Death in Nonna's Kitchen E-Book

Alex Coombs

• Herausgeber: No Exit Press
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Serie: Old Forge Café Mysteries
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

When famous TV chef Matteo McLeish turns up at the Old Forge Café and offers chef Charlie Hunter a place in his kitchen for the duration of Hampden Green's local opera festival, she thinks it's because he rates her cooking skills. In fact it's because he's heard she's good in a crisis. The wholesome star of Nonna's Kitchen is being blackmailed by one of his team. Tempted by an improbably large pay cheque and the boost to to her CV, Charlie accepts his offer. Does the threat lie close to home, or back in Italy with Matteo's culinary roots? And can Charlie find the blackmailer before she's swept up in an avalanche of death and scandal?

Leseprobe

DEATH IN NONNA’S KITCHEN

Alex Coombs

‘Good food is the foundation of genuine happiness.’

Auguste Escoffier

For Mike Boyce Great chef, great guy, great friend

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Epigraph

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

Chapter Fifty-Five

Also by Alex Coombs

About the Author

Also in the Old Forge Café Mystery Series

Copyright

About the Publisher

Chapter One

It was the end of May when, on my morning run, I turned onto the path that bordered one of the many fields near the village of Hampden Green where I live. I’m a Londoner; I moved out here to the Chilterns and opened a restaurant and I’ve been here six months.

Business was going well. But despite – maybe because of – favourable reviews and bums on seats, I was tired. I was short of money and short of breath, but I ran on. I might die exhausted, penniless and in pain but at least I’d die fit and lean. If it was an open-casket funeral people would say, ‘She’s looking good, so 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. 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. Work, frantic prep for the day ahead, then the first trickle of orders coming in shortly after twelve, that like a river in full spate crashed around my ears with a vengeance from quarter to one onwards.

Later, during a lull in the lunchtime service, a brief respite from the heat of the stove and the pass and the clatter of pans on metal and the roar of the fans – I asked Francis my kitchen porter/chef (in a kitchen as small as mine the distinctions get blurred), a man as strong as an ox and somewhat less intellectual – 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.

‘Cheque on,’ Jess my waitress said as she handed a ticket to me over the pass. ‘Two parmesan crust chicken, one confit tomato linguine and a grilled aubergine with Provençale ratatouille.’

‘Cheers Jess.’ My hands automatically opened fridges, put another couple of pans on for the order. I turned back to Francis.

‘The Marlow House Festival?’ I repeated.

‘Opera, Chef,’ he said. Anyone else might have added this in a condescending way, but not Francis. He was condescension-free. He not only wouldn’t be able to spell it, he wouldn’t know what it meant.

‘Opera?’ I said, somewhat stupidly.

‘Yeah, opera, singing. . .’ He looked at me, puzzled, as he started work on a dessert cheque: a strawberry pavlova with Chantilly cream. It’s not uncommon for kitchen porters, or kps as we call them, to do relatively simple tasks like puddings. I had never quite lost hope too, that one day I might make a chef out of Francis – although this hope often seemed optimistic, if not forlorn.

‘I know what opera is, Francis.’ I said tetchily.

He finished what he was doing. ‘That OK, Chef?’ he said anxiously, showing me the finished result.

‘Yeah sure,’ I said. I could have done it better but it was acceptable.

‘Service,’ he called out to summon Jess, then walking over to the sink and, starting to load plates and cutlery into the enormous Hobart dishwasher, he continued. ‘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 we listened to in the kitchen, playing undemanding, uncontroversial 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 numbers, yes it’s a former Number One, it’s “Two in a Million” by S Club 7!. . .’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘maybe we’ll pick up some custom from it.’

Jess shook her head. ‘No, you won’t – it’s fully catered.’ She scowled at the radio. ‘Do we have to listen to this?’

‘It’s S Club 7,’ I said. ‘I think it’s high art. . .’

Jess pursed her lips; she hated my plebby taste in music. She left with the dessert and I hummed along to the music as I seared the chicken breasts.

An opera, eh?

