Men with time on their hands can get themselves into all sorts of trouble!!

 

Six men who have retired to a pretty seaside town in West Wales play golf together three times a week. Toby is a churchwarden who has fathered an illegitimate child. Scott, a wealthy ex-dentist, is a philanderer with a trophy wife. Colin is a retired Professor in mathematics. Ginger was a bank manager who gambles. Jimmy was a seaman who races pigeons. Stan, well Stan has been advised that £250,000 has been credited to his savings account. Suddenly every one of his chums has a scheme for quadrupling his money. Which scheme will Stan adopt? Will it enable him to live out his fantasies? For one of them the outcome ends in tragedy.

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CHAPTER ONE

It's early morning in late summer. An eerie silence hangs over an empty golf course. The semblance of a heat haze mingles with a sea mist at the far end of the dunes. When Ginger gets out of his car a rabbit scurries across the eighteenth green. The little creature stops, looks at Ginger, pricks his ears, then continues with his journey, unconcerned.

Ginger is always the first of the group to arrive. Partly out of necessity, partly out of habit. His name isn't really Ginger, his name is Talbot Reardon, but nobody locally calls anybody Talbot. He possesses a tall, thickset body and close cropped, curly ginger hair. By birth he's from Scotland, but that was a long time ago. He needs to arrive early to use the toilet. Two years back, his elderly mother-in-law moved in with him and his wife, Caroline, and since then from seven in the morning, until he leaves home for golf, they both commandeer the bathroom, forcing Ginger to complete his ablutions in the changing room at the clubhouse.

Jimmy usually arrives next. That annoys Ginger. In fact, Jimmy often annoys Ginger. Jimmy is short, with pointy features; a pointy nose, a pointy face and short dark hair, which comes to a point in the centre of his forehead. Jimmy is Irish and takes great delight in riling Ginger. The Irish are like that with the Scots and visa-versa. Now Ginger is a hefty man. At least sixteen stone and well over six feet tall. With a driver, he can hit a golf ball the best part of two hundred and seventy yards, almost twice the distance Jimmy can manage. And occasionally, Ginger longs to hit Jimmy. He's big enough to hit Jimmy into next week, but he can't, and Jimmy knows he can't, because Ginger's mother-in-law, Mrs Hetherington, has cancer. Just after she moved in with Ginger and his wife, Ginger broke his toe. Stubbed it on a slab in the garden, when walking barefoot. Jimmy lived off that for months. He still never lets Ginger forget it. At the time, Mrs Hetherington was visiting hospital three times a week, for radium treatment. Ginger's wife Caroline can't drive; Mrs Hetherington was too ill to drive and Ginger's foot was in plaster, so he couldn't drive. For five weeks Jimmy drove them all to the hospital, twenty miles there and twenty miles back and he wouldn't take a penny. 'If you can't help a pal, who can you help?' he'd say, grinning. So as much as Ginger sometimes wants to hit Jimmy, he knows he can't.

More often than not Ginger is still in the toilet when Jimmy enters the changing room. Every time, in that situation, Jimmy will call out, 'Fore. Keep your bowels open Ging.' Ginger can set his watch by it. The words annoy him so much, he never bothers to reply and remains in the cubicle until Stan arrives.

Stan is Welsh, well sort of Welsh anyway. He's from Cardiff, which according to Jimmy isn't really Welsh. 'Just like London now, all suits and bankers,' Jimmy would say. At moments like that Stan and Ginger would just look at each other and make no reply.

'His nibs is in with the Pope,' Jimmy said, when Stan came in through the changing room door that day; another of his regular phrases.

'Looks as though it's going to be fine for once,' Stan said, ignoring Jimmy's remark.

'It does that. The barometer's high,' Jimmy replied.

For eighty years there's been a golf club on that windy peninsular. Over those years the changing room has acquired a permanent odour of damp must; a humid concoction of old wood, sand and salt sea air. On the wooden bench they were both sat upon, there were hundreds of tiny holes in the timber, caused by decades of studded golf shoe laces being tied on its surface. 'Part of our heritage here,' Jimmy remarked one day, pointing at the holes. 'Like putting your shoe in somebody else's footprints.'

Stan was attending to his laces. When he'd finished tying the bows he said, 'Something strange turned up in the post today,' and extracted a letter from his trouser pocket before handed it to Jimmy. It was computer written and from his building society.

'Good God,' Jimmy said after he'd read it. 'You're in the money then.'

'Well, that's what's strange,' Stan replied. 'I'm not actually.' The letter was from the Provincial Building Society. It was addressed to Mr and Mrs Stanley Gladstone Richards, his full name and their correct address and postcode were on the top. The letter said, 'We are in receipt of your remittance for two hundred and fifty thousand pounds and as requested we have credited this amount to your Instant Access Account.'

The toilet flushed. Hearing Stan's voice, Ginger felt safe to extract himself from the cubicle. He walked to the basin and began to wash his hands.

'Well it says here the money's yours,' Jimmy said, still marvelling at the amount.

'That's the problem Jim. I don't know anything about it. I haven't got that sort of money.'

'What do you think of this Ging?' Jimmy said. Ginger was drying his hands on a paper towel. 'You know about these sort of things,' Jimmy continued. 'Stan's in the money I'd say.' Ginger was a retired bank manager. He'd finished his career quite nicely thank you, as the local manager at this seaside holiday town. On financial matters therefore, he tended to laud it over the other lads. Ginger's family had been wealthy. He was educated at Gordonstoun and throughout his banking career he had constantly used his old boy connections to bluff his way through to the best jobs. He slumped down on the bench, puffed out a catarrhal snortle, snatched the letter from Jimmy's hands, pushed his glasses down onto the bridge of his nose, and read it.