Next morning the housemaid, trained by Denise, brought me in early morning tea and drew the curtains; and Denise herself knocked and came in while I was still drinking it, and before I had put on my wig.
‘Oh, your poor head,’ she said; but without conviction: she was thinking of something else. ‘Did you sleep well?’
I had. The bed had fine American cotton percale sheets like silk, and all the furniture was white bamboo with blue and green and white floral upholstery and a positive tattoo of drumlamps. Denise sat on the empty twin bed and said, ‘I hear you’re playing golf with Mr Tiko this morning, and I wondered if Wallace Brady and I could join you.’
Poor Bartholomew Edgecombe. I hadn’t thought of her as a golfer. But looking at those calf-muscles again, and those sinewy arms, and that brittle, determined jaw, I realized suddenly that of course she was; and most likely a good one. I cannot say I was overjoyed at the prospect of watching Lady Edgecombe and Wallace Brady get to know each other better over eighteen holes in my company, but I could hardly refuse.
At the door she stopped and said, ‘Oh, by the way: Bart had word from the airport about your case, dear. I’m afraid there’s no sign of it at all. Shall I see if something of mine will fit you this morning?’
I have already spoken of the size difference between us. I need only say that at this, moment Lady Edgecombe was wearing a boudoir cap of white frilled lace scattered with rosebuds, and a frilled negligee of white spotted net, and it will be clear why I declined.
‘Then perhaps you should look in at the pro’s shop when we go over for breakfast,’ Lady Edgecombe suggested. It was not, obviously, of passionate moment to her: she only wanted to make sure that I should not be prevented from playing golf by the exigencies of my attire. I said I would.
Indeed, after she had gone, I got up and padded over the carpet to examine myself in the vanity mirror, which was surrounded by fourteen ormolu make-up lamps with a total burning-power of what felt like two thousand watts. My feet sank three inches into the blue and green fitted carpet, of the variety known as deep shag, which wouldn’t show if your dog buried his bone in it, and for all I know he frequently does.
My headache had vanished. My face was brown and clean and healthy, and, once I had my wig on, looked better than Denise’s.
Outside the veiled window a crane lowered its jib, from which dangled a palm tree. I went over to look.
The incline of waste was no longer an incline of waste ground but a garden of flowering bushes, interspersed tastefully with groups of live coconut palms. A gang of men were unrolling a carpet of grass. And a boy in a floral shirt and a fancy straw hat had got down from a tanker and was watering it.
The Edgecombes had a garden.
It wouldn’t happen in Scotland.
I went in to shower, singing cautiously, dressed, had a word with the Edgecombes, and, borrowing their windowless Fiat, drove off to the Tamboo golf clubhouse.
The pro’s shop was upstairs, near the bar-lounge of last night’s exotic encounters. I walked past the glass doors and some satin steel furniture and a selection of metal-reeded chairs like diabolos to the double timber doors of the shop, and I stood for a long time and looked in the windows.
For that time in the morning, it was fairly dazzling. Stacks of cellophaned cashmeres and floodlit rows of hide golf-bags in green and yellow and cream. A carousel of slacks in cream and coral and primrose; drawers of suntan oil: shelves of white balls like nest eggs. Round the corner, I knew, were tunics and swimsuits and sunsuits, bikinis, pants suits, divided skirts, sandals . .
I walked past the cashmeres and stopped in front of the slacks. Then I opened my bag, pushed the revolver out of the way, and took out all Pally Loo-loo’s remarkable dividend.
I have no trouble making decisions. Half an hour later I was back at the club and able to join my host and hostess for breakfast. I had on a culotte dress in green linen with a see-through matching jacket and square-toed green canvas shoes. Lady Edgecombe had sprigged pants and a pink cotton shirt pinned with an Indian brooch at the navel; Sir Bartholomew merely his old Bermudas and a fresh shirt. He grinned, stood up and gave me a full bow as I came to the table. ‘Beltanno, I can tell you one thing,’ he said. ‘By this evening, they’ll have stopped bringing over their feet.’
