Vincent wasn’t a member, so he figured he wouldn’t do himself any favours going through the reception area. He locked the Range Rover and cut across a lawn to the other side of the building. All very Mediterranean: folding doors that gave out onto a pebbled seating area, tables and chairs shaded by trees with a view of the swimming pool. The fairway beyond it money-green and mown crossways in a chequered pattern.

A handful of people were outdoors having drinks—women in tennis whites, and the men mostly in pastel, looking as cheerful and richly coloured as a catalogue photo. Vincent saw a couple of guys teeing off at the first hole, but neither of them was a gorilla in a Hawaiian shirt. He threaded between tables, shading his eyes against the late sun, trying to see farther down the course.

‘Sir, can I help you?’

He turned and found a waiter smiling at him tightly, expression as blank and sterile as the white cloth draped over his arm.

Vincent said, ‘I was here last week with Eugene Lamar.’

‘I see.’

‘I was hoping to speak to Sylvester Crow.’

The guy’s smile grew a quarter-inch at each end, but his eyes remained tight. He stepped back and gestured with an outstretched arm—straight out from the shoulder, a cantilever that meant business. ‘You’ll need to sign in at the desk. And non-members incur an admission fee. Frank can help you.’

Vincent said, ‘Perfect,’ as if he’d been looking for Frank all along.

He went inside via the French doors and walked through a dining room and then a bar area with shelved liquor covering a whole wall—amber bottles as grand and eye-catching as a church organ. He went out into the parking lot and then down the other side of the building—left this time, where he knew the golf carts were kept. There was a fleet of them, ten or twelve, nose-in by the pro-shop. No one seemed interested when Vincent climbed onto a cart and hit the ignition button and headed off down the edge of the fairway.

He’d heard golf referred to as a good walk ruined, and he could see it would be a good way to ruin an otherwise pleasant cart ride, too. The thing rolled along with a contented electric hum, and the course made for nice scenery, fairways undulating gently and bands of late sun slanting in between the trees.

He found Sly in a group of four at the sixteenth. One guy was about to tee off, and Sly was watching from the shade with the two other men and the carts.