Murder on the Menu E-Book

Alex Coombs

• Herausgeber: No Exit Press
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 357

Beschreibung

'An irresistibly delicious mix of cooking and murder' Trisha Ashley 'Takes two of the world's greatest pleasures - food and mystery writing - and combines them exquisitely. I devoured it!' Thomas Mogford Chef Charlie Hunter's arrival in the beautiful Chilterns is the fulfilment of a long-held dream: to open her own restaurant in an idyllic countryside location. The Old Forge sits on the village green (complete with duck pond and flint-faced houses) and seems just the place for the high-quality cooking she wants to be known for. But instead of rural peace and a chance to lick her wounds, Charlie finds something ugly stirring under the chocolate box perfection. When a prominent local builder is found dead in suspicious circumstances, Charlie the outsider becomes a suspect. And the only way to clear her name seems to be to find out who the real killer is. Luckily she has allies: her student waitress, a kitchen porter making up in muscles what he lacks in brain and a briskly efficient clairvoyant. Using all the craft Charlie's learned in kitchens – discipline, timing, preparation and grim determination – she will be as relentless in her quest to bring a murderer to justice as she is in creating the perfect meal.

Leseprobe

MURDER ON THE MENU

Alex Coombs

To JAW

xx H

Contents

Cover

Title Page

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

Also by Alex Coombs

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publishers

Chapter One

I first met Slattery on the day I had my very low-key opening. Any less low-key, and it would have been invisible. I’d bought the restaurant, the Old Forge Café, and officially completed the deal on 31st December. I guess I wanted my new venture, which was essentially my new life, to begin on New Year’s Day. It felt right, and there is always that optimistic sensation that everyone has at the beginning of January – this will be my year! This is my time! I was no exception. Or in my case, this will be a year of no regrets, of positivity, of expunging the past. Emerging from the wreckage of a failed relationship into a brave new world.

I’d been in the village of Hampden Green in the Chiltern Hills for a week. Just one week. It felt an awful lot longer. In the past few days, I had brought in painters and decor­ators to give a more contemporary feel to the restaurant than the chintz and cream decor favoured by the former owner. I had not expected my first customers at the Old Forge Café to be two uniformed policemen and a Detective Inspector. It most certainly wasn’t the demographic that I had in mind when I bought the place.

The café had previously been owned by a Mrs Cope, an archetypal fluffy-white-haired lady in her late sixties who smelled of face-powder and rosewater and had eyes like a cobra. I had looked over the books and the operating costs. The Old Forge Café turned a reasonable profit but I could see big room for improvement. It also fitted all the personal criteria that I was looking for: location, accommodation and tranquillity. Additionally, it had a very well-equipped kitchen with a state-of-the-art oven and gas range. I decided to keep the name, partly because people would know where it was, and partly because I couldn’t think of a better one.

For the poet TS Eliot, April might have been the cruellest month; for the hospitality industry that’s not the case. The cruellest month is the beginning of the year. I had officially opened the place on a Friday in January, the hardest time to make money in catering. Everyone’s broke after Christmas, everyone’s depressed, and the weather’s usually awful. It’s not weather for going out. Out here in the South Bucks countryside, it was no exception. Mind you, my staff bills were low, for the simple reason I didn’t have any. I was a one woman band.

It didn’t take me long to realise that Mrs Cope not only had the eyes of a snake, but the morals of one. Buy in haste, repent at leisure. The kitchen equipment, now I came to actually use it, instead of being hurried around it by an estate agent, was in a terrible state. For example, the door fell off one of the fridges on about the third use and I had to wedge it shut with a sack of potatoes. A lot of the restaurant furniture was quite literally falling apart and the less said about the structure of the building, the better. The painters and decorators had had a field day pointing out more and more horrors revealed by their work.

But despite these setbacks, I was happy. It was my own place and I’d had enough of London where so many things reminded me of my past life with Andrea. Here he had bought me dinner, there we had argued in a pub. Those were the offices in which he’d worked. The geographical terrain of London was overlaid with a psycho-geographical grid on which I could plot my career in catering as well as our relationship, and I wanted a fresh start. I didn’t care that I was unknown here. Start off small and grow with the business, that was my short-term plan. I figured that as profits grew I could rebuild the place around me. I wasn’t even too concerned about the potential lack of customers – it’s always a problem in January, it wasn’t unexpected.

