Free Hole in One by Catherine Aird Page B

Detective Constable Crosby averted his eyes.
    â€˜Yes,’ called up Dr Dabbe after a minute or two, ‘I would
say you could put his injuries down, Sloan, as being consistent with his having had a heavy blow to the left sinciput.’
    â€˜Photograph that, too, will you?’ said Sloan to Williams.
    â€˜There may be other injuries, too, but he was definitely hit from above and slightly in front,’ said the pathologist succinctly. ‘Hit hard, too. Can’t tell you much about what with yet. Not until I can get the skull on the table and take a really good look at it.’ He sat back on his heels and added a careful professional caveat: ‘And maybe not even then.’
    â€˜But with the proverbial?’ asked Detective Constable Crosby, demonstrating that policemen, too, could speak in their own lingo.
    â€˜Proverbial?’ said Dabbe.
    â€˜Blunt instrument,’ said Crosby.
    â€˜Too soon to say,’ said the doctor. ‘Could have been anything. Anything at all.’ He grinned. ‘Did you know, gentlemen, that being hit on the head with a soap-dish did for the Emperor Constans in AD 668?’
    Sloan admitted ignorance of this riveting fact.
    â€˜You learn something every day,’ said Crosby laconically.
    Sloan, who wasn’t at all sure this was true in Crosby’s case, asked if there was any sign yet of what the victim had been wearing. Manners might maketh man but clothes mattered, too, in a murder case because they usually came from somewhere traceable.
    One of the white-suited figures sat back on his heels. ‘We’re just getting to the chest, Inspector. Looks like it could be an ordinary T-shirt. Bit dirty now.’
    â€˜No logo?’ Proclaiming something was common on T-shirts. Rebellion, usually; immaturity often.
    â€˜No, sir.’
    â€˜Pity.’
    â€˜And jeans,’ said one of the other men, brushing away even
more sand.
    â€˜There’s another thing that doesn’t help,’ called up the pathologist.
    â€˜Yes, doctor?’
    â€˜Sand and water are two burial mediums which don’t leave signs of disturbance behind them for you people to find and measure with your fancy equipment.’
    Sloan decided against saying that he didn’t need telling that. It was his habit anyway to let people tell him things he already knew: they often went on to tell him something he didn’t. He decided, too, against mentioning concrete overcoats: all they left behind in time was a body-shaped hole. Momentarily diverted, he wondered if a body-shaped hole could be offered in evidence …
    â€˜And sand has the merit of finding its own level easily after it’s been disturbed, too,’ said Dabbe. ‘Water’s better naturally.’
    â€˜There now,’ put in Crosby, ‘a new lady golfer goes out and does what the hi-tech brigade can’t – finds a body in the sand. Well, what do you know?’
    Detective Inspector Sloan sighed. Having the body found by an amateur golfer was fine by him: what he didn’t like to have to think about was the possibility of its having been placed there by a professional disposer of bodies. That would bring a whole new dimension into play. When it came to the perpetrators of non-accidental fatal injuries the police preferred the amateur to the professional any day.
    â€˜No one was actually looking for a body here or anywhere else,’ he reminded them all mildly. The list of missing persons at the Police Station had been checked now and there was no young man on it. He didn’t know whether this was good or bad. But it was a fact, which was something.
    â€˜Inspector …’ called out Williams.
    â€˜Yes?’
    â€˜What are you going to be doing with that ball in the
bunker?’ asked Williams, police photographer but a golfer, too. ‘It’s practically new.’
    Â 
    The police photographer was not the only one taking an interest in a golf