Murder at the Open Read online

  Murder at the Open

  Angus MacVicar

  © Angus MacVicar 1965

  Angus MacVicar has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1965 by The Anchor Press Ltd.

  This edition published in 2016 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  1. Sunday

  2. Monday

  3. Tuesday

  4. Wednesday

  5. Thursday

  6. Friday

  1. Sunday

  That Sunday morning, soon after six o’clock, Aidan and I went walking. The party the night before had been slightly hectic; and, having Presbyterian consciences, we wanted rid of any lingering whisky fumes before attending public worship at the Kirk of the Holy Trinity later in the day.

  Even on the 5th of July the clear air of St Andrews, Scotland, had a trace of bite in it. As we tramped down the first fairway of the Old Course, our shoes sullying the dewy silver of the grass, we inhaled great lungfuls of air and enjoyed, not for the first time, its therapeutic qualities.

  At this hour of the Sabbath the venerable golf-course was deserted except for ourselves. It stretched away in front, shorn and trim, the white and red flags limp in the morning stillness. With the Open Championship due to begin on Wednesday morning, it had a green glory that to a golfer was like a Constable landscape to an art lover.

  We had motored through from Glasgow in time to watch the qualifying rounds over the New and Eden Courses on the Friday and Saturday. It was a holiday we had both looked forward to for almost a year; and we had been careful to reserve rooms in the hotel months in advance, for during the fortnight of a Championship the population of St Andrews, normally ten thousand, easily trebles itself, and accommodation becomes as rare as a hole in one.

  So far, the weather and the golf had been up to our expectations.

  The leading qualifiers were young Cobie Legrange from South Africa — recently a winner of the Masters’ Tournament — and Ronnie Shade, the elegant Scottish amateur. For once we harboured a quiet hope that the Open might be won not by a famous American or a mature native of the Commonwealth but by an interesting newcomer.

  Whatever the outcome, however, we were in a happy mood of anticipation, observing the marquees and tents and scoreboards going up, the spectators’ stands being erected, the television towers rising like skeletons in the clear air. There is a thrill about an Open at St Andrews that exists nowhere else.

  We had found the company at the hotel congenial. English golfers and American tycoons listened with genuine interest to Aidan’s monologues on the history of the town. I was thankful to relax and say very little and look forward to a week in which there would be no necessity to write a word of ‘copy’. Last night’s party had been gay and friendly, and really good whisky had been forthcoming if you asked for it, which doesn’t always happen in holiday hotels.

  Now, preferring exercise to health salts as a cure for a hangover, Aidan and I walked smartly, skirting the whins which separate the Old Course from the New. Beyond the fifth tee, we cut across past the Beardies bunkers on to the Elysian Fields. There we turned and began to make our way back, by way of the Principal’s Nose and the Railway Sheds.

  The old grey town was silhouetted against a sunny sky. It lay in silence, a sheltering arm of slate-roofed buildings thrown around the Cathedral and the Castle and the Royal and Ancient Clubhouse. The time was now nearly seven o’clock, but only a few chimneys were plumed by breakfast smoke.

  “Marvellous!” said Aidan, striding and sniffing. “A skyline as famous in its own way as Manhattan. I remember playing golf here with the Principal of Oklahoma University. He stood on the sixteenth tee and said he could scarcely believe his eyes. To him it was a skyline out of a fairy-tale. Of course, his enthusiasm may have been due partly to the fact that at the time he was two up with three to play!”

  “Your liver seems to be improving,” I said.

  “Right now I feel like doing seventy on the Eden and beating you by ten and eight!”

  “Last time we played on the Eden you took seventy-nine, and I won by three and two.”

  “Angus, what a Philistine you are! Leave me to my dreams, can’t you? ‘Fair dreams of morning: dreams amongst the dew … ’”

  “Poetry never sank a putt,” I told him.

  “You’re mistaken!” he came back. “The secret of poetry is rhythm and timing, which is also the secret of good putting. Of every golf stroke, in fact.”

  He could argue figs off thistle-stalks when the mood was on him.

