Free Dead on Course by J. M. Gregson

must have expected to be questioned. Had these two been in the middle of a row? ‘Perhaps I should tell you that it seems certain now that a serious crime has been committed.’
    Munro licked his lips and hesitated. It was his wife who said, ‘You’re quite sure, then, that Guy was murdered?’ This was ground they had already covered when he had met the golfing party together earlier in the day. She might have been just breaking the conversational ice, but he sensed she was temporising, playing for a little time while she organised her thoughts.
    ‘ That will be a decision for the Coroner’s Court in due course, Mrs Munro. But yes, our pathologist seems reasonably sure from his examination that Mr Harrington did not die from natural causes. Whether the death was a result of suicide, manslaughter or murder remains to be seen.’
    ‘ Or accident.’ Sandy Munro found his voice at last—and discovered himself almost shouting. He said apologetically, ‘Presumably Guy could simply have fallen to his death?’
    He must have heard his wife ’s sharp intake of breath, for his head jerked towards her with a look of fear. In the long moment that Lambert allowed to stretch among them, the Scotsman still did not seem to grasp the mistake he had made. It was Hook who said eventually, ‘You think that’s how he died then, Mr Munro? A fall?’
    ‘ But surely you told us earlier in the day that he had fallen from the roof garden of the hotel during the night. I’m sure you did.’ Bluster was not the right response, and Munro was in any case not a natural blusterer.
    Lambert said blandly, ‘No sir, I did not. For the simple reason that I was then not sure of the cause of death myself. But it seems you are right. The pathologist confirms that the nature of the injuries, internal and external, indicates a fall from some height. Possibly from the roof or an upper window of the hotel, as you mentioned. I should be interested to know how you divined that so efficiently.’
    ‘ I—I suppose I guessed it from the state of the body.’ Munro looked as miserable as a schoolboy before the master who has caught him out in a lie.
    ‘ You saw the body then? I understood the corpse was discovered by Mr Nash and Mr Goodman.’ Lambert looked interrogatively at Hook, who confirmed the fact like a man responding to a cue, without needing to consult his notes.
    ‘ They must have told me.’ Under stress, Munro’s Fifeshire accent was strong enough for his low words to be almost undistinguishable. ‘That’s right, I remember. Tony Nash told me at breakfast.’
    Now his wife ’s impeccable English accent rang out in stark contrast, beautifully enunciated, falsely bright in the quiet room. ‘We were discussing it before you arrived this morning, Superintendent—we had plenty of time together in the lounge. I think George Goodman thought that that is what had happened as well.’ She managed to make her supportive words sound light and confident, but the smile with which she tried to support them was a mistake. She was no more of a coquette than her husband was a blusterer.
    The first lies of the case. Or were they merely the first ones Lambert had detected? His mind flashed for a moment to the enigmatic figure of the dead man ’s widow. He thought of the way the corpse had been lying in that curious hollow of the golf course when he had first seen it, with its stomach thrust awkwardly at the heavens. The only visible damage had been that great smear of blackening blood on the side of the head. His own first thought had been that death might have come from a bludgeoning: it had taken the expert examination of Cyril Burgess to correct his impression that this might have been a mortal wound.
    It was unlikely that Nash and Goodman, coming upon the body unexpectedly in the early morning, would have made more accurate assumptions about the cause of death than he had. Unless, of course, one or both of them had an earlier involvement in this