Murder in the Rough Read online

  Taking a deep breath, she pulled open the drawer where she knew it was kept.

  The drawer was empty.

  Only in its deepest corner, as Miss Unwin peered and peered, was there to be seen the tiny key of the locked tantalus, that row of decanters in which Mr. McMurdo kept three kinds of whiskey for his private consumption.

  Miss Unwin stood there motionless for a few moments. Then she decided that there was nothing to be done about searching for the possibly useful little weapon until she could summon the servants in the morning. She took her candle upstairs to bed. And slept soundly.

  She learned nothing next day from her inquiries among the servants, nor did such attempts as she was able to make to look for the life preserver elsewhere in the house prove any more successful. She came to the conclusion then that in all probability Mr. McMurdo, having impulsively reminded his wife of the existence of the little bludgeon, must have decided to change its place of concealment, such as it had been.

  Easter came and went. Life appeared to be going on much as usual. There was still no word from Scotland about when they might expect Mr. McMurdo back, but in other years, so Miss Unwin learned, he had stayed on as his cousin’s guest for some long time, unable doubtless to tear himself away from the nearby links, so much better provided with differing holes to play than Blackheath’s nursemaid-haunted seven.

  But when they were informed of his return home, it was in somewhat extraordinary circumstances. A telegraph message was brought to the door.

  COUSIN IAN UNFORTUNATELY DECEASED, it read. RETURNING IMMEDIATELY.

  But when the master of the house set foot again within its doors, they learned little more.

  “Poor Ian,” Mr. McMurdo told his wife and Miss Unwin that evening in the drawing room. “He died in my arms, struck by a gutt—struck by a golf ball. A terrible thing, a terrible thing.”

  Mrs. McMurdo broke into sobs.

  “There’s no need for that,” her husband said. “You never met the man in all the years of our marriage. It’s no occasion to weep for him now.”

  “But—but—”

  “Enough. The man’s dead, and that’s all there is to be said about it.”

  The Morning Post was conveniently beside his chair. He buried himself behind its crammed columns of social announcements and advertisements.

  Miss Unwin sat in respectful silence next to Mrs. McMurdo’s sofa, ready with a bottle of smelling salts. And she thought. First, that all her suspicions about the game of golf appeared to have been justified. How appalling it was that, in the course of trying to get one of those white-painted gutties into a distant little hole, a man had died, struck by another of those small balls propelled from afar by a swishing stroke of that club known as the driver.

  Then it occurred to her that the terrible accident was likely to be a blessing for herself, little though she could welcome the way it had come about. But there was no gainsaying that, with the death of Mr. Mungo McMurdo’s rich, unmarried cousin, her employer would now be able to keep her in his service. For a moment she asked herself whether it was right that she should benefit in this way from the death of that gentleman in distant Scotland. Then she decided that it would be much better for wee Margaret, almost without a friend in this little-loving house, to continue to receive her lessons from someone she knew rather than from a stranger.

  Before long, Mrs. McMurdo, still wiping away occasional tears, announced that she was feeling so upset that she thought she ought to retire to bed. Miss Unwin accompanied her in her toiling ascent of the steep stairs and waited until she had seen Hetty, Mrs. McMurdo’s maid, approaching the bedroom. Then she went to bed herself, early though it was. To bed, but not for a long while to sleep. The extraordinary events of the past few days went revolving and revolving in her mind. They seemed somehow so unlikely, and, always hovering, there was a small feeling of guilt that she herself had been relieved of the anxiety about finding a new position if an impoverished Mr. McMurdo had dismissed her.

  At last she told herself firmly that she was almost certain eventually to learn more about how Mr. Ian McMurdo had met his end than her taciturn employer had chosen to tell his wife. The Morning Post was bound to carry a full report of the inquest. After all, it must surely be the first time that any gentleman had been killed by a ball in the course of playing this new game of golf, new at least outside the realm of Scotland. Her resolution made, she succeeded at last in falling asleep. But that sleep was pervaded by the most extraordinary dreams.

