The Red Chairs Mystery

  Copyright © 2019 L. D. Culliford

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

  The Red Chairs Mystery is a work of fiction. Where historical events or persons are depicted, fact and fiction are interwoven. Outside the facts, any further similarity of characters, their life events or the incidents portrayed in the book, to the name, attributes, background or life history of any actual person, living or dead, or to any actual event, is otherwise entirely coincidental and unintentional.

  Matador

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  Tel: 0116 279 2299

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  ISBN 978 1789012 897

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

  Dedicated to the memory of Alex King, professional golfer (1926 – 2006) and Sylvia King (1928 – 2014)

  “When the going gets tough, the tough go golfing!”

  Contents

  Prologue

  The 1st Chapter

  The 2nd Chapter

  The 3rd Chapter

  The 4th Chapter

  The 5th Chapter

  The 6th Chapter

  The 7th Chapter

  The 8th Chapter

  The 9th Chapter

  The 10th Chapter

  The 11th Chapter

  The 12th Chapter

  The 13th Chapter

  The 14th Chapter

  The 15th Chapter

  The 16th Chapter

  The 17th Chapter

  The 18th Chapter

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  Summoned to his elderly father’s study, a small boy stands trembling before his protector. Expecting rebuke for another unwitting and unintended domestic misdemeanour, he feels only relief when the judge, looking stern, remains silent and simply holds out a letter.

  The boy’s name on the envelope is written in an uncharacteristically shaky hand, but the elaborately cursive script is nevertheless without doubt his mother’s. The note is short; a few lines that, despite already reading quite capably, he still cannot understand. He has no difficulty, age six, making out the words, but what do they convey? He knows only that his dear mother had been thin, pale and withdrawn for several weeks, and then disappeared from home.

  The youngster had been at school when the ambulance called. As he searched room by room on his return to the house, the judge’s resonant voice intoned firmly, ‘Your mother has been taken to the hospital’. Nothing more. ‘When will she return?’ he wanted to ask, but felt too exposed. As if he were somehow in the dock, but disallowed from defending himself, speech seemed completely forbidden.

  Twelve interminable days have passed since she vanished. The household routine continues as before; and now the letter. Dimly, the boy begins to grasp the portent of the situation. Perhaps he will never see his mother again. Why else would the words, ‘I want you to be brave’, and, ‘Have courage’, be inscribed before him in a rush of unsteady lettering on that fateful notepaper, which still smells faintly of lavender? What the letter does not say is that, although only thirty-six, the unfortunate woman has a cancer of the stomach, and will be dead within forty-eight hours. She and her son are indeed destined never to meet again. Omitted too from the note is any indication whatsoever of esteem, affection or love.

  Later, despite remaining forever averse to the aroma of lavender, the boy barely remembered his mother. He was excused attending the funeral; or succumbed rather to a conspiracy that ensured his absence; his aunt and uncles keen to avoid any risk of emotion erupting to the surface during that most solemn of occasions. His father became increasingly distant.

  The boy was lonely and unhappy at first; but began to realise that, without close supervision, he could behave in whatever way he liked. By the time he went to the boarding school, two years later, he had grown crafty, clever at getting his way. By charm or threat, he wheedled people and manipulated situations for both personal advantage and the seductive amusement of mischief. He had a cruel streak but, strangely enough, people tended to like him. He excelled, when necessary, at eliciting absolution for his lapses.

  On the other hand, some people would never forgive…

  The 1st

  Chapter

  Archie had been roused by the insistent loud yapping of a dog. Ella was quiet, and for this reason the old man realised that the sudden sound in his ears must have come in a dream, or a hallucination. Soon after, at the usual time, six-fifteen, because the dog in the warm kitchen hadn’t stirred from her basket, he knew for sure that it had not been the Labrador barking. Shaking his head, Archie raised a hand to his deaf right ear. ‘I must be going soft’, he thought.

  The grizzled widower lived in one of a short row of cottages, their gardens backing onto the third fairway. With consent from golf club officials, he had put in a garden gate, giving him access. Man and dog were through onto the course before seven o’clock. This was their ritual. Ella chased about here and there, sometimes finding golf balls. Archie carried an old seven iron with a worn grip. Play was not officially permitted before eight, but he only used the club for fossicking around in the undergrowth, and for hitting the occasional shot. Still able to make the ball travel a respectable distance with that club, he had had it a long time.

  A lean, stooping figure, Archie set off across the mown grass walking north-west, skirting the great pond that was one of two filled-in gravel pits making the course so distinctive and tricky to play, with Ella out front scampering left and right, following the morning smells. It had rained sharply during the night, long-awaited September rain after a dry summer, but the sky was already clearing. Past the fourth green they went, the pair, rounding great bushy thickets towards the long fifth hole.

