A Taste of Death Page 12

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Friday, 22 January, lunchtime

  Back at the restaurant I busied myself at the stove, char-grilling the steak. I drew a blank asking Chris about Craig Scott, he said he knew him of course, but avoided him like the plague.

  ‘Couldn’t stand the bastard, next question.’ He was reluctant to even speculate about who might have had it in for him. It was an abrupt, dismissive shutdown of my line of questioning.

  I persisted, ‘But lots of people knew he was a dealer, so who do you reckon killed him?’

  ‘It could be anyone, couldn’t it? But if you ask me, he was poisoned, or given an overdose. I mean they cut the stuff, don’t they, so if you gave him something that was ninety per cent pure instead of ten, twenty per cent, he could easily have OD’d. So, I’d guess his fellow scumbag criminals.’

  And with that, he drew a line under Craig Scott’s death.

  I prodded the steak. You can tell how well a steak is cooked by pushing the ball of your right thumb with your left index finger. All fingers open, rare. Right thumb to tip of right index finger, medium rare. Right thumb to middle finger, medium, to ring finger, well done. You can feel the muscle tighten as you prod it. That’s quite literally a rule of thumb. It’s not always perfect. Another problem with steak for the chef is that if the service is busy, even though the food may have left the stove perfectly cooked, if it’s been left on a hot plate under the lights it’ll carry on cooking. You can’t always get it right with the best will in the world. What saves us chefs a lot of the time is that, on the whole, people don’t like to make a fuss, provided you haven’t screwed things up too much.

  The reason I mention that is I can tell a great deal about meat when I prod it, but I haven’t got a clue when it comes to prodding people for the truth.

  Although Chris was reluctant to even speculate about who might have had it in for Craig Scott, Dave Whitfield was a different matter. He was happy to discuss him.

  I cut the steak up with my knife: it was perfectly cooked, seared on the outside, rosy pink on the inside, and I filled the baguette which had a bed of caramelised red onion in it. I ran some horseradish cream down it, job done. I said, ‘I hear from some people he was a bad builder, others say he was good, what do you think?’

  Chris shook his head. ‘He wasn’t bad, we all have our off days though …’

  I finished plating his lunch, a little pelouche of salad, a couple of onion rings, some fries, and I asked, ‘Didn’t you two have a bit of a bust-up once …?’

  Chris looked at me shrewdly and when he spoke it was in very measured tones, the way you speak when you don’t want to implicate yourself.

  ‘I have to spend so much time monitoring work now I employ a few people. I have to make sure it’s done properly. I think that’s why now I’ve got a lot more respect for Dave Whitfield than I did when we had our bust-up.’

  ‘Did Whitfield screw things up?’ I asked Chris.

  ‘I said I’ve got a lot more respect for him because he had to rely on other people. And that’s hard. Because the people who work for you can’t necessarily be trusted to do a good job,’ said Chris.

  Too true, I thought, mournfully. Francis!

  He swallowed a mouthful of his steak. ‘This is bloody good … no, there are a lot of thickos in construction. Sometimes I feel like I’m surrounded by fools.’

  ‘So you made up with Whitfield?’ I asked. Mr Perceptive.

  He nodded. ‘Yeah. It wasn’t just about money, but it’s no secret we were going to be working together again. He was offering me in on something very tasty. He was going to be starting a big, fifty-home new-build project, a social and private housing development. Obviously something like that’s worth millions.’ He took another bite of his baguette. ‘Particularly around here.’

  ‘Whereabouts was that?’

  ‘Chandler’s Ford, near Aylesbury. I don’t know exactly whereabouts in relation to the village.’

  I ate some of my food thoughtfully. ‘What was your role in this going to be?’

  ‘Basically he wanted me as the site manager—’ he smiled ruefully ‘—it’s a shame that he’s gone because I’ll probably never get to do it now, because whoever takes over Whitfield Construction has probably got their own man lined up for the job.’

  ‘Did you want the job?’ I asked.

