THE GREAT GOLF MYSTERY

The 4th Tee murderer was a small man with rimless glasses, a mouse-like moustache, and a nervous twitch of the left nostril. This last acquisition was the only outward sign of emotion he had displayed since his trial, an understandably tension-fraught affair at which he had reluctantly been fid guilty by twelve low-handicap men; and a concerted murmur of sympathy and admiration had sounded throughout the barred corridors of the prison on the morning he was taken to the death cell.

His lawyer visited him later that day, a trace of understandable embarrassment detectable in his demeanour. A previous commitment to participate in the local pro-am tournament had necessitated his delegating the case to a new, and it now appeared, incompetent substitute, and while his absence had been excusable he felt that common courtesy demanded he put in an appearance, if only to say goodbye.

He was himself still a young man, but a nasty slice and a great deal of time spent in bunkers had matured him beyond his years, and his heart went out to the bowed figure he found listlessly toying with a putter, a pile of treasured score cards beside him.

The lawyer murmured a greeting, and seated himself.

The 4th Tee Murderer glanced up from his reverie, blinked, and twitched his left nostril at him.

“Ah, my dear fellow,” he said. His voice was low, but a hint of his old defiance could be heard beneath the dispirited tones. “Good of you to come and see me off like this. Hope I haven’t put you out in any way.”

“No, no,” the lawyer said, greatly relieved. His client’s lack of animosity plainly labelled him a man of superior intellect and deep understanding, one who fully appreciated that you can’t win them all. The lawyer’s nervousness vanished, and his features assumed a look of sombre commiseration.

It was true that he had been booked to play in a foursome that afternoon, but he felt that all things considered it would have been churlish to have mentioned it.

“My only wish is that I could do more. At times such as these, one experiences a sense of inadequacy comparable only to one’s earliest youth, when the hook, slice, and top were one’s shameful everyday companions.” He coughed delicately. “Are you quite sure there is nothing that I can do? A fresh supply of practice balls? A new Swing-Rite Practice Companion with Double-Strength Air-Flite ball on Triple-Strength elastic, perhaps?”

The 4th Tee Murderer laughed bitterly.

“And what benefit would I derive from these things, these painful reminders of all that has made life worthwhile? They would only serve to make the end even more unendurable, though mind you, there might still be time to correct an unfortunate tendency to hook slightly with the dashed niblick.”

He paused thoughtfully, then sank back into his former state of despair, “Ah, well. A flaw remains—perhaps symbolic of the unattainable perfection that we all seek and fail to find m this brief but blessed span, when we stride on springy turf—occasionally soggy, I grant you, especially in June, July, and August—learning to drive straight and true down the fairway of life, resisting the lure of bunker and the snare of rough, purifying ourselves little by little as we grope fumblingly toward par, and then—the Great Beyond.”

“Amen,” the lawyer said humbly.

The Murderer fixed him with a look of grim melancholy.

“Let me tell you the full bitter story,” he said. “Let me tell you about the murder I committed on the fourth tee at Huggins’ Hollow, the indubitably justifiable homicide that has resulted in my present incarceration and forthcoming demise. And I hope you have a strong stomach, for it is a tale that would sicken all but the stoutest. I speak metaphorically, you understand,” He paused courteously. “If you can spare the time, of course. Sure I’m not keeping you from anything?”

“No, no,” the lawyer said. “Not at all. I shall be most interested. As a matter of fact, what with one thing and another, the details of the case—” He coughed, eyed the bright sunlight that showed beyond the barred window, and suppressed a small inward sigh. “Pray proceed.”

“It began,” the Murderer said heavily, “as many other mornings have begun. I rose, showered, shaved, dressed, and proceeded downstairs to breakfast alone, leaving my wife to her slumber, or so I thought. And there I was, studying the previous day’s match scores in the Dally Golfer, about to sip my fourth cup of tea, when it happened. There was a bellow in my ear of “Surprise!”—and I chokingly emerged from my cup to find my wife beside me, fully attired in—golfing clothes!”

The Murderer was pale, and his hands tautened on the shaft of the putter that he held, employing, the lawyer noted absently but approvingly, an orthodox reverse overlapping grip.

“You will understand my dismay when I tell you that in our fifteen years of married life she had flatly refused to exhibit the faintest glimmer of interest in the finer things, contenting herself merely with running the house, painting impressionist landscapes which she sold disgustingly large sums of money, writing best-selling novels and occasional smash-hit musical, composing a symphony now and then, managing her dress salon, and so on. A wasted life,” the Murderer said sadly.

