Murder on the Second Tee (2 page)

MacGregor squatted beside her and inspected the items closely. ‘It’s a mistake to make early assumptions, but my guess is that this putter was used on him. We’ll know better once we have the lab report and the PM.’

He peeled off the sterile suit and put on his coat and hat. He took from Robertson his cigar, which had gone out, and clamped it between his teeth. Observing his red bow tie, Flick remembered Fergus telling her that after inadvertently inserting a conventional silk tie into a corpse’s rectum along with the examining finger, MacGregor never again sported a tie that might dangle. She would have liked to have been a fly on the wall that day.

‘He was battered to death, poor chap.’ MacGregor sounded matter of fact. ‘A number of heavy blows to the head, possibly with more than one weapon. Some of the blows were inflicted by something that did not have a smooth surface. Could well have been the back of that odd-looking putter. Died about one this morning, give or take an hour or so, but the injuries were probably sustained earlier. I’ll do the PM this afternoon and I’ll phone you afterwards. Could I have your mobile number?’

They exchanged numbers then MacGregor said, ‘A pleasure to meet you, Inspector Fortune. I’ve always enjoyed working with your husband. He’s an outstanding officer.’ He lit his cigar and sauntered back to his car.

Flick looked at Robertson, who was wiping his hand on the leg of his trousers.

‘That thing he smokes is disgusting, ma’am. It’s all slobbery to hold, too.’

‘You should have dropped it. I’d have backed you. By the way, was that a real dead animal on his head?’

‘Oh, yes, ma’am. There’s even a wee paw at the back.’

She pursed her lips but said nothing. Like many who had lived all their lives in cities, she strongly disapproved of blood sports. She wondered what Fergus saw in the pathologist.

Sergeant Wallace came up to her.

‘They know we mustn’t be disturbed, ma’am, but there are some very disappointed golfers, desperate to play the Old. I said they could go round by the Ladies’ Putting Green and start.’ In answer to her bemused look he pointed to the hilly putting green bisected by a path on the other side of the second tee. He added, ‘They’ll play the second as a short hole. Someone’s coming to put tee markers down the fairway.’

‘Well make sure it’s a long way down the fairway. And if anyone sends a ball in my direction, I’ll prosecute them under the Police (Scotland) Act,’ she snapped. ‘When the SOCOs are finished, they can have all their golf course back,’ she added, not wanting to seem anti-golf.

‘I made sure they know to give us a wide berth, ma’am.’ Wallace smiled.

She looked at the tent and shook her head. ‘Why, Wallace, Why?’

‘Robbery or gay-bashing, depending on the gentleman’s proclivities of course, or something else, though I doubt if it was premeditated. As vicious an attack as I’ve seen, ma’am.’

Flick nodded. ‘Me too. It doesn’t seem a likely spot for gay-bashing. It could have been a robbery that went wrong. I wonder if he has his wallet.’ She went to the tent and asked the SOCOs to see if they could find it.

A female voice replied, ‘Not here, ma’am, but there is a mobile phone.’

Flick turned to Wallace. ‘Get the mobile checked and search these bushes for his wallet. And the burn, too. I bet the killer threw it away. And we’d better see if anyone with a window overlooking the course saw or heard anything.’

‘You mean house to house, ma’am?’

‘Exactly. Including people staying at Rusacks Hotel over there.’ She gestured towards the road beside the eighteenth fairway. ‘Find out if there have been any reports from the public that could be relevant. Can you think of anyone local who’s mad enough or bad enough to do this?’

Wallace shook his head. ‘No. I’ve been wondering about that and I can’t see any of the St Andrews villains doing anything as brutal, unless it was personal of course.’

Well it’s personal now, Flick thought. If I don’t catch this killer everyone will think I’m rubbish.

* * *

After giving the men their instructions, Flick and Wallace walked over to the Old Course Hotel and round to the front door on the far side of the building. In the lobby they found Cupar’s two detective constables, di Falco and Gilsland. They were both in their twenties, tall and bright with ready smiles. Apart from that they had little in common, but were firm friends. Suave, with Mediterranean good looks, Billy di Falco could have stepped from an Armani shop window. Gary ‘Spider’ Gilsland might have bought his clothes at a charity shop closing down sale. A thick woollen pullover hung loosely from his skeletal shoulders and he wore his jeans as low-slung as was decent. Uneven tufts of ginger hair, a long way from forming a proper beard, sprouted from his face. In the elegant and stylish hotel lobby Gilsland was totally out of place.