What I didn’t know was that the Earl’s opera event was like the tossed pebble that starts the avalanche that would ultimately lead to several deaths and a scandal.

Chapter Two

Strickland was in a bad mood. He was on a split shift from his restaurant where he was head chef and was allowing himself a lunchtime drink before he went back to work.

‘French bastards!’ he said irritably. There had been an article on the Michelin system of awards in the trade press that had sparked his ire. 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.

‘Bloody Michelin Guide. . .’ he grumbled. ‘Bastards. . .’

He would have chewed his arm off for a star.

It was Friday and we were in one of Hampden Green’s two pubs. The grotty one. The Three Bells. The Three Bells was certainly in no danger of featuring in the Michelin Guide, or any other guide you might care to mention. Grotty décor, grotty toilets, grotty furniture. It was a beautiful day outside but not in here; in here it was genteel gloom. The sun never shone in the Three Bells. It was a wonder we came here at all, but it was quiet, and handy, 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 our respective stoves morning, noon and night, it was a blessed relief from our respective workplaces.

‘What are you up to?’ he asked. ‘You look a bit down in the dumps.’

‘I’m knackered,’ I said. ‘Jess is going off on holiday in August. I’ve got no one to cover for her, and a couple of my regular customers have said my wine list is unadventurous.’

I drank some Diet Coke; I wouldn’t be drinking wine in here. I’d tried once, it was like paint-stripper. The Three Bell’s wine list wasn’t simply unadventurous, it was potentially lethal.

‘You couldn’t lend me your maître d’ could you, Graeme?’ I knew he was French, he had to know something about wine, which I didn’t. I like drinking the stuff but I know very little about it. I desperately needed guidance.

He shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. Something in the way he said it made me wonder if there was some kind of problem there. He didn’t elaborate. ‘You could always try Malcolm.’ I gave a tight, sarcastic smile.

Behind the bar, resplendent in a moth-eaten grey cardigan, Malcolm, the taciturn landlord with the very red face, like a God of the Undead, stood tall, cadaverous 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.

My fellow chef was vibrating with energy. He had 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 Green. 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.

I changed the subject. ‘And how about you – how are things at the King’s Head?’

He took a mouthful of lager, and shook his head regretfully. ‘It’s Jean-Claude, the maître d’’ he said. ‘He’s inefficient, but it’s never that bloody obvious that I can sack him for it.’ He sniffed loudly again and stared at me through his slightly glazed eyes. So that was why Strickland had looked so sour a moment ago.

He continued. ‘And he’s hitting on the waitresses. . . Anyway, one of these days he’ll go too far and commit a sackable offence.’

I’d had enough of restaurant gossip. I changed the subject.

‘Do you know about the Earl’s opera thing?’

Strickland nodded. ‘Yeah, and I know who’s doing the catering too.’ He smiled at me.

‘Who’s that then?’ I asked.

His smile broadened. ‘Have a guess. . .’

‘I really don’t know. . .’

He sat back in his chair. ‘Matteo McCleish!’

‘What, Nonna’s Kitchen Matteo McCleish?’

‘The one and only,’ he said.

Chapter Three

Strickland’s pet peeve might have been the Michelin Guide, mine was TV chefs. Everyone knows Matteo and his bloody TV programme, Nonna’s Kitchen.

McCleish had worked his way up from being a chef who cropped up on Saturday Kitchen and an appearance on MasterChef: The Professionals, to having his own TV series on BBC2.That was Nonna’s Kitchen. The story behind it, everything has to have a back-story these days, was that his Nonna (Italian for Granny) had fostered his love of cooking. Matteo’s mother had been of Italian parentage but brought up in Scotland, his father Scottish – and at the age of ten his family had relocated to Italy, where he had been brought up. His parents worked long hours and he’d basically been looked after by his beloved Nonna, spending long hours with her in the kitchen where she showed him the rudiments of cooking. She’d been a decent, simple cook, and he showed how with his expertise, the simplest of ingredients and ideas could be transformed into restaurant style food.