‘And started bringing over their wills, perhaps,’ I said. I felt remarkably skittish. ‘I say, that would be something.’
I had fresh orange-juice, coffee, a small hot fluffy roll like a bread cake, and an individual packet of cornflakes, served ready perforated across the abdomens like a prepared case of peritonitis. Afterwards, Sir Bartholomew took me out on the high apron sun-deck at the back of the clubhouse and we leaned on the railing and looked at the prognosis for the dream called Tamboo.
Below us stretched the club’s own private patio, edged with tropical flowers and trees and scattered with yellow beach chairs around a swimming-pool lined with baby blue tiles, and filled with baby blue water.
Built on the same ridge, but divided from us by the steeply undercut road to the marina, were the clustered roundettes belonging to the guests of the golf-club: smaller timber-clad roundels like Edgecombe’s, still with their feet in scrub and piping and rubble.
But they were complete too and occupied, most of them. Coming to breakfast that morning I had seen diamond locket and the French screen stair among others crossing the flyover bridge which stretched from the roundettes to the clubhouse and golf-course. Below the bridge rumbled the trucks carrying the plant and work-gangs and tools to the marina. You could see it there, blue in the distance, marked by the white of the shining new jetty; the squat red and grey shape of the pile-driver; the huddle of cranes. Beyond on one side, the walls of the first waterfront townhouse condominium had got up to two storeys high in front of the rough green slope of the hill. On the opposite side, I could distinguish the red pantiles of the first house in a Portuguese-style fishing-village. Round the corner in the Bay of the Five Pirates, a yacht-club was scheduled to rise. Elsewhere unborn was Tamboo Village with international shops, roof gardens and patios. The discotheque in the Lighthouse Pavilion. The tennis-courts. The Beach Club and swimming-pool.
The private luxury homes for single and multiple families. The Condominium Club.
All that in the future; and the future was becoming the present with the speed of Sir Bartholomew’s garden.
Beyond the walls of the swimming-pool, near the uncleared bushes, where the stagnant swamp lay below, an excavator was working. Tractors crawled by; lorries with gravel; smart cars filled with dark-skinned talking men in caps and bright shirts. Below the flyover bridge a crane bearing an uprooted tree backed into sight, slowing to allow a mechanical grab to pass, followed by one of the ubiquitous water-lorries.
Generators throbbed. The whole island hummed and muttered with the mechanized voice of creation. Swarming, single-minded, over each growing-point, the builders, the planners, the developers paid no attention to the socialites, the holiday-makers, the investors, bronzed and sunglassed, driving one-handed amongst them, bathing-trunks and towel in the back seat; hissing past on the shore in the ski boat; sending buckets of balls down the practice drive with a flick of the wrist.
Sir Bartholomew raised a hand and pointed beyond the marina, to a strip of road on the near horizon. ‘That’s the way to the native settlement. Bullock’s Harbour,’ he said. ‘We must take you there some time. It’s not in the development, of course, but most of the men work for the company now. It pays better than fishing.’
It reminded me that I meant to go to Bullock’s Harbour too, but not, thank you, before I’d had my game of golf. Johnson had had no qualms about inducing me to come here. He could therefore accept my services in the order which I elected to offer them.
As it happened, Johnson was unaware where the dead waiter Pentecost came from. Or for that matter that he had three brothers still here. But that was Johnson’s fault, for going to Crab Island instead of Great Harbour Cay.
Wallace Brady and Mr Tiko joined us at that point. We left Sir Bartholomew to return to his house and followed Lady Edgecombe out on to the terrace which swept down through coconut palms to the brilliant green of the first tee. There was no need to inquire whether or no there were caddies. Here the main route was joined by a path from the clubhouse. And in motionless file on that path, two by two like black-nosed creatures about to descend from the Ark, were three dozen baby blue and white golf-carts with white seats and cocked white and blue sunshades.
