The Trawlerman, стр. 15
Alex retreated to a nearby white-painted bench and observed them as they peered at their watches, waiting for a fourth player.
Eventually one, the shorter of the three called, ‘You don’t play, do you?’
Alex snapped out of her thoughts. ‘Sorry?’
‘Fancy a round? We’ve been stood up.’
‘I’m not a member.’
They approached her.
‘Oh, don’t worry about that. We could sneak you on.’ They laughed like naughty schoolgirls.
‘I can’t actually play, either.’
‘Even better. Dawn here needs a handicap.’ More laughter.
She looked up at them. ‘Can I ask you, did any of you know Ayman Younis?’
The laughing stopped at once. ‘What are you? A journalist?’
Alex shook her head. ‘Worse. I’m a police officer.’
‘Show me,’ said the shorter woman distrustfully.
It was true, she was a police officer, but she had no right to be here flashing her warrant card; all the same, she dug into her shoulder bag, pulled out her purse and flipped it open.
‘New, I suppose,’ said the short woman, peering close. ‘I don’t recognise your name.’
Alex, still seated, blinked up at her in the bright sunshine. ‘Why would you know my name?’
‘I was a superintendent. Thirty-one years’ service. I know most people from around here. You’re not local.’
‘No. I came down from the Met.’
The woman made a face, then raised her eyebrows in a small flash of realisation. ‘Oh. You’re the one who sent poor Bill South to prison.’
Alex knew she had not made herself popular among her colleagues. ‘Yes. I was.’
To her surprise the woman said, ‘I don’t suppose that was very easy, having to do something like that.’
‘No. It wasn’t.’
The woman stood, scrutinising her. Idly she pulled a wood from her trolley. ‘I rather admire you for doing it. It was a big shock to us, of course. Bill South is a good man, but it was the right thing. It must have taken some guts.’
‘I don’t think most people round here see it that way. William South, mostly.’
A short, high laugh. ‘He has hidden depths, that man. I’m sure he respects your decision too. He’s up here all the time, you know. He came to do an ecological survey of the course last year. He still comes here bird-spotting sometimes, with that girl. His niece, I think.’
A murmur of agreement from the other woman.
‘His niece?’
‘I think she must be a relative. She doesn’t seem to go to school or anything. I think he looks after her. Trouble at home or something, I expect. He’s a very good man.’
Alex bristled, but said nothing. She imagined all these golf women fussing around Bill and her daughter. Zoë led a life she barely understood. ‘What about the Younises?’
‘Poor Mary wasn’t a member. She didn’t really do golf, did she?’
‘Mary Younis?’
‘Yes. You probably know that already.’ The woman squinted at her, trying to puzzle her out. If she had been working on the case, she would have known these details.
‘And Ayman Younis?’ Alex said.
‘You’d do better talking to Terry over there.’
An athletic-looking man was putting on the eighteenth hole nearby. He wore a dark-blue polo shirt, white shoes, and baseball cap.
‘Go carefully. Terry Neill has been very upset by the whole thing. He usually partnered with Ayman.’
‘Neill, you say?’
While the women teed off, Alex watched the man playing alone, tapping the ball towards the hole, missing it, and watching it roll to the other side of the green. She waited until he’d finished and was tugging his trolley towards the clubhouse, then stood. ‘Mr Neill,’ she called.
The man stopped, peered at her, took off his baseball cap. He had a thick head of salt-and-pepper hair.
She came closer. ‘You were a friend of Ayman Younis’s.’
From where she stood she saw him raise the white gloved hand that held his cap to his tanned face. He was crying, she realised.
Eleven
His eyes were bluer for their red rims.
‘I’m sorry. I’m quite the crier.’ They sat together on the bench in the warm afternoon sun. ‘It’s very raw, though. Last thing in the world you’d expect around here. The whole thing is so strange.’
He was in his late forties, she guessed, which made him younger than most of the other golfers she had seen on the course this morning.
‘I can’t actually imagine him not being here,’ Terry Neill said, looking around him at the course, flat and empty. ‘I’ve just been playing a round without him. Saturday mornings, every one for the last couple of years, we’re out here. Every time I sliced the ball or knocked it close to the rough, I wait for him to say something, to take the piss, but he’s not there. I can’t imagine him not being up in the bar now suggesting we have a drink.’
Alex handed him another paper hankie from her bag.
‘The thing about men is they don’t make friends easily. Me, at least. It’s a physical thing, grief, you know? Statistically, it’s known that some spouses die within a few months of each other. Loss alters us in significant ways.’
She looked at him cautiously. ‘You’re not, by any chance, a counsellor are you?’
He broke into a laugh. ‘God forbid. An academic. A biochemist. Former biochemist. Mostly retired now, obviously. Why? Are you looking for one? This doesn’t seem like the obvious place to start.’
‘No. I seem to have one already. You believe that grief is just a chemical imbalance, then?’
He picked off his gloves. ‘That would be a very arrogant thing to say. Grief is huge. But one way to look at it might be neurology. There’s a thing called Broken Heart Syndrome, did you know that? Extreme emotions have a physical effect on heart function. You can actually die from a broken heart.’
Alex’s mother had not died after her father had passed away. Far from it. She had prospered. Alex, who had loved her father in the way an only daughter could, had resented that.
‘You’re having counselling?’ he asked, wiping the underside of his eyes.