“However, it had happened at last. In her insatiable search for the new, the untried, she had finally decided to inflict herself on the most testing field of endeavour yet devised by man, confident in her butterfly fashion that she would sail blithely round in par as soon as she was let loose upon the hallowed ground.

“I pleaded, arguing the necessity for lessons, the need to parade one’s naked unfitness before the humbling eye of the pro; but she would have none of it. She sulked, she whined. She said that I had ulterior motives in wishing her not to play. She said that I didn’t love her. She said that she would go home to her mother.”

The Murderer sighed. “You may wonder at this point why I failed to settle for what would unarguably have been the lesser of two evils, the sad truth being that despite her inherently shallow nature and lack of imagination and initiative, I loved my wife. And despite my certain foreknowledge of the dark happenings ahead, I clung desperately to a vain hope that she would fall prey to some disease, preferably noncontagious, en route to the club, or fall and break an arm or leg before it became possible for her to shame me with her first attempted swing.

“Alas, it was not to be. At length I capitulated, and it was with a leaden heart that I watched her, one hour later, grasp my driver in a vice-like grip and address her ball for the very first time.

“The stance that she had chosen, despite repeated appeals on my own part, would be difficult to sum up in a phrase. Her toes were turned inward, her knees bent outward, her arms stiffly crooked at the elbow, and her posterior was as kickably projected as any man less iron-willed than myself could have wished. The total effect was similar to a clumsily stuffed penguin I had once seen as a child, an item that had afforded me considerable amusement at the time but now only caused me to reflect deeply on the tasteless humour of adolescence.

“She lifted her head toward the hole, presumably to verify that it had not been moved while she adopted her position, then swung the club—a sudden violent movement that was obviously intended to catch the ball while its thoughts were elsewhere.

“There was a muffled click, a square foot of turf sailed past my left ear, and I was astounded to see the ball limp to a halt over a hundred yards away, positioned directly in the centre of the fairway.

“I made haste to congratulate her on her success. To strike a golf ball at one’s very first attempt is a quite remarkable achievement in itself, and its presence on the fairway instead of somewhere to the extreme left or right of the tee mercifully meant that we could immediately put distance between ourselves and the clubhouse, where horrified gazes were plainly visible at the window.

“I played my drive, a somewhat hurried affair that found its way into some long stuff over to the right, and we then proceeded to where my wife’s ball lay.

“Halting beside it and casting a cursory glance toward the distant flag, she stated that as she now had the general feel of things and if I would be so good as to pass her one of the shorter clubs, which looked to be a little more her size, she would proceed to knock the ball down the hole from where we stood.

“In vain I pointed out the sheer physical impossibility of her covering a distance of two hundred yards with a seven, eight, or nine iron, but she brushed aside my pleas, impatiently snatched the eight from the bag, and once again addressed her ball.

“Here,” the Murderer said, following a slight pause during which he aged visibly (his hair turned almost white), “we come to the point in the affair at which I felt the first teetering of my reason. As she swung—a clumsy, ill-coordinated affair that made her initial stroke look like a bit of business by Pavlova on one of her better nights—her left foot skidded inward on the turf, the club struck the ball, and simultaneously she pitched in the direction of the hole, regaining her balance only at the very last possible moment.

“With the full weight of her body behind the stroke the ball lifted, travelled in a graceful arc, the apex of which was approximately six feet from the ground, landed just short of the green, rolled twenty feet in a geometrically faultless straight line—and vanished into the hole.”

“Blessed indeed are the doings of the Lord,” the lawyer said emotionally. He was a church-going man and knew the value of prayer, teaching one as it did to keep one’s head down. “She was shown the Way.”

“Blessed my bloodshot eyeball,” the Murderer said bitterly. “Dashed fishy, if you ask me. There was this woman, who’d never handled a club before in her dashed life, holing out with an eagle two on a hole that I’ve never been able to do in less than par, and using the wrong club to boot.”

He gnashed his teeth for a moment. “Dashed fishy. It was almost as though—oh, well, never mind. When I recovered from the shock, I congratulated her again. I told her that by the greatest good luck and assisted by a series of coincidences that made evolution look like mere child’s play in comparison, she had just broken the club record for the first hole.

“Her reply, voiced petulantly, was that she had been perfectly confident of the outcome of her shot, and that she was disappointed only in the fact that it exposed my attempts to dissuade her from employing the club she had used as merely a clumsy attempt to ruin her game.”

The lawyer tutted disapprovingly.

“Tut you may,” the Murderer said, “as would any civilized man. Stunned to silence, I holed out with a miserable six and numbly followed her to the second tee.