To one of them Lady Edgecombe’s houseboy was already strapping her olive green hide bag, and my second-hand one glazed with rubbing. Wallace Brady, in pale pink sweater and white slacks, heaved his own bag on the back ledge of its neighbour. His woods were protected by thick plushy socks. Beside it he also strapped Mr Tiko’s bag, the most immaculate of all, with each of four woods and ten irons encased in its own quilted anorak, and his initials on his hide bag in gold. Mr Tiko, in a blue tunic shirt and blue trousers, had been patronizing the pro’s shop this morning as well.
I gave him a smile based on fellow-feeling and a considerable body of unvoiced good intentions, and said, ‘It looks as if Mr Brady is going to drive Lady Edgecombe. Do you know how these things work?’
He was happy to show me. Lady Edgecombe’s houseboy had already paid our ten dollars and the meter key was turned in front of the seat: Mr Tiko settled beside me, grasped the wheel and pressed his left foot on the long flat accelerator. The cart moved, and so did Wallace Brady’s beside us. Side by side, at a gentle five miles an hour, the four of us drove down the path and on to the perfect green sward beside the first tee.
To slide the driver out of your bag and stand facing the first of eighteen beautiful fairways, your feet planted apart and the wind in your hair - what satisfaction is there like it in Scotland, with the sandy ground under your spikes, and the sea roaring there on the shingle and the cold trying in vain to penetrate your woollen stockings, your tweed skirt and pullover?
What, then, is it like sleeveless under a warm, cloudless sky, with five hundred yards of green velvet unrolling under your eyes, surrounded by low palmetto brush jungle? When the double bunker ahead is guarded by a coconut palm? We tossed for first drive from the women’s tee and Lady Edgecombe won and hit her first ball without preamble, a good third of the distance, nicely placed for a wood shot fairly close to the green, and well clear of the white sculptured traps. She had, as I suspected, excellent muscular control.
So had I. I drove off deliberately with the whippy crack which means distance; and meant, incidentally, the devoted practice of nearly every off-duty hour since I came out to Nassau. The sun was in my eyes. But I watched my ball with satisfaction take the straight line Lady Edgecombe had avoided, to fly over the first pair of bunkers and lie safely beyond. She smiled at me with her carefully drawn mouth and said, ‘Well done, Beltanno!’ but she hardly watched Brady or my Japanese namesake drive off. I thought, there are a few things she does naturally well, and this is one of them. This is one field in which she is secure. A psychiatrist would suggest that it would be wiser for her sake not to trespass on it.
I am not a psychiatrist, and I believe that cures are effected by people being made to confront their own weaknesses. I watched Brady give a competent and Mr Tiko an excellent opening shot, and then trundled off with my partner to watch Denise play her No. 3- wood. She hit it crooked, almost out of the fairway. Mine brought my ball neatly just below the lift of the green. Par was five. It seemed very likely I was going to start with a birdie. Brady placed his next shot beyond mine, but on the lip of a trap: Mr Tiko, with care, sent his ball close beside me. With mutual smiles, we entered our cart and drove off. ‘You play golf a great deal?’ he asked.
‘Well. I did my training with six first-class golf-courses within half an hour’s drive. But you learned in Japan, Mr Tiko?’
‘I learned to drive, yes. I have a good drive,’ he said. ‘But the rest I learned in America. Lady Edgecombe is good, is she not? But it is a game like chess: one must not allow oneself to be put off.’
‘I can’t imagine anything putting you off, Mr Tiko,’ I said, getting out. Denise had failed to get her ball near the green.
He gave a miniature shrug with his miniature shoulders. ‘An excess of alcohol, perhaps, or too little sleep, were I to be self- indulgent. But little else, I venture to hope. One must discipline the inner self as one would preserve any implement.’
