Free Rest Assured by J.M. Gregson

certainly a false alarm, Debbie. But if you have any further thoughts on it, or hear of anyone else being threatened, you should get in touch with me immediately at this number.’ He gave her his card. She studied it with the reverence she might have accorded to a royal telegram before setting it carefully against a china dog on her mantelpiece.
    He was leaving her home when Walter Keane appeared and was introduced. Hook hastened away to take his leave of the Ramsbottoms and head for home. As he left he heard Debbie saying to her husband, ‘You’ll never guess what’s happened, Wally …’
    So much for confidentiality.
    George Martindale and his family arrived for the weekend half an hour after DS Hook had left Twin Lakes.
    The Martindales were popular on the site. The whole family were very black and very cheerful. Even the people who thought you should never mention the word black when speaking of people knew that you couldn’t escape it with the Martindales. George and Mary seemed to thrust it at you sometimes, with their smooth dark faces and their large and very white teeth, whilst their two young children seemed totally unconscious of their colour. More importantly, they were perpetually cheerful and polite. Well brought up, people said approvingly. That phrase represented the perfect middle-class compliment for children, and there were many middle-class people who had units at Twin Lakes.
    George was Jamaican and Mary was Nigerian, but many people thought that they were from the same place. Their two delightful boys were aged eight and six. By seven o’clock on this May evening, both boys were out on the otherwise deserted golf course with their father, staring at small white balls with the intensity and single-minded concentration which only children of their age can summon. Mum was preparing food. It was an arrangement which feminists would have deplored but which Mary seemed happy to accept. The boys – and the much bigger boy who had sired them – were out from under her feet whilst she got on with preparing a meal in the rather constricted kitchen of her holiday home.
    The boys had cut-down clubs and were showing promise. That at any rate was the verdict of their cheerfully biased father. Tommy, the six-year-old, grew increasingly frustrated as he perpetrated two air shots, then a series of frantic swings which sent his ball scuttling along the ground. He said a rude word, was admonished by his father, and maintained sturdily that he had learned the word from him. Then, wonder of wonders, he dropped the face of his iron club on the ball correctly and it soared high and straight in front of him, to noisy acclaim from his father and more muted recognition from his elder brother.
    This wonder stroke immediately became to Tommy his natural game and his usual shot. His previous efforts were forgotten as mere aberrations from his normal game, probably the result of some external distraction from his partners or from the world around them.
    At six years old, Tommy was on his way to becoming a golfer.
    His father was a powerful man and an optimist. This is rarely an effective combination when golf is the sport. George smote the ball vast distances, but only rarely on the line which was required. His sons were impressed by his drives, but intrigued by the places from which he had to play his second shots. Martindale was a big man, but definitely not at his golfing best when he was bent almost double beneath birch trees or standing on one leg against a fir.
    â€˜You’d be better taking a drop,’ advised his elder boy gravely. Nicky was offering the accumulated golfing wisdom of an eight-year-old.
    His father would undoubtedly have counselled a drop to any of his normal golfing companions, with the resultant penalty of one shot, and a free swing. He now waved away his son’s advice and told him to stand clear of danger. This splendid figure of a man then crouched on one