Czytaj książkę: «Murder on the Green»
MURDER ON THE GREEN
The Old Forge Cafe
H.V. Coombs
Published by AVON
A Division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018
Copyright © H.V. Coombs 2018
The following are copyright lines to be used as applicable
Cover design © Becky Glibbery 2018
Cover photograph© Shutterstock.com
H.V. Coombs asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Ebook Edition © June 2018 ISBN: 9780008235802
Version: 2018-04-19
‘Good food is the foundation of genuine happiness.’
Auguste Escoffier
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-One
Chapter Fifty-Two
Chapter Fifty-Three
Chapter Fifty-Four
Keep Reading …
About the Publisher
Chapter One
I hadn’t been outside at seven p.m. on a Thursday in years, not with a full kitchen to run. But I knew that if you parked your car carefully – not by the side of the green which, as the many signs point out, is strictly forbidden – and strolled around, you’d think to yourself, ‘What a peaceful place.’ It’s what I had thought when I’d moved here.
The green, with its fenced-off play area, a couple of mothers exercising children before bed in the summer, and maybe a dog walker or two, seems like a nice place to raise a family or live a quiet life. Even the tasteful Parish information noticeboard gives details of Zumba classes and yoga in the village hall. Locals can be spotted sitting outside the local Three Bells pub having a quiet pint. And then there’s my restaurant, the Old Forge Café.
In the calm, tranquil dining room that Thursday night, there were about twenty-five people, enjoying good food (at reasonable prices!) efficiently and charmingly served by my young manager and her assistant waiter.
A peaceful place to eat in a peaceful Chiltern village. Until you get to the kitchen …
Heat from the stove, heat from the chargrill, heat from the hot plate, heat from the lights keeping the food warm on the pass, heat from the backs of the fridges, heat from the deep-fat fryers, heat and steam from the dishwasher …
‘Cheque on!’ I shouted to Francis over the kitchen fans. It was unbelievably hot. My jacket was sodden with perspiration. I wiped my forehead with the back of my sleeve.
‘Two hake, one fillet steak medium rare, peppercorn sauce … no starter …’
Francis’s large, red, sweaty face beamed at me from underneath his bandanna that he’d taken to wearing in the kitchen, and he turned away to get the vegetable accompaniments ready.
And not just heat to contend with, but noise too. The roar of the extractor fans, which in this small space were like a jet taking off, the hiss and bubble of the deep-fat fryer, the clang of the pans on the stove, the crash of fridges as we frantically opened and closed them, the crackle of the cheque machine as new orders came into the kitchen …
I added the cheque to the row of five that were already lined up in chronological order above the pass. An easy order to do.
I quickly finished plating the dish that I had just cooked, glanced at the clock, pulled a frying pan off the stove and balanced it on the side.
‘Service …’ Jess, my waitress, appeared, and I pointed at the pass. She was back from uni for the summer, thank God. Jess might be only twenty-two but she was by far the most mature person I knew, myself included. ‘Two lamb, one smoked aubergine feuilleté. Thank you, Jess.’
‘Thank you, Chef.’
She disappeared with the food, efficient as always. I turned to Francis as I took the cheque down and spiked it, and looked at the next three, to see they were all in hand. I opened my little locker fridge and took out two pieces of hake and a steak fillet and put the piece of meat on the bars of the chargrill.
‘Francis, get the red pepper relish out.’ I liked the red pepper relish, simple to make (cheap to make come to that), versatile, a real winner.
‘We haven’t got any, Chef!’ came the shouted reply.
For a second, the world stood still as I digested the news, then I was back in action, mechanically turning the various pieces of meat on the chargrill, checking that the three small frying pans I had on the go with yet more meat inside were all to hand, making sure that the piece of turbot protected by tinfoil under the lights on the pass wasn’t going over, getting too cooked. I was cooking fifteen meals simultaneously, and now this.
I turned to Francis who quailed under my gaze. I was very cross indeed. At five o’clock he had assured me that all the mise en place was done; well, that manifestly wasn’t the case. You didn’t run out of things in restaurants; it was unacceptable.
As was sending the hake out naked, minus its dressing as clearly stated on the menu, into the world.
I was tempted to bellow, ‘What do you mean, we haven’t got any …’ adding a string of profanities, but what would have been the use?
The hallmark of a good chef is being able to deal with crises and I am a good chef.
‘Go out to the walk-in, get me a red pepper, an onion, a fennel bulb – and hurry up …’ I snapped, suppressing the urge to scream at him.
