‘No worries, Reverend, I only arrived four days ago. I’ve had to tie up a lot of business before I could move in. But I’ll be living at the castle most of the time. I have big plans for the place.’
The Padre smiled unenthusiastically. ‘Are you all three playing this morning?’ he asked, his eye hovering over the single professional-spec leather bag and the two men standing a pace behind Jock McArdle.
‘Naw, Reverend, it’s just me,’ Jock McArdle returned with a grin. ‘These are two of my employees that I’ve brought from Glasgow. I thought that a bit of good clean sea air would be good for their health. Is that not right, boys?’
‘It’s a bit deathly if ye ask me,’ returned the one holding the golf bag. ‘There’s no night life. Just a handful of pubs.’
Jock McArdle guffawed. ‘This is Liam Sartori, Reverend. As ye can see, he’s a wee bit lippy, but he’s a good lad.’
The Padre shook hands, his practised pastoral smile belying the shrewd appraisal that he had made of the two young men. Liam Sartori was a tall, well built and excessively tanned fellow, probably the result of a sunbed rather than the sun’s rays, the Padre reflected. Possibly a third or fourth generation Glasgow Italian. His clothes were casual and brashly expensive. A gold medallion hung from a heavy gold chain on the front of a red, white and blue sports shirt. He was unsure whether Jock McArdle’s criterion of goodness matched his own.
‘And this is Danny Reid,’ Jock McArdle said, introducing the other young man who was in the process of opening a cigarette packet and offering it to Liam Sartori. ‘See, he’s the quiet one.’
‘I’m the thinking one, Reverend,’ said Danny Reid, clipping the cigarette in his lips and shaking Lachlan’s hand.
He was a shade shorter than his associate, possibly a touch under six foot, well muscled, with a tattoo of a claymore on his right forearm and at least six body piercings that the Padre could count on lips, ears, eyebrows and nose. Like his associate he had a medallion on a thick gold chain. His blond hair was spiky and most probably the result of peroxide. Lachlan watched as he lit their cigarettes with a gaudy Zippo lighter.
‘I can only manage nine holes, I’m afraid,’ Lachlan said. ‘I have a funeral to conduct in a couple of hours.’
‘Nine holes would be excellent,’ returned Jock McArdle, enthusiastically. ‘But see, would I be insulting your cloth if I suggested a wager?’
The Padre struck a light to his pipe, then replaced his box of Swan Vestas in his jacket pocket. ‘A small wager always adds a frisson to a game, so I don’t see why not. Match play or Stableford?’
‘I prefer simple match play, Reverend. Winner takes all.’
The Padre blew a thin stream of smoke from the side of his mouth and nodded. It fitted with his assessment of the Glaswegian. The new laird was clearly a man confident in his own abilities. ‘Shall we say five pounds for the winner? What’s your handicap, Mr McArdle?’
‘Fourteen.’
‘And mine’s a rather shaky eight. Exactly one eighth of my age. So, that means I give you three shots over the nine holes. That will be at the second, the fifth and the ninth.’
Jock McArdle nodded to Liam Sartori who unzipped a side pocket of the golf bag and extracted a box of Dunlop 65 balls, and a tee, then pulled out a Callaway driver. ‘You’ll be needing the big one, boss,’ he said with a confident grin.
The Padre puffed thoughtfully on his pipe and pulled out his two iron, the club he favoured for the tricky first drive, especially when the wind was gusting as it tended to do on the first three holes.
‘I am thinking that you will enjoy the course, Mr McArdle. It isn’t exactly the Old Course at St Andrews, but it’s a good test of golf. Nature designed it with the Corlins on one side and the North Atlantic Ocean on the other, and we just added a few refinements. It has six holes dotted about the sand dunes of the machair, with three tees for each one, so you can either play a straight eighteen, or, when it is quiet, string any number of combinations together. The fairways are mowed once a week, the sheep nibble the green to billiard-table smoothness and the bunkers have been excavated by generations of rabbits. Watch out for the gorse and the thistles; think your way round and you’ll be all right.’
He puffed his pipe again and nodded at the honesty box hanging from the fence. ‘And, of course, the green fee is pretty reasonable.’
Jock McArdle grinned and nodded to Danny Reid, who drew out a roll of money and peeled off a five pound note. Is this safe here, Minister?’ Danny Reid asked incredulously as he deposited it in the box.
The Padre pointed to the nearby roof of the church. ‘This is West Uist, Mr Reid. St Ninian’s Golf Course is beside church land. Who would steal from the church?’
Liam Sartori sneered, ‘I’m willing to bet that you’ve never been to my part of Glasgow, Minister.’
Jock McArdle eyed the yardage marker by the side of the first tee, then the two iron in the Padre’s hand. He handed his driver back to Liam Sartori and pulled out his own two iron. ‘Aye, golf is a thinking game, Reverend. A careful game.’ He grinned, a curious half smile with no humour in it. ‘You’ll find that I am always careful. It’s a good policy in my book.’
Jock McArdle was a bandit off a handicap of fourteen, Lachlan decided, after they had played three holes and he found himself three holes down. Or rather, he was a ‘bandit chief’, on account of the fact that his two boys seemed to take it in turns to caddy and to find their boss’s ball, a task that they seemed to achieve with miraculous skill. Indeed, knowing the extent of the gorse and thistle patches on the undulating dunes as well as he did, the Padre was almost certain that twice his ball had been discovered at least twenty yards further on than it should have, and on both occasions had seemed to fortuitously find a nice flat piece of fairway.
‘You play well for a fourteen handicapper, Mr McArdle,’ the Padre said, as they walked onto the fifth tee. ‘And your two finders have done sterling work this morning.’
‘I like to win at everything I do, Reverend. That’s why I’ve been successful in business. That’s how I came to buy the Dunshiffin estate.’
The Padre pulled a dilapidated pouch out of a side pocket of his jacket and began stuffing tobacco into his battered old briar pipe. ‘Am I right in sensing that you have something more than golf on your mind this morning, Mr McArdle?’
‘You’re a shrewd man, Lachlan,’ returned Jock McArdle with an ingratiating grin. ‘Do you mind if I call you, Lachlan?’
The priest shrugged. ‘Most people on West Uist just call me Padre.’
‘OK then, Padre. I’m not the sort of guy who beats about the bush.’ He nodded to his two boys and raised his voice:
‘You two go and have a smoke over by that pot bunker. But keep your eyes open. I’ll be driving over your heads in a minute, so mind and duck.’
When they were out of earshot he went on, ‘Do you know how I came to buy the Dunshiffin estate, Padre?’
Lachlan had won the last hole and gained back the honour to drive first. He shoved a tee into the ground and perched his ball on top. ‘I was aware of the liquidation of Angus MacLeod Enterprises after the death of the last laird of Dunshiffin, Angus MacLeod.’
‘I picked the estate up for a song. Two and a half million, if you want to know.’ His mouth twisted in a curiously self-satisfied way. ‘That’s not bad, is it, for a lad who started selling cones and wafers from a fourth-hand ice-cream van. I built up the biggest confectionary business in Midlothian over the last twenty years. And I have plans, Padre. Big plans.’ He bent and picked up a few blades of grass and threw them into the air where they were caught in the breeze and wafted sidewards. ‘The wind is not too bad here, is it?’