Death on the Eleventh Hole

by Gregson, J. M.

  Roy looked briefly along the terrace of houses and down the deserted road to check that no one was around. Swallows swooped and rose among the trees by the stream, at the bottom of the tiny valley, but there was no human being in sight. He went out into the back garden, climbed the slope to the back of it, and built a swift wigwam of twigs over rolled-up sheets of the Ross Gazette.

  This was the place where he always built his fires to dispose of garden refuse, and the sticks, fallen from the trees in winter, were dead and dry. The flames licked eagerly round them as the newspapers caught fire. There was but the gentlest of breezes, away from the houses, carrying the smoke away over the hill in the last of the sun. He watched with satisfaction as his wigwam fell inwards and the base of his fire was established. Then he piled other, thicker branches on top to consolidate the blaze.

  Although he had worked with wood in the forest for years now, kindling a small fire of his own like this still fascinated him, still gave him a primitive, caveman’s pleasure. He watched the centre of his blaze glowing red now beneath the flames, felt the heat, surprisingly intense against his legs. He put the underpants and socks into the fire first, then the shirt and the sweater, placing them in the very centre, watching the smoke thicken and blacken as the flames enveloped the wool.

  ‘What are you doing, Roy?’

  He leapt like a startled deer. His concentration upon his task had been so intense, his sense of satisfaction so complete, that he had heard nothing of his visitor’s arrival.

  It was Julie. It could have been no one else, for she was the only one who had a key to his front door. She called out, ‘I knocked, but you couldn’t hear me,’ and came smiling up the long, narrow garden.

  She hadn’t realized. Perhaps there was still time. Roy pushed the shirt with its tell-tale pattern further into the heart of the blaze, put the trousers, the last of the garments, hastily on top of the rest. But it was no good. His fire wasn’t big enough, not to swallow and destroy the evidence in the few seconds he had left.

  Julie was at his side in a moment, her smile turning to bafflement, and then to something much worse. ‘What are you doing’?’ she said in a distant voice.

  ‘Just burning a few old things.’ He knew he couldn’t lie effectively to her, knew that his explanation was ridiculous, but he could think of nothing else. ‘I had the fire going well, and I just thought—’

  ‘Those aren’t old things.’ Her voice was like ice. ‘Those trousers are practically new. And that’s the shirt I gave you at Christmas. What’s going on, Roy?’

  ‘Nothing, really. I just—’

  ‘You don’t burn new things. You couldn’t care less about fashion, but you don’t waste money on clothes. Why are you burning things that are practically new?’

  He had an inspiration. ‘Well, I didn’t want to tell you this, but I never really fancied that shirt. I’m a bit more fashion-conscious than you thought, you see! I didn’t want to hurt your feelings, though, so I thought that if I just quietly disposed of it, along with a few other—’

  ‘You’re lying, Roy. You liked that shirt, insofar as you get excited by anything you put on your back. And why burn new trousers and a good sweater, which you chose yourself?’

  She stood facing him, hands moving to her hips, her joy on her arrival here dismissed as completely as if it was now weeks, not minutes, behind her. Roy could think of nothing else to say that would not make the situation worse. He turned back to the fire with his stick, turning the garments she had mentioned, pushing them further into the centre of the fire. He could hear her breathing fiercely behind him, but he would not, could not, turn to face her. The smoke rose slowly in front of him, the clothes obstinately refusing to disappear with the speed he had hoped for.

  Eventually, she addressed his back, in a flat voice which frightened him more than more obvious fury. ‘You were seeing Kate, weren’t you?’

  Still he could not turn. ‘Yes, I saw her. Four or five times in the last two years, that’s all.’

  ‘You fucked her, didn’t you?’ The harsh word, the word she used only as a command in the extremes of their love-making, came like a bolt between his shoulders, making him wince, crippling him with his shame.

  ‘Yes. Not the first time I saw her. But the other times, yes. I — I don’t know why.’

  ‘Good shag, was she? Better than her mother, I expect.’

