Murder at the Open

by Angus MacVicar

  He glanced at Debbie, as if hoping for a friendly word or gesture of affirmation; but she kept looking down, her hands tightly clasped and motionless in her lap.

  Bill’s lawyer, a tall, pasty, middle-aged man with pince-nez, occupied a chair behind him. Gordon Cunningham spoke scarcely at all; but in his relationship with young Ferguson I thought I detected anxiety and even a strain of suspicion. His smooth voice annoyed me. His shifty eyes annoyed me. I was annoyed with myself for being annoyed. After years as a professional scribe, I haven’t yet acquired the real journalist’s trick of studying a stranger with impersonal objectivity.

  Erica Garson, Lingstrom’s secretary, had been crying. The redness about her eyes was evidence of that. But now, as she told Big Sam about her employer’s profitable business deals, her emotions were disciplined.

  “When he became President of Golf Products twenty-two years ago, its principal line was cut-price golf-balls. Gradually he built it up, buying over rival firms, arranging mergers, signing on young pros who showed promise on the circuits, until at last its cheap and tawdry image became one of lush quality. Ten years ago he engaged me as his personal secretary. I guess the reason was simple. I’d just won the American Ladies’.”

  Her slim-line clothes did a great deal to camouflage the stockiness of her figure. But her hard physique was obvious enough, and as I considered her final words I thought I detected a hardness of the spirit in her, too.

  The last member of the group was Cliff O’Donnel, Lingstrom’s chauffeur and caddie. He wore a blue suit with the cut of a uniform, which made him seem less tall and rangy than he actually was. But his hands were restless, and a dark bristle on his cheeks gave me the notion that he hadn’t spent much of the night in bed.

  Big Sam talked casually and with apparent sympathy to them all, following no set pattern of interrogation. I noticed, however, that the young constable was taking everything down. Aidan sat with half-closed eyes, mentally absorbent as a sponge.

  Gradually a pattern emerged. Lingstrom had come to St Andrews not only to play golf and watch the Open but also to discuss a possible merger between Golf Products and Ferguson & Son.

  “Gordon here wasn’t sold on the idea,” said Bill, indicating the lawyer with a backward movement of his head, “but I think something might have been arranged — if this hadn’t happened.”

  Cunningham wiped his mouth with a white handkerchief taken from his sleeve. “My objections were based purely on the conveyancing arrangements. I had a feeling my client was allowing too much scope for detailed investigation of his accounts, without reciprocal facilities being made available.”

  There was a momentary awkwardness.

  Big Sam said: “Let us go back to the party last night. It was a kind of celebration, I understand?”

  Debbie looked across at Erica Garson. Accepting the responsibility, the secretary nodded. “That’s right, Inspector. Conrad — Mr Lingstrom — yesterday afternoon he and I had a game on the Old Course. It was officially reserved for competitors in the Open, but he was allowed to play — a special concession, on account of his important position in the world of golf. Cliff here was carrying Mr Lingstrom’s clubs. I pull my own trolley,” she added. “I prefer it that way.”

  “Quite so,” said Big Sam, who didn’t play golf himself and seemed impatient of so much precise detail.

  “At the High Hole coming in — the eleventh, Inspector — Mr Lingstrom played a four-wood against a little breeze. The ball landed just in front of the green, rolled on and suddenly disappeared. When we got there and looked in the hole, there it was — an honest-to-goodness ‘ace’. Mr Lingstrom was overjoyed. He kissed me and danced around. He hugged Cliff and insisted that I should arrange what he called ‘a humdinger of a party’.” She paused for a second. “So I arranged it,” she said, at last. “Everyone enjoyed it, I guess.”

  “When did it break up?” inquired Big Sam, even though Aidan and I had already told him that it had come to an end shortly before midnight.

  “About a quarter to twelve,” replied Erica Garson.

  “Then you all went to bed?”

  “Debbie and I did, anyway. We went upstairs together and said good night in the corridor. I heard Debbie’s door closing. She heard mine, I expect.”

  “I heard.” Debbie’s voice was scarcely audible.

