A Knife in the Back E-Book

Alex Coombs

• Herausgeber: No Exit Press
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Serie: An Old Forge Café Mystery
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 367

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

'An irresistibly delicious mix of cooking and murder' Tricia Ashley 'An excellent addition to this series' ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Real reader review 'Very smart cosy mystery with a female restaurateur as the protagonist. Great characters, lovely food references and a fabulous plot' ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Real reader review 'Well done Alex Coombs, another entertaining cozy mystery that kept me hooked and guessing. Glad to catch up with the characters, had fun and appreciated the solution. Highly recommended' ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Real reader review Chef Charlie Hunter is just trying for mindfulness and a work/life balance, if such a thing is ever possible in the context of a busy professional kitchen. She's found herself a great podcast that's going to help her get there. Until she finds that her online self-help guru has feet of clay – feet which are much closer to her restaurant than seems possible. Even more disruptive is the attack on a well known writer in Charlie's quiet Chilterns village of Hampden Green, and the arrest of the village's own celebrity shock jock. Charlie finds herself dealing with more than she can cope with, and never sure where the next attack will come from. Then mere backstabbing turns to murder…

Leseprobe

JOIN OUR COMMUNITY!

Sign up for all the latest crime and thrillernews and get free books and exclusive offers.

BEDFORDSQUAREPUBLISHERS.CO.UK

A KNIFE IN THE BACK

Alex Coombs

For Tim PlattBest friend

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

Chapter Forty-Four

Chapter Forty-Five

Also by Alex Coombs

About the Author

Also in the Old Forge Café Mystery Series

Copyright

Chapter One

I hadn’t been outside at 7 o’clock in the evening on a Thursday in years. Before, it was because I had been working in other people’s restaurants. Now, it was because I had a kitchen of my own to run.

The outside world was the real world. The world I lived in most of the time was like the mythical world of Plato’s cave, lit by fires and guessable only by representations of reality that in my case were the food orders that the ticket machine delivered at periodic intervals. Orders that I then had to turn into edible reality. But outside the kitchen walls, I knew that if you parked your car carefully – not by the side of the common which, as the many signs point out, is strictly forbidden – and strolled around Hampden Green, you’d think to yourself, ‘What a peaceful place.’

It’s what I had thought when I’d moved here.

A hypothetical, disinterested observer would note the green, with its fenced-off play area, a couple of mothers supervising their children before bed in the late summer, some small boys playing football at the mini goal-posts and maybe a dog walker or two, exercising their animals with a fling-ball. It would seem like a nice place to raise a family or live a quiet life. The tasteful parish information noticeboard (made of wood, a kind of walnut stained finish and a glass case; you had to have permission to put notices inside) gives details of Zumba classes and yoga in the village hall – run by a new yoga teacher, a woman this time. Regulars can be spotted sitting outside the local Three Bells pub having a quiet pint. And then there’s my restaurant, the Old Forge Café.

In the calm, tranquil dining room that Thursday night, there were about twenty-five people, enjoying good food (at reasonable prices) efficiently and charmingly served by my young manager, Jess and her assistant waiter, Katie.

A peaceful place to eat in a peaceful Chiltern village. Until you go inside the kitchen…

Welcome to my world.

Heat from the stove, heat from the chargrill, heat from the hot plate, heat from the lights keeping the food warm on the pass, heat from the backs of the fridges, heat from the deep-fat fryers, heat and steam from the dishwasher…

‘Cheque on!’ I shouted to Francis over the kitchen fans. It was like a furnace in here. My jacket was sodden with perspiration and stuck to my skin. I wiped my forehead with the back of my sleeve.

‘Two hake, one fillet steak medium rare, peppercorn sauce… no starter…’

Francis’s large, red, sweaty face beamed at me from underneath his bandana that he’d taken to wearing in the kitchen, and he turned away to get the vegetable accompaniments ready.

And not just heat to contend with, but noise too. The roar of the extractor fans, which in this small space was like a jet taking off, the hiss and bubble of the deep-fat fryer, the clang of pans on the stove, the crash and bang of fridges as we frantically opened and slammed them shut, the dry crackle of the cheque machine as it printed out the new orders.

I added the cheque to the row of five that were already lined up in chronological order above the pass. At least this was an easy order to do.