Francis stood there rooted to the spot.
I lost my ability to suppress my urges. Time to scream.
‘Please, HURRY UP!’
He didn’t leap into action; he ambled. There are times when I would dearly like to kill Francis.
Jess came into the kitchen and saw my expression, sensed the mood in the air.
‘You OK, Ben?’ she asked.
‘I’m savouring the moment, Jess,’ I said through clenched teeth. ‘I’m very much savouring the moment in a mindful way.’
Earlier that day I had been reading an article on mindfulness. Whoever had written it had probably never worked in a commercial kitchen, but I was determined to take their comments on board, regardless.
I crashed a pan on the stove to vent some mindfulness on metal rather than Francis.
Francis returned and handed me the vegetables.
He looked stricken, his plump, red face a mask of contrition. Contrition was no good to me. I gritted my teeth and tried to enjoy the now.
Now was far from enjoyable.
So, while I cooked fifteen meals, (Francis doing the vegetables, silently, miserably, like a kicked dog) I frantically made a red pepper relish, buying time from the table by sending them some pâté and home-made parmesan and rosemary focaccia bread (chef’s compliments).
The relish is supposed to gently cook for about three-quarters of an hour – I had it ready in ten minutes, softening the vegetables in the microwave before frying them, frantically cutting corners. More by luck than judgement, it ended up just fine, but by the end of the night I was a sweaty, angry twitchy mass of nerves covered in sodden chef’s whites.
We sent the last cheque out and silence descended on the kitchen. I started turning the gas rings off on the cooker, shutting down the kitchen, tight-lipped with irritation.
‘I’m sorry, Chef, I was as much use as a chocolate teaspoon …’ Francis looked like he might cry, his lip trembling. He had taken his bandanna off and his very blond hair was plastered to his head like he had been swimming.
Francis was huge, his chef’s whites padded out with muscle.
‘That’s OK, Francis,’ I said, patting him on the back (it was like stroking a horse), ‘but please don’t do it again.’
We cleaned the kitchen down, I sent Francis home, and Jessica and I sat in the small empty restaurant and had a beer. It was becoming a bit of a tradition really, and I had come to enjoy Jess’s company since arriving in Hampden Green.
‘You look terrible,’ she remarked.
I looked at Jess. She didn’t look terrible; she looked refreshed. I wondered how she continued to look full of energy after a long day and night waitressing. Perhaps she had this mindfulness thing down? Jess gave me a look of worried concern and pushed a hand through her dark hair that she fought a constant battle against frizz with. One of the few problems I don’t have is frizzy hair – mainly because I haven’t got any.
Silver linings.
‘I was thinking exactly the same thing this morning, while I was shaving,’ I said. ‘Perhaps I should start wearing foundation.’
‘Well, you’ll need more than that,’ she said as she drank some beer, and looked at me with real concern. ‘How many hours have you worked this week?’
I did some mental arithmetic – fifteen hours a day for eight days – but I was too tired to do the sums. ‘A lot.’
‘Ben,’ she said, looking me in the eye, ‘you simply can’t go on like this – you need to hire another chef.’
I took a mouthful of beer. ‘I can’t afford to hire one – if I could, I would.’
Jessica looked unconvinced. ‘You can’t afford not to hire one. Working a hundred and twenty hours in a row—’ Jess, unlike me, was good at maths ‘—is not good for you.’
I smiled, rather bleakly. I knew that we were both right.
Jess drained her beer and stood up, reaching to pull on her coat.
‘I’ll see you tomorrow at ten,’ she said. ‘Try and get an early night.’
‘I will.’
She stood looking down at me. ‘Get another chef. You’re killing yourself.’
‘If a miracle happens, I will.’
I watched as she let herself out.
Miracles never happen, I told myself sorrowfully.
Chapter Two
The next day on my morning run, I turned in to the path that bordered Ferguson’s Field (I’d been here six months, and I was gradually beginning to learn the names of places).
I was tired, I was short of money and my back ached horribly, but I ran on. I might die exhausted, penniless and in pain but at least I’d die fit and slim.
There was a sheet of blue paper, laminated against the weather and secured to a bush. It was the third such notice I’d seen. Instead of ignoring it and simply wondering what it said, as I had the first two times, I did something clever. I actually stopped and read it. It was a change of usage notification from the council for the field.
My immediate thought was that it was going to be a housing development, which surprised me. The field not only belonged to the Earl, but it also abutted on his garden. I say garden, I should have said ‘gardens’ or estate. It was pretty sizeable. Earl Hampden was well known for his opposition to housing developments, so it seemed most odd he would try to put one up next to where he lived.