I put together a simple menu with a few clever touches. It was a café menu; I had no liquor licence yet. Things had to be made from low-cost ingredients so I could make a decent profit margin as I couldn’t get away with high prices and there was no buffer of profit from alcoholic drinks.

Not being too busy suited me for the moment. I felt that I would rather take a low footfall and turnover on the chin and work through the bad times of January and February, growing organically, than start out when things traditionally went well. Battling adversity, well, I was kind of used to that. And it was undeniably pleasant to wake up in the flat above the restaurant and savour the silence.

For the last two years I had been living in noisy central London kitchens, eighteen-hour days, working with kids who were twenty years my junior. My one-bedroomed flat in Kentish Town had been equally noisy. I was getting too old for clubbing, too old for the wafts of weed that kept seeping up from the flat below and the street outside, and London night life had long since lost its appeal. Gone were the days of finishing work at eleven and then going clubbing until four. Making the move to the Chilterns was not a hard decision to make.

I also didn’t mind the fact that I had hardly any personal effects in the flat that came with the restaurant. Not now that Mrs Cope’s stuff had gone. It wasn’t just the furniture that she had removed. She had taken not only the lampshades, but the lightbulbs too. That seemed a bit excessive, but, I reflected, Mrs Cope was a thoroughly vindictive woman.

Still, I was enjoying the space. Just as well since I had so much of it. Uncluttered by things I couldn’t afford, I pretended I was enjoying the minimalist life. Who needs tables and chairs and a sideboard? Who needs a bed and a chest of drawers? In a symbolic act I’d junked all my old furniture, a gesture of severing links with the past. Who needs a wardrobe, I had thought, I wasn’t looking to go to Narnia. I was regretting it now, that was for sure. That’s what you get for being impetuous.

I led the police into the restaurant area, gave them a table, asked them what they wanted to drink – two cappuccinos for the PCs and a double espresso for the man I assumed was their boss, and busied myself behind the counter. At least the old Gaggia coffee machine still worked.

The two uniforms were festooned like paramilitary Christmas trees with the tools of their trade: batons, Tasers, radios, other bits and bobs of equipment. They clashed horribly with the chintzy furniture of the restaurant which I couldn’t yet afford to replace.

I brought them their coffees. They looked me over in a markedly hostile way. Perhaps they missed Mrs Cope. Perhaps it was because I wasn’t from round here. Or maybe they just didn’t like my face.

The winter rain beat down unceasingly.

Through the glass I could see the green itself (or the common as it was sometimes called); the children’s play area, the fitness/arts studio, twenty or so houses and the village pond. There was also a pub, the Three Bells, a rough kind of place with a pool table. It was one of two pubs in the village. Houses of various shapes and sizes fronted on to the green. The road bent around to the left out of sight, leading to the King’s Head, the other village pub.

The two pubs were indicative of the social divide of the place: BMWs and Mercedes at the King’s Head, pick-up trucks and vans at the Three Bells.

In short, a typical Chilterns village. And carrying on the good old country traditions of surly hostility to incomers.

‘What brings you gentlemen to Hampden Green?’ I asked. The uniforms glanced expectantly at the DI, their spokesman. He had a tough, good-humoured face, somewhat battered and quite tanned. He also had a powerful physique under his suit, running somewhat to middle-aged fat, and a very obvious ‘don’t mess with me’ attitude. He looked hard as nails.

He stood up and pointed out of the window.

‘You see that house, the one with the blue door?’

I could, and I did. I nodded.

‘That’s my place.’

It was said more in the tone of a warning than anything else. That’s my house, this is my turf, this is my patch. Like a dog cocking its leg, the DI was marking his territory. He looked at me in an intimidating way to underline the message. Satisfied, he carried on.

‘I’m DI Michael Slattery, by the way. Now, I am here to investigate a burglary that occurred down at Andy Simmonds’ place last night. Do you know Andy?’

‘No,’ I said. I didn’t know anyone.

‘Well, he’s a pig farmer and butcher and he has a farm shop where he sells his meat. Last night someone forced the lock on his walk-in fridge and nicked about two grands’ worth of sausages and mixed meat. I’m investigating the crime.’

Blimey, I thought. What did he expect to find here? If I were the sausage thief, how would I get rid of them? A menu composed of nothing but sausage dishes? January is sausage month?