I quickly finished plating the dish that I had just cooked, glanced at the clock, pulled a frying pan off the stove and balanced it on the cooker away from direct heat where it would keep warm until it was ready to be reheated before I sent it out.

‘Service…’ Jess, my manageress/waitress/confidante/friend/IT adviser, appeared, and I pointed at the pass. She was back from uni for the summer, thank God. Jess might be only twenty-two but she was by far the most mature person I knew, myself included. ‘Two lamb, one smoked aubergine feuilleté. Thank you, Jess.’

‘Thank you, Chef.’

She disappeared with the food, efficient as always. I turned to Francis as I took the cheque down and spiked it, and looked at the next three, to see they were all in hand. I opened my small locker fridge for mains and took out two pieces of hake and a steak fillet and put the piece of meat on the bars of the chargrill.

‘Francis, get the red pepper relish out.’ I liked the red pepper relish, simple to make (cheap to make, come to that), versatile, a real winner.

‘We haven’t got any, Chef!’ came the shouted reply.

For a second, the world stood still as I digested the news, then I was back in action, mechanically turning the various pieces of meat on the chargrill, checking that the three small frying pans I had on the go with yet more meat inside were all to hand, making sure that the piece of turbot protected by tinfoil under the lights on the pass wasn’t going over, getting too cooked. I was cooking fifteen meals simultaneously, and now this.

I turned to Francis who quailed under my gaze. I was very cross indeed. At 5 o’clock he had assured me that all the mise en place was done; well, that manifestly wasn’t the case. You didn’t run out of things in restaurants; it was unacceptable.

As was sending the hake out naked, minus its dressing as clearly stated on the menu, into the world.

I was tempted to bellow, ‘What do you mean, we haven’t got any…’ adding a string of profanities, but what would have been the use?

One of the hallmarks of a good chef is being able to deal with crises and I am a good chef.

‘Go out to the walk-in, get me a red pepper, an onion, a fennel bulb – and hurry up…’ I snapped, suppressing the urge to scream at him. That would not be ladylike I told myself primly. If I’d been a man I might have said something like, ‘You’ll be wearing your effing nads for earrings if you do that again’ – but I’m not a man.

Francis stood there rooted to the spot. Like he’d been hypnotised or glued to the floor.

I lost my ability to suppress my urges. There’s a time and a place for everything. Now it was time to scream.

‘Please, HURRY UP!’

It had no noticeable effect. He didn’t leap into action; he ambled. There are times when I would dearly like to kill Francis.

Jess came into the kitchen and saw my expression, sensed the mood in the air.

‘You okay, Charlie?’ she asked.

‘I’m savouring the moment, Jess,’ I said through clenched teeth. ‘I’m very much savouring the moment in a mindful way.’

Earlier that day I had been reading another article on mindfulness. Mindfulness had become my latest obsession. If I had some free time I would research it on the internet. Obviously, when I was cooking it wasn’t a problem, I had laser focus on what I was doing, but I had noticed of late that when I was doing prep, or driving or running, my mind was becoming overwhelmed with negative thoughts. It was time to do something about it.

Whoever had written the article, I decided, had probably never worked in a commercial kitchen, but I was determined to take their comments on board, regardless. It was probably easier to be mindful if you work as a meditation teacher than a chef, but hey ho…

I crashed a pan on the stove to vent some mindfulness on metal rather than Francis’s skull. It felt so good I did it again, but harder, repressing an urge to scream at the top of my voice.

Francis returned and handed me the vegetables.

He looked stricken, his plump, red face a mask of contrition. Contrition was no good to me. I gritted my teeth and tried to enjoy the Now.

The Now was far from enjoyable.

So, while I cooked fifteen meals, (Francis doing the vegetables, silently, miserably, like a kicked dog – now I felt guilty as well as angry, sometimes you just can’t win) I frantically made a red pepper relish, buying time from the table by sending them some pâté and homemade parmesan and rosemary focaccia bread (chef’s compliments).

The relish is supposed to gently cook for about three-quarters of an hour – I had it ready in ten minutes, softening the vegetables in the microwave before frying them, frantically cutting corners. More by luck than judgement, it ended up just fine, but by the end of the night I was a sweaty, angry twitchy mass of nerves enclosed in sodden chef’s whites.