I stopped and read the document properly. For three weeks in July the field would host an open-air event with licensed bars. I shrugged and jogged on – it was nothing to do with me.
I lengthened my stride and picked up the pace. It was good to be running on a day like this in the Bucks countryside. The fields bordered with neatly trimmed beech hedges looked great, the trees giving a wonderful canopy of green overhead. It beat being in the kitchen.
All too soon I was back there.
Later, during a lull in the lunchtime service, I asked Francis if he knew anything about the event.
‘Of course, everyone does.’ He looked genuinely astonished at my ignorance. He scratched his head in perplexity.
Everyone except me.
‘It’s the Marlow House Festival,’ he explained.
‘The Marlow House Festival?’
‘Opera, Chef,’ he said. Anyone else might have added this in a condescending way, but not Francis. He was condescension-free.
‘Opera?’ I repeated, somewhat stupidly.
‘Yeah, opera, singing …’ He looked at me, puzzled. I started work on a dessert cheque: a strawberry pavlova with Chantilly cream.
‘I know what opera is, Francis.’
‘Well,’ he began, walking over to the sink and starting to load plates and cutlery into the enormous Hobart dishwasher, ‘the Earl puts on a big event every year for about a fortnight. The first two or three weeks of July. There’ll be a huge marquee there, about three hundred people per night, fireworks … It’s mega.’
‘Is that the Earl’s opera event you two are talking about?’
It was Jess who had just walked in. I know very little about opera – it certainly didn’t feature much on Beech Tree FM. That was the radio station that we listened to in the kitchen, playing undemanding, uncontroversial Seventies and Eighties pop classics. Their DJs had a permanent air of sunny mindlessness and inane links. One came on at this moment, ‘… and now, here’s a song about a river, no, not the Thames, not the Misbourne, not even the Chess, it’s Pussycat with “Mississippi” …’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘maybe we’ll pick up some custom from it.’
Jess shook her head. ‘No, you won’t – it’s fully catered. He gets a firm from London usually: steak, lobster, that kind of thing. I think that’s how he makes his money out of it.’ She scowled at the radio. ‘Who the hell is this?’
‘Pussycat,’ I said. ‘I think they might be Dutch …’
‘For heaven’s sake,’ said Jess. She sighed. The radio was a source of friction between us – she craved something more modern, but it was my kitchen and my radio.
‘What do they use for kitchens?’ I asked. My interest was piqued.
‘My dad says that they use the kitchens at the house,’ said Francis.
I’d forgotten that Francis’s dad was the Earl’s Head Gardener. Francis was always a reliable source of information about the peculiar character who was our local aristocrat.
‘They’re not massive,’ said Francis, keen to be in the unusual position of being able to show off his knowledge, ‘but they’re well equipped. Marlow House has always done big parties, weddings, stuff like that, particularly with the last Earl, but the new Earl isn’t so keen on people in the house. The opera lot are confined to the field and the gardens this year.’
It’s funny how your mind works. I was unable to cope with my current workload, but part of me was annoyed that the Earl, who admittedly I hardly knew, would hire these London caterers instead of me. There was no way on earth that I could have managed to squeeze in doing food and drink for three hundred people a night – the logistics would be daunting, together with running my own business – but I would have liked to have been asked.
I shook my head in irritation at myself. There I was, getting cross that I hadn’t been given something I couldn’t have coped with.
I have anger management problems that I have to constantly work on, but at least I was just cross, not furious. That was something.
A journey of ten thousand miles begins with a single step.
And news of the Earl’s opera event was like the tossed pebble that starts the avalanche.
Chapter Three
‘Sack the bastard!’ Graeme Strickland was his usual forthright self. We were in one of Hampden Street’s two pubs. The grotty one. The Three Bells. Diagonally opposite the common from where my restaurant was. Grotty décor, grotty toilets, grotty furniture. It was a wonder we came here at all, but it was quiet and that suited us.
What the pub lacked in desirability, it made up for geographically. It was a five-minute walk from both our restaurants and as we both spend six days a week shackled to the stove morning, lunchtime, noon and night, it was a blessed relief from our respective workplaces.
Behind the bar, resplendent in a moth-eaten grey cardigan, Malcolm, the taciturn landlord with the very red face, stood tall and silent, the grotty lord of all he surveyed. He was a discouraging presence. There was no hint of welcome or eagerness to serve, to spring into action should a customer appear; it was more as if he were guarding the bar from anyone who might be rash enough to try to get a drink.