The most obvious thing about Matteo, other than his ability to cook, was his extreme good looks. He had a seductive, half-Italian, half-Scottish pronunciation, and a model wife. She was Italian, completely so – the kind of woman you think of if someone says hot, Italian babe. She was, naturalmente, also an influencer with a sizeable following on Instagram and TikTok where she appeared often, usually wearing very little, some consumer product artfully placed, very much in the foreground.

So, Nonna’s kitchen had something for everyone. Matteo made women swoon, Graziana attracted a male audience. Some people maybe learned a bit about cooking.

Strickland nodded. ‘Yeah, thought that would surprise you.’

I smiled grimly, baring my teeth; surprises are not always welcome.

Oblivious, he carried on. ‘He’s going to be running a pop-up restaurant for the Earl’s opera in a fancy marquee. What do you make of that then?’

I tried not to be churlish. The village could do with some excitement. Since January when there had been a murder nearby – in which I had unwittingly been involved – things had been remarkably quiet.

The arrival of a bona fide famous person, a chef in the same league as Gordon Ramsay or Tom Kerridge or Rick Stein, would most certainly be the topic of conversation around here for the next month.

Strickland had some more information. ‘Not only is he running the pop-up, he has even moved here.’

Now that did surprise me. I knew he had a restaurant in London, I guess like many successful chefs he was starting to empire build. ‘So, Matteo McCleish has moved to the village? Where?’ I asked.

‘Yep, into the Old Vicarage,’ Strickland replied, raising his eyebrows, ‘well temporarily at least. He arrived a few days ago.’

I knew of the house. The Old Vicarage was massive, built back in the day when the clergy had money and bling. Not like today. It belonged to a shady businessman who had needed to leave the village quickly, address unknown. That had been a hot topic locally too. It was currently on AirBnB, so someone had said, for a massive sum of money. Well, it looked like the shady businessman had found a client.

Strickland pulled a face and drank some of his lager. ‘What do you think of him?’

I paused for thought. I didn’t want to say that I had to confess, I didn’t like him. I suddenly thought, maybe the root problem lay not with him and the cliched Nonna figure, but me. I guess I was envious. I wanted the freedom from financial worry that Matteo 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 go through life like he did, not a care in the world.

I didn’t realise I was about to learn a lot more about Matteo McCleish than either of us expected.

Chapter Four

Speak of the devil and he will come. The very next day, on Saturday lunchtime, I met both Matteo and his wife, the beautiful Graziana.

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. Unlike most people in kitchens who aren’t passionate about food, she’s not crazy, unqualified or desperate. But today was different.

She had come running into the kitchen an hour earlier.

‘It’s Matteo McCleish, and his wife, in our restaurant!’

I had never seen her so excited. She was wide-eyed; her hair, unruly at the best of times, stood up like she’d been electrocuted. Francis stared at her, a parody of amazement.

‘Gordon Bennett!’ he said. That, for Francis, constitutes great excitement. It was a measure too, of Matteo 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, calmly. In reality I was feeling anything but relaxed. I seemed to have forgotten my earlier reservations about the McCleishes. You hypocrite, Charlie, I told myself sternly. But it was no good. I was as bad as my staff. My heart was thundering with adrenaline. It’s Matteo McCleish, and HIS WIFE, in MY restaurant!Feigning nonchalance, ‘They’re just customers.’

But of course they weren’t just customers, they were culinary royalty,and when I got their orders I cooked their food as if it was going out to the King.

Matteo had lamb fillet with an anchovy and caper dressing garnished with a mint sauce and rösti potatoes, and Graziana, 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 into the kitchen.

‘They’ve started, they look happy!’

Then:

‘They are loving the sourdough bread.’

‘He just said, “Compliments to the chef”. 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, ‘Oi, you, that means you – War, Famine, Pestilence and you, Death! 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. Feigned nonchalance again. 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: ‘Matteo’s having the strawberry bavarois and Graziana’s having the lemon and lime 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, like a dotty aunt who needs to be humoured. Now I was transmuted from lead to gold by the alchemical hand of Matteo McCleish, sprinkled with his TV stardust.