  Miss Unwin dreamed that she, a woman, was playing golf. And she was being wonderfully successful on the links. Every time she stood there, the fat leather grip of a club, be it driver, cleek or niblick, in her delicate feminine fingers, the gutty she hit seemed to fly to exactly the place she had aimed it. And this despite finding from time to time that she was playing, not with any orthodox club, but with a long extended version of the ruler she kept on her desk in the schoolroom and, on rare occasions, found necessary to bring down sharply on little Margaret’s held-out palm.

  Nor was her success as a golfer hindered by the extraordinary hazards that presented themselves in front of her, whether it was a tall brick wall, suddenly springing up, with on it in elaborately painted lettering the words Genuine Dundee Marmalade or sometimes Genuine Juice of the Percha Tree, or whether it was a Blackheath nursemaid in neat uniform standing with her mouth wide open ready to swallow the gutty. Nothing hindered progress toward whichever flowerpot hole she was aiming for, not even the big sprouting bunches of curious flowers which, she somehow knew, little Margaret had put into them out of mischief.

  But morning came at last. One of the maids brought Miss Unwin her hot water. Breakfast was served as usual. Margaret was on her best behavior. The nightmares began to fade away.

  The questions lying deep in Miss Unwin’s head did not, however, fade away.

  It was more than a week later, after Mr. McMurdo had gone back again to Scotland to give his evidence at the inquest, that the report appeared in the Morning Post. Miss Unwin was able to take advantage of Mrs. McMurdo’s late hour of rising to get to see it first. She learned that her employer and his cousin had been out on the links on the day of the death as soon as it was daylight and that they had progressed as far as a hole known as the Devil’s Breeks, because it was necessary in order to play it successfully to take one wide green path through the surrounding whins rather than another leading steeply down to a cliff overlooking the sea. The two cousins had, according to the evidence, both succeeded in driving their gutties a good long distance, far enough for them to end out of sight on the far side of the slight hill in front of them. As they left the tee from which they had made those pleasing long drives, Mr. McMurdo told the presiding sheriff, they saw an aged gentleman known to them both, one Mr. Angus Todd, come up to play his customary early morning round. They said to each other that there was little danger of a notoriously slow player catching up with them. However, it seemed that Mr. Todd must have been playing more speedily than usual, because as the two of them stood on the far side of the rise discussing which of their gutties was nearer the hole, a ball came flying over and struck Mr. Ian McMurdo on the back of the head.

  I did what I could for him, the witness stated, but I knew almost at a glance that the wound was fatal.

  Aged Mr. Todd had then given his evidence, breaking down and having to be granted a respite when he said that the stroke he had played “must have been the best stroke I ever made.” After he had recovered, he told how he crossed the brow of the hill and saw Mr. Mungo McMurdo kneeling beside the prostrate body of Mr. Ian McMurdo. The final evidence was produced by the police constable who had investigated the occurrence, who said a golf ball found “nae muir than twa yards frae the corpus” bore on it the letters A T. The verdict had followed. Death by Misadventure.

  It was then that a tiny thought, no bigger than a wee gutty, rose up in Miss Unwin’s head, there to stay.

  When, a week later, Mr. McMurdo returned
from having inspected his new property in Scotland, he proved to be full of plans.

  “We shall move into poor old Ian’s house,” he announced. “I intend to sell the works in Shoreditch. They have not been paying well for some time. And now we shall be able to live the sort of life I should always have had.”

  “But—,” said Mrs. McMurdo.

  “But? But? What is there to say But about? Wait till you see the old family house. A wonderful place. Haven’t I always told you it was a wonderful place? And so near the links. I shall be out there first thing every morning, I tell you that.”

  “But how shall I manage without Dr. George? No one knows more about my condition than dear Dr. George.”

  “Nonsense. Arrant nonsense. The doctors in Scotland can run rings round any English one. Of course, you’ll come, and be glad of it. And wee Margaret will have the time of her life in the big house and all the grounds. A bonny place for a growing girl.”