  He turned at last with this second brutal word, feeling her pain, wanting to stop the tide of abuse he knew would go on and on, not knowing how to do it. ‘No, Julie, no one is better than you. You should know that. I’m sorry I ever went near her. We have something—’

  The words of apology broke the dam, and she flung herself upon him, mouthing obscenities, tearing at the flesh of his arms with her nails, trying to scratch, even to bite, the face she had thought she loved. He hooped her in his strong arms, held her tight against him to stop her from striking at him, held her there for a moment until she was breathless, then carried her indoors as if she were a child’s doll.

  She was tense against him still, and he relaxed his hold upon her, but cautiously, lest she tear again at his flesh. He held her still, only letting her lean back a fraction, so that her face was still within a foot of his own anguished features. ‘You bloody, bloody bastard!’ she cursed. ‘I lied for you! Lied for you to the police, about my own daughter. Said you’d only snatched a kiss, when I found you with her knickers torn half off and the girl screaming! Told the pigs you’d only made a pass at her, would have got you off the hook, if you hadn’t blabbed it all out when you spoke to them!’

  ‘I know, I know.’ He spoke like one soothing a child, attempted cautiously to stroke her head, but she shook his great paw angrily away. ‘I don’t know why I had to see Kate again,’ he muttered. ‘I wanted to apologize, to put right what I’d done two years earlier. Then when I found she was on the game…’

  He tailed away hopelessly, recognizing the impossibility of explaining this, and she had to complete his sentence for him. ‘When you found she was on the game, you thought you’d have a quick shag! Compare mother with daughter, see if what she had between her legs was fresher!’

  She was yelling the words into his face, and they were so near to the truth that he had no answer to them, no phrase he could produce to mitigate her pain and convey the measure of his regret. He pushed his mouth down on to hers, sought her tongue with his, breathed her name repeatedly into her ear, ran his hands up and down the familiar contours of her back, over the tense shoulder blades at the top, over the softer buttocks at the base.

  They stood clasped like that for a long time, until her words subsided and she clung to him, answering his caresses with more urgent ones of her own, running her nails down his back until she broke the flesh, even through the thick material of his shirt. He carried her upstairs then, set her down gingerly upon his bed, stripped away her clothes and his own as she lay with eyes shut, whimpering softly, and made love to her. Gently, tenderly, at first, then with increasing fierceness, until they cried out with the raw passion of the coupling and came together as fiercely as they had ever done in happier times.

  They lay for a long time entwined after their climax, minutes in which Roy wondered how safe it was to let her go, whether the woman who had spent herself so unashamedly in passion would still have the will and the strength to attack him as he lay naked beside her. He rolled away from her eventually without a word, and they lay on their backs beside each other, eyes closed, each wondering what thoughts were passing through the other’s brain.

  Eventually, without opening her eyes, she said in little more than a whisper, ‘Why, Roy?’

  ‘I don’t know why. If I could turn the clock back, I would.’

  ‘When? When was the first time?’

  ‘Two years ago. Two years after she’d left your house.’

  ‘She was on the game by then?’ It was a question, not a statement.

  ‘Yes, I think so.’

  ‘Either sh
e was or she wasn’t. Be honest with me, at least.’

  ‘Yes, she was on the game. I saw her walking the street, looking for custom. It gave me a shock, that first time. A week later I went back. I — I felt we had unfinished business.’ He used Kate’s phrase, but without the bitterness with which she had flung it at him. ‘I’d been brutal when she was at home, tried to force myself upon her. I wanted to try to put that right.’

  ‘As if you could ever put something like that right. Oh, you fool, you great, lumbering fool, Roy Cook!’

  For the first time, he heard affection beneath the exasperation. ‘Kate wouldn’t speak to me, not that first time. But I apologized, tried to put things right.’

  ‘And then the second time, you told her that now she was charging for it, you’d buy a bit. That a tom wasn’t allowed to discriminate among her clients.’