The gods had come down from Olympus. Or at least out of Nonna’s Kitchen. Matteo was here in high resolution and 3D. And so it was that towards the end of service, I found myself shaking the McCleish hand, wondering what to call him. It was a problem that I would never have thought I would ever have. Matteo sounded too presumptuous, Mr McCleish far too formal.

He was the first really famous person I had ever met. I’ve cooked for a fair few, but they’ve never come in the kitchen, why would they? 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 – shorter than me – and surprisingly slender. TV gives little indication of size unless people are helpfully standing next to something that has a recognisable benchmark height, a post-box for example, or a Labrador. Matteo 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.

He looked very stylish and had an even bronze tan. I’m normally quite happy with the way I look, but he was so high wattage that standing next to him, I felt very plain. I also felt my hair was letting me down. It doesn’t normally. It’s red-brown, shoulder length, plaited today to make sure none of it went in the food, but it looked dowdy next to Matteo’s luxuriant locks 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, Matteo 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 gawped silently at him, bereft of the power of speech.

‘I enjoyed my lamb,’ he said, encouragingly. He had quite a strong accent, that heady mix of Scottish and Italian. I should have known this from the few times I had seen him on 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 (or coked out of my brains) nor was I as good a chef. Strickland was touched with the hand of genius.

But, I thought smugly to myself, Matteo McCleish wasn’t in his restaurant right now, was he? He was here.

I smiled confidently, or tried to anyway. My lips certainly twitched.

Matteo 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?’ Matteo 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. My office was a space under the stairs. Upstairs was my accommodation. To say it was spartan was to oversell it. There was virtually nothing up there at all.

Virtually, though, was better than 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. Matteo 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. No one likes revealing how boracic they are. Anyway, it was a bit too intimate, I didn’t want Matteo getting any ideas. For all I knew he had some kink thing going on about female chefs.

‘Let’s go outside and I’ll show you my walk-in fridge,’ I suggested. ‘It’s new!’ I added proudly, instantly regretting it. Matteo 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.

Matteo brightened. ‘Good idea!’ he said. 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. In the afternoon sun it looked rather beautiful. Matteo 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. . .’

Matteo 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. It’s chilly, but it has the advantage of privacy and nobody can eavesdrop.

Matteo looked up at me and brushed his long hair back from his face. 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 whiny Fife accent – was the proud possessor of a Michelin star (Strickland would be extremely jealous) and I’d worked for him as a chef de partie in charge of his sauces.

The restaurant was in St Albans in an expensive hotel and the kitchen fronted onto 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 staff 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. . .’ Matteo 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. One item that Danny had bought for the cheese board was called Stinking Bishop. It’s a soft cow’s cheese, and it reeks to high heaven. He’d bought a 1.8 kilo wheel of it, that’s a lot of cheese, and two or three weeks later we’d still got a fair bit left. I’d cling filmed it, put it in a plastic container with a lid and it still stank. I cling filmed the container, it still stank. Every time you opened the fridge door a waft, no, it was far more than a waft, a torrent of ripe cheese stench smacked you in the face. ‘Danny, I love you,’ I had said, ‘but it’s either the cheese or me, one of us has to go.’

I got my way. I was carrying it out to the bins on a paper plate, reverentially, like a head on a platter, to put in the organic waste when I saw the builder’s van pulling in. Danny had shrieked out of the kitchen window, ‘It’s him, it’s him, I’m deid. . . Quick, do something, woman!’ and went to hide. The builder parked his van and jumped out; he marched over to me. He was short, stocky, aggrieved, and wearing a plaid shirt. What is it with builders and plaid shirts? Judging by the expression on his face, he’d come looking for trouble.

‘I’m sorry,’ I had said politely, ostentatiously blocking his way, ‘this car park is reserved for staff.’

He ignored my parking advice. There was a stiff breeze blowing towards the hotel, the builder was upwind of the Stinking Bishop that I was holding behind my back.

‘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 replied, ‘Out of my way, bitch!’ I raised my eyebrows theatrically at his rudeness.