We sent the last cheque out and silence descended on the kitchen. I started turning the gas rings off on the cooker, shutting down the kitchen, tight-lipped with irritation.

‘I’m sorry, Chef, I was as much use as a chocolate teaspoon…’ Francis looked like he might cry, his lip trembling. He had taken his bandana off and his very blond hair was plastered to his head like he had been swimming.

Francis was huge, his chef’s whites padded out with muscle.

‘That’s okay, Francis,’ I said, patting him on the back (it was like stroking a horse), ‘but please don’t do it again.’ I thought for a moment, reliving the sheer panic-stricken unpleasantness of those moments. ‘Ever again,’ I added.

‘I won’t… I promise.’

‘Well, we’ll say no more about it then.’

We cleaned the kitchen down, I sent Francis home, and Jessica and I sat in the small empty restaurant and had a beer. It was becoming a bit of a tradition really, and I was beginning to realise just how much I had come to rely on Jess’s company since arriving in Hampden Green.

‘You look terrible,’ she remarked.

I looked at Jess. She didn’t look terrible; she looked refreshed. I wondered how she continued to look full of energy after a long day and night waitressing. Perhaps she had this mindfulness thing down? Jess gave me a look of worried concern and pushed a hand through her dark hair that she fought a constant battle against frizz with. One of the few problems I don’t have. My hair seems to enjoy being bathed in sweat. At least someone’s happy.

Silver linings.

‘I was thinking exactly the same thing this morning, while I was brushing my teeth,’ I said. ‘Perhaps I should start wearing more make-up.’

‘Well, you’ll need more than that,’ she said as she drank some beer (thanks for the compliment, I thought) and looked at me with real concern. ‘You’re exhausted Charlie. How many hours have you worked this week?’

I did some mental arithmetic – fifteen hours a day for eight days – but I was too tired to do the sums. ‘A lot.’

‘Charlie,’ she said, looking me in the eye, ‘you simply can’t go on like this – you need to hire another chef.’

I took a mouthful of beer. ‘I can’t afford to hire one – if I could, I would.’

Jessica looked unconvinced. ‘You can’t afford not to hire one. Working a hundred and twenty hours in a row’ – Jess, unlike me, was good at maths – ‘is not good for you.’

I smiled, rather bleakly. I knew that we were both right.

Jess drained her beer and stood up, reaching to pull on her jacket.

‘I’ll see you tomorrow at ten,’ she said. ‘Try and get an early night.’

I smiled. Fat chance. If you’re a chef you haven’t finished until the last cheque has been dealt with and then you have to clean the kitchen down, make a note of what needs to be done the following morning and also do your meat, fish and veg order. I don’t think I’ve been to bed much before midnight in years.

‘I will.’

She stood looking down at me, shaking her head. ‘Get another chef. You’re killing yourself.’

‘If a miracle happens, I will.’

I watched as she let herself out.

Miracles never happen, I told myself sorrowfully.

Chapter Two

The following night was practically a carbon copy of the previous night. I felt like I had fallen into Groundhog Day. This time Francis had forgotten to make soup. He had a list – I had drawn it up and printed it out and laminated it – of all the things he had to do. It’s called an MeP list, a mise en place list. Soup was the first item.

‘Cheque on. Three vegetable soup of the day, three fillet steaks, all medium. New cheque, one duck, one hake, one salmon en croute,’ called Jess. I don’t like multiple cheques but I said nothing, there had to be a reason.

Francis hadn’t moved.

‘Francis?’

‘I forgot the soup, Chef,’ he said unhappily.

I stared at him in disbelief. How could he have been so stupid. And it was Friday as well, the busiest night of the week. I stood there for a moment as we both looked at each other. Time stood still.

I closed my eyes to blot out Francis’s face. I listened to the ambient sounds of the kitchen, the fans, the faint murmur from the restaurant that lay beyond the swing doors, the sound of the gas and things cooking. I’d taken a further step on my spiritual quest by listening to a podcast on mindfulness and general lifehacks when I ran in the mornings. Today on my tempo run it had been on facing life’s challenges, how they are an opportunity to grow. Well, I reflected to myself ruefully, as I re-opened my eyes, (no, unfortunately, this was not a bad dream, this was reality) here was a fantastic opportunity to grow.