‘A DI?’ I said. Quite senior for this sort of thing. Years ago I had dated a policeman and I seemed to recall DIs were fairly important. Not to throw any shade on sausages but I would have thought he would have had more important things to do than look into a meat robbery – and why did he need two uniforms?

‘Slow day at the office?’ I asked.

He scowled. I think my comment had been unwise. There’d been two shootings and a fatal stabbing round the corner from where I had last lived in the month before I’d left. I was sorry for the farmer’s loss, but really? Anyway, I felt that somehow I was failing to connect with DI Slattery.

I went back to my sausage musings. Mrs Cope would have shifted the sausage. That sounds like a dreadful double entendre, but what I meant was, bangers and mash, sausage casserole, sausage sandwiches, sausage and onion gravy. Or continental bockwurst mitkartoffeln salat. Homemade sausage rolls. . . I suddenly thought, my God, why am I mocking her? All of that sounds good, maybe not the casserole. All locally sourced, so good for the environment, and from free-range pigs. When I’d been out running I’d seen them in their muddy field standing around their little corrugated-iron pig houses. Good for animal welfare! Hearty food for this abysmal weather. I made a mental note.

‘Investigate sausage possibilities.’

But that was for later; right now I had the police to deal with. I waited for Slattery and his not so merry men to break the silence.

Outside the windows of the café the village of Hampden Green carried on its peaceful, unremarkable existence. It continued to rain.

I looked at the trio of cops. Three pairs of eyes stared back at me with naked suspicion. I stopped looking at them and looked out of the bow-fronted window behind them instead. A kind of horrible silence ensued. Periodically one of the uniform’s radios would squawk into life. He would ignore it.

Through the glass I could see most of the village. The green was deserted.

Slattery was the first to move. He stood up and pointed at the common.

‘Well, let’s just say that this is very much my patch’ – his gesture encompassed the whole village – ‘and I’m a tidy man and I like to keep things clean. Now, you’re new around here,’ he said, with a distinct lack of enthusiasm, ‘so I would like to officially extend the hand of welcome, but if anyone should swing by offering prime pork goods at knockdown prices I’d be upset if you failed to inform me.’ He looked menacingly at me, so did his colleagues. ‘In fact, I’d be very upset.’

This was, I decided, nothing to do with a break-in. This was DI Slattery showing me who was boss, who ran Hampden Green.

‘Sure,’ I said, ‘coffee’s on the house.’

He nodded, took his wallet out and handed me his card.

‘I’ll see you around,’ he said, as he stood up to leave.

It was a threat rather than a promise.

I wondered what I’d done to upset him.

I guess I wasn’t local.

Chapter Two

My next visitor was altogether more charming than the forces of law and order. It was only by chance that I actually heard her. I was making a coffee and walnut cake and had to go back into the restaurant to make an espresso that I was going to use for flavouring. It was then that I saw her through the glass of the front door. She waved at me to get my attention. I went over and let her in.

‘Hello,’ I said, ‘can I help you?’

I was talking to a girl who I guessed was in her late teens, early twenties, who had been trying without success to ring the bell by the restaurant door. I say ‘guessed’ because she was mainly concealed by a large umbrella that the heavy rain was bouncing off. It was ten o’clock in the morning but almost dark under the cloudy, black sky.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, gesturing helplessly, ‘I’ve been ringing the bell. . .’

Another thing that didn’t work, thank you, Mrs Cope, I thought. I’ll add it to the list.

‘It’s temperamental,’ I lied, which sounded better somehow than ‘broken’. ‘Broken’ was unprofessional, defeatist.

‘Do come in,’ I said, ushering her inside. I took the umbrella from her and her coat, sodden and heavy from the hideous weather.

‘I’ve come about the job.’ She looked around. ‘Is the chef, Charlie Hunter, around?’

‘I’m the chef, Charlie Hunter,’ I said. Bet this doesn’t happen to Monica Galetti, I thought.

She looked stricken.

‘I’m sorry. . . I thought. . .’

‘That’s ok. Have a seat.’

We both sat down and weighed each other up. I had put an A board outside saying that I needed waiting staff. I was amazed that the writing hadn’t been washed away. The marker pen for A boards was supposed to be weatherproof to a degree but it must have been undergoing a pretty severe test out there. I hadn’t been too confident that I would get any takers. There was not a lot of footfall in the village and the rain made people concentrate on the road rather than signs outside restaurants.