‘Don’t call me names, baby cakes,’ I said, warningly. That’s when he went ballistic. Maybe he didn’t like being called baby cakes. Maybe it was all too much, one chef knocking his missus off, and here was a lady chef giving him lip. He went very red in the face.

‘You asked for it!’ he snarled.

In fairness, he didn’t try to hit me with his fist (what a gentleman!), he tried to slap me. That was a bad idea on his part. I’d got the Stinking Bishop on its plate behind me. I’ve also got very quick reactions. I ducked under his hand, straightened up and slammed the putrid, squishy cheese into his face. Like a clown driving a custard pie into another clown’s face.

As a weapon it was unbelievably effective.

He stopped dead in his tracks. The stench was overwhelming. The cheese which had been bubbling and sweating in its container for ages, was now runny and liquid. It was in his eyes, up his nose, in his mouth and to top it all he must have suffered some kind of allergic reaction.

He sank to his knees, hands clawing at his face, swearing, rubbing his eyes.

‘Help me. . .’ he moaned. How are the mighty fallen.

‘You big baby,’ I said, staring at my handiwork in awed fascination. The cheese was all over his face, like he was wearing incredibly thick yellow clown pancake makeup of a gruesome kind. He was a figure out of a horror film.

‘Aaaa. . . Aaargh. . . what the fff? It’s horrible. . .’ Then, ‘Pah, pahhh. . .’ It had gone in his mouth when he’d opened it to speak and he was retching, spitting out rancid cheese juice.

I got him a bucket of water from the tap by the kitchen door. He plunged his head into it, scrubbing off the cheese as best he could. That had been it.

When his vision was slightly restored, he’d sworn at me, but feebly, got back into his van (well, staggered back really) and driven off, and that was the end of it. The affair fizzled out, my contract ended – I was covering for someone who was on extended leave – and we went our separate ways. I’d all but forgotten about it until today.

‘Well, whatever,’ said Matteo, clearly disbelieving my statement about reasoning with him. He made a mildly Italian gesture with his hands to indicate this. I suppose I hadn’t done that much reasoning, the Bishop had done the heavy lifting.

He carried on: ‘He also said that you were a woman who could be relied on to keep her mouth shut.’

I shrugged. ‘Well, I suppose I didn’t tell his brigade about the affair he was having.’

Matteo 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. Matteo 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. Matteo made his offer. ‘How would you like to come and work for me for a while?’

I blinked in disbelief, and Matteo 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. People would say, ‘That Charlie Hunter, she’s working for that guy from the TV show Nonna’s Kitchen.’ My reputation would soar. Oh, brave new world! Then reality bit. Savagely.

‘Well, Matteo, 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.’

Matteo shook his head confidently. A BAFTA award nomination and a prime slot on BBC2, plus high viewing figures had obviously done wonders for his self-esteem. People didn’t say no to him.

‘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. Then I got suspicious. Why did he want me to work for him? There were plenty of other, better qualified chefs around?

‘Why do you need my 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.

Chapter Five

I looked at him in astonishment. It certainly wasn’t the answer that I had been expecting.

Blackmailed! Surely not the wholesome star of Nonna’s Kitchen. 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.

Matteo looked around the fridge as if seeking inspiration. Thank God everything was labelled and day-dotted. I am so tidy it verges on the obsessional, which is a good quality in a chef. He picked up a plastic tub that said ‘smoked hadok’ in Francis’s wonky, child-like, writing. He opened it, peered inside and absent-mindedly sniffed it, obviously checking it hadn’t gone off. Force of habit.

Either he was very interested in fish and fish storage or the blackmail story was a sensitive one.

‘It’s for Cullen Skink,’ I said helpfully.

He looked bewildered. ‘Cullen Skink?’

‘It’s a Scottish fish soup,’ I said, slightly desperately, ‘not unlike a chowder.’

‘Oh, right.’ He put the fish back on the shelf and looked at me. ‘I should know that really, I’m betraying my Scottish roots.’ He smiled. ‘Nonna only ever taught me Italian food. . .’ He sighed and got back to the main point.

‘It’s Graziana. . . she did something unprofessional in her youth and it’s come back to haunt her. . .’ he finally said.