I sprang frantically into action. I put the pre-prepared salmon in puff pastry in the oven, criss-crossed the duck skin with my chef’s knife, seared it in a red hot frying pan and tossed it in the oven next to the salmon. I took the hake fillet out of the fridge, ready so I wouldn’t forget it. Then I made a roast Mediterranean vegetable soup in about five minutes, fortunately I had a tub of roasted vegetables which were for a vegetarian special (quinoa with roasted vegetables, feta and mixed seeds) on tomorrow’s menu.

‘Blitz that now,’ I told him as I banged the bowl down on the metal table in front of him. I recalled there were also some homemade parsnip crisps that I’d made. I got the soup ready while dealing with a couple of other cheques. I was pouring with sweat now, partly due to the heat of the kitchen but mainly the unexpected stress (having to make soup in the middle of service!). I managed not to swear or do anything rash.

A few minutes later I’d thrown in a couple of litres of veg stock, boiled it like crazy, re-blitzed it with a stick blender, wincing as droplets of boiling soup stung my face, checked the seasoning. How was the duck doing? I glanced at the clock on the wall, five minutes to go… The hake! A small frying pan on, splash of oil… I carried the pan of soup over to Francis’s station. Thank God he’d had the foresight to get three soup bowls and a ladle ready.

‘Cream, Francis!’

‘Chef.’

‘Fill the bowls…’ Back to the stove, hake on, back to Francis. I tipped some cream into the lid of the plastic bottle, leant over the first soup bowl.

‘Swirl of cream, sprinkle of chopped parsley, three parsnip crisps on top as garnish, do the other two…’ I lifted my voice, ‘Service!’

Then back to the hake. Duck out, salmon could stay another minute. While I started plating this, I thought, I’m being remarkably calm. This was courtesy of Dr Melanie Thomas, the mindfulness woman. She was the creator of ‘The Mindfulness Podcast with Melanie’. And also the author of ‘Steps Towards Mindfulness – A Stoic Approach’. There was a plethora of mindfulness apps and books out there but I didn’t have the time or inclination to research the subject. For now, she was my go-to woman.

The evening wore on. But I wasn’t the only one having problems. Jess, out front, was getting increasingly annoyed with a table of one, a woman dining on her own.

So far, she had already sent back her starter, a prawn cocktail that I’d put on as a kind of whimsical retro joke and had proved wildly popular – face it, it’s a nice thing to eat. It is comfort food at its very best. Table Seven had said, ‘Not what I was expecting’! It was prawns in Marie-Rose sauce on a bed of leaves, what else could you possibly be expecting in a prawn cocktail, a margarita with a shrimp in it? She had said the wine was corked, which was not the case, and her panna cotta was ‘insipid’, followed by ‘I should know, I go to Italy all the time’.

I felt like storming out and shouting, ‘My boyfriend’s Italian, he likes it, he says it’s better than his mother’s, you cretinous woman.’ But I didn’t.

Oh, and her fish was ‘rubbery’.

I had never seen Jess so worked up. I tried to cheer her up with some of the mindfulness techniques I’d learnt.

‘It’s not the situation that causes us pain, Jess,’ I said earnestly, ‘it’s how we react to it… Just look at me and the soup thing, I’m so over it…’

She leaned over the pass. ‘Charlie, I love you, but any more of these bloody platitudes and I’m going home, okay…’

‘Sorry, Jess.’

I watched as she left the kitchen like an angry cat. When we’re disturbed it’s our fault, not the other person’s, I thought smugly. Maybe I should have shared that with her too. I had ordered a copy of Dr Thomas’s book; I should have made it two.

Later that evening, after the last customer had left, I was having a drink of wine with Jess and savouring the tranquillity of my silent restaurant. I’d got my laptop open and was transcribing my scribbled notes on what we needed to order for the following day in terms of fruit and vegetables, and Jess was looking at something on her phone. I glanced over at her. Whatever she was reading was evidently amusing her, she was grinning broadly and occasionally her shoulders would twitch.

‘What’s amusing you?’ I asked.

‘Oh, nothing…’

‘That is such an infuriating thing to say, Jessica.’

‘What?’

She sighed, put her phone down and looked at me. ‘Okay, it’s an article by this woman lecturer in the New Statesman about what dicks male academics are. She sorts them into types, “Patronising Man-splainers, Screaming Queens and Mr Geeky – The Unitribes” as she calls them. It’s hilariously accurate, you should go to Warwick…’

Warwick is where her uni is. I gather it has a famous (ish) castle too. She read me some of her article, I feigned interest, Jess saw through that immediately.