“You know the hole, of course—a short affair liberally dotted with bunkers of the most vicious kind and completed by a cunningly positioned tree a little to the left of the tee. I watched in stricken silence as she again wrenched her limbs into the macabre pose that I had witnessed on the first tee, paused only to observe that the buttercups appeared to be a trifle early this year, then swiped at the ball.

“You could call it a slosh, if you prefer, or even a bash, but in no way could you label that fearsome wielding of the club a correct golfing stroke. The ball vanished, and it was only by craning my neck that I found it again, a diminishing speck that moved upward in an almost vertical line, curved sharply, then descended at frightful velocity to vanish into the topmost foliage of the tree. There was a sharp report, a shower of leaves, and the ball reappeared bouncing lightly onto the green, where it stopped three inches short of the hole.”

“Merciful Heaven!” the lawyer exclaimed. His face was pale.

“Merciful my ingrowing toenail,” the Murderer said querulously. “If Heaven is so dashed merciful, what’s it up to when it allows such incredible luck to fall on someone who has always laughed at the mere mention of the game and whose demeanour indicated that she still considered it no great shakes and somewhat easier than falling off a log? Merciful Heaven, indeed,” the Murderer said, chafing visibly.

“Anyway, to cut down on the painful details, I hooked my tee shot, took five to get out of a bunker, and finished up with an eight for a bogey three.”

The lawyer made incredulous noises.

“Quite so,” the Murderer said. “We proceeded to the third tee, the four-hundred yarder, where, my rapidly failing grip on a sense of reality assured me, it would be quite impossible for her to achieve a distance of more than a hundred yards or so—particularly in view of the fact that she had insisted on retaining the eight iron, a club, she said, that seemed to suit her style of play.

“The chances of her duplicating the incredible shot she had performed on the first hole were so minute as to be laughable, and yet it was with jangling nerves that I watched her as she squared up to the ball, paused only to comment that the daisies, too, appeared to be coming along nicely, and swung down on it.

“The result of this stroke,” the Murderer continued, his eyes glazed at the memory, “can only be described as staggering, astounding, incredible, unbelievable, impossible, inconceivable, unheard of, and beyond the bounds of reason. The ball took off, rose to a distance of eighteen inches above ground level, and maintained this height for approximately two hundred and seventy-five yards. It fell at last and rolled an additional fifty before coming to rest, perfectly positioned on a slight incline that bisects the fairway at that point.

“It was a full minute before I could gather my rapidly disintegrating wits sufficiently to play my own shot. My drive, incredibly under the circumstances, was a moderately good one, and it was only after I had played my second shot and we had proceeded some distance down the fairway that I detected something distinctly odd about my wife’s ball. We eventually reached it, and one glance was sufficient to explain its fantastic performance.

“The bottom edge of the club had sliced cleanly into the cover, almost removing it but failing to sever the final three-quarters of an inch. The ball had then, of course, as any simpleton familiar with ffoulkes-ffarrington’s Law could tell you, simply done a quarter backspin, followed by a quarter sidespin, opened out, and glided to the spot where it finished up.

“Wonderful thing, aerodynamics,” the Murderer said thoughtfully. “Did you know that half a banana, sliced vertically, will fly from Dublin to New York if ejected from a small-bore cannon at a speed of one hundred and ninety-three point nought nought nought seven miles per hour? Allowing for reasonable winds, of course. Nothing too blowy.

“Anyway, there it confronted us, the pitiable remains of what minutes before had been an excellent golf ball, quite unplayable now, of course. I explained to my wife that she was entitled to a replacement, and following her somewhat reluctant agreement I removed the corpse and placed a new ball where it had rested.

“She eyed it in a suspicious sort of way, rather as one might view a cigar that one has strong reason to suspect is loaded; but eventually she aimed her club and played her second shot.

“Again her left foot skidded inward, again she toppled in the direction of the hole, this time landing heavily on her side, at which point there was a sickening yet somehow heart-warming crack. I choked back my eager inquiry and watched the ball.

“Once again, unbelievably, it rose to a height of eighteen inches, sped toward the green, glanced off the lip of an intervening bunker, rose gracefully into the air, then sank out of sight, shortly reappearing as it rolled to a gentle halt a mere inch from the hole.

“On turning my blurred and unbelieving gaze to my wife, to ascertain whether it was her neck, arm, leg, or simply her wrist that had been fractured, I was staggered to find her once again on her feet, angrily dusting herself down, the jagged remains of the club in her non-dusting hand.”

The lawyer made sounds of distress.