‘Oh, right.’ My turn now. I felt like reaching for the box with the haddock. There’s that thing isn’t there, in Men’s Liberation Movements where they have a Talking Stick? Whoever has the Stick gets to speak. They pass it around. We could do that with the smoked haddock. Pick it up as an indication that it was my turn to hold the floor and nobody would be allowed to interrupt.

‘It’s sexual,’ he finally said. ‘She did this thing in Italy, like Only Fans.’ He sighed. ‘She was young and naïve and pressured into it. She had another name online, Gemma Moravia. . .’

He smiled at the memory, ‘we did that thing to find your porn name, your first pet, she had a dog called Gemma, and your street as a kid, Via Moravia. So. . .’

He shook his head, ‘we thought it was ancient history. But someone got hold of it. . .’ Then he added, softly, ‘And, to make it worse, I think it’s someone I know. It’s one of my brigade.’

‘Oh,’ I said. I felt for him, but what was I supposed to do about it?

He continued. ‘I really want to know who’s behind it, and of course, it goes without saying I want it stopped.’

‘It sounds like you should go to the police,’ I said helpfully. Matteo looked at me sadly and shook his head.

‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘I can’t trust the police to keep this quiet. If it gets out, it could wreck my career. The TV people are very twitchy about anything involving sex these days, particularly with mainstream, family oriented talent. As well as that,’ he added angrily, ‘I don’t want naked pictures of my wife in compromising positions plastered all over the internet.’

‘Point taken,’ I said. ‘So no police.’

‘No police.’

‘Private detectives?’ I suggested, brightly.

‘Exactly, Charlie. The problem is, I don’t know any private detectives.’ Then he smiled, ‘But I do know chefs and how resourceful they can be. We’re innate problem solvers, Charlie,’ (I thought of Francis – how true) ‘you’re the one I need to help me.’

‘Me!’ I said, disbelievingly.

‘Yes, you, Charlie.’ He warmed to his theme. ‘You can handle tough people, and I heard you solved a murder. You’ve proved you can do it. So I want you to help me find out who is blackmailing 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. Matteo didn’t want me around for my cooking skills. He wanted an investigator who could also be his minder. 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 push cheese in people’s faces or whack them with whatever came to hand and was, above all, discreet.

I didn’t know what to say. I sat there in disappointed silence.

‘Please,’ he said. It was the heart-breaking gentleness with which he spoke that did it. I’m an easy touch for a sob story. I think it was then that I finally decided I didn’t dislike him; on the contrary.

As I looked into his sincere, pleading brown eyes I knew I would help him.

I did some swift calculating. If I agreed to help him, I’d get help in the kitchen, and I could treat my new job – tracking down the blackmailer – as a paid mini-break. It had to be better than working a hundred plus hours a week slaving over the stove.

‘OK,’ I said. I 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 Matteo wanted help of a very different kind.

We shook hands and he embraced me. Damn, he smelt good! Lucky old Graziana.

I thought back to a conversation I had been having a few days ago with Jess. I had said it was going to take a miracle to get another chef. And lo, the miracle had happened.

I just hadn’t expected it to happen the way it did. But, I guess, that’s the way of miracles.

Face it, Lazarus must have been as surprised as everyone else when he was led out of the tomb.

Chapter Six

‘We’ll need a cover story,’ I said. Matteo was still comfortably perched on the potato sack looking very pleased with the way this conversation had gone.

He smiled. ‘I was thinking that I would tell them I’m doing a cookbook on British pub and restaurant cooking and you would be my helper, as someone who is used to relatively simple menus.’

Was there an implied slight there? Me and my ‘relatively simple’ menu? I decided to ignore it. I told myself, concentrate on the fact that you’re being paid and you’ll get a free chef thrown in.

‘What,’ I asked innocuously, ‘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.’

‘Will they believe that?’

Matteo snorted. ‘I’m the head chef. They’ll believe what they’re told to believe.’

‘Fair enough,’ I said. Who was going to question him? The head chef, like God, was almighty and worked in mysterious ways. ‘Who’s going to be looking after my kitchen?’

