Murder at the Open

by Angus MacVicar

  “Sure, and I hope the Professor wins! Honest! I hate my pals to lose. Besides, just think of the money coming in on Nicklaus and Lema! If George Will pulls it off I’ll be in clover!” He wheezed himself into another paroxysm of damp chuckles.

  “What about you, Angus? Haven’t you a fancy you’d like to back with Mr Jenks?”

  “Well”

  “I must warn you, Ringo, my friend has none of my feeling for Scottish Nationalism. A man of curious fairness to the lawless tribes.”

  “That’s what I like! No sentiment where business is concerned, eh?” When I didn’t answer on cue, Mr Jenks took a gulp from his glass and said: “What’s it to be, then? American, Australian, French, British?”

  Aidan shot me a warning look. I said, slowly, “What about Harry Weetman?”

  “Twenty to one against. A bargain.”

  “Right. I’ll take you on for a pound.”

  “Sure, Mr Mac!” He clapped me on the shoulder again, airily waving away the note I offered him. “No, no — this is a social occasion. Win or lose, come along to my hotel Friday night — the Baflie Hotel round the corner — and we’ll settle. Gentleman’s agreement, eh?”

  “Very well.”

  “Fine! Now, what will you have, Mr Mac? One of those outlandish Highland whiskies you write about in your books?”

  “Nothing for me, thanks. I have to go out. And if you’ll excuse us for a moment, Mr Jenks, I’d like a private word with Professor Campbell.”

  “Oh, sure, sure. It’s a free world, eh?” He drowned his giggles with a copious mouthful from his glass.

  In a corner by the door, with the laughter and talk and smoke billowing about us, I said: “Debbie’s coming out with me. In about an hour. I’m collecting her in the hall here.”

  “Good for you!” Aidan’s eyes sparkled with a kind of triumph behind his horn-rims.

  “What’s behind it all?” I asked.

  “Behind what? My new-found friendship with Ringo? That’s easily explained”

  “I don’t mean Ringo — though I must say your taste in drinking companions seems to have sunk to a new low! I mean — as you well know — your plan to get Debbie to talk to me.”

  “It’s worked so far, hasn’t it?”

  “Can’t you answer a straight question?”

  “I’d like to — believe me! Instead, let me say this. I guessed how you’d approach Debbie and what her reaction would be.”

  “And now you — and Big Sam — await with confidence the reaction of somebody else?”

  “Could be, Angus. Could be. Now, I must get back to my post of duty. Can’t allow Ringo to suffer the pangs of loneliness. A useful ally, Ringo. A living watersplash in which the bloodhounds lose the scent. Au revoir, dear boy. Au revoir.”

  He waved gaily and went back to his buddy. I could willingly have strangled him.

  *

  When I got there, I couldn’t concentrate properly on the final list of that day’s scores displayed in the draughty, flapping press tent. It appeared, however, that events on the Old Course had been sensational, especially towards the end of the afternoon, when the wind, according to the Met. Office at Leuchars, had reached a force of sixty miles per hour. The skills of such fine players as Eric Brown, Peter Allis, Neil Coles and Ronnie Shade had been utterly defeated. Brown had taken an 80, and the news from Jock was that at the 14th, when blasting from a bunker, the Bomber’s ball had been blown fifteen feet almost back into the bunker. Allis and Coles had each carded a bad 83, Ronnie Shade a disastrous 86. Scots and English in trouble together. Had Aidan been interested — which apparently he wasn’t — he’d have been hard put to it to find a pleasing Nationalistic angle.

  The defending champion, Bob Charles, had gone round in 79. He’d told the press boys: “I couldn’t have played any better in the conditions than I did. This gale is spoiling the Championship.”

  Power-man Jack Niclaus, handing in a 76, had also said his piece to the reporters: “Putting was the toughest thing. My eyes were watering, sand was blowing into them, and the wind was doing its best to knock me down. But as far as hitting the ball goes, it was the best round of golf I’ve played in five trips to Britain.”