  Archie took an old ball from his jacket pocket and let it fall there, beside the tee, manoeuvring it onto a convenient tuft with the head of his club, setting it up before taking a swing. As the favoured weapon reached shoulder height, bright sunshine broke through distant clouds. The sudden shaft of brilliant light upset his concentration a touch. Hurrying the shot, he mistimed it, launching the ball away, fading it to the right where there was heather. ‘Bother,’ he said quietly; and then, aloud to the dog, always on the alert, ‘Come on Ella! Let’s go and look for the blasted thing’.

  Heather is unfriendly to golfers, burying balls without trace. Archie decided not to spend long searching, particularly as the ground was wet, but Ella had already lost interest and was bounding on ahead. He heard her barking, loud and insistent, before he had given up ferreting around. This time he was definitely not dreaming. Normally placid, the friendly black Labrador was excited now. ‘What is it, Girl?’ called Archie, lifting his rheumy eyes to look down the fairway. Then, softly to himself, ‘What the dickens is that?’

  Ella stood al
most two hundred yards away and continued barking fitfully while he covered the ground. At first, in front of her, he could only see something large, red and rectangular, more or less blocking the fairway where it narrowed with bunkers on either side, a decent nine-iron shot forward of the green. Coming up, he put a reassuring hand softly on the dog’s velvet neck. ‘Ssshh,’ he whispered. ‘Be quiet Girl!’

  Silence enveloped them. Nothing moved. Archie looked down at the two, large, bright red leather armchairs in front of him. They had been placed carefully, touching, side by side, facing north-east back up the fairway towards the tee. Slumped carelessly in the left-hand of the pair was a tiny, thin, pale, damp figure, a girl or young woman. Her curled-up body, clad loosely in only a threadbare, dusky blue man’s dressing gown, seemed terribly thin, wasted to the point of emaciation. ‘Like something out of Belsen’, Archie would say later. He could see no obvious blemish on her, but she was definitely dead.

  ***

  The scene instantly brought the old golfer back to another sorry event, four years earlier. He had taken her favourite summer drink, a cold lime-soda, to his wife Marjorie, sitting in the back garden one fine evening; but she too was gone. There had been no warning. Apparently healthy, she had departed nevertheless in an instant. The ambulance people did their best to revive her, but age, they said, made resuscitation unlikely. The Coroner’s report had confirmed it: “A massive pulmonary embolism”, it said, meaning that a silent blood clot, formed in her legs, had suddenly travelled up through the heart, giving it a fatal shock and blocking both of the arteries to her lungs, choking her body of oxygen from the inside. He had stood and cried then for a few long moments before finally going back into the house to ring for help. Now too, with the dog beside him, he found himself crying again.

  It seemed odd to Archie how inertia had gripped and prevented him going faster to call for an ambulance the first time, although he knew later that those tearful seconds would have made no difference. And when he thought about it afterwards, it seemed odd this time too that he had just stood there over the corpse, grieving in a way – and growing angry – before he could think; and having thought, before he could act. He felt a sense of urgency, but he needed time to get to grips with the matter; to get to grips with himself.

  Eventually, it was Ella who moved first, letting out a soft yelp of sympathy. ‘Come on then, Girl’, said Archie. ‘It’s no use standing around here. We’d better go and fetch someone.’ He decided to cut across to the clubhouse, and muttered aloud, ‘There’ll be somebody there by now.’ The dog appeared to agree and they moved off. After a few paces, however, Archie turned back. He had remembered the phone in his pocket. There was no signal. He could not call anyone; but something prompted him to take photographs. ‘I know I’m going soft’, he thought, ‘But I don’t want anyone suggesting I made all of this up’.

  ***

  On that same Thursday morning, September 27th 2012, Holly Angel was, unusually for her, still in bed after nine o’clock. When the phone started buzzing, she was propped up on pillows, sipping a cup of jasmine tea. The call annoyed her because she had taken the day off to visit her father on his birthday and treat him to lunch at his favourite pub. A conscientious detective, however, she could not reasonably ignore a direct communication from her section chief.

  ‘I’m sorry, Holly’, the conversation began. ‘I do know you have plans for today but… I don’t think this will take long. I need a female officer to go and have a look at the scene. And you’re the only one available right now. The possible victim is a woman or young girl.’

  ‘Yes, Ma’a’, she said, leaving out the final ‘m’, deliberately making herself sound like a lamb bleating for it’s mother. ‘And what about you, Detective Inspector Laura Garbutt? You’re a female officer too.’ The question formed, but was never spoken as Holly put the phone on ‘speaker’ and continued to listen.

  ‘We are not treating it as particularly suspicious’; the deep-throated voice continued after explaining the matter. ‘This is a prestigious club and it could be delicate. I’ve decided to keep everything low-key for now; but if it turns out that she was murdered, we’ll obviously have to step it up. Take a quick look around. Speak to a couple of people on the ground and you can follow it up when you’re back at work tomorrow… You probably won’t even need to cancel your lunch… Also, before you mention it, I know you’ve still got the missing-person case to finish tidying up’.