Flick quickly up-dated the two detectives. She decided to send Gilsland to their base in Cupar to dust Parsley’s mobile for prints then find out what he could from it. Spider, as everyone except Flick called him, was never happier than when engrossed in IT.

Before he left she took him aside. ‘You look like a scarecrow, Gilsland,’ she said quietly. ‘Tidy yourself up before you come to work tomorrow.’

An expression of horror on his face, he said, ‘Tomorrow, ma’am? But I had …’

‘This is a murder. We have to move quickly, so no days off till we make an arrest. Sorry,’ she added, remembering him talking about a family wedding at the weekend, ‘but you’d have had to smarten up for the wedding anyway.’ As he left, shoulders bowed, she felt a twinge of guilt.

As Wallace arranged with an under-manager to obtain a list of all guests staying the previous night, she went to see how Amy Moncrieff was faring with Belinda Parsley. Her room was situated in a wide, discreetly lit corridor on the first floor.

Amy answered Flick’s knock and came out into the corridor. She showed the inspector a photograph of a smiling man on a foreign beach.

‘It’s him,’ Flick said. ‘But before we confirm it to her, have you found out anything?’

‘Well, ma’am, she seemed to want to talk. Mr Parsley was a director of a bank in London, the Blue-something Bank. Mrs Parsley said he’d been very stressed, and there were issues with some of the other directors. They all came up here to thrash things out away from London, and took partners to make it look normal. They arrived on Wednesday night and spent yesterday morning working. In the afternoon most of them played golf. They split up for dinner last night, but there was a lot of discussion afterwards. Mrs Parsley went to bed. She takes sleeping pills and didn’t realise anything was wrong till this morning.’

‘Did she say what these issues with the other directors were?’

‘No. She said her husband was still uptight at dinner. I got the impression that the directors had fallen out among themselves.’

‘How?’

‘She said Mr Parsley had been very particular who he sat with at dinner. They finished up at a table for four with their oldest friends in the bank, Simon and Eileen Eglinton. That’s all I can tell you, ma’am.’

‘You’ve done well, Amy. Stay with her and learn all you can.’ She glanced at the photograph. ‘We’d best get this over with.’

Belinda Parsley nodded when they told her then burst into hysterical tears. Flick left Amy to cope as well as she could and went to reception.

Jocelyn, the under-manager, was a devotee of detective fiction and had been secretly thrilled by a murder inquiry touching her life. She was happy to help the police, even if these officers seemed quite ordinary. She wished Flick and Wallace had more pizzazz, or were at least eccentric. Bright, with a ready laugh, she enjoyed her job, but with her thirties looming sometimes felt in a rut. Brushing back her long blonde hair, she told the detectives that the bank was the Bucephalus Bank. They had taken eight rooms at two weeks’ notice, rooms that would not have been available during the tourist season. Not all the guests in the group had come with partners, and the list Wallace had been given showed the room numbers of those who were in the party. The Parsleys had dined with the Eglintons the previous evening and had split the wine bill, one bottle of chablis and two vintage clarets. The group had booked in till Monday morning and no one had departed early. Jocelyn promised to let the police know should anyone attempt to do so.

Flick said, ‘We’ll also need to interview all members of staff who were on duty last night and all guests. Detective Sergeant Wallace will coordinate staff interviews, and I’ll appoint an officer to speak to the guests, starting with those scheduled to leave today. We’ll need forwarding addresses and contact details in case subsequent inquiries throw up something we need to check.’

Jocelyn looked doubtful. Police interviews, no matter how tactfully conducted, were upsetting to many people, and the Old Course Hotel prided itself on sending guests away happy and relaxed.

Flick had already decided to give di Falco the job of talking to guests. ‘Don’t worry,’ she reassured Jocelyn, ‘I know just the man to keep your guests happy. One more thing, we’ll need to use one of your conference rooms to inform the rest of Mr Parsley’s party about what’s happened.’ She looked at her watch. ‘Would you send a message that I need to see them all, including partners, at nine-fifteen?’

