Read As Easy as Murder for Free Online Page B

our direction. I formed the conceited impression that it was meant specifically for me, and found myself smiling back.
    ‘He’s a new one on me,’ Patterson murmured, drawing my attention back to him. ‘I wonder who he is.’
    I followed his gaze and saw a well-muscled young man of medium height with braided hair, and skin like shiny ebony, carrying a huge golf bag along the back of the range until he found a space between two players. ‘Yes indeed,’ I whispered, as he swung the clubs from his shoulders and planted it firmly on the ground.
    ‘No,’ said Patterson, ‘not him; he’s a caddie. I mean his boss.’ He pointed to a guy who was following him, a few paces behind. He was quite a bit taller than the other, and his tanned face was set in serious concentration.
    If we hadn’t been sitting I’d have fallen over. I felt my heart hammer as it jumped from the normal sixty-something beats per minute to rather more than twice that. My head swam, and for a split second I didn’t know who or where I was. Bizarrely, I wondered if I was dead, like those cops in purgatory in that TV series, for it was as if I was looking at someone I knew better than any man in the world, only it couldn’t be him, for he really was dead, and anyway this version was only half the age he’d have attained if he hadn’t been. My right hand was at my mouth. I bit my fingers, hard, to restore a semblance of reality.
    Shirley had been looking at me. ‘Primavera,’ I heard her call out, ‘are you all right?’
    I gulped and nodded, but I was speechless.
    Patterson had been oblivious to my near faint. He’d been too busy leafing through the programme. ‘Got him,’ he exclaimed. ‘It’s that new lad, the kid from the last Walker Cup team. He’s just turned pro and this is his first event.’ He thrust a page in front of me. ‘There he is. Sinclair, his name is: Jonathan Sinclair.’
    I had worked it out for myself by that time. I’d placed him, even though I hadn’t seen him since he was a precocious, pre-pubescent youth, not since the days when I’d been married to his uncle, his Uncle Oz. I knew how his life had developed, though; his Grandpa Blackstone was vastly proud of him, and had kept me in occasional touch with his progress as a golfer. I knew that he’d gone to university in America, on a sports scholarship, and that he’d made a name for himself on the amateur circuit. But I hadn’t seen Mac for a while, and so, while I’d been aware that turning pro had been on the cards, I’d no way of knowing that it had happened.
    ‘Jonny.’ I only whispered the name, but Shirley heard me nonetheless.
    ‘Who?’ she asked, loud enough to make the former US Open champion’s caddie throw a frown in her direction.
    ‘Jonny,’ I repeated. ‘I’d forgotten what his dad’s surname was. He’s Oz’s sister’s older boy.’
    She stared at me, then at him, then back at me. ‘Oz’s nephew? The kid who was here when you and he were married? He’s turned into that?’ She looked at him again, a little more closely. ‘Now you tell me, yes, he does look like him. Not as much as Tom does, of course, but still . . .’
    Of course. It came back to me; Shirley had met him, when Grandpa Mac, Ellie and her boys had come for Christmas to the house in L’Escala that Oz and I had bought not long after we were married. For several reasons, that place, that whole time, had been a disaster for us. The only positive had been Tom’s conception, just as his parents were falling apart as a couple. Things had been pretty bad also for Shirley then. But she hadn’t reacted by taking flight, she’d done so by correcting a mistake, and buying back the house she’d sold believing wrongly that she’d be happy somewhere else. Still, tough and all as she was, my instant concern was that being hauled back to those days wouldn’t be good for her.
    I should have known better. ‘Wow,’ she whistled. ‘What a honey. What age will he be