; filtering them out will be a nightmare.’

‘I know; but we’re hoping that we’ll be able to eliminate most of them immediately.’

I checked my watch; time to go. ‘Poor Alex,’ I sympathised. ‘I’m sure you’re doing all you can.’

‘And one thing that I shouldn’t have.’ He paused. ‘Well, not me; Hector.’

‘What was that?’

‘He called London and asked for a computer check on your friend Mr Cowling. Now I understand why you talked me out of picking him up. He had a call back; from our director general, no less. I didn’t hear what he said, but Hector was very quiet for a while afterwards.’

‘That doesn’t surprise me.’ I filled him in on my own inquiry, and John Dale’s panicky phone call in response. ‘I couldn’t tell you before, Alex, not outright, but I hoped you’d got the message.’

‘I had got it, but I neglected to pass it on to the boss. In the
circumstances,’ he chuckled, ‘I’ll be keeping that to myself.’

I didn’t mention Gomez’s embarrassment when I met Patterson and Shirley in the championship’s tented village. Their relationship seemed undamaged by the grenade I’d lobbed into it the night before. Indeed, I sensed a little extra buzz about Shirl; I reckoned I’d spiced up her life even more.

That encounter came after I’d checked on Jonny in the practice ground. His swing looked absolutely grooved to me, and judging by the way Lena Mankell nodded after most of his shots, the most approval she ever seemed to show, she was happy too. The viewing stand wasn’t full, but it was a lot busier than it had been three days earlier. Uche spotted me and gave me an expansive wave. Since he was probably the most eye-catching bloke on the range, it drew attention to me that I could have lived without.

‘You family, then?’ a fat, fifty-ish bloke asked. He was two seats along, dressed in shorts and a Lacoste shirt, and his beer gut shifted as he turned towards me.

‘My nephew,’ I replied, as modestly as I could.

‘Who?’ he retorted. ‘The caddie? Bloody hell, love, your suntan’s fading if you’re his auntie.’ He turned to his mate, seated just beyond him. ‘D’you hear that, Nev?’ he chortled. ‘This lady’s the black fella’s auntie.’

A few other spectators looked around, at both of us. I sized him up. If I’d chosen, I could have kicked him solidly in the head before he’d even got one cheek of his ample arse off his seat. But that would have been a hell of a start to Jonny’s round. More than that, it’s not the way that disputes are handled in Spain. Still, I wasn’t for letting the porky yob go unanswered.

Happily, neither was Clive, the practice ground manager, my Scots friend from Monday. While I was debating whether to poke the guy in the eye metaphorically or literally, he stepped over three rows of seats and plonked himself down, next to loudmouth. I couldn’t hear what he said, but it worked. Tubby and Nev weren’t inclined to have a bit of fun at his expense. They were out of there, without even a backward glance in my direction.

‘Sorry about that,’ Clive murmured as he made his way back to ground level. ‘Bloody yobs from Benidorm; I can tell the kind a mile off. If they give you any more bother let me know and I’ll have them banned from the course.’

‘I’m more worried about them upsetting my nephew’s caddie,’ I confessed. ‘Or deciding to heckle him and Jonny on the way round.’

‘They won’t go near them; be sure of that. I made it very clear to them that they shouldn’t. Don’t you worry,’ he said. ‘I’m looking out for young Mr Sinclair. I promised that I would.’

That puzzled me. ‘Who did you promise?’

‘His manager. Mr Donnelly. He called me, told me that he had a lad coming on tour and asked me if I’d make sure he got settled in all right.’

‘You know him?’

The big Scot nodded. ‘Aye, from way back. I played a couple of seasons on the PGA tour in my time. Brush was around then, on the edges of things, like. Crazy man, for all that he was a college graduate; all the Yanks are now, nearly all even in our day. The game’s elitist over there; don’t let anyone tell you different. He never amounted to anything on the tour. Plain truth, he just wasn’t
good enough, even without the drink. He lost his playing card, then dropped out of sight for a while, for a right few years, in fact. I’d heard he resurfaced . . . he got religion, so they say, but I was still surprised when I found out he’s looking after your nephew. I’m doing him an injustice, maybe. Like I said, he was a bright enough guy, when he was sober and didn’t have a golf club in his hand. Looking at the endorsements your lad’s got, he’s doing a pretty fair job for him; now it’s up to Jonny to show whether he’s good enough to wear all those badges.’

He had a gallery of seven when he hit his first shot as a tournament professional, at twenty minutes past two that afternoon. Shirley, Patterson, me and four others; like us, they were adherents of the other two players, one French, the other a Swede.