‘Oh, yes,’ Jocelyn said with enthusiasm. This was more like Agatha Christie. She became even more excited when Flick called Billy di Falco over and introduced him. Broad-shouldered, with olive skin and jet-black hair, he gave Jocelyn a smile that showed off deep brown eyes and pure white teeth so regular that they almost looked false. Jocelyn showed him to a table and chair beside reception where she could see him, and without being too intrusive, he could interview guests when they checked out.

‘Behave yourself,’ Flick warned him as Jocelyn set up the gathering in the conference room she had allocated.

* * *

The room was spacious and well lit. Flick and Wallace arrived early and took their seats at one end of the large, oval table. Although she had never met one, Flick had developed a strong dislike of ‘fat cats’. She regarded it as criminal that they should wreck the economy with greedy schemes and still pay themselves bonuses the size of the average worker’s career earnings. If Parsley had known his killer, the murderer was probably about to enter the room. As the bankers came in, singly or in couples, she cast a careful eye over each of them. Few of them looked like fat cats, she thought. They seemed wary, careful not to sit immediately beside someone already at the table. By quarter past nine, seven persons, two couples and three women on their own, had gathered. No one spoke. Most avoided eye contact with the detectives and with each other.

A tall, thin man had an aloof bearing. He was with a large lady who wrinkled her nose as if smelling a bad smell. Both stared through the voile curtain as if there was something fascinating outside. The woman of the other couple wore designer trousers and blouse in lurid pink that clashed with the pale tone of the shirt worn by the man whose hand she fawningly grasped. She used her other hand to dab at her eyes, showing off her rings but not smudging her blue eye shadow. Her surgically altered face, smooth, tight and not quite symmetrical, was framed by a blonde bob.

A very thin woman dressed in black, her posture taut and upright, sat near no one. Stretched facial skin accentuated her enhanced lips. Bottle-fed, jet-black hair failed to conceal a scrawny neck. She poured herself a glass of mineral water. Although her hand shook, she looked round the others with eyes as cold as a lizard’s. ‘Blonde Plastic’ and ‘Black Plastic’ respectively, Flick named these cosmetic disasters to herself.

A younger woman, fresh-faced and wearing a green tracksuit, her hair wet from a visit to the spa, unscrewed her water, poured some and gulped it down before setting her glass on the table with a defiant click. Flick observed her clean, neat nails, a contrast to the purple talons round Black Plastic’s glass. The third woman on her own, also younger than the rest, began to doodle on the pad in front of her. Dressed in jeans and a tee shirt, she did not go with the others, Flick thought; she had the body language of an undergraduate who had gatecrashed a bad party.

Surprised by the lack of men, Flick allowed the tension to mount. At twenty past nine she looked at her watch and said, ‘I am Detective Inspector Fortune and this is Detective Sergeant Wallace. Is everyone here?’

‘Four of our number had an early time on the Old. I imagine they’ll be well out on the course by now.’ The speaker was the man whose hand was gripped by Blonde Plastic. Rotund, with a pasty face and crinkly, black hair swept back from a high forehead, his pink shirt was open at the neck. His oatmeal jacket looked expensive. He had taken the seat opposite Flick at the other end of the table. He did look like a fat cat, she thought, complete with trophy wife. Anywhere else, she would have assumed her ostentatious jewellery to be fake.

‘Please give their names to Sergeant Wallace,’ Flick said. ‘And you are?’

‘I’m Lord Saddlefell, acting chairman of Bucephalus Bank.’ He spoke with a strong North of England accent.

‘Thank you, Lord Saddlefell. I’m afraid I have to inform you and your colleagues that Mr Hugh Parsley is dead, and the circumstances of his death give rise to suspicion.’

The younger women, in the tracksuit and in the tee shirt, both gasped. The thin, aloof man suddenly looked visibly distressed. The large woman beside him winced but continued to stare out of the window. Blonde Plastic sniffed and carefully lifted a tissue to her eyes. The faces of Black Plastic and Saddlefell were like stone: solemn, concerned, but not grief-stricken.

Saddlefell shook his hand free of his wife’s and spoke again, his tone assertive. ‘Am I right in thinking, Inspector, that Mr Parsley’s body was found on the second tee this morning?’

‘I don’t know the source of your information, Lord Saddlefell …’

‘One of our group playing golf was on the first tee when he heard that the greenkeeper had found a body. He texted us. Then we heard that Hugh Parsley was missing … This is tragic, tragic,’ he added.