  ‘Christ, yes. Regular hours, great pay, and, well, it’s the kind of thing I do very well. I’ve got the practical knowledge, I can do most construction jobs myself – not electrics obviously – so you can’t bullshit me,’ he paused, ate a bit more steak and continued, ‘and I don’t get intimidated and, equally, I don’t lose my temper. And I can keep to budget and time, so it would have been well paid and enjoyable, but now—’ he shrugged expressively ‘—well, that’s all gone down the swannee.’

  We sat in silence for a bit, contemplating what might have been. What he said had the ring of truth.

  ‘Do you think he killed himself?’

  Chris snorted derisively. ‘With a massive thing like this going on?’ He shook his head emphatically. ‘No way. It’s what he’d worked all his life for, the big deal.’ He looked at me almost angrily. ‘All his life he wanted to be someone, you know, to be looked up to, that’s why I think he had that stupid blue pillar, it was like reassurance that he was important. I don’t give a monkey’s for stuff like that, so long as I’ve got money, but Dave wanted everyone to know. He wanted to be seen to be successful, and that would have done it for him. Of course he didn’t kill himself.’ I nodded.

  ‘DI Slattery thinks it was suicide,’ I remarked.

  ‘He was always boasting, Dave was,’ said Chris, ‘suicides don’t boast. And as for Slattery,’ Chris spoke with contempt, ‘don’t talk to me about Slattery. He was accused of taking bribes from a brothel in Byfield to look the other way a few years ago, and there are other stories about him. People have been mysteriously injured whilst—’ his fingers made air quotation marks ‘—resisting arrest.’

  So Slattery was a bent copper. I’d heard quite a few stories while I’d been inside about police corruption. Mind you, they were all from criminals. Hardly unbiased. But it was enough to know that my own opinion that Slattery was questionable was shared by others.

  My mind moved back to my scenario of Whitfield obligingly handing over his shotgun to his companion who had pulled the trigger.

  Did Slattery shoot? I bet he did.

  ‘Let’s go and get some pigeons, Dave … meet up early?’ Then later … ‘Dave, could I see your gun?’

  Of course you’d hand over your firearm to a policeman, and who better than a CID officer to arrange a body to make it look accidental?

  Anyway. Whitfield had died at the point he was about to pull off something really big. Once again, the golden deal had slipped through his fingers. Chris’s point sounded very likely. Whitfield with his longing for public recognition, his Ferrari: why would he kill himself now? I moved back to the development. Maybe it was a rival for that who had killed him? Get rid of Whitfield. Maybe they thought they would pick up the contract.

  ‘What form did the bidding take, do you know?’

  Chris nodded. ‘It was sealed bids that had to be submitted by such-and-such a date. I don’t know when the cut-off point was exactly. It was public/private partnership, overseen by the council. Everything has to be just so, even the plans on paper have to be of a certain size and folded a certain way. But there wasn’t just the price criteria, otherwise everything would go to the large firms. With this it was also energy efficiency, local impact, green issues, all those had to be dealt with, and there was a certain amount of preference to be given to smaller, local firms rather than the big national boys.’

  I looked at Chris, relaxed on his stool. His shock of iron-grey hair was belied by a young-looking, good-humoured face, and his long legs and arms looked immensely powerful. He was an impressive man.

  ‘So,’ I said, choosing my words carefully, ‘the decisi
on process wasn’t at all straightforward. It did not simply boil down to price.’

  ‘Exactly,’ confirmed Chris.

  ‘And Whitfield would qualify as a smaller, local firm.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Chris, ‘and he was utterly confident that he had got it. So now whoever he left Whitfield Construction to will carry on the work. Probably, anyway. I know he had sleeping partners, he had backers. I don’t know who they are but they’ll put their own men in, I dare say.’

  And both Chris and I could guess how he knew he’d got the contract. We both knew that Dave Whitfield was friendly with Luke Montfort. There was the tower that he’d put up in his front garden, almost like a beacon that illuminated not just his company, but also signified the power that he managed to exert over the council planners who must have granted permission for what most people in the village regarded as an excrescence.

  Was it a rival who had pulled the trigger?