  Holly paused a moment after switching the phone off to glance at the icon of the Virgin and Child on her bedroom wall. It came from the shop at Westminster Abbey where she had bought it on impulse during a visit a couple of years earlier. Her then companion, Michael, had somehow talked her into taking part in the annual national pilgrimage to the shrine of Edward the Confessor along with hundreds of others. Unfortunately, she had felt no particular inspiration during the visit until the end, in the shop, gazing into that most serene of maternal faces. Even the briefest moment of contemplation before its timeless image still brought her a satisfyingly deep inner sense of serenity.

  Feeling calmer, she decided to call the pub and cancel her booking, and then telephone her father. A former soldier turned school-teacher, he understood at once. ‘I know you don’t think much of Laura Garbage’, he said cheekily, ‘She is your superior officer, though, and we can always go for lunch another time.’ ‘But I don’t know anything about golf!’ his daughter replied, laughter in her voice. ‘I can teach you’, he said. ‘You know it’s never too late.’

  ***

  There were three good things about Tony Angel: his name (Holly loved being an Angel); the fact that after the divorce, several years earlier, he had gone to live and work in America, leaving her in peace; and the settlement, big enough for a deposit that allowed her to buy her own property. Although the Sussex Police Headquarters are in Lewes, Holly’s unit was based in Sussex House, an extensive, modern, somewhat airless and decidedly soulless, purpose-built facility in Hollingbury, not far from the main Brighton by-pass. Her work was usually focused on the stretch along the coast from Brighton and Hove to Littlehampton, so she had chosen a small house in Shoreham Beach, very close to the sea, where she could take her daily run up and down the shoreline in all weathers, keeping fit.

  The journey to SRGC – the Sussex Royale Golf Club – took about fifty minutes, leading her through pleasant scenery, with broad fields and the South Downs tracking down her left side as she went. Turning southwards, shortly before reaching Petworth, Holly found herself on a tranquil, winding country road amid leafy woodland, with fields of sheep and horses interspersed on either side.

  It was a little after ten-thirty when she arrived at her destination, the black Nissan Micra, covered in measles spots of Saharan rain-dust, looking slightly out of place beside a deep green, open-topped Porsche on one side and pristine lilac Jaguar on the other as she parked up. Both cars, she noticed, had personalised number plates: ‘SUS 1E’ on the Jag and ‘RIP 1T’ on the Porsche. She also noted, near the rear entrance to the clubhouse, a green delivery van bearing the elegant gold script of a respected local wine merchant. Filing information like this in her memory-banks helped considerably with her work. You never knew what might be important.

  Having telephoned ahead from the hands-free device in her car, the club secretary was waiting for Holly in the vestibule, once the hallway of a magnificent Sussex farmhouse that now formed the centrepiece of a well-appointed clubhouse. Peter Harding was also ex-army, known to members as ‘the Colonel’; and it was his pride that the club ran smoothly for all concerned. His methods were based on what he called ‘friendly efficiency’, but which others saw as a combination of ruthless attention to detail and not suffering fools gladly. The present situation was, of course, entirely unwelcome, but he was not one to create a fuss and perfectly capable of making day to day decisions independently, confident of the support of the Club Captain and members of the Committee. In post for t
hree years, he was generally regarded as sound.

  ‘I’ve closed the course’, he said after the introductions, ‘And called in the head green-keeper, John Tranter. He’ll have brought all his people in too. We don’t want anyone disturbing anything, do we? And I’ve also sent a round-robin email to members, telling them about some “unusual course conditions” making play impossible – without giving the game away, naturally. But the phones have been buzzing, and members want to know what’s going on. Despite the downpour, there wasn’t enough rain in the night to account for preventing play. Most of the course is on gravel and greensand, and the drainage is generally good. I’ve told Valerie, my assistant, to leave an answer-phone message that we’ll be reviewing the situation at 2.00 pm.’

  The Colonel paused to look Holly in the eye. She returned his gaze but said nothing. ‘It’s tricky’, he continued. ‘I realise you won’t want the area disturbed at all, but I’m still hoping you’ll let me open at least the back nine holes this afternoon.’

  ‘We’d better go and have a look at the scene, then.’

  Holly, recognizing her host as a man of action, was already turning for the door.

  Impressed, he guided her outside towards the professional’s shop where three golf buggies stood in a line. With Holly aboard the nearest, he took control, only too aware of his attractive passenger, despite her prim navy outfit and somewhat severe haircut. Passing behind the first tee and second green, he headed the buggy down over the rough grass beside the third fairway. ‘It’s been quite a summer, hasn’t it?’ he said to break the silence, trying to make conversation. ‘Has it?’ Holly replied. ‘Yes. You know… Bradley Wiggins’ superb win in the Tour de France, great success for Team GB at the Olympics, and then Murray’ beating Djokovic in the U.S. Open the other day.’ ‘I suppose so.’ Holly’s response was vague. She was clearly preoccupied, looking intently around, familiarising herself with the undulating heathland scenery.