Joe nodded.
"Good. Now the conventional way of playing this hole would be to hit your first shot from the tee, that"s where we are, straight up to the dog-leg, that"s the bend. Then you would hit your second shot to the next bend, hopefully with a bit of draw, that means making it curl to the left so that it actually goes around the second bend as far as you can get it, to lessen the distance of your third shot. OK?"
"Yes," lied Joe.
"But what long hitters, and desperate idiots who are three down with three to play do is try to cut the first corner by hitting a drive straight over the trees on the right there, and hoping it takes a hop round the second bend and brings the green in sight."
"So you can get there in two shots?"
"That"s right!" said Porphyry, delighted. "I"m both a reasonably long hitter and a very dedicated idiot. Also I was dormy three, so I really let one go, didn"t quite catch it perfectly, and produced a slice. That means the ball started bending right. It wasn"t a huge slice but it was enough. I heard the ball rattling among the trees. All I could hope was that I was lucky and had a decent lie so that I could chip out. Of course I played a provisional ..."
He had started walking forward as he talked and Joe was once more trotting slightly behind.
"A Provisional?" he gasped, wondering how the IRA had got into things.
"I hit a second ball in case the first were lost," explained Porphyry. "You get a penalty shot for a lost ball, so if I didn"t find the first one, that would mean I"d played three with my second."
"Even though you"d only hit it once?" said Joe.
"Right! You"re beginning to get it, Joe," said the YFG with a confidence which was totally misplaced. "Syd was up by the dog-leg but had drifted into the short rough on the left. My provisional was up there too. He went forward to locate his ball while I shot off into the woods hoping to spot my first."
They were in the woods in question now. Again the shade was welcome. As they followed a diagonal line towards the stretch of fairway out of sight from the tee, Joe glimpsed a house through the trees, set well back.
As if answering a question, Porphyry said, "That"s Penley Farm where Jimmy Postgate lives. One of our founder members. In fact, come to think of it, the only one still with us. In his eighties, but still manages nine now and then. Lost distance, of course, but he"s never lost the ability to hit a straight ball. Dead straight in everything, Jimmy. True English gentleman, which is what makes it so difficult."
"Sorry?" said Joe, thinking, here we go! Back to round-the-houses land.
"But I"d better stick to the proper sequence so"s not to confuse you," said Porphyry. "I was poking around pretty aimlessly. To tell the truth, I hadn"t much hope, when you hear a ball clatter like that, you know it could have gone anywhere. Then I glimpsed something white up ahead towards the fairway there. Thought it was probably a mushroom at first, but when I went up to it, lo and behold, it was my ball! Here it was, right here. A truly fortunate lie."
They came almost to the edge of the trees. Here the ground was free of undergrowth, bare earth mainly with a bit of scrubby gra.s.s.
"How did you know it was your ball?" wondered Joe.
"Chap always knows what ball he"s playing with, otherwise there could be all kinds of confusion. I"m a t.i.tleist man myself, always Number 1, and just to make a.s.surance doubly sure, I have them personalized."
He pulled a ball out of his pocket and handed it to Joe. On it in purple was stamped a small seahorse with the initials CP.
"Family coat of arms. Three seahorses rampant, and a dolphin couchant."
Joe listened uncomprehendingly, but once the bit was between his teeth, he wasn"t a man to let himself be led astray, especially not by seahorses.
He said, "So you found your first ball. What about the other one you hit?"
"Oh, I gave Syd a wave to show him I was all right, and he played his second shot, then picked up my provisional and brought it with him. No use for it, you see, not once I"d found the first one."
Joe was still a bit bewildered by all this two-ball stuff. The same with tennis where if you missed your first serve, they let you have another. Imagine trying that in footie. Oh sorry, ref, says Beckham. I didn"t mean to blaze that one over the bar, can I have another go?
But it was too hot for diversion.
He said, "Any chance of getting to the cheating bit?"
"Yes, I"m getting there," said Porphyry with just the faintest hint of irritation. Even G.o.ds don"t care to be hurried. "Syd"s shot was pretty good, he drew it round the bend nicely, leaving himself a medium iron to reach the green in regulation. Now a half was no good to me you recall I was dormy three. So I took out my three wood. As you"ll have noticed, I didn"t have a view of the green. I was going to need to get not only the distance but put enough draw on the ball to take it round the bend and up to the green. As if to make up for my drive, I hit a cracker. Off it went and when we got to the green it was lying four feet from the flag and I knocked it in for an eagle. That means two under par. Three shots on this hole. So even though Syd got a birdie, that"s four shots on this hole, I won."
Joe said, "My head"s hurting."
Porphyry said anxiously, "It must be the sun. You should have worn a hat. Would you like to sit down for a minute?"
"No, I"m fine. We any nearer the cheating?"