‘You don’t get it, do you?’ she said.

‘No, not really Jess. I guess you have to know that kind of background and I don’t really. It’s not my world.’

‘No, I guess not, it’s nothing like catering. Anyway, Charlie, you’re kind of hard to intimidate.’

‘Am I?’ I said.

Jess laughed. ‘Look, Charlie, the last person who tried to have a go at you, you half-blinded with a chilli… then there were those horrible thugs you beat up with a rolling pin.’

‘Jess, you’re making me sound psychotic,’ I protested.

She stood up and stretched and put her phone away. ‘I know you’re not, you just have an adorable rough and tumble streak.’ She smiled. ‘Anyway, I’m off home, I’m going to go and watch Dr Young having a go at Jordan Peterson on YouTube.’

‘You’ve lost me now,’ I said. I didn’t know who either of these people were.

She smiled as she shrugged herself into her jacket. ‘It’ll be like watching Tyson Fury fight Jake Paul,’ she said, confidently. ‘You know in advance who’s going to win.’ She walked over to the door. ‘See you tomorrow.’

‘Good night, Jess,’ I said.

I watched her leave. Pretty, intelligent, confident, the world at her feet. Tyson Fury I knew, the others, well, they were hardly going to impinge on my world, were they?

On Saturday morning on my run, I was doing interval training and listening to my mindfulness guru, Dr Thomas. I couldn’t do anything to alter my circumstances but I could do something to change the way I viewed them. That’s what Dr Thomas told me. Today she had a special guest in the studio who was some kind of an expert on Stoicism. As I panted along one of the many footpaths around the village I nodded approvingly as he explained how we shouldn’t get angry as it will only make the matter worse, but how we should plan our way out of things.

The word associated with anger in my mind was Francis.

I tried not to be angry with him. It was practically impossible. Forgetting the relish, omitting to make soup. Earlier in the week he’d managed to really screw up something I thought was impossible to ruin, garlic butter. He’d added a crazy amount of salt to it. ‘Sorry Chef, I got distracted…’ he’d mumbled, then he’d added, practically in tears, ‘I’m as much use as a glass hammer.’

‘That’s okay,’ I’d said, patting him on the shoulder, ‘accidents happen.’ Inside I was suppressing hysterical rage.

The thing was, he was great at washing up and he was reliable. These are two prized assets in a kitchen porter. Generally, people who wash dishes for a living are not the most trustworthy individuals, and he was. It was just food that was his Achilles heel. That, unfortunately, is a real problem in a small restaurant.

I also owed him a considerable personal debt. Francis had, quite literally, saved my life. How can you possibly fire someone who has done that?

With the matter still unresolved, I wearily walked back across the common. There were a couple of runners jogging down the road. We waved at each other, I knew quite a few people in the village now. I saw a woman I knew as Pretty Mum, tall, willowy, good-looking, with her cockapoo and daughter in an expensive looking all-terrain buggy and Della, undoing the doors of her small van – ‘Della’s Dog Walking’ – and releasing three of her charges, plus Della’s own black cocker spaniel, on to the green, preparatory for their walk. She lived down the road from me, one of the few people who could say, like Jess and Francis, they had been in the village all their lives.

Later that evening, after service, I was in my local pub, the Three Bells, having a drink with Graeme Strickland the head chef at the King’s Head, the Michelin starred restaurant in the village.

The King’s Head had been a bog standard pub and these days such places find it hard to survive. Its owners had invested heavily and turned it into a sought-after restaurant. It became a destination place. The same could not be said of the Three Bells. If the Three Bells had been an animal, it would have been put down a while ago. But it was handy for both our establishments and we didn’t care where we drank so long as it was away from a kitchen.

Strickland often ate at my place on his day off; I appreciated the compliment. Once you got used to his arrogance – he had quite a high opinion of himself, no faux-modesty there – he was a genuinely nice guy and insanely knowledgeable about food. He also freely gave me cookery advice and tips if I asked. This is kind of unusual in catering where chefs, understandably, tend to avoid sharing trade secrets.

I was venting about Francis and he interrupted me.

