A Taste of Death Page 10

  ‘How much would it cost to repair?’ I asked through gritted teeth.

  ‘You can’t, well, you could, but it would cost more than buying a new model,’ said the engineer. ‘It’d be a waste of time and money.’

  ‘How much would a replacement cost, like for like?’

  ‘With VAT and installation—’ he screwed his face up; it’s not going to be cheap, I thought ‘—oh, five K. Probably nearer six.’

  Six thousand I did not have.

  ‘Actually,’ he added. Go on, I thought, stupidly hopeful until he spoke, ‘better make that seven, to be on the safe side.’

  Thank you, Mrs Cope.

  I went upstairs to my flat and did some exercise to wind down after the excitement of the day. I was still slightly worried in case Slattery managed to connect me with Whitfield’s body. Failure to notify police of a crime, a charge I could hardly deny. I couldn’t really say I hadn’t noticed the headless corpse as I reached the stile. But, as yet, no return visit from Slattery. Nothing had happened so far. No news was good news.

  I finished the Tai Chi breathing that I was doing, did some yoga and then push-ups and sit-ups.

  My thoughts while exercising, counting sit-ups as I did them, ran along the lines of:

  Seventy-four sit-ups No Oven. Seventy-five sit-ups No Oven. Seventy-six sit-ups How can I cope with no oven? Seventy-seven sit-ups I hate you, Mrs Cope. Seventy-eight sit-ups I’d like to kill you. Seventy-nine sit-ups Where am I going to find seven K? Eighty sit-ups …

  Etc. Two hundred sit-ups, two hundred somewhat negative thoughts. It was obvious to me I was falling woefully short of Zen-like calm.

  In an effort to shake off the oven thoughts, I shadow boxed in front of my mirror. That was all I had in the bedroom apart from my mattress and a pillow. The lounge next door was still devoid of furniture. It looked like that would be the case for a while.

  I was throwing combination punches and I sorely missed my gym in Bethnal Green, the heavy bag, the speed ball, sparring with ageing ‘geezers’, my age and older, men who in their day had been tasty young prospects and were now staving off the future with still impressive training sessions, followed by eye-wateringly, unhealthy sessions in the pub where they talked about their glory days.

  I suppose I was lonely after all. Aside from Jess, and she was a generation apart from me, which is a pretty unbridgeable gulf, I didn’t really have any friends. After I came out of prison, I had more or less isolated myself. My parents were dead, I was an only child (that’s why you’re such a spoiled brat, as Claudia, my ex, would put it), so I just devoted myself for two years to learning how to cook, hanging out with whoever I worked with at the time and having one or two enjoyable but meaningless affairs.

  I hadn’t wanted anyone in my life, I wanted my life to be as clean and uncluttered as a new fridge. But now I’d come to Hampden Green I wanted to live like a normal person again. I wanted a girlfriend, I wanted Naomi.

  I had cast Jess in the role of friend and confidante. She seemed happy to do that and I had grown to like her hugely. But now I was worried that Francis might be coming between us.

  He was spectacularly useless. I couldn’t really rely on him to do anything. Today he had ruined a couple of kilos of broccoli. Like most restaurants, I precook my vegetables and microwave them to order. But if there is one thing I hate it’s overcooked veg.

  I’d got Francis to take the heads of broccoli and cut them off the stalk into identical, or as near as possible, sized florets. I’d watched him like a hawk as he did this, and he’d managed fine. I was relieved. Then we put a big pan of water on to boil.

  We’d filled a sink up with iced water. He was to boil the broccoli for three minutes, drain it, then plunge it into the iced water to stop it cooking and bring the temperature way down.

  He listened intently. ‘We want to avoid soggy broccoli, Francis, don’t let me down.’

  ‘No, chef, I won’t.’

  ‘What don’t we want, Francis?’ I asked, to check he had understood.

  He screwed his face up with effort. ‘Soggy broccoli, chef.’

  ‘Three minutes, in boiling water.’ It seemed simple enough.

  ‘Yes, chef.’

  I left him to get on with it and went outside into the yard and into the storeroom and checked on my dry-store goods: tinned tomatoes, dried pasta, olive oil, salt, things like that. I walked back into the kitchen. Francis was cleaning the large double-handed pan in the pot-wash area. There was nothing on the stove. I walked over to the sink.