‘I’m Jessica, by the way, Jessica Turner, but people call me Jess.’

‘I’m Charlie Hunter, as you now know, chef proprietor.’ I smiled at how pompous that sounded. It was true, it was an accurate description of my job, but it sounded quite grandiose. You could be chef proprietor of a burger van when you think about it.

I examined my applicant appraisingly. Jessica Turner was about five foot five with dark curly hair, large brown eyes and an attractive, lively face. She was well-spoken and was dressed down in a baggy jumper, jeans and Cuban-heeled boots. She looked intelligent and good-humoured.

I explained my plans for the restaurant, she listened attentively and asked a couple of sensible questions.

I asked Jess about herself. She was a second year student at Warwick University studying Computer Science. She was staying at home temporarily as a combination of industrial action and building work at the uni had shifted that term’s work online. I nodded. IT, I was impressed. I had a website that I’d bought off the shelf but I lacked the time to be organising it properly, let alone updating it. In my hands it looked decidedly amateurish. Jess could help there when we were quiet. Her skills would come in handy. I could write a menu, but I couldn’t use spreadsheets with any degree of competence, or even coherently organise a simple-to-use drag and drop website. Did she have waitressing experience? Yes, she did.

‘What kind of food are you going to do?’ she asked.

I made her a coffee and explained not only the menu, but its rationale. There was nothing too fancy or too expensive.

So, on the menu as well as restaurant dishes there were old warhorses like caramelised red onion and steak baguette, baked potatoes, quiche and various sandwiches. It was still predominantly a café menu, but a café menu with artistic flourishes, and from these little seeds mighty things would grow.

There was the inescapable ploughman’s (we were in the country, there were fields), but made with good cheese, homemade pickled red cabbage and piccalilli. I had added plenty of things that would not go off – I couldn’t afford the luxury of waste – so there were quite a few cutesy preserves and frozen desserts, parfaits, semifreddo and sorbets that would last and not have to get binned if unsold. Occasionally I’d add mysterious touches: compressed pineapple, a potato foam on the soup, that kind of thing. Stuff like that was old hat in London but still novel out here. There was only me, it couldn’t be too adventurous; I didn’t have the luxury of time, but it was good, it was honest and it represented reasonable value for money.

It was more like I was pitching for a job than she was, but I guess she was about the first person I’d had a chance to talk to about it.

‘That all sounds very interesting,’ she said. And the strange thing was, she sounded like she meant it.

The job was hers.

‘I’m afraid it’s only minimum wage, but you get tips, which you share with the kitchen staff.’

She nodded. ‘How many kitchen staff are there?’ she asked.

‘None, other than me. But I don’t get tips, since I’m the owner, so currently they’re all yours. But you will have to help with the washing up.’

She smiled. ‘I can wash up, Charlie.’

She had a great smile. I think she was amused by the shoestring nature of the business. We agreed that she could start the following day.

‘So I guess I’d better take my sign down then,’ I said.

She looked puzzled.

‘What sign?’

‘The A board.’

‘I didn’t see the A board sign.’ She looked confused, as did I. I stood up and glanced out of the window to see if it was still there. It was, it hadn’t been stolen, that was my suspicious London mind at work; she must have just been blinded by the godawful rain.

‘Then how did you know I needed a waitress?’

Her face cleared. ‘Oh, that. Well, someone told me last night.’

‘But I hadn’t put a sign up last night.’

She shook her head sorrowfully. ‘Oh, Charlie, you’re not from here. This is a village, everybody knows everything about everyone else’s business. Don’t worry, you’ll get used to it in the end.’

We shook hands and I watched her back disappearing across the green as she trudged home through the rain.

I thought about what she had said. I suppose I thought it was quite sweet that everyone knew what everyone else was doing without Facebook, TikTok, Twitter or other social media.

After all, it was a pleasant, friendly little village. What could go wrong?

Chapter Three

The following day, twenty-four hours after DI Slattery’s visit and Jess’s hiring, there was the arson attack.

Coincidentally fire, in the form of smoke, had gone into what I was cooking at the time. I had just made and served a customer a smoked venison sandwich on rye with a small garnish of curly endive, beetroot and cornichons.