It was a philosophy with which I found myself in perfect agreement. A 5-iron, thoughtfully used, brought me within two yards of the pin. Both the men followed on to the green, but neither remotely so well. I got my birdie.
It was a pleasant moment of success. The sun blazed down: the white fringe of the cart moved to the faintest of sea breezes. Ahead, triangular against the blue sky, was the roof of the airport control tower; behind us, on the ridge, one could see the twin sloping roofs of the clubhouse. Brady dropped back the yellow flag and we resumed our seats. The two carts side by side set themselves into motion, and crossing Santa Maria Drive, we turned uphill past a low scrubby wood to No. 2 tee, par 3,155 yards. Lady Edgecombe drove off.
Since golf sagas may be as boring as holiday slides, I have no intention of narrating the whole of that game. Enough to say that although I did no better than that, I kept up a good average at every hole; and that Lady Edgecombe found a hard and competitive game which was nevertheless vulnerable to the unexpected. At the third, when I fell by sheer mishandling into the second large trap, she played her best shot yet, a brilliant No. 3-iron which landed straight on the green. But when my next chip shot, by a combination of skill and good luck, actually ran on to the green and within striking distance of the hole, she was again put off, and took three to get the ball down.
It was irritating, in that a neurotic player is always an unspoken blight; but the men played steadily, if unspectacularly, and were unfailingly pleasant companions. Neither, for example, prattled.
The great joy, of course, was undoubtedly the condition of the fairway and greens. Ploughed up from jungle and swamp, the course had been designed and then sown by blowing-machine, the sprigs raced here by barge from their seed farms in Georgia. Turf. I knew, had come in the same way, rolled like carpets the way I had seen it, and even the coconut palms, their roots wrapped in polythene, had been imported by the barge-load; the tugs dragging them across from the Florida coast. For no coconut palms grew on Great Harbour Cay before the development. Nothing grew. The islanders fished for sponges, and, when that failed, for lobster and crawfish. Now, down on the road we saw the trucks going by from the big netted nursery off Royal Palm Drive. Trucks full of potted plants, and bags of horticultural perlite, and Canadian sphagnum peat moss. And the grass on the fairways, cut weekly one inch in height, was like the grass on the greens where I used to play near Loch Rannoch; and the grass on the greens, three-sixteenths of an inch and shaved daily, in green powderings which lay in small heaps on the roads, was like heavy green suede.
We moved round the course in the sun, like children on a toy railway, stopping and starting; pretending to play plastic golf under the perpetual hot sun of childhood. An inlet of seawater ran past the second green, its beaches white, a rocky island of grey and yellow stones in the middle. The third fairway led up to the airport: beyond a banking of white limestone the line of flags showed, and as we played a Dakota flew in slowly from the left, skimmed our heads and landed. You could see the passengers disembark. I watched Lady Edgecombe scanning the numbers, and she played well at that hole. Reminded of her status: reminded that if the company at present did not come up to her expectations, there was more and better elsewhere. Not that she seemed disappointed in Brady. He had good American manners, and he was polite as her rank demanded, although he was unable, I saw, quite to get her measure. I guessed this was one of many attempts on her part to draw him into their circle. I guessed she would get tired of trying, again, as she had, petulantly, at Nassau.
In the permanent company lodged on the island, there were probably few enough whom she felt might amuse her. And Brady’s style, one had to admit, was engaging enough. He played an even game, without rancour, and cracked one or two mild jokes; then ceased to crack them when Lady Edgecombe leaned on the theme just a little too long. Mr Tiko, ever polite, merely smiled and made congratulatory remarks. To me, in the cart, he talked a little about the game in Japan and put one or two gentle questions about courses in Scotland. He was no trouble.
