Trent Intervenes

‘Yes, some. But Hunt can tell you about it as well as I can; he was there. I shall have to ask you to excuse me now,’ Captain Royden said. ‘I have an appointment in the town. The steward will sign you on for a fortnight, and probably get you a game too, if you want one today.’

Colin Hunt and his wife, when Trent returned to their house for luncheon, were very willing to complete the tale. The verdict, they declared, was tripe. Dr Collins knew his job, whereas Dr Hoyle was an old footler, and Freer’s death had never been reasonably explained.

As for the other evidence, it had, they agreed, been interesting, though it didn’t help at all. Freer had been seen after he had played his tee-shot at the second hole, when he was walking down to the bottom of the dip towards the spot where he met his death.

‘But according to Royden,’ Trent said, ‘that was a place where he couldn’t be seen, unless one was right above him.’

‘Well, this witness was right above him,’ Hunt rejoined. ‘Over one thousand feet above him, so he said. He was an R.A.F. man, piloting a bomber from Bexford Camp, not far from here. He was up doing some sort of exercise, and passed over the course just at that time. He didn’t know Freer, but he spotted a man walking down from the second tee, because he was the only living soul visible on the course. Gossett, the other man in the plane, is a temporary member here, and he did know Freer quite well—or as well as anybody cared to know him—but he never saw him. However, the pilot was quite clear that he saw a man just at the time in question, and they took his evidence so as to prove that Freer was absolutely alone just before his death. The only other person who saw Freer was another man who knew him well; used to be a caddy here, and then got a job at the quarry. He was at work on the hillside, and he watched Freer play the first hole and go on to the second—nobody with him, of course.’

‘Well, that was pretty well established then,’ Trent remarked. ‘He was about as alone as he could be, it seems. Yet something happened somehow.’

Mrs Hunt sniffed sceptically, and lighted a cigarette. ‘Yes, it did,’ she said. ‘However, I didn’t worry much about it, for one. Edith—Mrs Freer, that is: Royden’s sister—must have had a terrible life of it with a man like that. Not that she ever said anything—she wouldn’t. She is not that sort.’

‘She is a jolly good sort, anyhow,’ Hunt declared.

‘Yes, she is; too good for most men. I can tell you,’ Mrs Hunt added for the benefit of Trent, ‘if Colin ever took to cursing me and knocking me about, my well-known loyalty wouldn’t stand the strain for very long.’

‘That’s why I don’t do it. It’s the fear of exposure that makes me the perfect husband, Phil. She would tie a can to me before I knew what was happening. As for Edith, it’s true she never said anything, but the change in her since it happened tells the story well enough. Since she’s been living with her brother she has been looking far better and happier than she ever succeeded in doing while Freer was alive.’

‘She won’t be living with him for very long, I dare say,’ Mrs Hunt intimated darkly.

‘No. I’d marry her myself if I had the chance,’ Hunt agreed cordially.

‘Pooh! You wouldn’t be in the first six,’ his wife said. ‘It will be Rennie, or Gossett, or possibly Sandy Butler—you’ll see. But perhaps you’ve had enough of the local tittle-tattle, Phil. Did you fix up a game for this afternoon?’

‘Yes; with the Jarman Professor of Chemistry in the University of Cambridge,’ Trent said. ‘He looked at me as if he thought a bath of vitriol would do me good, but he agreed to play me.’

‘You’ve got a tough job,’ Hunt observed. ‘I believe he is almost as old as he looks, but he is a devil at the short game, and he knows the course blindfolded, which you don’t. And he isn’t so cantankerous as he pretends to be. By the way, he was the man who saw the finish of the last shot Freer ever played—a sweet shot if ever there was one. Get him to tell you.’

‘I shall try to,’ Trent said. ‘The steward told me about that, and that was why I asked the professor for a game.’

Colin Hunt’s prediction was fulfilled that afternoon. Professor Hyde, receiving five strokes, was one up at the seventeenth, and at the last hole sent down a four-foot putt to win the match. As they left the green he remarked, as if in answer to something Trent had that moment said: ‘Yes; I can tell you a curious circumstance about Freer’s death.’

Trent’s eye brightened, for the professor had not said a dozen words during their game, and Trent’s tentative allusion to the subject after the second hole had been met merely by an intimidating grunt.