  That’s when alarm bells started to ring.

  The colour was wrong. The broccoli floating in the sink should have been a vibrant green, a kind of emerald. It wasn’t. It was a dull, lifeless green. I put my hand in the water and picked up a floret. It was not al dente, it was soggy mush.

  ‘Francis, this broccoli is no good,’ I said, quietly, masking my fury. How could he have been so unbelievably stupid? ‘Take it out and throw it away.’

  ‘What’s wrong with it?’ he asked, in an annoyingly challenging way.

  What I wanted to do was scream at him, throw a handful of the stuff at the wall and shout about how it shouldn’t explode like that on impact. I wanted two burly chefs to hold him down while I stuffed chunks of it into his mouth yelling, ‘Eat it! Eat it!’ as I had once seen happen. I was truly upset and what made it even worse was that he seemed to have no conception of what he had done wrong.

  It would be disgusting to eat and he hadn’t noticed.

  I liked Francis. He was good-natured, hard-working, eager to please, reliable, but he was a terrible, terrible chef. If I had a larger brigade and all he had to do was wash up, I’d be, we’d both be, happy. But I needed an extra pair of hands. It was a real problem.

  I was going to have to let him go.

  How would Jess take it? She was very attached to Francis. I didn’t want to upset her.

  There was a knocking on the back door and I went to open it. My guilty conscience made me think it was going to be DI Slattery come to interrogate me as to the fate of Whitfield for no other reason than the fact that I had spent eighteen months in HMP Bretton Wood. Oh, and the fact that I wasn’t local and had had the temerity to move into his village.

  I was a mess of irritable woe, falling far short of where I wanted to be mentally, spiritually and financially.

  I opened the door. It wasn’t Slattery.

  ‘Hello,’ said Naomi. She looked great. I was wearing old running tights and a T-shirt over a rugby shirt. I was covered in sweat. I doubted I looked great. I looked tired and sweaty. Tired, sweaty and anxious, fearful of the future.

  ‘Hello,’ I said, politely, ‘do come in.’

  ‘Thanks,’ she said. There were dark shadows under her eyes. I guessed that although she was divorced from Whitfield there must have been some residual feeling or at least lack of animosity given that they lived so close to each other. And a violent death is a terrible thing if you’re, or if you had been, close to someone. Should I have told the police what I’d seen? I was beginning to feel guilty.

  I ushered her into the kitchen. I didn’t have much provision for entertaining guests. There was the restaurant itself, obviously; plenty of tables and chairs, but it would have felt like sitting in a goldfish bowl. I was becoming very aware of how any action seemed to be seen by everyone who lived in the village. I could have turned the lights out, but then it would just have felt a bit strange.

  Upstairs was out of the question. I thought of my lounge, bitterly cold, the two beer crates covered with towels that acted as chairs. ‘Do take a crate, Naomi …’

  The contrast with her own warm, cosy, fully furnished lounge would have been breathtaking.

  I took her coat. I offered her a brandy which was pretty much all I had in the kitchen. I buy seasoned cooking wine for cooking. I couldn’t give her that, and I couldn’t really offer her the Pflumli. It was OK to cook with, but it was too weird to drink.

  She settled in a corner of
the kitchen, sitting on a work-surface as she sipped her brandy.

  I apologised for the seating arrangements. I apologised for my mood. I explained about the oven. Naomi made sympathetic noises.

  Commercial kitchens are not great places for a cosy chat, no chairs. Naomi was sitting next to the small plug-in oven that I used for desserts, and, of course, everything else now (curse you, Mrs Cope), swinging her legs and I leaned on the pass.

  ‘Cheers!’ I motioned with my glass, Mr Affability.

  I wondered what had brought her here, I didn’t need to wait long.

  ‘I think someone killed Dave,’ said Naomi. She looked at me to see what my reaction was. I suppose I could have said, I know. I saw someone running from the scene. I shrugged. To be honest, I was completely indifferent. I was sorry for her loss but I was feeling too sorry for myself to care that much. My oven, I thought, my oven!