  By now we had reached the springy turf of the seventeenth fairway and had in view the most famous golf green in the world — the slightly elevated Road Hole, with the deep bunker to the left and the flinty hazard of road beyond it and to the right, the ultimate test of nerve and skill in a close-run game.

  We passed the Scholar’s Bunker and made right for the eighteenth tee and the stone bridge across the Swilcan.

  Ahead of us — on our starboard bow, as it were — the, Road Bunker loomed deep. Had we approached it from any other direction I doubt if we’d have noticed anything odd about it. Indeed, all we spotted at first were a few criss-cross marks, as if someone had been trying to smooth the damp, tumbled sand with the head of a club.

  Tall, gangling and wispy-haired like an animated scarecrow, Aidan squatted on the verge and peered down into it. “Observe!” he said, as if addressing his class of Literature and Poetry at Glasgow University. “Last night, practising for the Open, one of the great men makes an error. A pulled second, a sclaffed third — who knows? He finds his ball in the bunker, fails to hack it out and in the end is at pains to obliterate the evidence of his ignominy!”

  Professor Aidan Caerlavrock Campbell, forty-seven years old and scion of an ancient family, has a name like a drum-roll. His frequent bursts of what he calls ‘essays in deductive logic’ are also like drum-rolls, to be suffered in numb, admiring silence.

  “Panton or Will?” he went on. “Henning or Hutchinson? Miguel or Garialde? Impossible, surely! Such masters of the sand-wedge would have had the ball out in one deft flick. The Americans? Rodgers played with Charles during the afternoon — we watched them, remember? — and from the condition of the sand, crisp and fresh, this happened late last night. Ergo, it’s the work of some blasted Englishman!”

  Prodding a lump in the sand with the 3-iron I’d been using as a walking stick, I smiled to myself. Aidan was a Scottish Nationalist, with a high octane flash-point. An ancestor of his had been beheaded in the Tower of London for having ‘succoured and clandestinely hidden’ a prominent Jacobite. This may have had something to do with it.

  “Englishman or not,” he said, frowning behind his horn-rims, “it’s rather odd. Almost incredible, in fact. A bunker on the Old Course knocked about like this on the eve of the Open”

  “Aidan!” I interrupted, shocked into quavering speech. “Do you see what I see?”

  “My God!” he breathed.

  It was a man’s closed fist. Between the thumb and forefinger there protruded the torn edge of a scrap of paper.

  *

  Inspector Samuel McLintock was a native of Dundee, which, in addition to jute, jam and journalism, produces some remarkably astute policemen. His colleagues in the Fifeshire Constabulary — and a surprising number of people in St Andrews and the surrounding countryside — knew him as Big Sam.

  Burly in brown Harris-tweed jacket, shaven face as formidable as a wrestler’s, he was on the spot by a quarter to eight. His assistants included a police doctor, a uniformed sergeant with a camera, two ambulance men, three Council employees with shovels — and a senior greenkeeper w
ho watched the digging with anxious, not to say, anguished eyes.

  We had raised the alarm from a nearby phone-box. Now we hovered on the outskirts of the crowd, our appetites for breakfast submerged in stomach-churning curiosity.

  Aidan moved restlessly, like a stork on a chimney. “The ring on the little finger!” he muttered, thrusting his face close to mine. “Don’t you remember it, at the party?”

  Like Jesting Pilate, he didn’t wait for an answer. A flashbulb blinked twice, and he turned away in haste to watch closely as the body was lifted from its shroud of sand.

  They laid it on the mown turf, beside the stretcher. Blood had oozed from injuries to the left side of the grey-fringed head on to the silvery tussore jacket and dark blue woollen shirt. When the doctor began to carry out a preliminary examination nausea welled in my throat.

  But the ugliness of death had no obvious effect on Aidan. “I suspected it!” he announced, with histrionic gusto. “Now that I ve seen his face, I know for certain! Inspector, I recognise this man!”

  “Indeed, sir?” Big Sam had been studying the scrap of paper prised from the stiff, dead fingers. Now he stood upright, his blue eyes as sharp as icicles.

