Trent Intervenes. E. C. Bentley
wasn’t any wound showing, and I had seen far worse things often enough, but the padre was looking sickish, so I asked him to go back to the clubhouse and send for a doctor and the police while I mounted guard. They weren’t long coming, and after they had done their job the body was taken away in an ambulance. Well, that’s about all I can tell you at first hand, Mr Trent. If you are staying with Hunt, you’ll have heard about the inquest and all that, probably.’
Trent shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Colin was just beginning to tell me, after breakfast this morning, about Freer having been killed on the course in some incomprehensible way, when a man came to see him about something. So, as I was going to apply for a fortnight’s run of the course, I thought I would ask you about the affair.’
‘All right,’ Captain Royden said. ‘I can tell you about the inquest anyhow—had to be there to speak my own little piece, about finding the body. As for what had happened to Freer, the medical evidence was rather confusing. It was agreed that he had been killed by some tremendous shock, which had jolted his whole system to pieces and dislocated several joints, but had been not quite violent enough to cause any visible wound. Apart from that, there was a disagreement. Freer’s own doctor, who saw the body first, declared he must have been struck by lightning. He said it was true there hadn’t been a thunderstorm, but that there had been thunder about all that weekend, and that sometimes lightning did act in that way. But the police surgeon, Collins, said there would be no such displacement of the organs from a lightning stroke, even if it did ever happen that way in our climate, which he doubted. And he said that if it had been lightning, it would have struck the steel-headed clubs; but the clubs lay there in their bag quite undamaged. Collins thought there must have been some kind of explosion, though he couldn’t suggest what kind.’
Trent shook his head. ‘I don’t suppose that impressed the court,’ he said. ‘All the same, it may have been all the honest opinion he could give.’ He smoked in silence a few moments, while Captain Royden attended to the troubles of his telephone instrument with a camel-hair brush. ‘But surely,’ Trent said at length, ‘if there had been such an explosion as that, somebody would have heard the sound of it.’
‘Lots of people would have heard it,’ Captain Royden answered. ‘But there you are, you see—nobody notices the sound of explosions just about here. There’s the quarry on the other side of the road there, and any time after seven a.m. there’s liable to be a noise of blasting.’
‘A dull, sickening thud?’
‘Jolly sickening,’ Captain Royden said, ‘for all of us living near by. And so that point wasn’t raised. Well, Collins is a very sound man; but as you say, his evidence didn’t really explain the thing, and the other fellow’s did, whether it was right or wrong. Besides, the coroner and the jury had heard about a bolt from a clear sky, and the notion appealed to them. Anyhow, they brought it in death from misadventure.’
‘Which nobody could deny, as the song says,’ Trent remarked. ‘And was there no other evidence?’
‘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