  I didn’t like that bit about hitting the ball well — Americans have a nasty habit of coming back sharply after being down. I didn’t like the fact, either, that Ringo Jenks and his colleagues — though hedging a little on the previous day’s bets as far as O’Connor was concerned — still quoted Nicklaus as favourite at 4 to 1.

  On the whole, however, the tally of first-round leaders, from a British point of view, was reasonably encouraging. At 71, as I already knew, O’Connor and Garialde were narrowly in front. They were followed, at 72, by Harry Weetman and Bruce Devlin from Australia and, at 73, by B. J. Hunt, Tony Lema, Angel Miguel, Max Faulkner (good old Max, I thought!) and a competitor whose name was new to me, H. Boyle from Coombe Hill. George Will came close enough at 74, though Jock was writing a piece bemoaning the fact that this score contained 39 putts.

  I couldn’t enjoy the excitement. I couldn’t even enjoy a story they were telling about the lone Chinese competitor, slim and smiling Huan Lu, who’d been blown on his back as he swung his club at the 12th hole. “Typhoon!” he’d exclaimed. “In which we no play at home at no price! I do miracle to score 76!” I couldn’t enjoy anything, because I was too disturbed at the prospect of doing my duty and talking to Debbie Lingstrom.

  *

  I had to meet her in an hour — and now the hour was nearly up. Reluctantly I left the press tent, waving across to Jock as he stood in a phone-booth dictating his piece to the Express in Glasgow.

  Poor old Eric Brown, I thought. Bad luck with the weather, an 80 on his shoulders and little prospect of the wind dying down tomorrow. But I had a lot on my shoulders, too. I was inclined to reserve some sympathy for myself.

  Back in the hotel, I stood in the hall and studied a poster on the notice-board advertising the Byre Theatre. It seemed you couldn’t escape golf even there. The week’s play was called The Open. I knew the author, A. B. Paterson, a St Andrews journalist. I knew the play too: a winner, featuring a caddie called The Louse — the answer to the prayers of any good character actor. Aidan and I had tickets for it on Friday night. I wondered if everything would be over by that time.

  I saw her coming down the shallow, broad stairs. She still wore black, but on top of the mourning frock she had on a light-coloured shower coat. We stood talking together for a second or two, then moved towards the swing-doors. A plainclothes-man, reading an evening paper with one shoulder against the wall, glanced at us briefly as we passed.

  Outside we turned left, facing the wind which blasted along the Scores. We turned left again into Golf Place, then right on to the main exit road leading under the railway bridge in Links Crescent towards Newport. Out there on the sidewalk, with open ground on both sides, there was no danger of our being overheard as we talked. People might be watching, but if so they remained invisible.

  In the wind, however, talking was difficult, and the continual rush of traffic alongside added to the noise. I should have to find a quieter place if intimate confessions were to be encouraged.

  Debbie was probably wondering why I’d taken her in this direction, but she made no complaints. I suspected that the fresh assaults of the wind were causing a temporary exhilaration and that she was actually enjoying the brief interlude of freedom. She hadn’t put on a headscarf, so her hair was in attractive confusion; and soon her cheeks had a colour which I hadn’t noticed there since the party on the Saturday night.

  I reckoned I knew why she had agreed to come out with me. She wanted to know more than I’d told her about Bill Ferguson. And in her state of frustration — the desperate frustration of guilt, maybe — she recognised in me a stooge to whom she might be able to unburden her heart in comparative secrecy.

  I hoped she had no inkling — as I had — that we were being used as bait to get a quick rise from the murderer. On the
basis of ordinary detection, the process of truthfinding was taking too long for Aidan’s taste. Even his ‘deductive logic’ was up against the problem of collecting enough material evidence on which to build a case. But if the criminal, already thwarted in efforts to silence Debbie for good, could be presented with what appeared to be another chance of doing so, then this individual might be caught in flagrante delicto, as it were.

  There was, I considered, every excuse for the scared feeling that walked with me like a shadow. But in spite of uneasiness, I was determined on two things — first, to make Debbie talk and so release the tensions that threatened to destroy her, and second, to ensure that if a crisis did come she should remain unharmed.

