Skinner's Round (42 page)

Then he played his chip, safely, to the green, and walked on to secure his par.

`Four under at the turn,' said Skinner, as they stepped the few yards to the tenth tee. 'We need five more on the back nine if Maggie and I are to pick up our winnings.'

`Don't worry,' said Atkinson, solemn and deadly serious. `You're on a sure thing.'

Ì'm firing him up,' thought Skinner as he watched another monstrous drive leaving the champion with the shortest of second shots to the green 390 yards away. 'The harder I go at him the better he's playing. The man's an animal. And he's pulling me after him,' he added as an afterthought as his own drive split the fairway, soaring out 300 yards to astonished applause.

Golfer and policeman resumed their side-by-side march, and their parallel duel. 'You shouldn't have let Rick do that, you know. The problem you had was that the first note had something about it. The old lady had seen the real Witch's Curse. You see, it was a sort of family secret. Eventually I saw it too, and it was clear to me that the second note had a different author, someone who'd only heard the story of the curse, not the full version.

`When we found Morton last night, I knew there'd be another. We had men outside all the newspaper offices this morning waiting for Rick, but he beat us to it.

`The notes kept us off balance for a bit. They took up resources. The one thing I never bought for a second was the notion that there might actually be a local coven intent on fulfilling the curse, but it was still a line that had to be investigated.

Ànd it all turned on itself in the end. While at first the note was no lead at all to Michael White's killers, eventually it turned into one, when you two decided to ape it. And when we got lucky again, discovering that Rick attended Henry Wills's classes, man, it pointed me right at the pair of you.'

They reached Skinner's ball. Again he took no chances with the sand on his left, or the waters of the Truth Loch on his right. He hit a low, punched shot, pitching the ball and sending it skipping on to the safe part of the green, making his par virtually certain. It had hardly come to rest, before Atkinson was ready. His ball almost split the flag as his sand wedge sent it spinning towards the hole. 'Five under, I think,' he said quietly.

The Truth Loch was even more in play on the eleventh hole, biting a chunk from the fairway and forcing even Atkinson to play it as a dogleg, taking iron from the tee. He and Skinner hit safe tee-shots, then followed with three-wood approaches. The champion's shot reached the green easily, while the policeman's was short but safe.

`So here we are,' said Skinner as they walked along the waterside. 'White's dead, and we're chasing our tails. Then Mike Morton does you a huge favour by picking a fight with Masur, right in front of me. It was such an inviting set-up that you just couldn't resist it. So there's Masur after the dinner, walking back, over there.' He pointed across the loch towards the outline of the ducking stool. 'He's even in the right spot. Rick comes out of the darkness.

Probably Masur thinks that it's you, that you've decided to walk back too. He doesn't see the threat until it's hit him on the back of the head. He's out as he's tied into the chair. And even if he wakes tip as he's lowered into the water, all he can do is struggle, as the water fills his lungs.' He paused, with another slight shudder.

`Next morning, the body's found, and of course we suspect Morton straightaway, as you planned. The silly bugger even compounds his predicament by going for a walk in the garden at Bracklands after dark and getting mud on his shoes!

Ì have to admit, the murder of Masur was real creative thinking. Not your average assassination. And that was where it really started to go wrong for you, when you first over-reached yourself.

`Because the trouble was, it was too creative for Morton or Richard Andrews. They're old-fashioned Mafiosi types. Their way would have been to take the back of Masur's head off with a silenced .38, not something as flashy as that. I doubt if Andrews would have taken Masur off-guard, either.'

He stopped, concentrating hard on his third shot to the par-four hole. Abandoning caution for once, he took his wedge and surprised even himself by hitting his shot to within a yard of the pin. He raised his club to acknowledge the crowd's applause, and walked on to the green, marking his ball to allow Atkinson to claim a safe par before completing his own.

'Still, we had no choice but to treat Morton as our chief suspect,' he said as they walked to the tee of the 230-yard par-three twelfth. 'With Andrews unaccounted for, he was still the best bet we had.' He shook his head. 'Then Rick dropped that bloody note at the Herald, and I said to myself "Wait a minute!"

