Quintin Jardine - Skinner’s round

`That's the plan. Suddenly you see a chance to put it all into practice in one sweep. Masur and Morton are both here. Even better, they're at each other's throats over Tiger Nakamura.'

Skinner's ball was only a few yards short of Atkinson's bunker. He thought about trying for the green but saw the sand lying in wait ahead, and hit a five-wood, leaving himself a thirty-yard pitch to the green.

The champion's ball was plugged wickedly in the bunker. Even with his strength and skill he was able only to coax it clear by a few feet, the ball landing in straggly semi-rough, only its top visible. Looking at the lie, Skinner expected him to select a mid-iron and to trust to his wedge to save par. But he was mistaken. Three-wood, please, Mario,' said Atkinson. To the astonishment of the gallery, Atkinson took the club and, from that position, fashioned the finest golf shot Skinner had ever seen. The ball soared away, on a right-left drawn trajectory, rather than the usual professional's faded shot, flying against the line of the curving fairway, flirting with the trees of Witches' Hill, but plunging, as if wire-guided, into the centre of the green and rolling up to the very edge of the hole. The spectators in the small stand behind the green rose to their feet as one. The gallery around the golfers cheered wildly. As the ball came to rest, Atkinson glared across at Skinner with fire in his eyes, and his lips drawn back in a silent animal snarl.

As they walked on down the fairway, the policeman said quietly. 'That was a sort of answer, Darren, wasn't it? You know, it's as well you use golf clubs, not firearms. Otherwise I think I'd have to kill you, and I'd hate that.'

His tone changed and became conversational once more. As I said, I've encountered people like you two before. They've always perished on the sword of their own ambition. You guys have perished on your imagination. Just as no one else would have imagined that shot back there, so no one but Rick would have had the flair to fasten on that bloody stupid note by Hector Kinture's mother to the Scotsman.

`The trouble is, once I found something out, it was like a signature. And what I discovered was that Rick, as Henry Wills's student fifteen years back, had heard the vague, unsupported tale of the Witch's Curse.

It was dismissed as colourful folklore by serious academics like Henry, but it stuck in Rick's mind, and when he read the old Lady Kinture's piece of nonsense in the newspaper, he had his brainwave. "Blade, Fire and Water", the old curse said, and here you were, with your potential victims, at Witches' Hill.' He paused to allow the champion to stride ahead on to the green, smiling and waving to the cheering crowds, and to tap his ball in for a fourth birdie.

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.'

I'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.

And 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!

I 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.'