  At the beginning, we talked about the weather — an inevitable subject, banal but safe. She gasped out her wonder at its Scottish savagery and held tightly to my arm to maintain balance on her high-heeled shoes. I told her it was forecast that the wind would die down and that by midday tomorrow it might ease off to a moderate breeze.

  As we approached the broad wooded area on the left of the road, some few hundred yards past the entrance to the Eden Course, I gave her a short account of the day’s golf in the Championship. She listened in silence, completely uninterested, I thought. But when I mentioned Tony Lema, she managed to smile.

  “I’d like Champagne Tony to win,” she said. “He was a playboy once, but since he married he’s disciplined himself and become a real steady golfer. He deserves to win. Besides, he’s a wonderful stylist. I prefer style to power, don’t you?”

  “In certain circumstances, yes.” I left the answer vague.

  We came into the shelter of the wood. We crossed the main road and turned left along a path which skirted the trees. In a little glen a burn ran quietly.

  Above us, the wind wailed and blustered amongst high branches; where we were it was almost dead calm. I had an eerie feeling of being cut off from the comfortable world of gales and golf and lively people.

  A rustic bench had been erected in a corrie. We sat down. A bank of turf and stone reared up behind us, tree-clad on its top. The burn was in front. The dark wood stretched away to our right.

  I sat between Debbie and the wood. Somewhere in its depths a blackbird interrupted its singing to call a warning. It might suddenly have become aware of us. Or a marauding stoat could have been the cause of its alarm.

  Debbie said: “I’m so relieved to get out into the fresh air, away from the hotel. It’s been a strain, Mr MacVicar.”

  “That I can imagine. This afternoon, for instance.”

  “Let’s not talk about this afternoon. Please. For a second everything seemed to boil up in my face. I can’t even remember what happened.”

  The colour was leaving her cheeks again. She swallowed and passed a hand across her forehead.

  “Are you all right?” I said, quickly.

  “Yes. I — I felt slightly sick. Reaction, I guess.” She recovered some of her poise. “You — you wanted to tell me about Bill?” she said.

  “I’m sorry for Bill,” I told her. “He just can’t understand why you won’t let him help you. He loves you — very genuinely.”

  She bit her lip. Tears rushed into her eyes. She looked frail and ill.

  “Mr MacVicar, you’re a writer. Maybe you can understand. I … ” She stopped, closing her eyes and swallowing again.

  I put it down to a spasm of emotion. I said: “I think I do understand. You’re doing it for his sake.”

  “Yes. Oh, yes. I’m glad there’s someone I can talk to about it. I’ve been so alone. So unhappy, so undecided. But now — ”

  “Go on,” I encouraged her.

  For a time, however, she stayed silent. The blackbird in the wood was still complaining. The burn tinkled past below us, dark coloured like good draught beer. I was on edge in case her mood might turn cold and distant again but decided not to risk making her suspicious by asking too many loaded questions. So with difficulty I kept my mouth shut, too.

  I couldn’t help feeling that this particular moment of time contained a crisis. There was tension in the air — a hint of violence ready to erupt — that stretched my nerves to the point of physical exhaustion. I couldn’t explain it, rationally. Maybe it had to do with the quietness surrounding us, with the blackbird’s uneasiness, with the odd change that was occurring in Debbie. Looking back now, I blame myself for not having recognised the truth.

  She sat forward, her folded arms held in stiffly against her body. For a while she remained like this, motionless.

  Then, when I wasn’t expecting it, she relaxed. “Please bear with me,” she said. “I — I don’t feel too good. You know how it is. You keep things to yourself. The poison builds up. Then you decide to give in, to confide in someone, and there’s a reaction. Not only mental. Physical as well.”

  “I understand,” I said.

  She looked up with a small, wry smile. “Why have you this effect on me?”

  “Aidan says I look avuncular.”

  “Sure. Maybe that’s it. You can keep a secret, too, I think.”

  “I know how to keep a personal secret. But not one which has to do with — with public affairs.”

  “I see.” She sighed and closed her eyes for a second. “I see,” she repeated. “But in any case I want to tell you, otherwise I’m scared I’ll go mad.”