It really was a horrible place.
Strickland was on a split shift from his restaurant and was allowing himself two pints. Theoretically he should have been working ten a.m. until three p.m., six p.m. until ten p.m. In reality it was more nine a.m. to three p.m., five p.m. to midnight. Six days a week. He had his own way of coping with the endless hours. He’d just come back from his third visit to the toilet. He might have had bladder problems, but his suspiciously wide eyes and frequent sniffs, as loud as they were frantic, told a different story.
His restaurant, the King’s Head, was the other pub in Hampden Street. It had been turned into a restaurant and Strickland had firmly dragged it by the scruff of its countrified neck, from pork pies, filled baps and ploughman’s lunches into the world of fine dining. He was highly successful. Now, if you wanted to eat there it was a three-week wait, unless there was a cancellation.
We tended to choose the Three Bells, first off because it was no threat to either of us. Malcolm’s food ran to crisps and sometimes, if he’d been on a gourmet spending spree, pork scratchings. The second reason was that the Three Bells was round the corner and therefore the perfect place to grab a quick drink mid-shift. There had been an article on the Michelin system of awards in the trade press the other day. This was a sore point. Strickland was aggrieved as he’d just narrowly missed out on his coveted Michelin star. He still had his four rosettes but boy, did he want that final accolade.
‘French bastards!’ he’d said when last year’s annual results had been announced and he had been ignored.
The Charlie was not mellowing his mood. I had stupidly moaned to him about Francis’s lack of ability. It was not only stupid, it was unfair too.
It wasn’t Francis’s fault.
I had hired Francis as a kitchen porter, a person who washes dishes, not as a chef. It wasn’t as if he had misrepresented himself to get a job. He had never said he was a chef. He never wanted to be a chef.
In the old days I would have raged at Francis, screamed and shouted and got rid of him. Now, courtesy of the Tao Te Ching, which I read daily to help with my anger management, I was working on my personality rather than his. The way of the Tao. I decided not to share this with Strickland – he would have thought I was mad.
‘Well, I can’t really do that,’ I said, taking a sip of my drink. ‘I can’t fire Francis.’
Before Strickland could say anything, I changed the subject. ‘And how about you – how are things at the King’s Head?’
He frowned. ‘I’ve got this sodding awful restaurant manager. He keeps harassing my waitresses.’
‘Sack the bastard!’ I said, parroting his advice to me. At least I just had an amiable oaf.
He took a mouthful of lager, and shook his head regretfully. ‘He’s very clever, it’s either when no one’s looking, wandering hands sort of stuff, or verbal, or it’s just creepy behaviour, like staring down a blouse, that kind of thing. But it’s never that bloody obvious.’ He sniffed loudly and stared at me through coke-crazed eyes. ‘Perhaps you could beat him up for me, Ben.’
‘I don’t do that sort of thing!’ I protested.
‘Course you don’t …’ There was polite disbelief in his tone.
Serve time for GBH and people, understandably, think you’re violent. A reputation is a hard thing to shake. Particularly in a village. Strickland continued, ‘Anyway, one of these days he’ll go too far. Probably grab a customer – I wouldn’t put it past him, he’s a sick bastard.’
‘Why’d you hire him?’ I was genuinely interested.
Strickland looked at me. He was a small, dapper, good-looking man, never a hair out of place.
‘He came highly recommended, glowing CV.’
‘Probably from someone desperate to get shot of him,’ I said. ‘You know the way it is with troublemakers and the incompetent; just please get out of my life and I’ll give you a fantastic reference and a generous payout.’
‘It’s the only explanation,’ said Strickland mournfully. He looked quite depressed, as anyone would, with an unsackable member of staff. I changed the subject.
‘Do you know about the Earl’s opera thing?’
Strickland nodded. ‘Yeah, and I know who’s doing the catering for it too.’
The way that he said it made me sure that he had won the contract for it. He would be well placed to do it. He had the expertise. He’d been at the top of the tree for twenty years, from a spotty faced kid to thirty-six-year-old head chef. He also had phenomenal energy – it wouldn’t have surprised me to learn that he was going to do it single-handedly.
Probably in his break.
‘Who’s that then?’ I asked.
His smile broadened, ‘Have a guess …’
I felt a stab of envy. Undeserved, but I had to acknowledge it was there. ‘I really don’t know …’
He sat back in his chair. ‘Justin McCleish!’