For the fourth hole we recrossed Santa Maria Drive: busier now; lorries rumbled round the white dusty corners with their loads of men and machinery. On the fairway, however, it was quiet: the twitter of an unknown bird came from the small wood beside us. A small red service cart with two Negroes sitting relaxed side by side moved almost without sound down the next fairway. Ahead, a spray was working, jets of water rising in pulses as if a small monkey engine were throwing up steam in short bursts. It swung slowly, and left on the slope of the green a long sparkling bloom of pale blue; the beaded grass reflecting the sky. Wallace Brady had shown me the red metal caps, sunk in scores round the tees, greens and fairways, from which emerged the sprinklers at night, set to spray in rotation all through the darkness and keep the turf perfect under a tropical sun. We played down the fifth and crossed Harbour Drive to the sixth hole, and the first set by the sea.
The Fiat was sitting at the side of the road, and in it Sir Bartholomew, waiting for us. He waved to Denise. ‘It’s all there according to orders when you’re ready. Who’s winning?’
‘Dr MacRannoch,’ said his wife brightly. ‘She’s beating us hollow. Lots of Scotch perseverance.’
I noted I had been demoted from Beltanno again. We played the hole, and then joined Sir Bartholomew on the beach.
The last thing I want, I suppose, when playing a competitive eighteen holes against unknown opponents is to break off a third of the way round for refreshments. For one thing, it takes quite some effort to collect one’s concentration and rhythm again. I had a feeling that Brady and Mr Tiko, although agreeable as ever, felt much the same. We stepped down to the beach through a thicket of grey-green cactus and water-lily-like mangrove, sprawling over ridged layers of crumbling white rock. Beyond stretched the dazzling white sand with the sea hissing transparent upon it, and changing as it deepened to all the brilliant aniline shades: greenish chrome to pure turquoise to cerulean, to hazy grape-blue on the horizon. Someone had put out long beach chairs and umbrellas just here, and Sir Bartholomew was unpacking a hamper with tins of soft drinks and a big flask of coffee. There were also some biscuits and fruit. Lady Edgecombe unstrapped her golf-bag and drew a neat Thermos from one pocket. ‘And this.’
Sir Bartholomew looked at it. I said to Mr Tiko, ‘Look. There’s some fan coral.’ The beach was like white silk, weathered into tissue by the unceasing water and mapped with spidery black curves, skeletons of dead waves. Sir Bartholomew said, smiling, ‘Well, for before-lunch, Denise. Don’t let’s put everyone off their superb strokes.’
She uncorked the flask without listening. ‘I don’t suppose Beltanno has tasted planter’s punch. Don’t be a spoilsport, darling,’ she said. She started to pour. ‘Not for me,’ I said, turning quickly. Lady Edgecombe smiled at me. ‘I dare you,’ she said.
I looked at Sir Bartholomew. ‘All right,’ I said. Brady and Mr Tiko both held out for coffee, and she didn’t press them. But her husband, I saw, also took planter’s punch. It left less in the flask. But not little enough.
It was hot now. I was glad of the green linen dress, lying back on my chair, glass in hand, one finger trailing in the glistening sand. It was full of treasures: white sea urchins; transparent shells so small and perfect that I wished I had a microscope and some means to identify them. The sea-rim hissed and withdrew, leaving the sand like satiny porridge patched with sparkling patterns of froth. Seaweed stirred, like grey snippets of ribbon, and a dog bounded by, followed by a splashing group of sunburned young men and women: the visitors, or some of them, who had been at our table last night. They stopped to call greetings and ask after Sir Bartholomew: Denise, drawling and languid, offered a selection of amusing remarks, fanning herself with the tie of her shirt. Diamond locket, in python bathing-trunks, said to me, ‘Are you swimming?’
‘Don’t be frivolous, Paul,’ said Lady Edgecombe gravely. ‘Dr MacRannoch is playing an awfully scientific game of golf.’ She managed, with clarity, to the end of the sentence. Wallace Brady stood up. ‘And I think we’d better get on with it,’ he said. ‘Unless anyone’s tired? There might be someone on our heels, don’t you think?’