  “Why haven’t you told Bill? Or Miss Garson?”

  She didn’t answer at once. Her arms tightened against her stomach and she held her breath.

  Finally she said: “It’s a matter of trust, I guess. I can’t trust myself, so I don’t trust them.”

  “That’s like a riddle out of a fairy-tale.”

  “I know. Be patient with me, please.” She paused, then went on: “There was a girl once — a girl just out of high school, spoilt and cosseted by a rich uncle. She’d only to say that she wanted something and she’d get it. Clothes, golf-clubs, ponies, vacations in Miami. But she was bored. The boys she knew were nice — real gentlemen, you might say: her uncle saw to that. They took her out to parties and left her home again and chastely kissed her good night at the front door. She was seventeen. She’d heard tales from other girls at school — tales about their adventures with men who weren’t gentlemen. This was what she wanted now — what she called to herself experience of the world. Her mother was dead. She had no older woman friends to turn to, and she was curious. The nice boys were — well, unresponsive, so she looked elsewhere.”

  I began to feel in myself the qualms of her sickness. But I merely nodded and tried to convey sympathy.

  I was sympathetic all right. A motherless girl raised in a male atmosphere without benefit of straightforward sex education, her instincts striving for expression against the cage-bars of ignorance, dazzled by news of the pleasures of sex but uninstructed in the physical and psychological knowledge on which such pleasure is based — here was a common product of a prudish society, which, even yet, fails miserably in its responsibilities to the young and the innocent.

  It never occurred to me that she might be putting on an act for my benefit. I accepted her — and her story — as completely genuine. Aidan has no great regard for my estimation of character. I’m doubtful about it myself. But in this case I was convinced I was hearing the crystal ring of truth.

  “This girl,” she went on, persevering in a fiction that in itself betrayed a lack of sophistication, “this girl thought she knew where she could find a man of experience. I guess she didn’t realise what it all might lead to — I guess she thought it might stop at a few petting sessions — ”

  A sudden catch in her breath silenced her. She was torturing herself, I imagined, by presenting the facts in their ugliest light. I was quite unprepared, therefore, for what followed.

  She was about to speak again, when in a horrifying way she gasped and screamed. She half rose to her feet, bent almost double, arms clutching her stomach.

  Her screams echoed off the bank above us. I felt cold, helpless, numbly
desperate.

  She staggered back. Her legs struck the seat of the rustic bench. She collapsed against it, sprawling and becoming actively sick.

  I tried to hold her in my arms. Her back arched and she screamed again. My mind was a blur of indecision.

  In four days a golden girl had changed — first into a chilly figure of remote tragedy, now into a creature of utter physical degradation. Surely it wasn’t possible. Surely it couldn’t be happening to Debbie Lingstrom. Surely I hadn’t been singled out as the sole witness to such a terrifying transformation.

  I lost my head. At the back of my mind the suspicion still existed that people had been following us and watching us. I began to shout. I began, like a panic-stricken child, to shout for help. My cracked voice cut into her screaming.

  And people came — running along the path and out of the wood. Three of them were strangers: an elderly, well-dressed couple — the man looked like an ex-Army type — and a youngster with a fishing-rod who must have been trying to catch trout further up the burn. The other two, shoes muddied from contact with damp earth in the wood, I recognised. One was the plainclothes-man who’d been reading the newspaper in the hall when Debbie and I left the hotel. His companion was Aidan.

  They crowded round Debbie on the bench. Aidan was the only one who looked at me. The others were like jurymen, careful to avoid meeting the eyes of one they had secretly condemned.

  At first I said nothing, because I found speech physically impossible.

  Aidan muttered: “I’m sorry. I had no idea”

  Something clicked in my head. “Damn you!” I croaked. “You arranged this.”

  “You went along with the arrangement. Anyway, this wasn’t what I expected.” He was rattled. Uncharacteristically rattled. Even in my distress I realised that.

  The elderly man and his wife ministered to Debbie. She grew quieter, though to me her quietness was like the quietness of death.

  The boy with the fishing-rod stood staring, his paleness matching hers.