‘I saw the finish of the last shot he played,’ the old gentleman went on, ‘without seeing the man himself at all. A lovely brassie it was, too—though lucky. Rolled to within two feet of the pin.’

Trent considered. ‘I see,’ he said, ‘what you mean. You were near the second green, and the ball came over the ridge and ran down to the hole.’

‘Just so,’ Professor Hyde said. ‘That’s how you play it—if you can. You might have done it yourself today, if your second shot had been thirty yards longer. I’ve never done it; but Freer often did. After a really good drive, you play a long second, blind, over the ridge, and with a perfect shot you may get the green. Well, my house is quite near that green. I was pottering about in the garden before breakfast, and just as I happened to be looking towards the green a ball came hopping down the slope and trickled right across to the hole. Of course, I knew whose it must be—Freer always came along about that time. If it had been anyone else, I’d have waited to see him get his three, and congratulate him. As it was, I went indoors, and didn’t hear of his death until long afterwards.’

‘And you never saw him play the shot?’ Trent said thoughtfully.

The professor turned a choleric blue eye on him. ‘How the deuce could I?’ he said huffily. ‘I can’t see through a mass of solid earth.’

‘I know, I know,’ Trent said. ‘I was only trying to follow your mental process. Without seeing him play the shot, you knew it was his second—you say he would have been putting for a three. And you said, too—didn’t you?—that it was a brassie shot.’

‘Simply because, my young friend’—the professor was severe—‘I happened to know the man’s game. I had played that nine holes with him before breakfast often, until one day he lost his temper more than usual, and made himself impossible. I knew he practically always carried the ridge with his second—I won’t say he always got the green—and his brassie was the only club that would do it. It is conceivable, I admit,’ Professor Hyde added a little stiffly, ‘that some mishap took place and that the shot in question was not actually Freer’s second; but it did not occur to me to allow for that highly speculative contingency.’

On the next day, after those playing a morning round were started on their perambulation, Trent indulged himself with an hour’s practice, mainly on the unsurveyed stretch of the second hole. Afterwards he had a word with the caddymaster; then visited the professional’s shop, and won the regard of that expert by furnishing himself with a new midiron. Soon he brought up the subject of the last shot played by Arthur Freer. A dozen times that morning, he said, he had tried, after a satisfying drive, to reach the green with his second; but in vain. Fergus MacAdam shook his head. Not many, he said, could strike the ball with yon force. He could get there himself, whiles, but never for certainty. Mr Freer had the strength, and he kenned how to use it forbye.

What sort of clubs, Trent asked, had Freer preferred? ‘Lang and heavy, like himsel’. Noo ye mention it,’ MacAdam said, ‘I hae them here. They were brocht here after the ahccident.’ He reached up to the top of a rack. ‘Ay, here they are. They shouldna be, of course; but naebody came to claim them, and it juist slippit ma mind.’

Trent, extracting the brassie, looked thoughtfully at the heavy head with the strip of hard white material inlaid in the face. ‘It’s a powerful weapon, sure enough,’ he remarked.

‘Ay, for a man that could control it,’ MacAdam said. ‘I dinna care for yon ivorine face mysel’. Some fowk think it gies mair reseelience, ye ken; but there’s naething in it.’

‘He didn’t get it from you, then,’ Trent suggested, still closely examining the head.

‘Ay, but he did. I had a lot down from Nelsons while the fashion for them was on. Ye’ll find my name,’ MacAdam added, ‘stampit on the wood in the usual place, if yer een are seein’ richt.’

‘Well, I don’t—that’s just it. The stamp is quite illegible.’

‘Tod! Let’s see,’ the professional said, taking the club in hand. ‘Guid reason for its being illegible,’ he went on after a brief scrutiny. ‘It’s been obleeterated—that’s easy seen. Who ever saw sic a daft-like thing! The wood has juist been crushed some gait—in a vice, I wouldna wonder. Noo, why would onybody want to dae a thing like yon?’

‘Unaccountable, isn’t it?’ Trent said. ‘Still, it doesn’t matter, I suppose. And anyhow, we shall never know.’

