Death on the Eleventh Hole Read Online Free PDF Page A

suddenly, as if asserting herself as the stern landlady.
    ‘And Tracey didn’t mention on Friday that Kate Wharton was missing?’
    ‘No. She may not have been missing, of course, on Friday. I told you, I last saw her on Thursday, but Tracey may have seen her after that.’ Liz Eastham’s instinct was to place the burden of answering on to this as yet anonymous contemporary of Kate’s, to extricate herself as quickly as possible from police questioning.
    Lambert nodded. ‘We shall have to see her in due course, if the girl who’s been killed is indeed Kate Wharton.’ He opened a drawer in his desk and picked out the facial photograph of the corpse that he had selected for identification purposes. ‘Do you think that this is her?’
    Liz Eastham’s thin fingers trembled a little as she took the photograph, handling it as carefully as if it had been a sacred relic. She looked at the serene, lineless face, with its eyes closed in the peace of death, for two long seconds. Then she said, ‘Yes. That’s Kate all right.’
    She would have liked to weep a little as she handed the picture back to the superintendent who would search for her killer: it seemed the only proper thing to do.
    But the tears would not come.

 
    Four
     
    Detective Sergeant Bert Hook had broken the news of death to many distraught parents in his time. He tended to be selected for this task for two reasons. The first was that he had a natural empathy with people caught in such dreadful circumstances: beneath his weather-beaten village bobby exterior, there was a ready response to the distress he saw. The second and more important reason for CID purposes was that he was a deceptively acute observer: his stolid bearing concealed an instant feeling for any reaction which was false, any facial expression which betrayed the mind behind it.
    It was a valuable quality whenever there were suspicious circumstances surrounding a death. With three-quarters of all murders in the area committed by members of the family, even a mother was suspect at this stage of an inquiry. Hence the reason for a CID officer as well as the uniformed policewoman on this grim mission.
    The woman who opened the door to them seemed to have no premonition that they brought bad news. She said to Hook as he offered his warrant card, ‘You didn’t say you’d have company when you phoned, Sergeant,’ and stood looking down with a slight smile at the trainee woman constable who stood behind him.
    Julie Wharton proved to be a woman in her early forties, with a rather square, carefully made-up face framed by a helmet of skilfully cut dark hair. She wore a bright green sweater and dark green, almost black trousers. She looked for a moment longer at the heavy figure of Hook in his light grey suit, then at the uniformed girl who seemed scarcely old enough to be out of school. Then she led them through a narrow hall and into a neat living room. There she turned to face them, so abruptly that they were arrested suddenly in the doorway of the room. Householder and visitors stood awkwardly facing each other, scarcely three feet apart.
    Hook said, ‘I think it would be better if you sat down, Mrs Wharton,’ and promptly sat down on the sofa himself, with the uniformed girl beside him. Julie Wharton hesitated, and he thought for an instant she was going to question his presumption. Then she sat down and said with a little sigh, ‘You’d better tell me what this is all about, Sergeant Hook.’
    He had expected her to show alarm when he asked her to sit down, to catch some intimation of the awful news he brought. But still she behaved as if she had no apprehension of bad news. Hook cleared his throat and said formally, ‘I believe you have a daughter, Katherine Mary Wharton,’
    For the first time, her face clouded, with his use of the girl’s full name. ‘My daughter is Kate Wharton, yes. Is there something wrong?’
    Hook reached into the inside pocket of his jacket, thought for an awful