It would be fair to say that the customer, bald, overweight, tattooed (not a great look – the flab, not the ink, I have a couple of discreet tattoos myself, not on public display) was not shaping up to be one of my favourites.

Jess arrived as things started getting heated between us. I hadn’t been overly impressed with the look of him when he walked in and my opinion of him was getting progressively lower. Jess gave me a sympathetic glance as she passed by, heading for the kitchen to change into her apron.

‘What’s that?’ he pointed aggressively at the garnish. Most things about the guy were aggressive as well as his mannerisms: his bald (aggressively so) shaved head, his tattoos, visible on his arms and flowing up his neck, lots of red and blue and green (bright, vivid colours, no delicate Korean style ink for him), his general demeanour.

I patiently explained. How it would enhance his eating experience, how the flavours were cunningly paired, how the vinegar that the small cucumber (which is what a cornichon is) was pickled in would cut through the richness of the meat. And didn’t it look good! He was having none of it.

‘Bollocks to that,’ he remarked judiciously. I doubted he was a professional food critic, so his opinion was not worth taking on board. At least I hoped he wasn’t a food critic. Although, ‘Bollocks to that,’ would make an arresting title for a food review in a paper.

‘No offence, darling, but when I want crap on my plate I’ll ask for it, OK?’

Idiot, I thought. I gritted my teeth (darling! Would he have said that to Angela Hartnett? I think not), shrugged and fetched a plate, and deftly scraped off the offending items with the blade of a knife. For a mad moment I would willingly have plunged it into him.

Actually, I’d have changed tools first.

I was using the back of my long, broad-bladed chef’s knife to clean the plate. For stabbing Whitfield (that was his name I learnt later) to death I’d have gone for a long, thin but sturdy boning knife. It would have slid in much more easily.

As my old head chef used to say, ‘Always choose the right tool for the right job.’

The question of what is right and not right, a perennial problem. They say that the customer is always right. Not in the world of good food. There, the customer doesn’t know best, the customer is entitled to their opinion, but that’s all they’re entitled to. Not to demand changes to the menu. I’m quoting a chef I once knew; well, it was OK for him, he had the luxury of fame and money. I had neither. I did what I was told. I felt belittled, sad and dirty, complicit in Whitfield’s vandalism of my food. And angry.

The sandwich sat forlornly on the plate. He switched his baleful attention from me and the food to jabbing messages into the keyboard of his phone.

I went back into the kitchen. Jess walked in with an order in her hand.

‘Cheque on, one steak baguette, one minestrone soup with parmesan and rosemary focaccia. . .’

I thought of the guy again and I picked up a frying pan and crashed it down on the range. Arsy customers really upset me; it shouldn’t, but it does. Jess flinched.

‘Are you OK?’

I told her what had just happened.

Her face cleared. ‘Oh, that’s Dave Whitfield; ignore him, he’s a knobhead.’

I put another pan on the heat and took a rump steak from my fridge and a tub of pre-cooked caramelised red onion.

As I seasoned the meat she said, ‘Whitfield lives across the common, you’ll probably be seeing quite a lot of him.’

My heart sank.

‘Oh, great.’

‘Yeah, he lives in the house with the obelisk.’

I knew immediately which house she was talking about. Outside of discussions as to the real meaning of 2001 A Space Odyssey, you rarely hear the word ‘obelisk’. You did in Hampden Green, courtesy of Dave Whitfield.

She disappeared back into the restaurant. I attended to the steak and thought about Whitfield and his house. It really did have an obelisk, a kind of blue Perspex tower in the front garden that was illuminated, like a miniature version of the Shard in London. It must have been nearly three metres tall. This cast an eerie blue light over the green at night. In a village with no street lighting, it was quite the thing. It was disconcerting, the way it glowed, an unmissable blue beacon. I could even see it through my curtains. So, the mystery was now explained – that was Whitfield’s house, his plastic tower, his turquoise aura. His own personal advert for his construction business. The letters, DW were etched into it for all to see. I had been wondering what they stood for, now I knew. Perhaps the purple phallic tower in his garden was making up in metres what he lacked downstairs in the trouser department. Maybe I should ask him.