  “Mr Ferguson?” prompted Big Sam.

  “Cunningham and I went to my room. We talked there until two o’clock in the morning. Business, I’m afraid.”

  “Mr O’Donnel?”

  The chauffeur-caddie shifted his position in the chair. His once good-looking face, now scored with lines of middle-age, had taken on an expression of shame. He put his hands between his spread knees and rubbed the palms together.

  “Well?” said the Inspector.

  He took a quick breath. “I’m a heel! I may as well tell you.”

  No one spoke. Big Sam’s eyebrows were heavy question-marks.

  “I was at the party — Mr Lingstrom invited me special. That was the boss all over — a real democrat with a small ‘d’. I had a good time — too good, maybe. At a quarter to twelve, when the boss said good night and left us to go upstairs, I went along to the Baffie Hotel at the corner, where I’ve been spending most nights with buddies I got to know at the Open last year. I joined them around midnight and stayed until five this morning. Hell, when I think of it”

  “Your friends’ names?” said the Inspector, spurning drama.

  “Well, Tosh Harrison was one — you know, the caddie with the black beard who does his stuff at all the big tournaments. Then there was Ringo Jenks, the bookie, and two of his friends — Bert and Alf, I think they’re called: I can’t remember.”

  “You’ve been in Mr Lingstrom’s employ for some considerable time?”

  “Yeah. All of ten years.” O’Donnel’s mouth wavered, and tears began to roll down his cheeks. “He was the kindest boss in the world, I reckon. Picked me out of the gutter in Skid Row and gave me a place in life. I’d have done anything for him — anything at all. Then last night, when he needed me, I wasn’t there. I was rotten drunk in that low dive!”

  He checked himself. “Inspector,” he said, huskily, “he was a great guy. Who could have killed him?”

  “Who indeed?” said Big Sam.

  Somewhere in the small city built upon history, religion and golf a church-bell began to ring.

  The questioning went on.

  *

  Just before lunch it was all over. We stayed on with the Inspector in the upstairs lounge.

  “‘Thicker than leaves in Vallambrosa’,” murmured Aidan.

  Big Sam frowned. “I beg your pardon?”

  “Alibis. Everybody’s got one.”

  The frown remained. “By ‘everybody’ you mean all those close to him?”

  “Right.”

  “It was a closed-circuit crime, you think?”

  “Yes. Lingstrom had no enemies outside his immediate circle — not that I can discover and not in this country at any rate. And there’s no suggestion that his death was due to a hit-and-run attempt at robbery. When the body was being taken out of the bunker I noticed that his fountain-pens and wallet were still in the pocket of his tussore jacket and that his watch, though broken, was still strapped to his right wrist.”

  The Inspector nodded. “You appear to be very observant, Professor. There may be something in what you say.”

  They were boxing carefully, sizing each other up.

  Aidan lit a cigarette. “I noticed also that the hands of the wrist-watch had stopped at ten to two. Does this fit in with the medical evidence about the time of death?”

  Big Sam surveyed him like a headmaster confronted by an unexpectedly precocious schoolboy. “The police doctor,” he replied, “estimates that when Lingstrom’s body was found he had been dead for about five to seven hours. Rigor was well advanced, but this could have been hastened by the coldness and dampness of the sand.”

  “I s
ee. Then it figures, as the ‘tecs say on the telly?” The Inspector nodded.

  The probability is that the killing took place at ten minutes to two.”

  “Have you a theory as to exactly how it happened?”

  “Have you, Professor?” Dundonians are renowned for their canniness.

  Aidan accepted the challenge. “There were traces of blood on the seventeenth fairway, in that little hollow close to the bunker. I believe Lingstrom was met there by someone and knocked down. As he lay on his back, half-stunned, his assailant straddled his body and struck him several fatal blows on the side of the head with a golf-club. Then, faced with the problem of disposal, the murderer decided to bury the body in the bunker. On Sunday there’s no play on the Old Course, so our unknown criminal hoped that it would remain undiscovered until he — or she — had time to make a proper plan.”

