Quintin Jardine - As Easy as Murder

I keyed in the numbers that Jordi had written down and pressed ‘call’. It took a few seconds to make the connection, but when the ringing tone began it came in single pulses, a clue that the owner was in Spain, or some other part of Europe. It sounded six times, and then it switched to voicemail.

‘Hello,’ a deep, confident, cultured baritone greeted me. ‘This is Uche.’ What the hell happened to Mr Wigwe? I wondered. ‘I’m afraid that I can’t take your call just now, but if you tell me what’s on your mind, then I promise I’ll do something about it.’

What was on my mind was ‘Who the fuck are you?’ but I decided not to share that with him. Instead, I killed the call. He wasn’t linked to my former job, that was for sure, and I didn’t take him for a friend of a friend. If a chum of mine had known anyone with a name like that, more than likely I’d have heard about him and it would have stuck.

That left only one other likely explanation: journalist. It doesn’t happen very often but it has done. On two or three occasions I’ve had approaches from hacks digging into Oz’s life and death. In every case I’ve refused to speak to them: more, I’ve left them in no doubt that if they bothered me further, I had friends in the police force and elsewhere who would bother them.

‘I think I’ll just sweep you under the rug, mate,’ I whispered to myself.

‘Sorted?’ Ben asked as I moved back towards the shade of the entrance tent.

I shook my head. ‘A mystery,’ I replied, ‘and that’s how it will remain. If he calls again, you’ve never heard of me.’

I went back to Tom and to my happy day.

When the next one dawned, there were clouds in the sky. That suited my son, because he had school, and I didn’t mind either. In my experience golf courses are best avoided, either as player or spectator, when the temperature heads towards the nineties as it can here when you least expect it. Tom took his bike to school, with a packed lunch in his haversack. The former was normal, since it was no more than a ten-minute cycle; the latter he likes to do more often than not.

I’d never been to the PGA Catalunya course, but I had a feeling that it would be even more upmarket than the Emporda norm, which can be fairly posh, so I chose a designer outfit that I’d bought in Barcelona, sticking a lightweight rainproof jacket in my shoulder bag as a precaution, just in case those clouds were water-bearing.

I arrived at Shirley’s a couple of minutes ahead of schedule. The bitch in me hoped that I might catch them on the hop, or even on the job, but they were ready and waiting. Shirl had coffee on the hob and fresh croissants warming in the oven. I was determined not to let Patterson have a whiff of my precautionary interest in him, but I couldn’t stop myself from sneaking the occasional glance at him, trying to catch him off guard, to see if anything showed in his eyes other than the bonhomie so evident at our first meeting.

There was nothing; if anything he was even more laid-back. Those laugh-lined eyes of his were positively twinkling. So, indeed were Shirley’s. I reckoned that they must be getting very well acquainted. Looking at the pair of them made me wonder about myself. They were twenty years older than me and obviously at it like rabbits. So what had I become? Wasn’t I a woman any longer? I hadn’t fancied anyone since Gerard left, not for a second.

It passed quickly, though, as I told myself why that was. In the couple of days that had gone by since Gerard’s letter, I’d come to think of him as a lucky escape. I’d found him attractive, sure, but. . a lapsed priest, for Christ’s sake!

The fact is, my sexual career hasn’t been very exciting or very extensive. I won’t list all my partners: suffice it to say that I’m well short of double figures. And here’s the truth, boys. Of that number, only Oz really knew what he was doing down there, or to put it another way, cared about what he was doing for me. The others ate, shot and left, more or less. A wise and cynical lady, whose name I’ve forgotten, once said that the two saddest times in a woman’s life are, one, when her partner can’t find her clitoris, and two, when he finds it. I’ve had enough sadness in my life, and I’m not about to go looking for more.

Our leisurely breakfast behind us, we hit the road. I didn’t take the scenic route. Patterson had to make do with the scenery from the autopista. It took little more than three-quarters of an hour to find the championship venue. The newish PGA course is set between two trunk roads, just south of Girona Airport, but not so close to the flight path for it to be a major nuisance. It’s tree-lined, with undulating fairways (for non-golfers, those are the close-mown bits where the ball’s supposed to land) that look odd, given that they’re still surrounded by forest, the rest of which was cleared so they could be made. It’s a lovely course, though, and on that day had been beautifully presented for play.

Patterson was surprised to find that the visitors’ car park was far from full. In fact, the place looked deserted. In the distance I could see vans standing beside a giant marquee; it was the exhibitors’ tent, I supposed, but they all seemed to be dropping off stock, so I realised that it wouldn’t be open for business for a few hours, and probably not that day.

‘Where do they sell tickets?’ Patterson asked.

‘What makes you think they will?’ I countered. ‘They might charge a few euro admission during the tournament itself, but not on the practice days.’

‘If this was Wentworth,’ he began, ‘even on a Monday. .’

‘But it isn’t Wentworth,’ I pointed out. ‘It’s Spain, and in this country, golf is still very much a posh people’s sport. Sure, there are plenty of courses around but they’re mostly used by Brits, Germans and Swedes. You can walk up and play on them, but they’re not cheap. As for tournaments like this. . when this starts properly, you’ll find that most of the spectator announcements will be in English.’

As I spoke I wondered whether I should have talked them into waiting until Wednesday or Thursday; but what the hell, I’d shown them the way. If they wanted to come back when the action started, they could. In the meantime, we were there, and there was nothing to do but go in search of whatever there was to be seen.

As we left the car park we saw that there was more bustle about the place than we had realised. Plastic seats were being fitted on the spectator grandstands, a television camera was being winched up on to a stand and a giant leader-board was under construction, beside what I guessed had to be the eighteenth green. The tented village was being set up just behind a big modern clubhouse, around which, happily, there seemed to be plenty happening. There were tables out front under a sun awning; all of them were occupied, exclusively by men, some in blazers like Patterson’s (I had begun to think of it as his uniform), others in what seemed, from a distance, to be designer golf gear. None of it, I reckoned, had been picked up for a couple of euro at the Palafrugell street market.

‘What do we do?’ Shirley asked.

‘Find the practice ground?’ I suggested.

‘How?’

I looked around for any sort of public information, but saw none, not even a layout of the course. Then I glanced back towards the clubhouse and saw three men appear. One, in a T-shirt and shorts, was carrying an enormous golf bag covered in logos, the second, who wore slacks and jacket, had a phone pressed to his ear and was in mid-conversation, and the third, in golf gear and with two-tone footwear that looked hand-crafted, had ginger hair tied back in a ponytail. I recognised him from telly as a pro.

‘Let’s follow them,’ I proposed.