  ‘The police are going to treat it as an accident, Slattery called me to let me know.’ She drained her glass and put it down hard on the metal surface on which she was sitting. I didn’t like to tell her that I had heard it on the local radio. She looked at me with dark, solemn eyes. I wasn’t sure what to say, what she expected of me. I might have thought that she was here to talk about her party. What was it called, the Feast of Imbolc or some such title? Not Whitfield’s death.

  ‘Oh,’ I said. Mr Tactful. Naomi eyed me speculatively, like she was judging me. She abruptly changed the subject, from Whitfield to herself.

  ‘Have any of my kind fellow villagers filled you in on what I used to do before I became Mrs Whitfield?’ she asked, a trace of bitterness more than apparent in her voice.

  ‘That you used to be a dancer?’ I was trying to be diplomatic.

  ‘Can I have another one?’ she said, nodding at her glass.

  ‘Sure.’ I walked over and refilled it. She pushed some errant hair away from her face with her long fingers.

  ‘Everyone knows everything in a village, or thinks that they do …’ She swirled the cognac around in the glass.

  ‘I’m from London too,’ I said, distancing myself from village opinion. I don’t think she was listening.

  She took a big mouthful of brandy and sighed deeply.

  ‘I like you, Ben,’ she said. ‘Is it true what they say about you?’

  ‘And what do they say about me?’ I asked.

  ‘That you were in prison … don’t look surprised, this is a village, everyone knows everything.’

  Bloody Slattery, I thought.

  ‘Yes, it’s true, GBH, to be precise,’ I said. She smiled at me, her large dark eyes held mine. She looked very frail and kind of forlorn perched on the stainless steel worktop, bird-like.

  ‘My turn now. I did used to be a dancer, but not with the Royal Ballet. I used to be a lap dancer, well, a pole dancer, in Slough. I had a bit of a wild youth, Ben.’ She smiled ruefully. It was a great smile. Self-deprecating, sad but not self-pitying. She carried on:

  ‘Drugs, mainly coke, booze, the works. I got through a hell of a lot of money – well, I was a stripper, I earned a lot of money, but I was spending a lot too. There came a point when I very nearly went on the game.’ She looked at me defiantly as she said it. I shrugged. We all have to do something. ‘They say you’re as sick as your secrets, well, that’s my secret. By the M4. At Caramel Rosa’s, Table Dancing and Grill. There’s class for you … Slough. Of all places, not exactly the Crazy Horse in Paris is it? Not even Stringfellows. Anyway, I met Dave.’

  She sighed. ‘He was a decent man, he took me away from all that. Well, obviously things didn’t last, he was no saint.’

  I wondered where all this was going. She carried on, ‘Neither was he an idiot.’ She gave me a challenging look as if I were going to argue with her. ‘He would not have gone walking with a loaded shotgun, safety catch off. He would not have done that, full stop.’

  I know, I thought. I was beginning to feel really guilty now. I had seen someone running from Whitfield’s body and I hadn’t told the police and now I hadn’t told Naomi. I had replayed the scene hundreds of times in my head. The horrid mess that was Whitfield, the cold rain, the biting wind and that figure, running away. It could have been a man or a woman. A fast, athletic run. I wish I had said something to Slattery now, but I hadn’t. Beware your sins will find you out. I very nearly told her at that point, confessed I suppose, but I didn’t. Prison made me very cautious about opening my mouth.

  ‘Why are you telling me this, Naomi?’ I asked gently. It obviously had taken a lot of, what? Courage? Desperation? To come out with all of this. I couldn’t see where it was leading.

  ‘He was a pain in the arse.’ She looked at me defiantly as if I was going to dispute this, then carried on, ‘But he was a good man. He saved my life and I owe him and I may be an annoying cow, but I pay my debts. If the police aren’t going to investigate this, I’ll have to do it myself. I want you to find out who killed Dave.’

  Are you crazy? Was my first reaction.

  She slipped elegantly off the work-surface and walked over to me.

  ‘Why me?’ I asked. ‘What makes you think I’d be able to do it or want to for that matter? I’m a chef, not a private detective.’

  She stood in front of me. I’m not tall but she was several inches shorter. She looked up at me.