"Nearly there," said the YFG, heading back into the woods in the direction of the house. "What happened was that Syd was a bit demoralized. Getting a birdie and still losing the hole can do that. I won the next two holes so we ended up all square."
"Like a draw?"
"That"s it. But you can"t have a draw in a knock-out compet.i.tion, so we went down the first again."
"To play another eighteen holes, you mean?" said Joe aghast.
"Oh no. First man to win a hole wins the match," said Porphyry.
"Like a penalty shoot-out?"
"Yes, I suppose so. I won that hole too, so we headed back to the clubhouse for a drink. My treat, of course, being the winner. We were standing at the bar. Syd was telling everyone who came in that I must have sacrificed a virgin to the devil or something, coming back from dormy three to win. He was particularly eloquent on my incredible luck on the sixteenth, clattering my drive into the woods, and yet still somehow managing to come up with an eagle to beat his birdie. He"d just repeated the story for the third or fourth time when Jimmy Postgate came in. That"s Jimmy from Penley Farm, the house I showed you on the far edge of these woods. He speaks quite loudly, Jimmy, because he"s a touch deaf. So everyone in the bar heard it loud and clear when he took a golf ball out of his pocket and tossed it to me, saying, "Here"s the one you lost at the sixteenth, Chris. Plopped right into my swimming pool! Good job there was no one in there or it might have been a burial-at-sea job!""
Trust.
Now the Young Fair G.o.d fell silent, clearly reliving what even Joe with his weak grasp on the finer points of the game could see must have been a devastating moment.
But just to be quite sure he said, "So if that was your ball went into the swimming pool, no way you could have found it sitting nice and handy right at the edge of the fairway. No way except one, that is?"
"Except one?"
The YFG was regarding him with hope brightening his face. Poor sod thinks I"m going to pull a rabbit out of the hat, thought Joe. Willie Woodbine must really have sold him the notion I"m some kind of voodoo priest. Well, it was disillusion time.
He said, "The except one being that you put it there."
The light died.
"Of course. That"s the obvious conclusion everyone reached."
"Not everyone, surely?"
"Oh, one or two like Jimmy tell me they find it impossible to believe, but I wouldn"t blame them if even they had doubts. Let"s face it, what other explanation can there be?"
"Only that you were fitted up," said Joe.
"Fitted up?"
It was hard to believe in this wall-to-wall TV cop-show age that anybody could still be ignorant of the jargon.
"That it"s a fix," said Joe. "That someone wants you to be accused of cheating."
"Oh," said the YFG, sounding disappointed again. "That"s what Willie suggested."
"Willie Woodbine? You called in the police?"
"Good lord, no. I didn"t do anything. I really thought it was so absurd it would just go away, some simple explanation would present itself, we"d all have a laugh and that would be that. But as the days went by, it became clear it wasn"t going away."
"People were accusing you, you mean?"
"Of course not. No, it was people coming up to me and a.s.suring me they didn"t believe a word of it that made me realize how much everyone was talking. I"d invited Willie along for a game on Sat.u.r.day I"m putting him up for membership, you know and while we were playing, it just sort of came up. I suppose I was hoping his professional expertise might be able to show me a way out. He was very sympathetic, but didn"t see how he could help officially. That was when he recommended you, Joe. So that"s why I came to see you yesterday."
"Yeah. Great. But Willie did reckon it might be an attempt to frame you?"
"Or a bad joke, perhaps, that went wrong. That"s what he said. Told me to ask myself who might be capable of doing such a thing."
"And?"
"I haven"t been able to think of a soul."
"You got no enemies then?" said Joe doubtfully.
"Not that I know of."
That figured. Joe too had once had a similar sunny confidence in human kind, till his chosen profession showed him flaws in his argument. Now he knew, sadly, that the fact that Porphyry thought everyone loved him would be enough to make those who didn"t hate him even more.
So no help with who? Which meant that the poor sod wasn"t going to be much help with why? either. How? was the easy one. Porphyry hit his ball into the wood. A lurking plotter hurled a similar ball into Postgate"s swimming pool, then placed the original one, or a third ball, if he couldn"t find the original, on the fringe of the fairway.
Or maybe this guy Postgate himself had orchestrated the whole thing. That would make life a lot simpler.
A few minutes later Joe was scrubbing this particular theory.
Porphyry now led him to Penley Farm, entering the long rear garden by a wicket gate. A man was dozing on a cane chair by a small swimming pool. He had a mop of vigorous white hair and a sun-browned complexion. As they got near, Porphyry called out, "h.e.l.lo, Jimmy," and the man opened his eyes, looking rather disorientated and extremely ancient. But when he saw who it was, a smile lit up his face, reducing him to a healthy eighty-year-old, and he rose to greet them.
"Chris, good to see you," he said, shaking the YFG"s hand vigorously.
