That is normally a good thing, an admirable thing. In this case, it would eventually make things very difficult for the police. But no one was thinking about policemen at the time. Patrick Nayland was a model employer. Both his workforce and his customers seemed to think that. And this was the kind of business where there was plenty of evidence. Nayland owned a small golf course outside the old market town of Oldford, in that green and pleasant part of England between the rivers Severn and Wye, where Gloucestershire runs into Herefordshire. It is a quiet and beautiful area, with the mellow stone villages and rolling hills of the Cotswolds to the north and east and the high mountains of the Brecon Beacons to the west. This was not a pretentious golf course: it had only nine holes, and a short and undistinguished history. In the early nineties, when the proliferation of golf courses was being encouraged by a government anxious to emphasize the new leisure which was to be a feature of life in the years ahead, Patrick Nayland had obtained planning consent for a new golfing development.