  Again she was so near to the truth that he had no words to answer. ‘Something like that, yes.’

  ‘How many times, Roy?’

  He wondered whether to lie, found that he no longer wanted to. ‘Four, five. Maybe six. Spread over the last two years.’

  ‘To spice up what you were getting from me, was it? God, you must have thought I was such a fool!’

  He wondered for a moment whether she was preparing herself to spring at him again. But whatever the racing tensions of her mind, her body remained perfectly relaxed beside him. ‘It was me who was the fool,’ he said, ‘not appreciating what I’d got!’ He allowed his hand to steal tenderly over hers, wondering if it would be flung angrily aside.

  ‘Did she threaten to tell me?’

  He was a long time before he replied, as he tried to analyse the oblique words of Kate Wharton at their last meeting. ‘No. But I was afraid she might. I realized what I’d got with you, what a fool I’d be to risk damage to it.’

  ‘You were burning the clothes you wore to visit Kate, weren’t you?’

  ‘Yes. The last time. It’s silly, I’m sure they couldn’t connect me with her, but I wanted to be rid of them.’

  He didn’t dare to move, because he feared to fracture the bond of intimacy that held between them, despite what he had done, despite her questioning. But when the silence had stretched through two long minutes, he said, ‘I’m going to get us a cup of tea, now,’ and levered himself clumsily off the bed.

  Julie Wharton lay quiet for minutes on end after he had gone, listening to Roy Cook’s movements in the kitchen of his small, quiet house. When she finally opened her eyes, she felt she was taking stock of the rest of her life.

  She turned on to her side, studied the fresh green leaves of the trees beyond the rectangle of window. As she watched, a thin funnel of smoke drifted slowly across the motionless trees, reminding her of the one question she had not dared to ask.

  Had Roy been burning the clothes he wore to kill her daughter?

  Seventeen

  In the incident room at Ross Golf Club, early on Tuesday morning, DI Rushton sat with Superintendent Lambert and DS Hook. They were the only three people in the big temporary building, exchanging notes at the beginning of the day, bringing each other up to date on the information produced and checked by the rest of the thirty-man team and the forensic laboratories.

  ‘What about the cars?’ said Lambert. The vehicles belonging to people who had even a peripheral connection with the crime were being checked for any traces of the dead girl’s body or clothes, but Chris Rushton knew just which ones his chief was most interested in.

  ‘Negative, I’m afraid,’ he said, flicking up the relevant page on his computer. ‘Roy Cook has an old Granada hatchback. It was cleaned comprehensively by him, inside and out, on the day after the murder was discovered. That’s his story, at any rate.’ DI Rushton, who had not confronted any of the leading suspects, naturally inclined towards the man with a previous record of violence towards women as his killer.

  Bert Hook put in: ‘He didn’t strike me as a car cleaner, Roy Cook. Not a man to be interested in showing his vehicle off to the neighbours on a Sunday morning in middle-class suburbia.’

  Rushton nodded. ‘According to what he told our uniformed boys, he was intending to take Julie Wharton away for the weekend. The car was in a mess, he said, and he cleaned it thoroughly in readiness for a dirty weekend on the night of Tuesday 8th May.’

  Lambert raised his eyebrows. Neither Cook nor the dead girl’s mother had said anything about going away. ‘Which weekend was this?’

  ‘The one after the murder. They didn’t go, of course, once Kate Wharton had been murdered. It’s obvious enough that they wouldn’t. But there is no hotel booking anywhere to confirm the story. For what it’s worth, Julie Wharton supports her man: she says they were planning a weekend away. Cook said they were intending to just drive off on Friday if the weather was nice and book accommodation where they fancied it.’

  ‘You’d be able to do that in early May, I suppose,’ said Lambert reluctantly.