"You too, you"re looking well, Jimmy. This is Joe Sixsmith. He"s a private detective. Joe, meet Jimmy Postgate, last of his kind more"s the pity."
Joe, who"d been expecting his role as prospective member to be maintained everywhere in the club, was a bit taken aback by Porphyry"s sudden attack of directness, but Postgate seemed to take it in his stride.
"Private detective, eh?" he said. "Never met one of them before. You look a bit overheated to me, Joe. Fancy a gla.s.s of lemonade? Or do you chaps only drink straight bourbon?"
"Lemonade would be great," said Joe.
They sat by the pool and drank their lemonade which was home-made and delicious, but it soon became apparent to Joe that it was going to be the only profitable part of the visit, unless you could count Postgate"s uncompromising a.s.sertion of his undentable belief in Porphyry"s innocence. Coming from a man who had inadvertently provided the cornerstone of the case against him, this struck Joe as a bit of a paradox, which he defined as something that didn"t make sense or made more sense than at first appeared, but whether it helped or hindered him he couldn"t say so he sent it to the Recycle Bin.
Invited to offer an alternative explanation of events, Postgate just shook his head and repeated, "No, it beats me. Beats me. All I know is that young Chris here doesn"t have a dishonest bone in him. Now, what can I do to help?"
Change your story, thought Joe. Though it was probably too late for even that to help.
He said, "Could you explain exactly what happened?"
"I was sitting in my chair here, reading my evening paper, when there was a splash, and when I looked into the pool I saw a ball. Fished it out and recognized it as one of Chris"s. No surprise there."
"You weren"t surprised?" said Joe, puzzled.
"No! Takes a big hitter and Chris is one of the longest hitters in the club. It"s a carry of at least three hundred yards. Even though it was well off line, I thought Chris would be quite chuffed to hear he"d got that distance when I tossed the ball back to him in the clubhouse. If I"d known the bother it was going to cause, I"d have kept my mouth shut!"
Joe studied the pool then looked up at the trees towering high around the level lawns of the garden. He turned to Porphyry, who was enjoying his lemonade as if he hadn"t a care in the world, and said, "Thought you heard your ball clattering among the trees?"
"Yes, I did."
"You hear that?" he asked Postgate.
"No, but I"m a little deaf these days," said the man cheerfully. "OK up to a dozen or so yards, but after that it"s the silent land."
There seemed little else to learn here and Joe was beginning to find his host"s cheery demeanour and his client"s hopeful gaze equally oppressive.
"I"m done here," he said, adding without any great conviction, "for now."
They took their leave of Postgate and headed round the front of the house. Joe was quite lost by now but Porphyry told him they were walking back towards the clubhouse up the third fairway. Then he added, "So, Joe, now you know as much about the business as I know, what do you think?"
I think you"re in freefall, mate, and the only way you"re going to stop is when you hit the ground, thought Joe.
"I"m pondering it," he said. "Ponder first, speak last, that"s my rule."
The truth was that, despite his earlier resolution that just coming out here and seeing how the other one per cent lived had earned him the money in his back pocket, he was beginning to feel bad about it again. There was nothing he could even pretend to be doing. It wasn"t a question of Porphyry"s guilt or innocence, though the notion had crept into his mind that maybe when it came to golf the guy was so focused on winning that it blinded him to the truth of his own behaviour. Games could do this to people. Joe"s taxi-driving buddy, Merv Golightly, was a case in point. A lovely guy, loyal in friendship, generous and kind in nature, a total sweetie till you came up against him compet.i.tively, that was. Then he couldn"t lose. He would cheat his young nephew at snap. Snooker b.a.l.l.s rearranged themselves to give him an easier pot. Needing a double to win at darts, he would follow his arrow to the board and pluck it out with a cry of triumph before you could see for sure which side of the wire it had clipped. And if challenged, his protestations of innocence were so clearly genuine that Joe had long since concluded he really believed them!
No, the trouble was Joe couldn"t see anywhere else to go, even to pretend he was doing something. Time to break away. The only question was, how much of the two hundred did he feel he could legitimately take with him.
"You earned any of it, Joseph?" he could hear Aunt Mirabelle asking.
"Not exactly."
"Then you give it all back, boy," she said sternly. "You know I"m right."
The Bermuda Triangle were still sitting on the terrace. As they pa.s.sed their table, Latimer waved a gla.s.s and called, "Chris, why don"t you and Joe join us?"
Not waiting for Porphyry to reply, Joe said, "Look, I need to get back to town. Got an urgent appointment, running late already."
"Pity," said Porphyry. "Thanks anyway, Tom. Oh, Colin ... something I had to tell you ... what was it? Sorry ... a bit distracted lately ..."
Impatient to be away, Joe chipped in. "Wasn"t it about some worker who"s gone missing? Waring or something?"