Chapter Four
So, Justin McCleish, famous TV chef, was going to be running the show. Not Graeme Strickland. Well, that was surprising, to say the least. Everyone knows Justin.
McCleish had worked his way up from being a chef who cropped up on Saturday Kitchen and MasterChef: The Professionals, to having his own TV series on BBC2. The most obvious thing about him, other than his ability to cook, was his extreme good looks. He had a seductive, half-Italian, half-British pronunciation, and a model wife. The former made women swoon, the latter attracted a male audience. Some people even learned a bit about cooking.
Strickland nodded his head.
‘Yeah, thought that would surprise you. He’s going to be running a pop-up restaurant for the Earl’s opera in some marquee, hundred-quid five-course tasting menu, hundred and fifty with matched wines and two-hundred-quid ‘deluxe’ truffle and champagne option. What do you make of that then?’
Hampden Street could do with some excitement. Since January when there had been a murder nearby, things had been remarkably quiet. The most talked about thing was currently a village debate about parking near the village hall.
Half the village wanted restrictions, half the village didn’t. Temperatures were running high.
That had ruffled more feathers than the murder and subsequent arrest of a local for the killing. Parking was always a hot topic here. Murder seemed a bit meh for the village, a bit, who cares … Parking though …
The arrival of a bona fide famous person, a chef in the same league as Gordon Ramsay or Tom Kerridge or Rick Stein, would be the topic of conversation in the village for the next month.
Strickland had some more information. ‘Not only is he running the pop-up, McCleish is even moving here.’
‘So, Justin McCleish is moving to the village. Exciting times!’ I said.
‘Yep, into the Old Vicarage,’ Strickland replied, raising his eyebrows.
The Old Vicarage was massive and had belonged to a shady businessman who was facing a ruinous divorce and had needed to sell up quickly.
Strickland pulled a face and drank some of his lager. ‘What do you think of him?’
This was an easy one to answer. His name cropped up a lot in conversation. Coincidentally, I had recently mentally listed the main reasons I disliked Justin McCleish – several times.
The case for the prosecution:
His looks – the long, dark hair, the designer stubble, the faux ethnic jewellery, the hippy/surfer dude vibe. He was in his late thirties. This was a look he was too old for, in my opinion.
His causes – Jamie Oliver has his school dinners/sugar tax; Hugh has his sustainable fish thing; Gordon Ramsay, swearing and bad temper; Marco Pierre White, inscrutably weird behaviour. The low-hanging fruit have gone. Justin had his ‘feed the poor’ crusade, meals-on-a-budget ideas.
And last but not least, Aurora McCleish, his skimpily dressed Italian wife, heavily and sexily tattooed and annoyingly beautiful, who floated in and out of shot on his TV programmes.
‘What do you think of him?’ repeated Strickland, insistently.
I paused for thought. I had to confess, I didn’t like him.
I thought I was jealous, but no, that was the wrong word. I was envious. I wanted the freedom from financial worry that Justin had. I bet he didn’t wake up in the morning concerned about his unpaid bills. If I was honest, that was probably why I didn’t like him; he was successful and I resented it. I wished that I could float through life like he did.
I tried to rise above this. A big part of the new post-prison Ben Hunter was tranquillity and that meant not slagging other people off, hard as it might be.
‘I don’t know,’ I said judiciously. ‘I’m sure he’s very nice.’
I didn’t realise I was about to learn a lot more about Justin McCleish than either of us expected.
Chapter Five
Speak of the devil and he will come. The very next day, much to my surprise, I met both Justin and his wife.
Jess had announced their presence. Normally, Jess does her job running my restaurant with a mixture of good-natured efficiency and ironic detachment. For her, it’s a well-paid holiday job, a distraction from studying IT, which is where her future lies. She rarely gets excited – why should she? Working in the hospitality business is not her dream. But today was different.
She had come running in to the kitchen an hour earlier.
‘It’s Justin McCleish, and his wife, in our restaurant!!!’
I had never seen her so excited. She was wide-eyed; her hair stood up like she’d been electrocuted. Francis stared at her like a parody of amazement.
‘Gordon Bennett!’ he said. That, for Francis, constitutes great excitement. It was a measure too, of Justin McCleish’s fame, that Francis knew who he was. His knowledge of people is usually confined to cricketers and rugby players.
‘Can everyone just calm down,’ I said, my heart thundering with adrenaline. It’s Justin McCleish, and HIS WIFE, in MY restaurant! ‘They’re just customers.’
But of course they weren’t just customers, and when I got their orders I cooked their food as if it was going out to the Queen.
