The Defective Detective : Murder on the Links by Adam Maxwell Page B

forward knocking me back to full consciousness and causing everyone to stare.
      “Clint!  Is that you?” Mitch Van Doren stood over the body, the expensive shoes that matched his expensive suit being slowly ruined by a malfunctioning sprinkler that intermittently squirted a jet of water at him like some sort of evil underground clown.
      “No.”
      “Haha,” he actually laughed.  “Good one.”
     
Good one?
  Who says that?  No-one, that’s who. 
      “They told me there were two dead bodies. Glad to see it’s just the one.”
       “They?  Who’s they?”
      “Well, that’s to say, erm, well I’m not glad there’s a dead body obviously.”
      “Mitch what are you doing here are you drunk?”
      “It’s just that, well, what with your condition.  Erm, you can see why they made the mistake can’t you.  Drunk? What, er, no.  Just had the one.”
      “Well then,” I said, climbing out of the golf cart and coming a little closer to him.  “If you’re not drunk and you aren’t here for me why are you here?”
      His brow furrowed and he stared back.
      “Because I’m pretty sure,” I said as I stepped a little further towards the body, careful to stay out of the radius of the sprinkler.  “There are rules around when there are dead folks involved.”
      He stared the stare of a man with little intelligence and no sense of humour.  I waited for his brain to re-engage and, momentarily, it did.
      “Ah, right, yes.  Thing is that I can.  I’m a private detective, the dead person clearly isn’t you and, erm, I’ve been asked to look into it by the Agency.”
      “Right.  Very good.”
      I stared at the body.  It was the first time I’d ever seen someone properly dead before.  He lay, his eyes ridiculously wide, his mouth pulled into a silent scream.  What little hair he had stood straight out.  It was like something from a cartoon.  I laughed accidentally and then the wave started to come towards me, my eyes getting heavier and heavier.
      Fighting the urge to sleep I bent over, putting my hands on my knees and breathing deeply.
      “First time you’ve seen one?  Erm, I mean a dead body.”
      I nodded and stared at the golf clubs scattered on top of him and all around, the discarded cigar butt on his chest but mostly the smoke rising from his hair.  I could feel the sleep rolling away from me again.  I stood upright.  I had to do something, keep moving, keep focussed.
      “So what’s this agency then?” I said, walked over to the golf bag and tried to lift it onto its three-wheeled transporter-thingy.  It was heavy.  Really heavy and inside there was some sort of electrical contraption.  Home made.  Like a bomb only not.  “Have you seen this?”
      It’s amazing how much information you can glean from an idiot with a personality bypass.  Once he’d stopped me from trying to tidy up the scene of a murder he told me some quite interesting things that seemed, for a man of his limited creative means, impossible to make up.  The Agency was just that – no adjective, just ‘Agency’.  He was a detective, though God knows how.  I also found out that it was extremely well paid, had high profile clients, often dealt with murders, that he was a senior investigator and that he once kissed a man called Kevin and never told his wife.  Mitch’s wife, that is, I didn’t ask about Kevin.
      As we talked several police men and women of varying ranks had begun to arrive.  The closest one to Mitch and I was talking to a tubby middle aged man who turned to us for a second to blow a plume of cigar smoke before continuing whatever it was he was saying. 
      The policeman’s face contorted into a frown and he opened his mouth to speak, paused, looking like he might not bother and then decided to go for it anyway.  “Are you with him?”
      He gestured towards Mitch who was walking towards a tall woman she instantly began to throw her arms in the