  “He was staying at our hotel, with his niece, his personal secretary and a chauffeur. Last night he threw a party, to celebrate his first hole in one. He was wearing that ring and those same clothes.”

  The others gaped, my friend’s excitement reflected in their faces.

  “His name?” said Big Sam, dourly.

  “Conrad J. Lingstrom. He is — or was — President of a firm called Golf Products Incorporated. An American. A millionaire, I believe.” Aidan paused and took breath. He sidled closer to the Inspector. “Tell me,” he said, in his usual glamorous whisper, “is it murder?”

  Big Sam gazed distantly at the Railway Sheds. That he disapproved of such a melodramatic approach was clear to everyone but his questioner. “Will you excuse me now, sir?” he said. “I’ll be at the hotel in half-an-hour to take statements. Yours and Mr MacVicar’s included.”

  “But the niece? The secretary? Who’s going to tell them?”

  “I infer from the Masonic ring that Mr Lingstrom was a Protestant, so I’ll ask my own minister to help me break the news.” The words were rung out, a sop to amateur ignorance. “Later on, the niece will have to make a formal identification at the mortuary.”

  “Her name’s Debbie, Inspector — Debbie Lingstrom. We met last night at the party. A ‘rare and radiant maiden’ whom even Edgar Allan Poe would have approved of. As lovely and as shapely as a sonnet.”

  Big Sam blinked. When Aidan got going, even strong men were apt to be disconcerted.

  The spate continued: “The secretary’s probably ten years older, about thirty-five. Good looking in a weather-beaten way, but a tough nut — definitely a tough nut. Someone told me last night that she’s a former Lady Champion of America. Golf, you understand. She’s corrie-fisted, like Bob Charles. Gets her clubs specially made”

  “Do you mind!” Big Sam pulled himself together and exerted the full power of his personality. “You’ve been very helpful, Professor. Very helpful indeed. But as a policeman I prefer to make up my own mind about people in a case.” He turned his massive back. For once Aidan took a hint.

  *

  We breakfasted in the hotel. It was a good hotel, comfortable and pleasantly staffed, with a management which understood that during the Open Championship guests with the golf bug require meals at unorthodox times.

  That morning the dining-room was full. A few of the small flower-decorated tables were occupied by wealthier professionals, tanned dark by sun and wind, calm and aloof. Young couples dealt anxiously with lively, talkative children. Elderly folk, some of whom I recognised as habitual spectators at the Open like Aidan and myself, talked quietly to each other, not on the usual golf watchers’ subjects but about the sensational news that had so suddenly erupted into the Sabbath peace of St Andrews. Americans who had joined in the party the previous night looked lost and unhappy, for it was one of their own number who had died.

  Debbie Lingstrom and Erica Garson were absent from their usual table; and the room seemed dull and drab because of it.

  Aidan ate more heartily than I did. This was customary in spite of his spare figure and flat stomach. What wasn’t customary — far from it, indeed — were the monosyllabic replies he offered to most of my questions.

  As he turned from bacon and eggs to toast and marmalade he asked a question of his own: “What caused the damage to his head, do you think?”

  “I’m no expert. The conventional blunt instrument, possibly.”

  “The instrument wasn’t all that blunt. It lacerated the skin. Hence the blood.”

  “What’s your theory?”

  “It’s beginning to jell,” he told me, and again lapsed into uncharacteristic silence.

  After breakfast we went upstairs and waited in the small lounge which had been put at the disposal of the police.

  We smoked cigarettes and looked out at the Royal and Ancient Clubhouse and the sparkling sea beyond. Immediately below the window, on the area of turf in the Bow Butts, where archers had once foregathered for target-practice and where now the Professional Golfers’ Association scoreboard would soon be erected, groups of people in their Sunday best stood talking and shaking their heads. It wasn’t hard to guess the main topic of conversation.

  The Inspector arrived at half-past nine, brisk and authoritative. Accompanying him was a young policeman with a fair moustache who, in a slightly laborious shorthand, took down our statements concerning the finding of the body.

  Finally Big Sam leant forward, his elbows on the table. “You noticed that the sand in the bunker was a bit uneven. Nothing else attracted your attention?”