Justin had lamb fillet with an anchovy and caper dressing garnished with a mint sauce and rosti potatoes, and Aurora, a chicken Caesar salad. I scrutinised every single ingredient on their plates as if I were performing brain surgery.
Jess kept us updated every time she came in to the kitchen.
‘They’ve started, they look happy! They like the sourdough bread. Oh, God, this is so exciting!’
A bit later: ‘They’re halfway through, they still look happy and there are three paparazzi outside on the green! And they’ve parked illegally!’
She was a true child of Hampden Green. If the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse turned up, someone would point to the sign, ‘No Riding On The Common (£100 fine)’.
When the plates came back we all stared at them like doctors looking at a life or death X-ray.
‘Blimey, clean plates!’ said Francis.
I shrugged. They liked it!
‘Don’t sound so surprised, Francis.’ My voice was dismissive. Inside, I was shouting to myself, ‘He ate everything!’
They had dessert.
Cue another update from my waitress: ‘Justin’s having the strawberry bavarois and Aurora’s having the lemon posset with almond shortbread.’ She added, ‘God she’s even more beautiful in real life than on Instagram.’
Then, more clean plates, compliments to the chef and the following bombshell: ‘He wants to meet you!’ Jess looked at me adoringly. Normally she treats me as if I were slightly half-witted, an amiable old fool. Now I was transmuted from lead to gold by the alchemical hand of Justin McCleish, sprinkled with his TV stardust.
The gods came down from Olympus. Justin was here in high resolution and 3D. And so it was that towards the end of service, I found myself shaking Justin McCleish’s hand, wondering what to call him. It was a problem that I would never have thought I would ever have. Justin sounded too presumptuous, Mr McCleish too formal.
I compromised by saying nothing, hoping I didn’t come across as totally idiotic.
He was the first famous person I had ever met. It was a strange sensation. I couldn’t help but scrutinise him as intensely as I had his food when I’d sent it out from the kitchen half an hour earlier. It was hard work not staring at him too obviously.
In the flesh he was smaller than I had expected, and surprisingly slender. TV gives little indication of size unless people are helpfully standing next to something that has a recognisable benchmark height, a postbox for example, or a Labrador. Justin was also more handsome in real life than he was on the screen – he certainly didn’t disappoint there. He was ridiculously good-looking in an Italian way and I remembered hearing that his mother was from Le Marche, near Ancona.
That was the part of Italy that Claudia Ferrante, my ex, was from. If I ever saw her again I could ask her if she had known the family. I felt a sudden lurch of sadness in my otherwise happy day. Claudia was a match for Aurora in looks and formidably bright. Jess thought we should get back together. Fat chance.
I put the thought of my ex to one side and concentrated on Justin. He looked very stylish and had an even bronze tan. Standing next to him, I felt pallid. Chefs rarely get to see the sunshine and I was no exception. I also felt very bald, my shaven head glinting next to Justin’s luxuriant long hair that reached to his shoulders. He was like a Seventies rock star but one dressed by Henry Holland.
He put an arm around me in a friendly way as Jess took our picture together on her phone.
It was unusual for Jess to rave about anyone; normally she treated people and events with a healthy scepticism.
The McCleishes had been a big hit with all concerned. Damn, I thought, Justin even smelt good. I had just finished a busy service in the forty-degree heat of the kitchen and I suspected that I exuded an aroma of sweat, strain, and food.
I consoled myself with the thought that Justin probably couldn’t do a hundred slow, consecutive press-ups like I had that morning after getting out of bed. But why would he want to? He doubtless had someone who could do that for him.
I think I was coming off poorly in the comparison stakes.
‘I enjoyed my lamb,’ he said, encouragingly. He had quite a strong accent. I should have known this from TV but it had never occurred to me he would actually talk like that. ‘And the bavarois was excellent.’
Thank God I hadn’t known it was destined for him when I had originally made it, I thought. There is something very unnerving about cooking for a celebrity chef or a food critic. You feel every little thing is going to be inspected to the nth degree. Graeme Strickland would have laughed at my nervousness, but I wasn’t an insanely overconfident megalomaniac like he was, nor was I as good a chef. Strickland was touched with the hand of genius.
But, I thought smugly to myself, Justin McCleish wasn’t in his restaurant. He was here.
I smiled confidently, or tried to anyway. My lips twitched.
Justin (as I would now come to think of him) gave my kitchen a cursory glance. I was very proud of it, but a kitchen is a kitchen. What was I going to say?
