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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.
Chapter Six (#ulink_fb621b19-35d4-5fea-896b-4c0ffd3c3105)
‘We’ll need a cover story,’ I said. Justin was still comfortably perched on the potato sack looking overly pleased with the way this conversation had gone.
He smiled. ‘I was thinking that I would tell them I’m doing a thing on British pub and restaurant cooking and you would be my helper, as someone who is used to relatively simple menus.’
‘What, to keep you grounded, no foams or emulsions …’
‘Exactly. And you need to understand how I work, so you’ll be working with my chefs,’ he said.
‘Will they believe that?’ I asked.
Justin snorted. ‘I’m the head chef. They’ll believe what they’re told to believe.’
‘Fair enough,’ I said. ‘Who’s going to be looking after my kitchen?’
‘I’m lending you Andrea, my sous-chef. He’s good.’
I nodded. The sous-chef deputises for the head chef in the kitchen, covers for them when they’re on holiday or ill. If I wasn’t in my kitchen, I would need someone of sous-chef ability to replace me.
‘What if he’s the blackmailer?’ I asked.
‘Well, you can see what you think of the others first and keep him in mind for later,’ Justin said. ‘Besides, they’ll talk more freely if he’s not there – he’s quite a forceful character.’
And so, a couple of days later, I found myself being introduced to Justin’s team.
‘Hello, everybody.’ Justin McCleish was all smiles as he introduced me to the assembled group. ‘This is Ben Hunter, the chef I’ve told you about, who’ll be joining our team as of today …’ He turned to me, waving a proprietorial arm. ‘There are other people on the books but these are my key players …’
We were in the dining room of the Old Vicarage where Justin had just finished a briefing to his kitchen team. There would be other agency chefs working alongside them, but this was the core group and therefore they made up my main suspects.
The ‘key players’ looked far from overjoyed at the news that I was joining them. Perhaps they hadn’t read the Bucks Free Press when it had described the Old Forge Café as a welcome addition to eating in the Chilterns.
Never mind, I’d e-mail them the link. I’m sure they could hardly wait.
Introductions were made.
‘This is Andrea, my sous.’ Justin pointed out the gloomy chef to me. ‘He’ll be the one looking after your kitchen …’
As I studied his face, I hoped for my kitchen’s sake that he was nicer than he looked.
Andrea shook my proffered hand with little enthusiasm. He was tall and thin with a downturned mouth like a shark, which made him look both bad-tempered and dangerous at the same time. He was very pallid in an unhealthy way, like he had never seen the light of day. Mind you, we all were.
I was then introduced to Tom, his development chef, a quiet, tough-looking guy in his mid-thirties with a hipster beard.
‘Pleased to meet you.’
‘Likewise.’
Tom’s grip was vice-like, powerful, as we shook hands. He was wearing an Iron Man hoody to proclaim how fit he was. I was suitably impressed. I couldn’t swim three miles, cycle a hundred-odd kilometres and then run a marathon, much less one after another. He ran his eyes over me in a considered, evaluating way.
‘This is Gregor, my pastry chef.’ I didn’t think Gregor was Iron Man material. He was medium height, slightly overweight, as befits a pastry chef, and worried-looking, with an incipient double chin and a lot of black stubble. He was one of those men who I guessed had to shave twice a day. He nodded at me, unimpressed.
I had two more chefs to meet, two more chief suspects. I quickly added adjectives to the faces to help me remember them: Andrea was Grumpy; Tom, Thoughtful; Gregor, Unhappy.
There was Octavia, who wasn’t Italian but, judging by her voice, simply very, very upper-class. She was the intern. She was tall, blonde, and I’d guess in her early twenties. She smiled at me with glacial contempt.
She went on my mental list as Arrogant.
And lastly there was Murdo, a young Scottish chef, also tall but gangly as opposed to the willowy Octavia. He had a mop of curly ginger hair, some of it skywards-pointing in a poorly assembled top-knot – he reminded me of an overgrown schoolboy. He was the only one who showed any enthusiasm at all to be introduced to me.
His jacket was partially unbuttoned. There was a black T-shirt with red lettering – ‘Cannibal Corpse,’ it said. I hoped that was the name of some rock band, and not the name of a restaurant he had worked in.
Well, if it was a band, it probably wouldn’t get much airplay on Beech Tree FM. Rick Astley’s ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ had been playing on my journey over. I guessed that Cannibal Corpse probably would not be covering it.
‘Hi,’ he said and blushed furiously.
Bashful.