  ‘Nothing from Julie Wharton’s Citroen Saxa. It hadn’t been cleaned recently, and there were no traces of anything suspicious. And nothing from Malcolm Flynn’s BMW. Plenty of traces of Class A drugs, as you might expect, but nothing which would suggest a body had been carried. We hadn’t expected anything useful, of course: if this death is drugs-related, it’s highly unlikely that Flynn would have killed the girl himself.’

  ‘Anything from Richard Ellacott’s vehicle?’ This was Bert Hook, who, having been brought up in a Barnardo’s home and been patronized in his time by many a man such as Ellacott, always found it satisfying to find a murderer among their number. Besides, Ellacott was a golfer, a captain of a club no less, and Bert’s love-hate relationship with the game still inclined him to suspect villainy amongst its practitioners.

  Rushton was already shaking his head. ‘Ellacott had his Mercedes booked in for a full service on Monday of last week — the day the body was discovered, and the morning after it was dumped. The garage offers a valeting service, and the car’s exterior was thoroughly washed and its interior was valeted before he collected it. Apparently he always has these things done with the full service, once a year.’

  Lambert said, ‘It’s hellish convenient for him, on the day after the body was dumped.’

  ‘We checked with the garage: Ellacott takes the car in at about this time every year for a full service, MOT and valeting. It would be a very convenient happening for a murderer, as you say, but the timing seems genuine.’

  ‘What about Joe Ashton’s old van? Don’t tell me that’s been in for a valet service!’

  Rushton smiled grimly. ‘No. But the interior is surprisingly clean. It’s fourteen years old but he’s only had it for the last few months, and it’s as clean as a new pin inside.’

  ‘Suspiciously so?’

  Rushton shrugged. ‘The lad says he’s always kept it clean. Forensic say that may very well be the truth: they couldn’t find any signs of neglect followed by a violent spring-clean. They did find a few fibres from the sweater Kate Wharton was wearing when she died.’

  Rushton had a habit of delivering his most dramatic snippets very casually. It was Bert Hook who said sharply, ‘Where?’

  ‘On the front passenger seat, I’m afraid. They were caught on a frayed bit of piping on the back of the seat.’

  Where a girlfriend might often have sat when she was alive, then. Fibres from the clothing of a corpse would almost certainly have been somewhere in the carrying space of the van, or on the rear doors, through which the body would probably have been thrust and extracted in some haste. Bert Hook sighed. In a CID man, it should have been a sigh of professional disappointment or frustration. This one sounded suspiciously like relief.

  ‘Has Malcolm Flynn volunteered anything useful?’ Rushton asked. ‘To me, this killing still seems likely to be drugs-related. Kate Wharton refused to go on dealing for Flynn on Monday night, and died the following Sunday. The timing is exactly right for them to have brought in a contract killer.’

  Lambert
nodded grimly. ‘I agree. The Drugs Squad have had a go at Flynn on this, as well as me. He’s admitted that he reported to his superior on the Tuesday after that Monday night meeting that Kate Wharton was refusing to continue as a pusher. But he’s stuck to his story throughout — that he knows nothing beyond that point, that he didn’t kill her himself and has no idea whether the organization regarded her defection as serious enough to warrant her elimination. I don’t think we’re going to get any more out of him, for the simple reason that he’s probably telling the truth. He certainly wouldn’t be called upon to kill the girl himself, and once he’d passed the information upwards, the situation would be assessed and dealt with by someone much further up the hierarchy.’

  ‘Keith Sugden?’ Rushton mentioned the name of the biggest drugs-baron in the Midlands, who lived in a large house by the Severn, with wonderful original furniture and decor from the Arts and Crafts movement of William Morris and his followers. Sugden was a man they had never been able to bring to court, despite the expenditure over the last decade of huge police resources.

  Lambert shrugged. ‘It could have been. Or someone just below him in the pecking order. The probability is that we shall never know. At the moment, we don’t even know for certain that this death was drugs-related.’

  Bert Hook said slowly, almost reluctantly, ‘That’s what I’ve been wondering about. Kate Wharton was well down the hierarchy. Would the defection of a simple pusher warrant a murder?’