‘Could we, erm, have a quiet word somewhere?’ Justin said, nodding his head to the side.
That was a harder question to answer than it sounded.
The downstairs of the Old Forge Café was taken up by the kitchen, dry store (a glorified cupboard) and the restaurant. Upstairs was my accommodation. To say it was spartan was to oversell it. There was virtually nothing up there at all.
Virtually, though, was a massive leap from nothing at all.
I had bought a bed, a huge step up from sleeping on a mattress on the floor, and the sizeable living room did have a TV balanced on a beer crate and a secondary beer crate (or IT suite as I liked to call it) where my laptop sat. Justin might think I was merely eccentric. He might think that I viewed the accumulation of material objects, like furniture, with scorn. Or he might realise the truth – that I was embarrassingly poor and that all my money had gone into kitchen equipment.
I wasn’t going to have him know that.
So, upstairs was out of the question. It was embarrassing. No one likes revealing how poor they are. Downstairs was equally impossible – no privacy.
‘Let’s go outside and I’ll show you my walk-in fridge,’ I suggested. ‘It’s new!’ I added proudly, instantly regretting it. Justin wouldn’t have boasted about his fridge; the company would have given him one for free and then paid him a fortune to endorse it.
Justin brightened. ‘Good idea!’ he said.
We crossed the little yard at the back of the kitchen.
We walked out of the kitchen into the little yard, which, luckily, I keep immaculate. I’ve even started growing herbs in large terracotta pots, which seems to be working well. Justin nodded his approval and then we disappeared into the walk-in. I pulled the door to behind us and said with a polite gesture, ‘Take a seat …’
Justin looked around the fridge, about the length of a shipping container with racking inside. He sat down on a sack of Yukon Gold potatoes and looked up at me. I leaned against the fridge door, smiling politely. I wondered what this was all about. You don’t go and have a conversation in an industrial fridge to make idle chit-chat.
Justin looked up at me and brushed his long hair back from his face. He was very brown and there was a smattering of designer stubble on his upper lip and chin.
‘I was talking to Danny Ward, the head chef at the Cloisters – remember him?’
I nodded. Danny – a tubby, lecherous Scot with a look of infinite cunning, pebble-thick glasses, balding red hair and a whiney Fife accent – was the proud possessor of a Michelin star (Strickland was extremely jealous) and I’d worked for him as a chef de partie in charge of his sauces.
The restaurant was in St Albans and the kitchen fronted on to the staff car park that was covered in pea shingle. What really stuck in my mind wasn’t the food but Danny’s personal life. Danny was having an affair with a married woman, and her husband, who was a roofer as solidly built as St Albans Cathedral but slightly larger (according to Danny), had vowed bloody revenge.
One of my jobs, aside from the sauces, was to check every time we heard the scrunch of tyres in the car park, that it wasn’t the jealous roofer hellbent on GBH. Whenever a car or a van arrived, Danny would go and find something to do in the cellar until I told him the coast was clear.
‘He told me about you and the builder …’ Justin said, looking at me expectantly.
‘Oh,’ I said, disappointed. I had hoped Danny would have praised me for my exceptional saucier abilities, not for dealing with some psychotic workman.
‘He said that you beat him up.’
I shook my head. ‘No, well, I reasoned with him.’
I remembered the incident well. One day the builder had actually arrived. I was beginning to think that maybe he was a figment of Danny’s imagination.
I’d marched into the car park when I saw his van pulling in. Danny had shrieked, ‘It’s him, it’s him, I’m dead …’ and gone to hide. The builder was short, stocky, aggrieved, and wearing a plaid shirt. What is it with builders and plaid shirts?
‘I’m sorry,’ I had said politely, ‘this car park is reserved for staff.’
He ignored my parking advice.
‘Where’s the Scottish bastard!’ he demanded.
‘Hiding’ would have sounded disloyal. I told him he couldn’t go into the kitchen (a health and safety issue, I’d said) and to go away, and he took a swing at me.
I ducked the punch and, as I straightened up, I hit him with a solid left hook to his body and a right cross that snapped his head back. He was unconscious as he hit the ground. I was worried that I’d hit him too hard if truth be told. I thought I might have seriously injured him, but thankfully he came to almost immediately.
He’d sworn at me, got back into his van and driven off, and that was the end of it. The affair fizzled out, my contract ended – I was covering for someone who came back – and we went our separate ways. I’d all but forgotten about it until today.
‘Well, whatever,’ said Justin, clearly disbelieving my statement about reasoning with him. He made a mildly Italian gesture with his hands to indicate this.