The editor's a pal of mine, and he agreed not to use it. That didn't bother you, though. You weren't after publicity. You just wanted us to see it, without taking the chance of dropping it on our doorstep. You knew that Morton wasn't the murderer, so you saw the second note as a back-up, to forestall, you thought, any chance of us looking in your direction.'

He stopped as Atkinson lined up his two-iron and smacked the ball greenwards, over the guarding bunker, to land eight yards from the flag. Skinner's three-wood was high, so high that he thought for a moment, as he watched it against the now threatening clouds, that it would drop into the sand, but, willed on by striker and crowd, it carried safely to the fringe of the green.

`You poisoned Bravo for the same reason, of course,' he said as they walked on. 'Right about here. With me on the scene as the perfect witness to an attempt on your life. I thought "What a stoic you are, Darren," as I watched the way you played on after it, as if you were in no danger. Which of course, you weren't, other than from me, eventually.

`Yes, that spiked drink was intended for poor old Bravo all along. I'd asked you about Mr Nice by that time, and you thought, "What a good idea to make the coppers think that he's after me as well!" A nice wee piece of insurance against the silly polis looking too hard at other people's motives for murder, including yours.'

He reached back and accepted his putter from McIlhenney as they reached the green. His ball was just off the putting surface, but the grass was even and he was able to roll his approach smoothly and safely up to the side of the hole, for a slightly fortuitous three. Atkinson's eight-yarder across the slope of the green was beautifully judged, curving down from the right to finish three inches behind the hole.

`Lovely putt, Darren,' said Skinner as they walked through a small coppice to the raised tee of the 565-yard par-five thirteenth, a monster of a hole with a narrow tree-lined fairway for the first 250 yards, opening out into a bunker-fringed hogsback. 'That must have been hellish difficult to read. But then you're at your best under pressure, aren't you?'

As he had done on the first three days, Atkinson took a three-wood from the thirteenth tee, avoiding the dangers of the hogsback. Skinner played even safer hitting a two-iron for accuracy, low between the corridor of trees.

`That was Rick at the side of the tee, wasn't it?' said Skinner as they walked on. 'Rick gave that wee boy the drinks, done up in his rain gear, in glasses and a floppy hat, so no one would recognise him and think they were seeing double. Of course you couldn't risk the spiked drink going astray. So you had that in your bag all along. The drinks that were handed out, so publicly, were clean, but you did a double shuffle with the bottles.'

He tapped Atkinson, convivially on the arm. 'Hey, maybe you dumped the spare one on the course. The bins are all emptied daily, but just maybe, if I used enough people to sift through the public refuse tip, I might get lucky and find something odd; a full, untainted bottle of isotonic thirst quencher, with your prints on it, and Rick's, and those of that wee boy. Doubt it, though. I'll do you the courtesy of assuming that you wiped it.'

They reached their tee-shots. Skinner used his two-iron again, clearing the hogsback and finding a flat piece of fairway 100 yards from the green. Atkinson put his ball thirty yards closer, with a four-iron.

`That was an awful thing to do to Bravo, Darren. He thought he was your pal as well as your caddy.

Ìt was an awful thing you did to Oliver M'tebe too, having his father kidnapped by those two Australians, just to put him off his game this week. That boy must be the goods right enough.

They say he's approaching your class already, and that he'll be the next Number One.'

Èventually,' said Atkinson, evenly. 'That's why we signed him up. But the time isn't here yet, Bob, not yet.'

`No, but he's enough of a threat now for you to do something about it. After all there's a million pounds in the pot this week. The biggest prize ever, and you weren't going to let anyone else lift it, were you, not even if you picked up your manager's thirty per cent as a consolation.

`So you had Mr M'tebe picked up. You hired those two Aussie caddies, guys you knew would be linked to Masur, not you, and they picked him up off the street, just like that. The South African police hadn't a clue where to look.'

The thirteenth green was on a rise, like the tee, and guarded by two bunkers. Skinner judged the distance carefully, and hit a full shot with his wedge. Polite applause from around the green told him that he had found the putting surface. Atkinson's feathered shot, hit with his third wedge, was a dream of a shot, all softness and touch. It followed the flag unerringly, and drew a roar from the gallery. The two strode up the slope to the green.