  The Inspector sighed. “In general I agree with you, Professor. Though I’m afraid that no one can be positive that the murder weapon was a golf-club.”

  “But you admit the possibility? And the appropriateness of such a weapon, particularly at St Andrews?”

  “I’m no golfer,” said Big Sam.

  I was getting tired of this delicate exchange of intelligence. “It all sounds extremely plausible,” I said. “But last night at a quarter to twelve we all saw Lingstrom going upstairs — presumably to bed. Why should he have been traipsing on the golf-course two hours later, still in the same clothes?”

  Aidan looked at me with pride.

  The Inspector emerged from clouds of cerebration. “A good question!” he said. “And here’s something else you may care to consider.”

  He fished an envelope from the inner pocket of his tweed jacket and with big fingers gingerly extracted a scrap of paper. “This is what we found in the dead man’s fist. What do you make of it?”

  I read the scrawled, disconnected phrases: ‘ … easily carried away …never again … ’

  After a time I shook my head. “Seems to have been torn from the top corner of a piece of notepaper. Probably part of a letter. Anything else I should deduce from it?”

  “Have you studied the hotel register?”

  “How d’you mean?”

  He was about to answer when Aidan chipped in: “That was smart, Inspector. Whose handwriting is it?”

  “Debbie Lingstrom’s.”

  Aidan’s scanty hair stuck up about his head like a halo. “There’s a turn-up for the books!” he said. “Why didn’t you mention this at the interrogation?”

  “I spoke to her about it alone, earlier on. She flatly denies it’s her handwriting.”

  “You’ll check with an expert, of course?”

  “Certainly. But if Debbie Lingstrom didn’t write the words, then I’m a beatnik from Broughty Ferry!”

  The idea of Big Sam with long hair and wearing skintight jeans made me laugh. But the laugh was received with disfavour and I cut it short.

  *

  The press tent above the 18th green became like a forward battle HQ. Phones rang urgently as anxious news editors in London, Manchester, Glasgow and Edinburgh implored their golf correspondents to keep in touch with the murder story and prepare for the arrival of the crime men. who were already speeding towards St Andrews by car, plane, train and helicopter. Dazedly, like gentle persons required to engage in a tough rugby game, the golf correspondents did their best to obey.

  Tales about the Road Hole were dredged up from the memories of local inhabitants and of their own senior colleagues. These were hastily written up as background material: how in 1939, when Dick Burton won the Championship, Henry Cotton and Martin Pose of the Argentine, each with a chance to win, had hacked their way to spectacular disaster on the hard surface of the road, Cotton carding a 7, Pose an 8; how in 1946, Sam Snead’s year, runner-up Johnny Bulla had come to grief there with a 7 in one round and a 6 in the next; how in 1960, at the Centenary Championship, Kel Nagle had won because of brilliant 3’s at this hole in his last two rounds.

  In the matter of up-to-date news, however, the correspondents found the going harder. Patience wearing thin in face of deepening mystery, Big Sam became aloof and un-cooperative. He snapped out a refusal to see any of them, though in the end he did promise to arrange a short news conference in the evening, when the crime reporters arrived.

  As it happens, however, the Scottish Daily Express golf correspondent is my son, Jock. He inveigled Aidan and me into the press tent immediately after lunch, and someone produced a bottle of Black and White. Sipping a hearty noggin from a plastic cup and glowing with pontifical good will, Aidan sketched in for the boys a factual picture of the murder. He spoke steadily for about half-an-hour, while their pencils did the twist on flapping note-books. Quotations from Dunbar, Scott and Burns — and even on one occasion from Bobby Jones — dappled his discourse like spots of sunlight in a shadowed glen.

  In the outcome, however, he told them scarcely anything that was significant. He said nothing about the medical evidence, for example, or about the scrap of paper found in the dead man’s fist.

  But they were grateful. More Black and White was forthcoming for both of us, and by three o’clock I had begun to notice that details of desks and phone-booths were becoming slightly blurred.

  The young man with the dapper black beard, who wrote about golf for the Scotsman, posed the key question. “Have the police any clue at all as to the murderer?”