  ‘You’ve been inside, Ben. You can handle yourself. Dave was a hard bastard and you flattened him without blinking. You’re intelligent and resourceful. I don’t know much, Ben, but I know men, and I think …’ she took a long, appraising look at me, ‘I think you’re very tough and very capable. And I think you are desperate to get a new oven. And I think that you don’t have very much money. It’s in your eyes, I know that look – a worried-about-bills look, I’ve had it myself. I’ll pay you.’

  ‘I don’t want your money.’ I lied.

  ‘You need a new oven, so you help me and I’ll buy you one, and a stool for in here so you can entertain me in style. And maybe some nice wine instead of rotgut brandy.’ She shook her head and smiled. ‘That stuff is seriously manky.’

  She looked up at me, I looked down at her. She was an odd mixture of frailty and strength. If you had to come up with an adjective to describe her in one word, it would come to something like, ‘sweet’. So it seemed odd that she had cast herself as Whitfield’s avenger. But, of course, ‘nice’ does not necessarily imply ‘weak’.

  I considered the offer. I felt that I owed her. I hadn’t exactly lied to her, but I had to Slattery. If I’d told him about seeing someone running away this death might well be being treated as a murder inquiry instead of an accident. If I did find the killer – if there had been a killing, it could still have been some kind of accident after all – then I would have atoned for my earlier actions.

  And I definitely needed an oven, and I definitely couldn’t afford to buy one myself. Well, I thought, even if I didn’t find the person who had run away, the killer, at least I can show that Whitfield was murdered, and the police can re-open the case, that should suffice. And I was hard-working, and I wouldn’t rip her off.

  ‘Done,’ I said. We shook hands solemnly.

  ‘Hobart Oven?’ I asked hopefully.

  ‘Why not?’ she said. ‘When can you start?’

  ‘I’ll come round tomorrow night at nine,’ I said, ‘I’ll need to take notes.’

  ‘I’ll see you then.’

  I let her out and wondered what I had let myself in for.

  Practical Cookery, Seventh Edition, the industry bible, did not, as far as I know, cover sleuthing.

  Oh well, I thought, I’ll just have to wing it. It can’t be too hard.

  Which shows just how little I knew.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Thursday, 21 January, afternoon

  The very next day I thought I had killed Craig Scott.

  At five o’clock in the afternoon, while I was going through my mise en place list for the following day, there was a knock on the kitchen door. It was DI Slat
tery, a faint smirk on his lips, and he was not alone. He was accompanied by a tall, slim, pleasant-looking middle-aged lady with blonde hair and slightly prominent teeth.

  She introduced herself. ‘Hello, I’m Sandra Burke, EHO, and I’m here to look around your kitchen.’

  ‘Feel free,’ I said. I could feel an icy hand tighten around my heart. The Environmental Health Officer does not need to make an appointment, like Death they can arrive unannounced.

  Sandra Burke fired a volley of questions at me as she walked around the kitchen opening cupboards, peering under things and checking the clipboards that I have hanging up detailing things like fridge and freezer readings. Luckily, in many ways, I’m an EHO’s dream. I take cleanliness and hygiene very seriously. To be honest it’s no great effort on my part, I’m a naturally tidy person anyway. I show due diligence and I had the records to prove it. It helps that my pessimistic nature ensures that I am continually preparing for the worst and now it had arrived, she was impressed.

  Fridge and freezer temperature logs where twice daily the temperatures had been recorded. Records to show I temperature probed my cooked food. Everything was dated and labelled. I had records for everything, I thought smugly. Slattery stood watching, his face grim, I could imagine him saying, ‘Yes you do have a record for everything, including a police one.’

  She looked in fridges – all was clean and tidy including the seals (a notorious place for grime to build up). She even made me pull out the fridges so I could check behind them to make sure that I’d been cleaning there. I had. Though I say it myself, it was impressive. Not just my opinion: ‘This is very impressive,’ Sandra Burke said, echoing my own thoughts. ‘I wish all the kitchens I look at were this clean.’

  Slattery watched, a slight frown on his face. I could feel his disappointment growing. I bet he was thinking, ‘If only there were a cockroach or two …’

  ‘What’s all this about?’ I asked him as Burke started photographing my kitchen and making notes about the storage and started poking around the hazardous chemicals for cleaning. Dear God, I thought, I let Francis do some simple prep – I hope to God he didn’t confuse salt with sink cleanser. Or drain unblocker!