  “But—but what about her education?”

  “There are dominies in Scotland more learned than all the schoolmasters in the whole of England, and good men on the links too. Good men on the links.”

  “But Margaret has been used to being given her lessons by a governess. I do not think she would welcome some harsh—what did you call them?—some harsh dominie teaching her.”

  “Well, then,” Mr. McMurdo spluttered, making some sort of concession to feminine weakness, “Miss Unwin shall come up with us. Yes, that will do. That will do.”

  “No, sir,” Miss Unwin said then. “No, I shall not be able to accompany Margaret to Scotland.”

  “And why the d—— not, ma’am? Do you want better wages? Is that it? Yes, I dare say that’s it. Well, you can have them. You can have them. No one can say Mungo McMurdo is unwilling to pay for his daughter’s care.”

  “No, sir. That is not my reason. But I think it best if I explained it to you tomorrow. May I come to the library at, shall we say, half past nine?”

  “But, damn it, I ought to be on my way to Blackheath by then. Perhaps the last time I shall play on those wretched seven holes.”

  “No, sir. You have always left the house, whether to go to the marmalade works or to play golf, at ten o’clock. That is why I suggested half past nine.”

  For a moment Mr. McMurdo looked as if he was going to explode in an outburst of rage. But something about Miss Unwin’s calm demeanor seemed to penetrate to him.

  “Very well. Very well, ma’am. Half past nine, and don’t you be one minute later.”

  “I shall not, sir.”

  At half past nine next morning, on the dot, Miss Unwin knocked at the door of the library.

  “Come in,” a gruff voice issued from the far side of the forbidding mahogany.

  Miss Unwin entered.

  “Well, what is it you’ve got to say?”

  Miss Unwin took in a single breath.

  “It is this. I cannot go with you to Scotland because you have murdered your cousin, Mr. Ian McMurdo.”

  Standing facing her, Mr. McMurdo said nothing. A red flush of blood began to mount into his cheeks. But Miss Unwin knew that he had already realized that no amount of rage and bluster would counter the accusation she had made.

  “Allow me to tell you,” she said, “why it is that I know what I have said is nothing but the truth.”

  Slowly Mr. McMurdo sank back into the chair behind his desk.

  “First,” Miss Unwin said, “I came to realize some weeks ago that your business was no longer producing the financial returns it had once done. Marmalade made in Dundee was claiming an increasing share of the market. Then I heard from little Margaret that you had told her, boasted to her, that you had used just one gutty to play all the seven holes on the Blackheath links, and I realized that you were having to economize even when playing golf. Next, you declined in spite of your wife’s earnest requests to find another manservant in place of John, even to the extent of taking no one with you when you visited Scotland.”

  “But—but why should I have done? Ian—Ian had plenty of servants.”

  “Yes, and you grudged him his establishment and his wealth.”

  “I did not. I—”

  “But, if you did not, why was it that among the few golf balls you allowed yourself when you left for Scotland, there was one with written on it the initials A T?”

  “How the devil did you know about that?”

  “It was not the work of the Devil, Mr. McMurdo: it was the providential curiosity of your own little daughter.”

  “Well, what if I did happen to have a gutty with those initials on it? They could have been—they could have got there in any one of a hundred ways.”

  “I do not think so. I think you marked it in that way so that, when you had struck your cousin down with the life preserver you took with you to Scotland in one of the pockets of your golf bag, you could drop that ball beside his body and make out that he had been accidentally struck by the one sent over the hill by Mr. Angus Todd, who, to your knowledge, went out to the links there every morning and, being a gentleman of some years, was a notoriously slow player.”

  Mr. McMurdo sat there in silence.

  At last he came back to life.

  “I think there is one thing you have forgotten, Miss Clever-sticks.”

  “Indeed?”

  “Yes. This.”

  In a single swift gesture he tugged open the drawer at his left hand, dipped into it and produced the very life preserver which Miss Unwin had accused him of using, with its neatly rounded end, to kill his cousin.