I know he was nervous, for he told me so afterwards. It couldn’t have helped when one of his partners hooked his tee shot into the trees on the left, but it didn’t affect him, as he hit a conservative three metal right into the middle of the fairway, short of the threatening bunker on the right.

I was standing well out of his eyeline but close enough to hear Uche tell him, ‘Shot, boss. You can’t win the tournament on the first tee, but it is possible to lose it.’ It was the right thing to say; it calmed me down too, for in truth my heart had been hammering so loud that I’d been worried he’d hear it.

We set out after the group, following the cart path to the left of the fairway. The Stadium Course, as they call it, was built as a championship venue, and so the spectator vantage points were good, allowing us to get close enough but not too close. Jonny was away, furthest from the green after his cautious drive, but the
perfect distance for his eight iron. They’d put the flag in the most difficult position, back left of the green, six paces on and near a bunker. Jonny’s second shot landed just short of the target and rolled a little closer. A ten-foot putt later and he had his first birdie on the card.

The eleventh hole, his second, looked very scary indeed from the tee; it was less than two hundred yards long, a par three, but with a big bunker in front, and a water hazard the size of Lake Geneva at the back. The green was so small that I could hardly see it from where I stood, but my nephew must have had a good view for he nailed a six iron that would have hit the bull if he’d been aiming at a dartboard rather than a thirty-yard circle of grass. Two putts, and he’d made his first pro par.

The next was a par five on the card, but Jonny played it like a four. He whacked his drive further than I could see, close enough to find the green with a four iron, while his two partners each chose to play short. His putt was the best part of thirty feet and I knew that he was concentrating on leaving it close, but his line was good and he got lucky. He’d played his first three holes in nine shots, three under par. Shirley went as crazy as I felt; anyone else might have been embarrassed, but not her. My nephew didn’t seem to notice her whoops; that’s how far he was ‘in the zone’.

The thirteenth was a beast, a par four of modest length but made difficult by a green that was mostly surrounded by water. The safe approach was to the left and that’s where he played, putting his first four on his card.

By the time we reached the eighteenth, where he saved par after leaving his second shot in a bunker, he was five under. I
looked up at the leader board behind the grandstand. The Irish kid was in the lead; he’d shot a sixty-five, seven under, one ahead of our Spanish pal with the ponytail and two ahead of Jonny and three others, all of them finished for the day and back in the clubhouse.

We had a little more company for the second nine. Word had got around and more spectators, English ex-pats in the main, came to join the party. So did a couple of journalists and a portly guy from a British TV station, microphone in hand, who seemed to be in hiding under a wide-brimmed Aussie hat. Nerves began to grip me again. They must have shown, for Uche saw me, smiled and gave me a large wink.

The second nine was tougher than the first had been. Jonny made his first mistake at the third, a par five, where there was no margin for error. He went for the green with his second, but tugged it slightly left. The ball took a hard bounce, into the water. The crowd groaned, and I felt like crying. He cheered me up with his next shot, his fourth after a penalty drop, a delicate chip that rolled up to the hole-side, seemed to pause as if to size up the drop, then fell in.

He played it ultra-safe after that, with his caddie’s help, for I saw a few debates over club selection and guessed that Uche was urging caution where there was any doubt. Jonny played steady par golf from then on and was rewarded on the ninth, his last, when his long uphill putt made it all the way to the hole. He was seven under par: tied for the lead.

The first thing I did, as soon as he’d stepped off the green, was hug him. ‘Extra big steak for you tonight, my boy,’ I promised.

‘Not too big, please, Auntie P,’ he replied, with a smile. ‘I have to talk to the press, so I’ll be late getting back, and I don’t want to be so full that I can’t sleep.’

‘Whatever you like. You’re a star, now.’
Just like your uncle was
. The thought jumped into my brain but stayed unsaid. As well, for Jonny contradicted me.

‘No, I’m not. I’m the first round co-leader and I’m surrounded by guys who are as good as me and who’ve been here many times before. I won’t be a star for another three days.’ He beamed, and gave me another hug. ‘And then, I promise, we will have a party!’

The second thing I did, as he headed for the recorder’s tent, to check, sign and register his score, was to call his mother, to give her the good news. It wasn’t necessary. Ellie had been watching the coverage on the portly guy’s TV station, and then keeping in touch with his score online when its live transmission had ended. She sounded a mess; elated, sure, but desperately sorry not to have been there. ‘How is he?’ she asked. ‘Is he handling it okay?’