Lady Edgecombe shook her head. ‘No one on that plane who plays golf. No. We have the course to ourselves. Finest course in the world. Isn’t it, Bart? Good, clean healthy living. No gambling, no blackjack, no roulette, no casinos. Nothing to do but swim and fish and play tennis, when the tennis-courts have got themselves built, and sail, when the marina is built, and go to the night-club when the night-club is built, and make love . . . when...’
Sir Bartholomew put a hand on her arm. ‘Look out. Your nice brooch is slipping.’
It stopped her, and she looked down. Mr Tiko had already moved off, returning the collected glasses to their basket: Wallace Brady was gazing, eyes shaded, at the reefs out to sea. Bart Edgecombe said gently, ‘Take it out and put it in your pocket; then it won’t get lost. Or would you like to call it a day? We could go back and see who’s in the clubhouse.’
She drew herself up, her brown, middle-aged muscular body throwing off the suggestion. ‘When I’m doing something exciting, I want to finish it. You go and rest. You haven’t been well. We’re doing splendidly. One for all and all for one!’ said Lady Edgecombe, sportingly if rather confusingly, and set off back to the fairway. I caught Wallace Brady’s eyes on me and we exchanged glances; then he went on to take Denise by the arm. Sir Bartholomew passed me on his way to the car without saying anything; as he went by, one of the red service buggies drove up and stopped by the crossed rakes at the edge of the green: before we were out of sight the hole was being manicured back into pristine perfection again. We gathered on the seventh tee and set off again.
I played the rest of that round with a sense of unease, which was not due to Lady Edgecombe’s new and lighthearted approach to the game. It was, I think, because I had forgotten Bart Edgecombe’s danger. Or, seeing him at home, with wife and servants, or among familiars in the clubhouse in an enclosed society, on an island in which every guest, every stranger was known, it seemed the danger must be less than in the unconfined rat-race outside.
And now, seeing him walk alone to that light open car, and get in alone and drive off alone, I wondered what protection Johnson thought he was offering him from the shelter of Crab Island. Or was I his protection? And what did Johnson suppose I could do if an excavator turned that corner and drove headlong into the Fiat?
I sliced my drive and Wallace Brady gave a cheer and said, ‘The first crack!’ I grinned back, but I was thinking still. Of all our suspects, only Brady was on Great Harbour Cay, and he was here beside me. But that meant less than nothing. Whatever induced Pentecost to attempt murder in the Bamboo Conch Club could buy exactly the same sort of services here. If Bart Edgecombe was going to be killed, it would be at second hand, by somebody whose employer was very likely not even here on the island. Crab Island, after all, was only twenty minutes away by fast speedboat.
I lost that hole. Progressing along the course, I was struck not only by its superb condition, its peace and its greenness, but by how much lay near it which could be used by a killer. Here on the seventh the green overlooked a large sandy dip full of blue water: a flock of white egrets with swan necks and spider legs dangling rose as we approached and circled until we had gone: the water looked deep.
The fairway for the eighth lay between two half-made reservoirs. You could hear the soft roar of the machinery before driving off; then on the right loomed the raised lake, with yellow hopper and red chute in full operation. On the left, a sunken yard dug from the limestone was filled with machinery and equipment: hoppers, stacks of timber, bundles of pipes, red oil-cans and big silvery drums of gas. A three-sided warehouse held more plants and tools and some cars; rows of spares for the sprayers; rows of the long fan-shaped brushes I had seen being used on the greens. They were marked Little Helper.
We holed out and moved on. The ninth led to another lake. On the left, rows of stilted roundettes were in the process of roofing; the air was filled with the dry pleasant smell of sawn wood. The tenth was beside the new embryo tennis-courts, but from the fairway to the skyline on all sides was palmetto scrub. High on the left, someone had built a crow’s nest, a look-out platform for condominium clients, or snipers . . . Another lake. The eleventh: harmless, secluded, with the sun blazing down on its greenness the only shade in the centre, from a single buttonwood tree, low and wide with its grey scabbed bark and dark green willow-like leaves. Mr Tiko went off to study a strange yellow butterfly; Lady Edgecombe was playing silently and not very well; Wallace Brady was winning.