‘How on earth did he get planning permission?’ I asked Jess later. Planning was a sore point. My window frames were rotten (thank you Mrs Cope!) and needed replacement. They were listed though, and this added insanely to the cost. The point was, any form of deviation from the norm was fraught with difficulty and had to be ‘in keeping with the village’. You couldn’t just put any old window in, it had to be identical. And not just looking the same, the material had to be an exact match. God alone knows how Whitfield had managed to get his huge, glowing pillar through the council planning department. It certainly was not ‘in keeping with the village’ in any way, shape or form.

Jessica had said darkly, ‘That’s the question everyone here asked. Let’s just say, money talks.’

I left the kitchen by the back door to get some more panna cottas from the fridge in the store room on the other side of the kitchen yard. One of the double doors of my gate to the road had swung open and I had a clear view over the common and the houses on the far side.

Right now Whitfield’s tower, clearly visible, wasn’t talking but it was certainly communicating. In smoke signals. Maybe this was an example of sympathetic magic; he was eating smoked venison, here was more of it. A whole lot more. His front garden was ablaze and was emitting a huge black column of the stuff. Not just smoke, big yellow flames licked up into the cold grey January sky. It was very dramatic, like an illustration I had in my Children’s Bible when I was very young. A fiery pillar. I stared at it in fascination, a tall, burning mass of fire.

I ran back into the kitchen and into the restaurant. Whitfield, earbuds in his ears, was sitting in the restaurant with his back to the window, oblivious to the towering inferno in his front garden, still scowling at his phone.

The other customers were all, as one, staring at the conflagration. Their conversation had ceased, they were transfixed. I should have told him about the fire, but I was still annoyed with him from earlier. Karma, I thought.

I could now hear the sound of sirens. Someone had obviously phoned the fire brigade. Then I heard the sound of the bell as the front door of the restaurant opened.

‘Oi, Dave!’

Whitfield didn’t hear. The man who had just entered, strode across to Whitfield, leaned over and pulled the earbuds from his ears. I recognised him; he was one of the many builders who lived in the village, a tall, good humoured grey-haired man, Chris by name.

Whitfield transferred his scowl from the phone to Chris. ‘What?’

‘Your tower’s on fire, mate,’ Chris said, cheerily.

Whitfield put his phone down, his back still resolutely turned to the window.

‘What are you on about?’ he said angrily. The other man pointed and only then did he turn round and look out of the window. ‘JESUS!’

He did a double take and literally rubbed his eyes with disbelief. Then he moved; for an overweight guy he was surprisingly quick off the mark.

He leapt to his feet and was out through the door, running over the green in the direction of his house, its position clearly marked by the thick plume of smoke and the fire engine. We all watched him go.

As if a spell had been broken, the dozen or so people in the restaurant started talking animatedly to each other.

I cleared Whitfield’s plate away.

The bastard still owed me for his sandwich.

Chapter Four

A week passed. Jess had gone and I closed the restaurant for the day. All in all I was not dissatisfied with the start of my business. Everyone seemed happy with the food, except for Whitfield, and the universe had punished him by burning down his obelisk. Good.

When I had designed the format of the menus I had mentioned that I did outside catering for events and parties. I was pleased that already I had received a couple of enquiries from women who had eaten here and were interested. If I could get that side of things working it would help tide me over when business was quiet mid-week and during the rest of the winter. When spring came, I reasoned, I’d start to get the walkers or people who would actually want to venture into the countryside, as opposed to just the locals.

My mind wandered to other things. I thought of the burning pillar on the other side of the green. I wondered who had done it. I shrugged; there was nothing I could do about it. I put it out of my mind; Whitfield’s troubles were nothing to do with me.

Nothing to do with me at all.

I moved my mind back to work. Back to outside catering.

Outside catering is a pain. For a start, you have to work out of someone else’s kitchen. I’ve only done it a couple of times but I’ve had to move washing out of the way, children’s toys, all sorts of junk, just to get at a sink or a stove or a work-surface. I can’t stand clutter. For me, a kitchen is a place to cook, pure and simple. In a lot of houses though it’s like an annexe of the living room.

Then too, you’re out of your comfort zone; you have to bring everything with you. And you lack the amenities of a professional kitchen: large ovens, hot-plate cupboards, space to work. The latter is particularly infuriating when you don’t have it.