“You said it,” the Murderer said. “A club with which I had chipped my way out of many a tight corner; especially at the club dances when that confounded Mrs. Hhuntington hhereford got me lined up in her sights. She couldn’t resist small men. Compact, she called me. Sturdy, too, as I recall. However,” The Murderer dashed away a tear—whether for the demise of his number eight iron or the memory of missed opportunities at the club dances, the lawyer couldn’t be sure.

“My wife brutally brandished the remains at me, loudly decrying the manufacturer who had supplied what she described as a flimsy excuse for a golfing stick. I was too heartbroken to reply, too ravaged by a bitter and lasting grief to do anything other than dumbly take the body from her careless grasp. I completed the hole with a further—” the Murderer winced as he forced the hateful figures between clenched teeth—“seven strokes, but I was beyond caring by this time, chipping clumsily, putting like a lost soul.

“I was like a man in the grip of a nightmare as I followed her to the fourth and fatal tee. There, the fairway coiled before us, a fiendishly ingenious piece of golfing architecture, the sight of which has never failed to shatter the confidence of all but the half-witted and the short-sighted. Bunkers to the left, trees to the right, and a yawning chasm bisecting the fairway, the lip of its farther slope a full two hundred and five yards, two feet, nine and seven thirty-seconds of an inch away.

“Many golfers, as you know, have retreated gibbering from that spot, incurably afflicted with the Fourth Tee Twitch, that dreaded malady which renders the imbibing of liquid impossible other than through a straw, and induces in the victim a compulsion to buy and store unreasonably vast quantities of golf balls. My wife merely cast a nonchalant glance at this bleakly intimidating terrain, made a comment to the effect that it was about time that it was tidied up a bit, and contorted herself into her customary striking stance.

“Until this point her performance, fantastic though it had undoubtedly been, was not entirely beyond the bounds of reason. Her use of the club, while in itself undeniably horrifying to the sensitive observer, had resulted in nothing more than a remarkable series of freak shots, all physically possible if not exactly probable in such unprecedented profusion.

“She had also, of course, been more than fortunate in that certain static objects arranged for the purpose of creating hazards to impede the player had instead perversely aided her to achieve the incredible results I had witnessed on that grim and godless morning. It is true that the odds against such a sequence of improbabilities are zillions to one-against—ninety-eight zillion or thereabouts, I make it—but they are, at least, minimally possible.

“However, at this stage in the proceedings it was at last made abundantly clear that all logic had deserted this earthly realm, and that chaos, cold and uncaring, now reigned in its stead.

“The raven,” the Murderer said, with an abrupt change of gear that had the lawyer floundering for a moment or two, “is traditionally a symbol of evil, a line of thought to which I now subscribe with the utmost vigour, for I was about to witness a demonstration that bracketed it once and for all with those things that are so obviously thrust upon us by the boys downstairs. Things like the fourteenth hole at Snidgely Common,” the Murderer said broodingly.

“Anyway, she swung at the ball, an action that was accompanied by the tuneful and unmistakable snap of a disintegrating garter. With an exclamation of annoyance she cast the club from her and commenced to rummage beneath her skirt, while I, with faith suddenly re-ignited in my bosom, watched her ball rise at a limp tangent, fall to the ground a mere ten yards from where we stood, then trickle from sight into the yawning mouth of the ravine.

“And then it happened. A sinister flapping sound commenced, and before my eyes the black and malevolent figure of a raven rose from the murky depths. Clenched tightly in its claws was my wife’s ball. It turned a beadily thoughtful eye in my direction, sneered visibly, then turned and flew away from where we stood, headed directly down the centre of the fairway. Several yards short of the distant green it relinquished its grip, on my wife’s ball, which fell on level turf, bounded a short distance, and became stationary approximately six inches from the hole.”

A deathly hush filled the small drab room, a silence that was broken at last by the lawyer’s tremulous tones.

“At such times there is little one can say.”

“Permit me to differ,” the Murderer grated. “At such times there is a good deal one can say, and I count myself fortunate that my vocabulary is at least adequately equipped for such an occasion. As the power of speech returned, I utilized it to the full. I spoke. I employed the sum total of the invective at my command, unleashing on the elements a tirade that would not have disgraced a regimental sergeant-major whose foot has just been run over by a fifty-ton tank.”

