His mistake was natural.’ And again the old gentleman laughed delightedly.
Langley exploded. ‘I like a joke myself,’ he said, ‘but I’ll be skinned alive if I can see the point of this one.’
‘Why, the point is,’ Trent told him, ‘that nobody ever rowed for All Souls. There never were more than four undergraduates there at one time, all the other members being Fellows.’
‘NO; I happened to be abroad at the time,’ Philip Trent said. ‘I wasn’t in the way of seeing the English papers, so until I came here this week I never heard anything about your mystery.’
Captain Royden, a small, spare, brown-faced man, was engaged in the delicate—and forbidden—task of taking his automatic telephone instrument to pieces. He now suspended his labours and reached for the tobacco-jar. The large window of his office in the Kempshill clubhouse looked down upon the eighteenth green of that delectable golf course, and his eye roved over the whin-clad slopes beyond as he called on his recollection.
‘Well, if you call it a mystery,’ he said as he filled a pipe. ‘Some people do, because they like mysteries, I suppose. For instance, Colin Hunt, the man you’re staying with, calls it that. Others won’t have it, and say there was a perfectly natural explanation. I could tell you as much as anybody could about it, I dare say.’
‘As being secretary here, you mean?’
‘Not only that. I was one of the two people who were in at the death, so to speak—or next door to it,’ Captain Royden said. He limped to the mantelshelf and took down a silver box embossed on the lid with the crest and mottoes of the Corps of Royal Engineers. ‘Try one of these cigarettes, Mr Trent. If you’d like to hear the yarn, I’ll give it you. You have heard something about Arthur Freer, I suppose?’
‘Hardly anything,’ Trent said. ‘I just gathered that he wasn’t a very popular character.’
‘No,’ Captain Royden said with reserve. ‘Did they tell you he was my brother-in-law? No? Well, now, it happened about four months ago, on a Monday—let me see—yes, the second Monday in May. Freer had a habit of playing nine holes before breakfast. Barring Sundays—he was strict about Sunday—he did it most days, even in the beastliest weather, going round all alone usually, carrying his own clubs, studying every shot as if his life depended on it. That helped to make him the very good player he was. His handicap here was two, and at Undershaw he used to be scratch, I believe.
‘At a quarter to eight he’d be on the first tee, and by nine he’d be back at his house—it’s only a few minutes from here. That Monday morning he started off as usual—’
‘And at the usual time?’
‘Just about. He had spent a few minutes in the clubhouse blowing up the steward about some trifle. And that was the last time he was seen alive by anybody—near enough to speak to, that is. No one else went off the first tee until a little after nine, when I started round with Browson—he’s our local padre; I had been having breakfast with him at the vicarage. He’s got a game leg, like me, so we often play together when he can fit it in.
‘We had holed out on the first green, and were walking onto the next tee, when Browson said: “Great Scot! Look there. Something’s happened.” He pointed down the fairway of the second hole; and there we could see a man lying sprawled on the turf, face-down and motionless. Now there is this point about the second hole—the first half of it is in a dip in the land, just deep enough to be out of sight from any other point on the course, unless you’re standing right above it—you’ll see when you go round yourself. Well, on the tee, you are right above it; and we saw this man lying. We ran to the spot.
‘It was Freer, as I had known it must be at that hour. He was dead, lying in a disjointed sort of way no live man could have lain in. His clothing was torn to ribbons, and it was singed, too. So was his hair—he used to play bareheaded—and his face and hands. His bag of clubs was lying a few yards away, and the brassie, which he had just been using, was close by the body.
‘There 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