Òf course, pinching M'tebe's old man wasn't part of your grand design,' said Skinner as they walked. 'I wasn't really interested in who did that, until one of the Aussies let something slip.

The Reverend was smarter than they expected. Just before he escaped, one of them used the name, "RA". At first, I assumed he meant Richard Andrews, but when all the other pieces fell into place, I realised that he didn't. He was talking about Rick Atkinson.

`That's when you shattered my last illusions about honour and the nobility of the human spirit, Darren. I mean, multiple murder's one thing,' he said, his tone filled with ironic sadness, `but fixing a golf tournament, for God's sake! How could you?'

He shook his head and sighed, almost theatrically. 'Poor Oliver, poor Bravo. Reminds me of the old saying, about there being no greater love than that of the man who'd lay down the lives of his friends to save his own!'

Skinner's ball was indeed awaiting him on the narrow green as he crested the rise, even if it was fifty feet from the hole. He lined it up, thinking only of distance, and rolled it up, stopping it two feet to the right of the hole to secure, to his inner joy, his thirteenth par.

`So there we are, Darren,' he said, walking to the fourteenth, a relatively gentle 414-yard par-four, designed by the course architect to imbue a false sense of security into the unwary before the tigerish finishing holes. Two enemies dead, the tournament in your hands, the police protecting your life and limb, and Mike Morton, your last target, in deep trouble with us.

`But that gives you a problem. We're watching Morton like a hawk, in case Richard Andrews tries to make contact with him. Ironic, isn't it, we're treating Morton as a murder suspect, and by doing so we're protecting him from the real killers.'

He laughed as they stepped out on to the tee. Atkinson looked away from him down the fairway. He took his driver from McGuire and sent the ball an effortless 290 yards. Skinner did his best to copy the ease and smoothness of his swing, and was rewarded by a straight drive which carried around 240 yards but pulled up sharply on the fairway, running on only a further ten yards.

`You know,' said Skinner, suddenly serious, as they headed off once more, 'I'll have Mike Morton on my conscience for as long as I live. If I had kept him under surveillance, he'd still be alive. I couldn't see the whole picture at that time, yet it should have occurred to me that if Morton wasn't behind the two murders, and the attack on you, then he might easily be a target himself. But he shot his mouth off at me yesterday afternoon, and I got annoyed. I still wanted to speak to Andrews, if only to close off that line of enquiry, so I gave Morton twenty-four hours without cover to produce him, and the threat of what would happen if he didn't. But in truth, the poor bugger genuinely didn't know where Andrews was!'

He paused, and looked sideways at Atkinson again. 'You must have thought all your Christmases had come at once, when you saw my people drive away from Bracklands. One day to go, and a clear shot at Morton, if you can get him on his own.'

When they reached it, Skinner's ball was sitting up nicely for his next shot. Once more, the flag was protected by a deep bunker, making a direct approach hazardous, and so he hit his five-iron instead carefully to the wide area of open green to the right. Even Atkinson fought shy of a direct attack on the flag, landing his soft eight-iron twenty feet away.

Ìt turns out to be pretty easy. Rick phones Morton, doesn't he? He tells him he wants to meet him in secret, last night. Maybe he says that he wants to talk to him about his company and yours co-operating now that Masur's out of the way.' Skinner was looking closely at Atkinson as he spoke. Beneath the mask of impassivity, he thought that he detected the faintest twitch of an eyebrow.

`Morton agrees to meet him. He says he'll skip the dinner. Rick says, "Good, let's meet where no one'll interrupt us. How about on top of Witches' Hill, just after dark?" Morton says OK, and he's a dead man.'

Skinner lined up his putt, lagging it almost perfectly once more, leaving himself an eighteen-inch tap-in. Atkinson stalked his putt like a tiger, in pursuit of his seventh birdie, but once again found only the lip of the hole.

Ìt was only when I stood on the top of that hill this morning, looking at what was left of Morton that the whole thing fell into place,' said Skinner as they walked from the green. 'I thought about his "doppelganger" remark, I thought about Henry's case of mistaken identity, I thought about the second note, and I knew right then what I should have worked out yesterday. If I had, I'd have saved Morton's life.