  Maybe one of his sleeping partners? Had Whitfield been too greedy? He was obviously worried about someone or something when he had tried to hire me as a minder.

  Was it the same person who had been persecuting Whitfield or had someone else jumped on the bandwagon?

  Chris finished his baguette.

  ‘That was great,’ he said. ‘I hope you get the business with Craig cleared up, I bet it was drugs that killed him, not your crab.’

  ‘How did you know it was crab?’ I couldn’t help myself. Go on, Chris, say it, name names … Slattery! He’s trying to kill my business off, drive me out.

  ‘It’s a village, Ben.’ His tone was kindly, speaking to the stupid townie. ‘You’re from London, you wouldn’t understand, word gets around.’

  I looked at his rather smug face, patronising me again. ‘Well, Chris—’ I felt I wanted to make some kind of point ‘—if word gets around so much, how can a drug-dealer like Craig function, how come he’s not been nicked, busted, grassed up or otherwise inconvenienced?’

  Yes, Slattery, why are you so inactive on that front?

  ‘Because,’ Chris answered, pulling on his jacket, ‘he might be a dealer, but he’s our drug-dealer, it’s that simple. Now I’d better get back to work, check on those two muppets I’ve got working for me.’

  So, I thought as I watched him, through the restaurant window, walk lithely away across the green: local Craig Scott can deal drugs and Slattery will look the other way, while non-local me sells food and he tries to run me out of town.

  I seemed to hear Naomi’s comment from the other day ringing in my ears, ‘Everyone knows everything in a village, or thinks they do.’

  Except, I thought angrily, except who killed the local builder and who killed the local dealer.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Friday, 22 January, afternoon

  Well, brooding on injustice wasn’t going to help, I needed an oven and to get that I needed to find Whitfield’s killer.

  I got a piece of paper and a pen. I glanced at the PC in my cubbyhole. I should be writing on that, in Word. Jess was scathing about my reluctance to embrace technology – every day I had some comment about it. Yesterday’s lecture had been about passwords.

  ‘Password1 is not a password, it’s not secure – it’s like leaving your front door wide open, with the keys in the lock. Be a bit more innovative …’

  I mulishly wrote: ‘SUSPECTS’ in blue biro and underlined it in red. Suck on that, Bill Gates, I thought. Using a ruler I added some columns.

  I started writing a list of people and things to investigate, a sort of MEP list. I put Chris down and, under the column marked, reasons, wrote: disliked Whitfield, involved in shady property deal, might be why DW wanted me as a minder.

  I could imagine Chris being quite violent, Jess had hinted that he had a history of it. Whitfield had been physically frightened of someone.

  I added: violent. I thought of the running figure I had seen: athletic, I added.

  Next I put Montfort. To be honest, I couldn’t see him blowing Whitfield’s head off. He was a pen pusher, not a man of action. I also found it hard to picture him as the person I had seen running away. I obviously hadn’t been able to form any opinion of what they’d looked like, but the way they’d moved had been fast and athletic. Neither of those qualities applied to Montfort.

  But … He was in Whitfield’s pocket, from the minor (the obelisk), to the major (the housing development). Even if he hadn’t killed the builder, he might know who did.

  Devious, I put, corrupt, I remembered what Jess had said about him, perve, I added.

  Then I added Slattery to my list. When I’d been inside, at Bretton Wood, I had heard various stories of corrupt police. The DI had the right character for it: arrogant, judgemental, contemptuous and, I suspected, violent. I remembered him at the Raj restaurant with Whitfield and Montfort. They were not the sort of people I could imagine him socialising with, that left business. Was he involved in their deal?

  Slattery looked like the kind of detective who had joined up at eighteen, so he must be coming up for retirement. Was this part of increasing his pension pot?

  I put: Chris says he’s bent and violent. But Chris was a suspect too.

  Craig Scott next. Craig Scott was dead but he was a criminal; he had been involved in violence, albeit on the receiving end. He could have killed Whitfield. If he was close enough to sell and do drugs with Whitfield, he was close enough to blow his head off.