The lawyer smiled reminiscently. “Your story puts me in mind of my own reaction to recent trying circumstances. A muffed putt on the seventh only last Wednesday—”

The Murderer shook his head warningly. “To continue. As I paused to gather breath to continue my harangue, she intervened. She said she had no idea what I was talking about, that if I wished to employ disgusting language I could do so elsewhere, that I was nothing more than a rotten sport, insanely jealous of her obvious talent for a game at which I appeared to be somewhat less than competent, and that she was going home to her mother. And then,” the Murderer said, his voice a low, sudden sob, “she said—It.”

The lawyer winced, and summoned an inadequate tut.

“She said,” the Murderer said, his voice that of a man who has heard the Devil’s testament, “that it was, after all, simply a footling game, a pastime for retired bank managers and the feeble-minded. What person in his right senses, she wished to know, could actually derive enjoyment from striking a small ball with a stick that has a knob on the end, and frequently subjected to the buffering of the elements in the process? Who, she jeeringly queried, but an adolescent numbskull, retarded beyond belief, would thrill to the prospect of pursuing that same small ball for a distance of several miles, weaving from rough to hedge to bunker to ditch, exhausting both body and patience in the process and building up a bigger crop of ulcers than you could shake a stick at?

“There was more, much more, but it became simply a blur of words, a foully blasphemous sound that had to be stopped at all cost. And while red mist roiled before my eyes, it was done. I used my wedge,” the Murderer said. His eyes were moist with tears. “A crisp, wristy hit, with plenty of follow-through. She felt no pain, I am sure.”

His head sank on his chest, and he was silent at last.

“You were sorely tried,” the lawyer said hoarsely. He felt deeply for this man. “Under such brutally provocative circumstances, how can I say what I myself, despite the appalling prospect of having to conduct my own defence on such a charge, might have done? A rather intriguing example of this particular predicament,” the lawyer said, his voice adopting a professional drone, “was the case of Crown vs. Gubbins—”

“What have I done?” the Murderer cried. The lawyer blundered to a halt, losing the thread of things. “What have I done, what have I done?”

The lawyer endeavoured to soothe him. “A perfectly understand—”

“But she was right!” the Murderer cried. He leaped to his feet, wild-eyed, and cast his putter from him with a gesture of sudden loathing. “What is it but a recreation for the shallow and childish, an obsessive drug that blinds us to the true values? The human relationship, the bond between man and man, and,”—he sobbed—“man and his mate—there you have the true reason for existence!”

“What?” the lawyer cried, aghast.

The Murderer dispersed the pile of treasured score cards with a well-aimed kick. “I have been blind, blind! Why, when it is too late, has the truth made itself known to me? She was right! It is simply a footling game, a pastime for retired bank managers and the feeble-minded.! What person in his right senses would actually derive enjoyment from striking a small ball with a stick that has a knob on the end, and frequently subjected to the buffeting of the elements in the process? Who but an adolescent numbskull, retarded beyond belief—?”

He spoke on, but in the lawyer’s ears it became simply a blur of words, a foully blasphemous sound that had to be stopped at all cost.

And while red mist roiled before his eyes, the lawyer reached blindly for the Murderer’s discarded putter…

* * * *

“Ghastly business, ghastly,” the warden said. He coughed, distinctly ill at ease. “No, I mean, really. Er—rather unusual, too, I should have thought. Surely something with a little more loft to it—? Oh, well, no matter. What I fail to understand—ah—what has me totally baffled—er, that is to say, in a nutshell, if you follow :me, why did you—ah—do it?”

The lawyer sat before the warden in his office, his eyes downcast, his face wan. A guard stood at his shoulder, the murder weapon in his hand.

The lawyer opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again, croaked, then was silent.

The warden cracked his knuckles nervously.

“Company cramping your style, possibly? Quite understandable. Embarrassed and so forth. Man in your position—ah—Jenkins.” The guard stiffened to attention. “Might be better if you waited outside. You can leave the—ah—thing.” The guard exited.

“Well, now,” the warden said, leaning forward and shuffling his feet beneath the desk. “Better, eh? Free to talk, and all that.” He fiddled with the putter. “Jolly nice little club, this. Very much the style of thing I was using myself a year or so back. Rather too much meat on the shaft, I found—however,” He pushed it away. “You were saying?”

The lawyer opened his mouth again, croaked tentatively, then spoke in low, broken tones.

“He insisted on describing in detail the events that had resulted in his incarceration and forthcoming demise, warning me at the time that a strong stomach would be an advantage, as it was a tale that would sicken all but the stoutest. He spoke metaphorically, he assured me. It began, it seems, as many other mornings had begun…”

The warden settled back in his chair, adopting an expression of polite interest. He had, if truth be told, been booked to play in a foursome later that afternoon, but he felt that all things considered it would have been churlish to have mentioned it…