Across Fairway Road and more heavy traffic. Workmen swarmed over a half-finished house: heavy tools lay about. The twelfth, and past Edgecombe’s own house. Seen from the golf-course the red poles on which it stood looked all of twelve feet in height. They had put in more hibiscus: the villa perched with its feet in palm trees and flowers, with the hum of its generator coming plainly down from the hut on the right. From the balcony, before the picture windows with their elegant drapes, Sir Bartholomew waved from his chair. Isolated, overlooking the whole empty fairway and the jungle of low trees and bushes set round it. A killer need only lie there under the bushes at night and then, if he were agile, climb up the poles.
Brady waved back, and so did I. Lady Edgecombe gathered herself and played one excellent shot, the best for several holes, down the heart of the fairway. We sat in the carts and drove on.
The thirteenth, a raised tee, and on its right a deep dry excavation for a reservoir; the sides scored with the wide-ladder marks of caterpillar tractors crossing and recrossing. At the bottom lay an unattached green harrow with spikes on its wheels. Why should I think of Johnson?
Ahead, the pale green of a new lake in a deepish cut: the roofs of one or two other houses; the sound of dogs barking. Peanuts and Popcorn, perhaps, the pro’s chocolate poodles. And the fourteenth, turning back. We were on our way home: the sea, invisible, must be on our left. Then across Great Harbour Drive for the fifteenth and there was the water, pale turquoise ahead. To the right, an unexpected deep cutting and more machinery: another house, its roof newly timbered, its walls not yet completed. The sixteenth, separated from the sea only by a strip of flowering bushes, and the occasional pine.
We stopped there, while Denise waded over the scrub without speaking, and went to stand alone on the beach. She gazed out to sea. Mr Tiko, who had played an unvarying average game with placid good humour, waited patiently, Wallace Brady walked over to me. I said, ‘I don’t want to play it out, unless anyone else does.’ He was four strokes better than I was; Lady Edgecombe poorest of all.
Brady said, ‘I don’t mind, either way. The last two are a straight walk back into the clubhouse. We have to go that way anyway.’ He hesitated and said, ‘D’you think we should all ease up?’
‘Good Lord,’ I said. ‘What good would that do?’ Giving Lady Edgecombe the game wasn’t going to improve her ego. Only a dramatic improvement in her golf would do that. I don’t know what Brady was going to say; but just then Lady Edgecombe said something aloud.
Mr Tiko, who was nearest, walked politely towards her. She repeated what she had said, and this time we could hear it. ‘She’s lost the brooch out of her pocket,’ I said. ‘End of game, end of problem. Leave things long enough and they’ll find their own answer.’
‘It worries me,’ said Wallace Brady, ‘to think that you think I’ll swallow that. Maybe you forget that civil engineers don’t get to be civil engineers with that kind of philosophy, any more than doctors do.’
‘But Lady Ambassadresses can,’ I said. But under my breath. Mr Tiko was volunteering to tramp back and look for the brooch. Brady, putting a good face on it, walked up and offered to do the same: so did I. We were about to split forces when Lady Edgecombe said, ‘No, you mustn’t, Beltanno. All that stooping with your poor head.’ I had forgotten my poor head and so, I swear, had she until that moment. She said, ‘Look, someone must go and tell Bart. He’ll be up at the clubhouse in a few moments, patiently waiting. Suppose Beltanno takes one of the golf-carts, and leaves us here with the other.’
I didn’t mind, if she wanted the company of both men together. They were arguing who should go where, as I got into the cart and drove off.
It was the first time I had operated one of those things. On my salary, you don’t lightly hire them. The brake was fiercer than I had expected, but the thing was stable enough, so long as one didn’t ask the impossible on a steep or an uneven gradient. I steered sedately over the road and along the seventeenth and eighteenth fairways, finding on my left one of the big rubber-lined reservoirs from which the underground pipes could be fed. An ingenious system.