Another problem that would only be recognised by professionals, is that for a chef your kitchen is your kingdom. You are in charge, nobody can set foot in it without your say so. In someone else’s house a kitchen is a public space; people wander in and out, jostle you, run taps, open fridge doors, poke around, move things, behaviour that would not be tolerated for a second in a commercial kitchen. So outside catering, being in someone else’s space, is, all in all, a tricky thing to do.

The plus side is, if you get it right, it’s easy money and you get to show your wares, your ability to a wide audience. It’s a great advert if it all works well.

Upstairs in the flat that was above the restaurant, I pulled off my chef’s whites and did some basic yoga exercises, down dog, sun salutation and a bit of Tai Chi to relax my tired muscles. Standing upright for twelve hours a day is not good for you. It was fantastic to stretch my cramped body. I luxuriated in the stretches. I like yoga, so long as it’s done slowly and thoughtfully. I can’t stand the idea of Hot Yoga, I get hot and sweaty enough in a kitchen without wanting to do it for fun.

I looked around my bedroom. The plus side, it was very big, plenty of natural light and a view over the common. The downside, it was depressingly furniture free. The restaurant had swallowed my money. I was sleeping on a mattress on the floor, my clothes in a built in wardrobe. The wardrobe was large, the clothes depressingly few. Mind you, I wouldn’t be going out much, but it would be nice to dream. I sighed, my empty wardrobe to go with my empty social life.

I tried to kid myself that I liked this minimalist look, but in truth, it was rather depressing, and the carpet that Mrs Cope had bequeathed me, well, threadbare would be a euphemism. It was stained and moth-eaten. Frankly, it was nasty. I could always take my mind off the carpet by looking out of the window. In the daylight I could see Dave Whitfield’s house with the charred mess of his obelisk and behind it, trees and fields.

I finished my yoga, and as I did so the front doorbell sounded. I rolled my eyes, pulled a tracksuit on and went downstairs. I could see who it was through the glass; I was less than thrilled.

‘Do come in DI Slattery,’ I said, as I opened the door.

‘Thank you.’ He didn’t sound terribly thankful. I had forgotten his intimidating bulk; he filled the door frame.

Slattery was a big man. I’m five foot eight, and I guess that he was considerably taller. He looked at me coldly. His eyes were brown and hard.

‘Any luck with the sausage thief?’ I asked politely.

‘No.’ Another glare.

There was no back room at the restaurant, no manager’s office. Just the eating area, toilets and kitchen. We could have gone upstairs but there were no chairs and while I couldn’t speak for DI Slattery, I personally had no great wish to sit next to him on my mattress.

I waved him to a table in the restaurant. I did not want to switch on machines that had been cleaned for the day. He would have to do without the offer of hospitality. No coffee or cake for you, Mr Policeman.

‘How can I help you?’ I asked.

He sat opposite me, giving me a sardonic once over. It was such a classic policeman’s look, polite scepticism with a hint of amused contempt.

‘We received an anonymous tip-off that someone answering your description had been seen exiting Dave Whitfield’s garden earlier this morning.’

I stared at him with incredulity.

‘What!’

He repeated the sentence. He raised his eyebrows expectantly.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘I was nowhere near his garden.’

It was one of those moments when you are accused of something that you haven’t done but you feel strangely ill-equipped to deal with it. My denial, true as it was, rang hollow in my own ears. I felt myself starting to go red.

‘Ok,’ he said, ‘you were nowhere near his garden.’

‘Well, I did run past his house.’

I go running daily, three to five km and a ten to fifteen km long-run once a week. There is a footpath by the houses on the other side of the common and I had run there today. I explained this to Slattery.

‘So,’ he said, wearily, ‘you were near his garden.’

‘Well, maybe I was,’ I said hotly, ‘but I never touched his obelisk.’

‘Fine,’ he said irritably and stood up. ‘I’m glad we’ve got that cleared up.’ He looked at me and shook his head. I could see that he didn’t really believe me.

I saw him out and closed and locked the door behind him.

I went into the kitchen and looked at my prep list for the morning. I was now out of sorts because of the accusation that I had something to do with the arson attack. Coupled with that was, I couldn’t really understand what Slattery had got against me. Nobody enjoys being disliked and I was no exception.

I gave up on brooding. When in doubt, cook something. I had a prep list as long as my arm and I decided to make a base for some cheesecakes. I reached for a couple of packets of digestive biscuits and tipped them into a steel bowl and smashed them to crumbs with the end of a rolling pin. While I did so, I imagined bringing the rolling pin down hard on the faces and heads of Slattery and Whitfield.