Well, those were the prime suspects, and bringing up the rear were the two others in the McCleish entourage. There was his agent/manager, Charlotte, a short, buxom woman with thick glasses and unruly brown hair tied back in a bun. Wisps of it stuck out here and there in an untidy way. She smiled politely and gave a nervous laugh as she shook my hand. She looked kind, intelligent and motherly.
‘And this is my assistant, Douglas,’ Charlotte said.
By way of contrast, Douglas was skinny and angular with horn-rimmed glasses, a bald spot clearly visible under thinning hair, and a prominent Adam’s apple. He was one of those people whose looks never seem to change throughout their lives. He was probably in his early twenties but looked about forty in a paradoxically ageless way. He had probably looked forty when he was at school and he would probably look forty when he was drawing his pension.
He appeared nervous, like a skittish horse. He practically twitched as she introduced him to me. I smiled sympathetically, as I reflected that it must have been tough for him to deal with Justin’s kitchen team. Chefs are poorly paid, grossly overworked and, in general, have an awful life. But what they do have, and this has evolved like a protective carapace, is an aggressive sense of their own importance.
Douglas, the non-chef, would have been viewed with borderline contempt. He was certainly unhappy with his lot.
I filed the two non-chefs in my mind as Motherly and Twitchy.
The chefs were all wearing whites. Douglas wore an ill-judged short-sleeved shirt that accentuated his thin arms, and unfortunate blue polyester slacks. He looked like his mum had dressed him.
Andrea, as if he had been reading my thoughts, turned his head to look at Douglas and gave him a hostile stare. Douglas caught his glance and twitched uncomfortably. I saw his knuckles whiten as they tightened around a clipboard he was holding. There was obviously little love lost between the two of them.
The chefs looked at me with suspicion. Whether or not they liked each other, they were used to working as a unit. It would take a while before they accepted me and relaxed long enough to talk freely. Alcohol would probably help in the euphoria after service had finished.
But he was right. They wouldn’t suspect me of anything. And crucially, neither would the blackmailer. All I had to do was pretend to be thick. I could imagine Jess saying that it was a role I had been born to play.
I carried on with my expert detective evaluation of possible extortionists. Someone here was blackmailing Justin.
I looked at Justin’s team and said winningly, ‘I’m sure it’ll be an education working with all of you.’ I took my phone out. ‘Can I have a picture, to savour the moment I met a star of the present—’ I nodded at Justin ‘—and stars of the future!’
How glib was that, I thought. I’m Mister Suave. Nobody looked impressed or flattered but they all obligingly shuffled into position, as I held the phone up and checked all of my suspects were in the frame.
Click.
I put my phone away.
The door opened and a tall figure stood framed in it – another one of Justin’s team?
‘Justin! I heard you were all here …’ He looked like he had been auditioning for a part in The Three Musketeers, and sounded like it too. His accent was very French and he had shoulder-length hair, a large nose and a Van Dyke-style combination of moustache and goatee.
‘Jean-Claude!’ Justin put his arms around him and they kissed on both cheeks. Andrea’s face brightened. He walked up to Jean-Claude (d’Artagnan, I thought to myself) and kissed him as well. I managed to restrain myself. They started speaking to each other in French.
‘Ben,’ said Justin eventually, ‘this is Jean-Claude Touraine. He used to work for us at the old restaurant in Marylebone before … well, before he moved on.’
We shook hands. Jean-Claude smiled politely, while Justin grinned around at his team.
‘And now if you will excuse me, I need to speak to Ben. You’ll all get the chance to get to know him better once we start work in the pop-up kitchen over at the Earl’s. I’m very excited and I know you are too.’
They were so well disciplined they managed to conceal their excitement well. Andrea even managed a yawn.
As Justin took me by the arm and led me away to his study, I took a last look back at his brigade and my new workmates. I wondered which one of them, d’Artagnan, Arrogant, Thoughtful, Grumpy, Bashful, Unhappy, Motherly or Twitchy, was the Judas figure who was blackmailing Justin.
They all looked plausible as suspects to me.
Chapter Seven (#ulink_9c8df0ec-0e61-5570-8213-8be5bbe7e740)
‘Ma dai! But who is this … Justin, you should have told me that the new man was coming this morning …’
It was Aurora who came into the study just after us.
‘Carissima,’ said Justin. They kissed each other’s cheeks and they briefly spoke together in machine-gun-like Italian that I couldn’t begin to understand. Aurora moved over to me and shook my hand.
She was wearing a strappy white cropped T-shirt that showed off her body, and tight low-cut hipster jeans to reveal her infamous tattoo of the swan rising from the very dark blue fabric, its head and beak coiling around her pierced navel. The T-shirt had the word Liar emblazoned on it.
