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‘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 (#u1a04a99c-f80d-5750-8031-f909d0a45013)
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 (#u1a04a99c-f80d-5750-8031-f909d0a45013)
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.