‘I’ll lend you Giorgio, 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.

‘He might well be,’ Matteo said. ‘That’s what makes the whole thing so awful, they’re all closer than family. Knowing that one of them has got it in for me is unbelievably depressing, and stressful, Charlie. I can’t trust anyone and it’s wearing me down.’

My heart went out to him. He continued: ‘Well, you can see what you think of the others first and keep him in mind for later. Besides, they’ll talk more freely if he’s not there – he’s quite a forceful character.’

Hmm, I thought. I heard the faint sound of alarm bells ringing. Forceful character? That could cover a multitude of sins. Oh well, I thought, I’m sure Matteo knows what he’s doing.

And so, a couple of days later, on the Wednesday morning, I found myself in Matteo’s rented property, being introduced to Matteo’s team. I’d been shown in by the back door, there’d been some sort of photo shoot going on at the front. We were still a fortnight away from the team taking over the kitchens at the Earl’s house for their ten day preparatory run before the opera began. During those ten days they would feed the performers and orchestra as they rehearsed, plus the backstage staff, getting a feel of their new kitchen and the menu before the paying customers arrived. Today the brigade were being given a tour of the area, and I had become one of the attractions.

They looked distinctly underwhelmed to meet me.

‘Hello, everybody.’ Matteo McCleish was all smiles as he introduced me to the assembled group. ‘This is Charlie Hunter, the chef I’ve told you about, who’ll be joining our team soon. . .’ He turned to me, waving a proprietorial arm. ‘There are other people on the books but these are my key players. . .’

I smiled winningly. I was excited despite my misgivings about my crime-solving ability. Possibly one of them was the blackmailer?

We were in the dining room of the Old Vicarage where Matteo 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 email them the link. I’m sure they could hardly wait.

Introductions were made.

‘This is Giorgio, my sous.’ Matteo pointed out the ‘quite forceful’ 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. ‘Quite forceful’ was probably one of those euphemisms like, ‘he’s a bit of a character’, usually shorthand for a total nightmare.

Giorgio 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.

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 hoodie 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. I half-turned and noticed Giorgio run his eyes over me in a considered, evaluating way. Bet he does that with all the ladies, I thought to myself as he obviously awarded me quality points the way you might a piece of meat. As if to confirm the thought, he smirked and stroked his chin, nodding to himself. I didn’t smirk back.

‘This is Attila, my pastry chef.’ I didn’t think Attila 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, obviously unimpressed by what he was looking at. He didn’t look like the kind of man who would have enough get up and go to blackmail someone, and pastry is probably the least fraught areas of working in a kitchen. Then I reflected that a good pastry chef, and he had to be good or he wouldn’t be working for Matteo, had to be a meticulous planner, be analytic and be patient. All of these qualities would be ideal for a blackmailer to possess.

I had two more chefs to meet, two more chief suspects. I quickly added adjectives to the faces to help me remember them: Giorgio was Grumpy; Tom, Sporty; Attila, 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. (Later I looked them up. I’d liked Murdo. I somewhat doubted Rick Astley would be covering ‘A Skull Full of Maggots’ in the foreseeable future.)

‘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. I knew Matteo suspected his brigade, I wasn’t sure if the management qualified as potential suspects. 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 as she shook my hand. She looked intelligent and hard as nails. There was something slightly intimidating about her, maybe in the way she projected an air of supreme self-confidence like a forcefield.

‘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 Matteo’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 had certainly been born with the face of someone unhappy with his lot.

I filed the two non-chefs in my mind as Pushy 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 trousers. He looked like his mum had dressed him.

Giorgio, 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 visibly quailed. I saw his knuckles whiten as they tightened around a clipboard he was holding. He gave Giorgio a subservient smile, the way a dog might to a larger dog. I guessed that Giorgio probably made his life hell.

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.

But Matteo was right. They wouldn’t suspect me of anything. And crucially, neither would the blackmailer.

I looked at Matteo’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 Matteo – ‘and stars of the future!’

How glib was that, I thought. I’m Ms 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 Matteo’s team?

‘Matteo! 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.