  “No, Mr. McMurdo,” she said, and her voice did not betray a single tremor. “No, sir, I do not think so. I would have hardly come to you, alone as I am, if I had not taken a certain precaution first. I have,” she lied, thinking of how wee Margaret had once written out for her three times in her best hand Circumstances alter cases, “deposited a full account of everything I have said to you with a trusted friend.”

  With a dull thud Mr. McMurdo allowed the life preserver to fall back into its drawer.

  “So… so it is to be the police?” he said, all fire gone.

  “Perhaps. But I would not like to have it on my conscience that I was the one who made your wife a pauper, deprived of the income she will need to live the life she has been used to, and, above all, I am not ready to see little Margaret branded forever as having a murderer for a father.”

  Mr. McMurdo managed to look up for an instant.

  “But what… ?”

  “Mr. McMurdo, the stairs in this house are, as I have often warned little Margaret, dangerously steep. If you were to have swallowed the contents of one of those decanters in the tantalus over there and then, stepping out onto the landing, put your foot on one of those balls you call a gutty, a ball which I happen to have left on the floor there, then you would be almost certain to fall to your death.”

  When the inquest was held on the body of Mungo McMurdo, Esq., the verdict returned was Death by Misadventure.

  A GOOD SPOILED

  Laura Lippman

  It began innocently enough. Well, if not innocently—and Charlie Drake realized that some people would refuse to see the origins of any extramarital affair as innocent—it began with tact and consideration. When Charlie Drake agreed to have an affair with his former administrative assistant, he began putting golf clubs in the trunk of his car every Thursday and Saturday, telling his wife he was going to shoot a couple of holes. Yes, he really said “a couple of holes,” but then, he knew very little about golf at the time.

  Luckily, neither did his wife, Marla. But she was enthusiastic about the new hobby, if only because it created a whole new category of potential gifts, and her family members were always keen for Christmas and birthday ideas for Charlie, who was notoriously difficult to shop for. And as the accessories began to flow—golf books, golf shirts, golf gloves, golf hats, golf highball glasses—Charlie inevitably learned quite a bit about golf. He watched tournaments on television and spoke knowing
ly of “Tiger” and “Singh,” as well as the quirks of certain U.S. Open courses. He began to think of himself as a golfer who simply didn’t golf. Which, as he gleaned from his friends who actually pursued the sport, might be the best of all possible worlds. Golf, they said, was their love and their obsession, and they all wished they had never taken it up.

  At any rate, this continued for a few years. But then Sylvia announced she wanted to go from mistress to wife. And given that Sylvia was terrifyingly good at making her pronouncements into reality, this was rather unsettling for Charlie. After all, she was the one who had engineered the affair in the first place, and even come up with the golf alibi. As he had noted on her annual evaluation, Sylvia was very goal-oriented.

  “Look, I want to fuck you,” Sylvia had said out of the blue, about six months after she started working for him. Okay, not totally out of the blue. She had tried a few more subtle things—pressing her breasts against his arm when going over a document, touching his hand, asking him if he needed her to go with him to conferences, volunteering to pay her own way when told there was no money in the budget for her to attend. “We could even share a room,” she said. It was when Charlie demurred at this offer that she said, “Look, I want to fuck you.”

  Charlie was fifty-eight at the time, married thirty-eight years, and not quite at ease in the world. He remembered a time when nice girls didn’t—well, when they didn’t do it so easily and they certainly didn’t speak of it so fluently. Marla had been a nice girl, someone he met at college and courted according to the standards of the day, and while he remembered being wistful in the early days of their marriage, when everyone suddenly seemed to be having guilt-free sex all the time, AIDS had come along and he had decided he was comfortable with his choices. Sure, he noticed pretty girls and thought about them, but he had never been jolted to act on those feelings. It seemed like a lot of trouble, frankly.

  “Well, um, we can’t,” he told Sylvia.