It was twelve days later that Trent, looking in at the open door of the secretary’s office, saw Captain Royden happily engaged with the separated parts of some mechanism in which coils of wire appeared to be the leading motive.

‘I see you’re busy,’ Trent said.

‘Come in! Come in!’ Royden said heartily. ‘I can do this any time—another hour’s work will finish it.’ He laid down a pair of sharp-nosed pliers. ‘The electricity people have just changed us over to A.C., and I’ve got to rewind the motor of our vacuum cleaner. Beastly nuisance,’ he added, looking down affectionately at the bewildering jumble of disarticulated apparatus on his table.

‘You bear your sorrow like a man,’ Trent remarked; and Royden laughed as he wiped his hands on a towel.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I do love tinkering about with mechanical jobs, and if I do say it myself, I’d rather do a thing like this with my own hands than risk having it faultily done by a careless workman. Too many of them about. Why, about a year ago the company sent a man here to fit a new main fuse-box, and he made a short-circuit with his screwdriver that knocked him right across the kitchen and might very well have killed him.’ He reached down his cigarette-box and offered it to Trent, who helped himself; then looked down thoughtfully at the device on the lid.

‘Thanks very much. When I saw this box before, I put you down for an R.E. man. Ubique, and Quo fas et gloria ducunt. H’m! I wonder why Engineers were given that motto in particular.’

‘Lord knows,’ the captain said. ‘In my experience, Sappers don’t exactly go where right and glory lead. The dirtiest of all the jobs and precious little of the glory—that’s what they get.’

‘Still, they have the consolation,’ Trent pointed out, ‘of feeling that they are at home in a scientific age, and that all the rest of the army are amateurs compared with them. That’s what one of them once told me, anyhow. Well now, Captain, I have to be off this evening. I’ve looked in just to say how much I’ve enjoyed myself here.’

‘Very glad you did,’ Captain Royden said. ‘You’ll come again, I hope, now you know that the golf here is not so bad.’

‘I like it immensely. Also the members. And the secretary.’ Trent paused to light his cigarette. ‘I found the mystery rather interesting, too.’

Captain Royden’s eyebrows lifted slightly. ‘You mean about Freer’s death? So you made up your mind it was a mystery.’

‘Why, yes,’ Trent said. ‘Because I made up my mind he had been killed by somebody, and probably killed intentionally. Then, when I had looked into the thing a little, I washed out the “probably”.’

Captain Royden took up a penknife from his desk and began mechanically to sharpen a pencil. ‘So you don’t agree with the coroner’s jury?’

‘No: as the verdict seems to have been meant to rule out murder or any sort of human agency, I don’t. The lightning idea, which apparently satisfied them, or some of them, was not a very bright one, I thought. I was told what Dr Collins had said against it at the inquest; and it seemed to me he had disposed of it completely when he said that Freer’s clubs, most of them steel ones, were quite undamaged. A man carrying his clubs puts them down, when he plays a shot, a few feet away at most; yet Freer was supposed to have been electrocuted without any notice having been taken of them, so to speak.’

‘H’m! No, it doesn’t seem likely. I don’t know that that quite decides the point, though,’ the captain said. ‘Lightning plays funny tricks, you know. I’ve seen a small tree struck when it was surrounded by trees twice the size. All the same, I quite agree there didn’t seem to be any sense in the lightning notion. It was thundery weather, but there wasn’t any storm that morning in this neighbourhood.’

‘Just so. But when I considered what had been said about Freer’s clubs, it suddenly occurred to me that nobody had said anything about the club, so far as my information about the inquest went. It seemed clear, from what you and the parson saw, that he had just played a shot with his brassie when he was struck down; it was lying near him, not in the bag. Besides, old Hyde actually saw the ball he had hit roll down the slope onto the green. Now, it’s a good rule to study every little detail when you are on a problem of this kind. There weren’t many left to study, of course, since the thing had happened four months before; but I knew Freer’s clubs must be somewhere, and I thought of one or two places where they were likely to have been taken, in the circumstances, so I tried them. First, I reconnoitred the caddymaster’s shed, asking if I could leave my bag there for a day or two; but I was told that the regular place to leave them was the pro’s shop. So I went and had a chat with MacAdam, and sure enough it soon came out that Freer’s bag was still in his rack. I had a look at the clubs, too.’