I had had, as I reviewed it, an excellent morning of golf. A piquant round of great comfort. Not one for tricks or nasty surprises or any of the crude and unpleasant hazards which tax one to extremity, in sport as in life. But a good game of golf.
Sir Bartholomew was waiting, as predicted, on the patio of the clubhouse. He wouldn’t hear of my going back, but pressed on me instead his beach towel and his chair, ordered me a fruit-juice, and suggested that I should pass the time with a swim.
He didn’t need to explain his gratitude any more than I my commiseration. I changed, thankfully, into the new swimming-suit and beach shirt I had left in my locker, picked up my swim cap for de-wigging with later, and made my way back to my tall, ice-filled drink by the pool.
It was too hot to talk. In the baby blue water a long-haired girl swam showily and then got languidly out. The palms of the clubhouse were motionless and the seagrape in the corner hung its leaves like unpolished green sequins. Round the pool, the slatted beach chairs lay straddled like spiders, each with its burden of naked bronze flesh. Someone said politely, ‘You need to be oiled, lady, or you’ll get awful sore.’
It was Paul, of the locket. I said, ‘Thanks, but I should be all right. I’ve been quite a lot in the sun.’
He flashed his snowy capped teeth and waggled a finger. ‘Not there you haven’t. Call yourself a doctor, as well?’
He was correct, I was annoyed to discover. The shape of my present swim-suit produced problems which were undoubtedly novel. ‘Now just you lie there,’ he said; and before I could stir, a large warm hand lapped in liquid spread itself over my central vertebrae and proceeded to massage, ably and hard. I gasped, and turned my head to one side in order to read his expression.
He winked and continued unpausing. Feet had not even been mentioned. His impulses were entirely benign.
Someone, three chairs away, was grumbling softly about something: someone else somewhere was laughing. But quietly. Everything was quiet. In the pool, empty now, a string of coloured floats moved with the air on its satiny surface, hand-in-hand like a dream-line of children. A brush hissed. A coloured boy, in a black lace shirt with pearl cufflinks, was spraying the bushes at the back of the open-air bar: his sneakers squeaked below bare brown ankles as he moved gently along. The sound mixed with the organ note of a plane coming in; the giant cricket hum of the generators. A whining buzz came from the cart room, where the sixty unused golf-carts sat in canopied rows, feeding umbilically, each from its meter. Paul said, ‘You’ve got a cute little figure. Ain’t no one ever told you before, Doc?’
The girl from the reception counter, running out on the back steps with the radio-transmitter box gripped in her hand, stood and screamed, ‘Doctor MacRannoch! Are you there! Doctor.’
I was up and running, the beach shirt whipped over my shoulders, before she got another word out. She stood and stared at me gasping, her face stiff and the colour of yeast. I said, ‘Give me the transmitter. Take a deep breath. Now, what is it?’
But I knew. I could hear the hubbub behind: people wakened, talking, asking; even Paul’s naked feet padding along, a late starter behind me. I knew it. I knew it. I knew it.
The girl was still choking. I gave her a rap on the shoulder. ‘Come along. What is it?’
She said, ‘That was the car from the beach. To say they’ve gone for the nurse. And Mr Brady said you’re to go too. They were looking for something -’
‘A brooch. I know. What happened?’ I said.
‘They didn’t find it. And Sir Bartholomew said to call off the search. And they called Lady Edgecombe but she didn’t answer. And Mr Brady went off to look. Then Mr Brady called from the thirteenth that he’d found her.’
‘Well,’ I said. My voice was calm. I trust, but I couldn’t believe it yet, the thing she was going to say.
‘l,ady Edgecombe was dead,’ said the girl. ‘They say her neck’s broken.”
Denise. Not Sir Bart, but his wife.