  I put: unstable, not athletic.

  I put a question mark. I thought of all the previous incidents – the fire, the car, the compromising photos – all designed to enrage and humiliate the builder. Was his murder the culmination of an escalating campaign waged against him? Was his death due to someone just hating him?

  Lastly and reluctantly, more in the spirit of even-handedness than because I believed it to be true, I put Jess’s name down. According to Naomi, the Turners did not like Whitfield one bit. Neither were they keen on Jess. Her contemptuous views of Naomi rankled a bit with me, it has to be said. She certainly didn’t like Dave Whitfield. And while I couldn’t imagine for one minute Jess shooting the builder, I could easily imagine her assembling a timer for a bomb from a mobile phone. She had, after all, built her own computer – physically built it – she could solder, she was more than capable. And a girl who had come first in her class at ethical hacking (which I believe is where you can legally practise breaking in to secure networks) would easily construct a bomb. She could take photos, what youngster couldn’t? And anyone could throw paint over a car.

  But murder?

  I thought back again to the scene in the field, the figure running away … Was it a graceful run? The rain and wind in my eyes. The feeling of nausea after seeing the remains of Whitfield. There was no doubt that Jess could run. She had done so for the county.

  Well, I thought, it’s not going to be her and I doubt that she was involved even peripherally.

  Where to begin?

  With the weakest link. Montfort.

  I thought I must speak to Montfort next. Then I thought, if Montfort had really been in the pocket of Dave Whitfield he was hardly going to confess all to me. And I could scarcely insist he talk to me: I wasn’t DI Slattery able to go marching in to people’s lives and workplaces. But equally, I had to make some kind of effort.

  Any meeting was better with Montfort than no meeting at all. I checked the Tao Te Ching, opening it at random hoping for a piece of useful advice. It counselled caution: that if you want to dominate something you have to lower yourself. Mousse, I thought, Montfort loves mousses. I shall lower myself to inviting Montfort round and to catch a rat, you need bait.

  Put mousse on the menu and I’ll come.

  His words.

  I folded my piece of paper away and tucked it at the bottom of my overfull in-tray on my desk and got on with the mousse.

  I fetched four eggs, four hundred ml of double cream, caster sugar and three sheets of leaf gelatine. I had three passionfruit in the fridge doing nothi
ng, they’d work.

  I cleansed a steel mixing bowl with boiling water, oil is the bane of any whisked egg white. I put another two mixing bowls out for the cream and the yolk/sugar mix and as I cracked and separated eggs, I thought, Come into my parlour, Mr Montfort.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Friday, 22 January, late afternoon

  The mousse was finished and I was extremely satisfied with it. It was beautiful. Its texture was ethereally light. It held a hint of sweetness and was full of the exotic, musky, perfumed flavour of the passionfruit. Passionfruit comes from South America so I toyed with the idea of maybe pairing it with something else South American. If I were in the possession of a liquor licence I’d have suggested a rum-based cocktail.

  My liquor licence – a personal licence was the first step – was languishing somewhere in the council offices in Aylesbury. I was far from sure if I was going to be given one. I had to reveal my criminal record, conviction for GBH and the nature of my punishment, two years in prison of which I served eighteen months. That wouldn’t necessarily disbar me from getting the piece of paper I needed to sell alcohol, but equally it wouldn’t help.

  So while that rumbled on, I was restricted to non-alcoholic beverages, which, as I was only open at lunchtime, didn’t really affect me too badly. It was probably, I reflected, just as well I didn’t open at night so I wouldn’t sigh over a large amount of lost revenue. I had no way of knowing but it wouldn’t have surprised me if Slattery got wind of it. It was a matter of public record so it couldn’t have been easier for him to object on spurious police grounds.

  I think it was a safe bet to assume that if he could make trouble for me, he would.

  Well, I thought, no use brooding over possibilities. I put the passionfruit mousse, covered, clingfilmed, labelled and dated, in the dessert section of one of my fridges. I decided to go to the Three Bells. I needed a change of scenery, however grim.