He carried on, ‘He also said that you were a man who could be relied on to keep his mouth shut.’
I shrugged. ‘Well, I suppose I didn’t tell his brigade about the affair he was having.’
Justin said, ‘No, you didn’t.’
He looked at me admiringly, I guess justifiably so. Sharing a cramped kitchen space with other chefs for ten hours a day, you do tend to gossip. To have kept my mouth shut, especially about something so beefy, as Jess would put it, did show a great deal of self-control. Justin carried on.
‘And I heard on the grapevine about you solving that murder that happened around here, earlier this year.’
I didn’t know what to say, so I tried to look enigmatic. Justin frowned. Perhaps he mistook my enigmatic look for stupidity. It’s probably not hard to do. He looked me in the eye. ‘How would you like to come and work for me for a while?’
I blinked in disbelief, and Justin must have misread this as reluctance. He carried on in an encouraging tone.
‘It’d look good on your CV.’
He was really serious. I blinked again, in surprise this time. It most certainly would look good on my CV. Better than that, it would be great for business. It was a job offer to die for. Word would get around that I had been hired by one of the most famous TV chefs in Britain and it would have a dramatic effect on bookings. Kaleidoscopic images of wealth and renown and IKEA furniture danced through my brain. I would be able to afford a three-piece suite! Maybe a new shower. Oh, brave new world! Then reality bit. Savagely.
‘Well, Justin, I’d love to,’ I said reluctantly, ‘but I haven’t got anyone to take care of my restaurant – there’s only me. I just can’t.’
Justin shook his head confidently. A BAFTA award nomination and a prime slot on BBC2 had obviously done wonders for his self-esteem. People didn’t say no to him.
Aurora hadn’t. And he hadn’t even been famous then.
‘That’s not a problem, I’ll lend you one of mine. He’ll fill in for you while you’re gone. I’ve seen your menu; it’s nice, but let’s face it, it’s not rocket science.’
That was a bit uncalled for, I thought.
‘And I’ll pay well.’
I was thoroughly confused. Why did he want me to work for him?
‘Why do you need help?’ I asked.
He suddenly looked away, as if he had gone unaccountably shy. Then he turned his head back to me. ‘Because I’m being blackmailed,’ he said. It was that straightforward. It certainly wasn’t the answer that I had been expecting.
Blackmailed! What could he have been up to? Lurid possibilities swirled around my head.
‘Oh, right.’ I didn’t know what else to say. I stared blankly at him, sitting there looking poised, elegant and successful on the sack of potatoes.
‘Could you be a bit more specific?’ I asked.
Justin looked around the fridge as if seeking inspiration. Thank God everything was labelled and day-dotted. He picked up a plastic tub that said ‘smoked hadok’ in Francis’s wonky writing. He opened it, peered inside and absent-mindedly sniffed it, obviously checking it hadn’t gone off.
Either he was very interested in fish and fish storage or the blackmail story was a sensitive one.
‘I did something unprofessional in my youth and it’s come back to haunt me …’ he finally said. ‘It’s nothing sexual. But I really want to know who’s behind it, and of course, it goes without saying I want it stopped.’
‘It sounds like you need a private detective or a minder, not a chef,’ I said. I said it in a jocular, aren’t I funny, kind of way. Justin grinned at me and nodded.
‘You may be right, however, I don’t know any private detectives. But I do know chefs and you’re the one I need to help me. It’s one of my brigade, it has to be, and I need to know which one and I need to know soon. It’s tearing me apart.’
The penny dropped. It had taken a while – it should have been obvious from the word go. Justin didn’t want me around for my cooking skills. He wanted a protector. In all honesty, I felt a bit deflated. I had been so excited thinking that he rated me for my cooking abilities when all he really wanted was someone who could hit people and was discreet.
I didn’t know what to say. I sat there in disappointed silence.
‘Please,’ he said.
I looked into his sincere, pleading brown eyes.
I did some swift calculating. I’d get help in the kitchen, and I could treat my new job – tracking down and scaring off the blackmailer – as a paid mini-break.
‘OK,’ I said. It would still be working for one of Britain’s leading chefs; nobody would need to know exactly why. Everyone would think he’d hired me because I was a great chef and not because Justin wanted help of a very different kind.
We shook hands.
And so, the miracle had happened and I had gained a chef to help in the running of my kitchen and the chance to work alongside one of Britain’s top maîtres de cuisine.
I just didn’t expect things to work out the way they did.
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