  Aidan shrugged. “Inspector McLintock is cagey. He may have something up his sleeve, though I doubt it. He’s working under a considerable handicap poor fellow. He knows nothing about golf.”

  The Glasgow Herald man butted in: “What exactly do you mean, sir? Apart from the fact that the body was found in a bunker, do you reckon golf comes into it?”

  “There’s always the possibility,” replied Aidan, with a bland smile.

  “In what way?”

  “Who can tell, my boy. ‘We see through a glass darkly. But the mist will clear from the mirror in the end.’”

  He raised his cup and drained it. He was enjoying himself.

  We left the tent at half-past three, Aidan still dodging questions. Back in the hotel, we ordered coffee to clear our heads.

  *

  Before dinner we took a breath of air on the dunes above the West Sands.

  Dedicated golfers, amongst them a number of qualifiers for the Open, moved like ants on the New Course on our left. On our right, children played on the beach, some of them quietly absorbed in the building of sand-castles, others hopping and screaming like oyster-catchers at the edge of the tide. Anxious parents kept watch on them, not because the beach itself was dangerous but rather with the thought in their minds that somewhere close at hand there was a murderer.

  We sat on a grassy knoll sheltered from a west wind that had suddenly grown stronger. The sun was warm on our backs.

  Aidan was frowning. “There are peculiarities in this case which occur to a golfer at once,” he said. “I wish Big Sam would listen when I try to tell him. But he regards the pursuit of the wee white ball as a childish aberration and makes no bones about his opinion. He can’t conceive that anything as unimportant to him as golf can be linked with anything as important as murder. We’ll show him, Angus! We’ll do a bit of investigating on our own.”

  It was inevitable.

  “Let’s recap,” he went on, as persistent as an east wind. “Big Sam and I are agreed on one point — this is a closed-circuit murder. What deductions can we make from our knowledge of the people concerned?”

  It was a rhetorical question. I didn’t even bother to make a comment.

  “Take Debbie Lingstrom first,” he said. “She may be lying about that piece of paper. Probably is. But her love for her uncle and her grief at his death are genuine. I’d stake my Kilmarnock edition of Burns on that. And she’s so small and slight that I can’t imagine her killing him with a golf-club.”

  “If the murder weapon was a golf-club.”

  “If it wasn�
�t a golf-club, then it was something equally heavy. So my argument remains valid. Agreed?”

  “Agreed,” I said, hurriedly.

  “Take Erica Garson, Lingstrom’s personal secretary. She looks tough. Being a former American champion, she knows how to wield a club — or,” he added, in testy haste, “any other weapon of a similar kind. But according to our theory, which is fully supported by the medical evidence, Lingstrom was killed as he lay on his back. And since the fatal injuries were to the left side of his head, the murderer, therefore, would appear to be right-handed. Any objections to that?”

  “None at all. That’s a brilliant piece of reasoning which would never have occurred to me.”

  His irritation subsided. “Cliff O’Donnel next — the handsome but ageing chauffeur-cum-caddie, rescued by Lingstrom from the gutter in New York. I can’t conceive of any motive he might have had to kill so friendly and generous an employer. In any case he has an alibi, which was checked this afternoon by Big Sam. The police believe Lingstrom was murdered at ten to two on Sunday morning. There’s no doubt at all that from about midnight until five o’clock O’Donnel was drinking with Ringo Jenks and his pals in the Baffie Hotel — a bunch of blasted English bookies here for the pickings!”

  “You’re going like a bomb,” I told him.

  He took it as a compliment. His frown was lifting like haar in the sunlight. His ‘essay in deductive logic’, illumined by my praise and by his own delight in a flourish of Scottish Nationalism, was proving an effective safety-valve.

  “Now the other two,” he went on. “Bill Ferguson was contemplating a merger with Lingstrom’s firm. Why should he kill the man who’d have made the Ferguson ‘Clipper’ clubs as popular in America as they are here? In any case, he and Cunningham appear to have been talking business in his room at the time of the murder. He’s certainly anxious and worried — and sweet on Debbie. But then, aren’t we all?”