Serve Whitfield right for being so snarky about my food and calling me ‘darling’ and Slattery for persecuting an innocent woman.

Cooking can be so therapeutic.

Chapter Five

While the three cheesecake bases set, I crossed the road and walked around the village green. I say, walked. I squelched. The rain was still falling; whipped by the wind, it seemed to be coming at me sideways. It was ferociously cold, particularly after the warmth of the kitchen.

I looked at my watch, half-four. For the time being I was only opening at lunchtimes. Gradually I would phase in evening meals. Slow but steady growth was what I wanted.

I kept my head down as I walked. The green was a rectangular piece of common ground that houses and a few businesses fronted on to. On my side of the road there was my place, the Old Forge Café. I was in the middle of the left side of the rectangle and my neighbours were a small car repair business that also did MOTs, and a few houses. More or less diagonally opposite from me at the top right corner of the common was the Three Bells pub and next to it the village hall which doubled as a fitness centre and arts studio, and several more houses. On the opposite side of the green, the right side of the rectangle if you will, was Whitfield’s house and of course, DI Slattery’s. The road to Frampton End, the next village ran along the bottom. It was an attractive place, compact and down to earth, not full of second homes and retired business people.

The green, being at the top of the hill and surrounded by buildings, made the sky overhead seem vast. A couple of red kites soared overhead in the darkening sky. Soon it would be completely dark. There was a playground for children on the far side, but there was no one around today, it was too cold to play. There was a pond near there too, sometimes it had ducks. Not today. The only person I saw was a man, head down, buried in the hood of his anorak, leaving the house next to Whitfield’s with its charred obelisk in the front garden.

I thought, the village committee will be up in arms about that. It was like a sinister beacon of civil unrest, not suitable for a South Bucks village.

I walked up to the Three Bells and went inside. It was, quite frankly, as a country pub, disappointing, more than that, a bit of a dump. People have an image, rooted in reality, of what a nice countryside pub is, from the low-beamed ceiling, to the inglenook fireplace and cosy, homely charm. The Three Bells certainly fell short of the kitsch ideal. It fell far short of it.

The pub was basically one long room with the door at one end, the bar at the other and a pool table in the middle. The pub was defiantly not chocolate-boxy. It was never going to feature on Location, Location, Location, when Kirsty and Phil go for a drink to discuss something. It had as much atmosphere as a motorway service station. At this time of day it was quite busy, early doors. Half past four was knocking-off time for the local builders, and there were half a dozen scaffolders in there who worked for a company based just up the road, Marathon Scaffolding. They all wore company sweatshirts saying ‘Marathon’.

They nodded at me in a condescending way.

Strangely, I wasn’t the only chef in there. The catering trade was present in the pub in the form of four young male chefs from the pub round the corner, the King’s Head. I say pub, it was now a four-rosette restaurant. The King’s Head was knocking on the Michelin star door, asking to be let in. The chefs looked very young, very frail and very pallid compared to the muscular, weather-beaten scaffolders.

They must be on split shifts, the nightmare side of working in a kitchen, 10.00 to 3.00, 5.30 to 11.30 and there was nothing for them to do in the couple of hours off that they had, other than come here. I could sympathise, I’d done enough of those killer shifts in my time. And, of course, if someone’s off – sick or holiday – you work straight through, making your day stretch from ten in the morning to eleven or midnight. Fine if you work for Goldman Sachs and get paid a fortune, soul-destroying when you’re in some shit-hole kitchen, on minimum wage, desperately trying to keep the show on the road.

There was an enormous Scottish guy with them, six-foot-four, overweight, Dougie by name, an affable bear of a man. He was the King’s Head’s sous chef, the man directly below the head chef.

‘Afternoon, madam,’ Malcolm, the landlord, said to me as I walked up to the bar. It’s one of the oddities of life that many landlords seem to detest the general public, and Malcolm was one of them. He looked at his customers with an expression of total dislike, boredom or irritation. He was a red-faced, cadaverous man, reticent but when he spoke it was in a hoarse whisper, as if from beyond the grave. I had never seen him smile. I’m not saying he didn’t do it, perhaps he was a closet laugh-a-minute kind of guy.