  Aidan shook his head. “Not at the time. Afterwards we did see traces of sand on the grass round about. And smears of blood, in the grassy hollow beyond the bunker.”

  “Quite. That’s where Lingstrom was killed.” Big Sam frowned, no longer coy about the idea of murder. Almost to himself he added: “Whoever did the burying job was a neat and tidy worker. It’s a big bunker, of course. Plenty of room in it to hold all the sand dug out of the hole before the body was dumped in and covered over.”

  “Have you found the weapon?” inquired Aidan. “Or the spade or shovel used to dig out the sand?”

  The Inspector gave him a sharp look. “Not yet.” There was a small silence. Then, as if making up his mind about something, he went on: “Has it occurred to you that the murderer may have used his bare hands to do the digging? The sand was slightly damp, after that shower of rain during the night. But it was loose and easily worked.”

  “A hit! A palpable hit!” agreed my friend.

  “Oh, well” — the Inspector heaved himself back in the chair — “time we got on with it. I’ll see the niece and the others”

  “Excuse me,” interrupted Aidan, blandly courageous, “could we possibly sit in while you talk to them? Our time and ideas are at your disposal.”

  Big Sam shook us with a smile. “I’ve been making inquiries about you two gentlemen. Careful inquiries. It seems you have helped the police before, Professor Campbell — at a murder case in Glasgow.”

  “In a small way, yes.” The modesty was somewhat overdone.

  “And I understand your friend is a responsible journalist?”

  “Undoubtedly!”

  “In that case you may stay. It will probably save me from a flood of irritating questions later on.” He uttered a strange little guffaw. “But remember,” he warned us, suddenly grim again, “you may not speak unless you’re spoken to!”

  Aidan winked at me. We were in. No matter how Big Sam might bluster we were now, in effect, officially helping the police.

  My feelings were mixed. It was gratifying to have the confidence of the police and to share Big Sam’s thoughts on the subject of Conrad Lingstrom’s death; but I prefer

  golf to murder any time, an
d if I knew Aidan, our programme of playing and watching it had now gone for a burton. The best I could hope for was that the mystery might be solved before the Championship proper began on Wednesday.

  *

  They all came in together, marshalled to their places by the young constable.

  Debbie Lingstrom’s heart-shaped face, haloed by honey blonde hair, was pale and tear-stained. This morning she had used scarcely any make-up. At the party she had bubbled with life, warming men’s hearts and eyes. Now some of that life seemed to have gone out of her. Even in her distress, however, and in spite of the plain dark frock she had chosen to wear in the company of death, she still possessed a physical attraction that to me was strong and disturbing.

  As she answered the Inspector’s questions her eyes were downcast. “When my parents died,” she told him, “Uncle Conrad raised me as his own daughter. We lived mostly in New York, to be near his business. But we also had a country house in Long Island, and in summer he’d spend weekends there, playing golf. Or trying to play golf,” she added, looking up with a shaky smile. “He wasn’t all that good, you know, though he tried to make people believe he was a tiger.”

  “You were fond of your uncle, Miss Lingstrom?”

  “I loved him. He was like a schoolboy, impulsive and generous. Generous to me, I mean — and to Erica and to — to O’Donnel, the chauffeur. I’ve heard it said that in business he could be as hard as flint, but then that’s business, I guess. Sometimes his temper flared — over little things as a rule — but it soon burnt itself out, and he always wanted to make friends again.”

  Bill Ferguson, whom we had also met the night before, sat attentively by her side. Dark and angular, he looked older than thirty, which was the age he gave to the Inspector. This may have been due partly to his concern for Debbie and partly to his burden of responsibility as head of Ferguson & Son, Ltd., the big Glasgow firm producing the famous Ferguson ‘Clipper’ clubs.

  “Debbie’s right,” he said. “Conrad was like that, unpredictable at times, but a real charmer as a rule. I liked him a lot. When my father died two years ago and I was left suddenly in full control of the firm, Conrad went out of his way to help me with the American side of our business. No cut-throat stuff as far as we were concerned.”