‘Yeah, but Charlie, you know all this, you can’t blame the guy for being thick, it’s like complaining that your dog doesn’t understand Shakespeare…’ His eyes were slightly glazed, he’d obviously been doing coke in the toilets of the pub, it had made him philosophical. ‘Francis is Francis and the dog’s a dog, they’re not going to change just because you get cross with them.’

Despite the drugs, he was right. Marcus Aurelius couldn’t have put it better.

‘So true, bestie,’ I said. I changed the subject. ‘How are things with you?’

‘Oh, fine… Apart from this, it really annoyed me. I had this real bitch of a customer in the other day, moaning about this, that and the other. She had the turbot, said it was “rubbery”.’ He shook his head and drank some lager. ‘What does that even mean?’

Rubbery? I thought. That reminded me of my own arsey customer. I told him about her.

‘It has to be the same one,’ he said decisively. ‘Did you comp her meal?’

‘Yes. I don’t think we even charged her for the wine, she complained about that too.’

‘It’s definitely the same woman. She complained about the wine too. Has to be. I’m going to find out who she is, I bet all this is leading up to something.’

Strickland looked cross now. He was a small, neat man in his forties, my age, always immaculately dressed. He was also very good-looking, and he knew it. He had never made a pass at me though, he treated me purely as a good friend. I was happy with that. He also had a terrible temper.

‘She’ll claim that there’s glass or something in her food, or say she got food poisoning, try and get some money out of us to hush it up…’ He was very agitated now. ‘I’m going through the CCTV tonight with Dan, after service,’ he said. Dan was his restaurant manager. ‘I’ll send you her image. Show it to Jess, bet you it’s the same person.’

‘I think you’re over-reacting.’

‘Bet I’m not,’ he said darkly. ‘You’re too trusting, that’s your problem, Charlie.’

Tuesday morning came. I felt re-energised after my day off. I was closed on Mondays, my one day off a week. As I ran I reflected on what Strickland had said on the Saturday night. That was between listening to the importance of perception in life as explained in the mindfulness podcast. Melanie Thomas (I thought of her as Tranquillity Girl these days – I was going through all the old episodes, there were about a hundred I hadn’t listened to) was making the point that we should narrow our focus down to what we have agency over. For example, I couldn’t control the state of the paths on which I ran, but I could make sure I was careful not to fall over any tree roots as I went. I couldn’t make Francis into a chef, but I could limit the amount of damage he was able to inflict on food by hiring another chef.

Yes, I thought, with determination, that’s what I would do. I would hire some help. I couldn’t really afford it, but it would free me up to chase some outside catering for much needed extra money.

I was so pleased I had listened to Mel that morning, she had crystallised my intentions. I felt more in control now, not just of myself but my life.

When I got back to the restaurant, Francis came up to me.

‘There’s been a delivery for you, Chef.’

‘The veg?’

‘No,’ he shook his head. ‘It’s from Amazon, I think it’s a book.’ His red face looked semi-astonished; Francis was not a great reader. He went over to where I keep the log books for writing down the fridge temperatures and came back with a small packet. I opened it.

Steps Towards Mindfulness – A Stoic Approach, it said on the jacket. I experienced a surge of excitement. I felt with Dr Thomas’s book to help me I would start to really get somewhere.

‘Can I have a look?’ Francis said.

‘Sure.’ I handed him the book. I saw his lips move silently as he deciphered the title.

‘What does Stoyk mean?’ he asked.

‘I’m not sure… how do you mean?’

‘It says here,’ he pointed to the word Stoic. ‘Stoyk?’

‘Oh, it’s pronounced Stoic, two syllables, not one, sto-ic… it means…’ well, that was hard to answer in a word.

Jess appeared through the swing doors that led to the restaurant.

‘We’ll discuss it later Francis,’ I said.

My phone pinged, it was Strickland, there was a jpeg attachment to the message that said simply, ‘found the bitch.’

I showed Jess my phone.

‘Has he lost a dog?’ she said innocently.

I explained the circumstances; Jess’s face darkened. ‘In that case I forgive him, I think he’s found exactly the right word. Let’s see her.’

I opened the attachment. There was a slim woman who looked to be in her fifties with short, dark hair with a flamboyant red streak in it and a combative expression on her face. Francis leaned over Jess’s shoulder to take a look.

‘That’s definitely her,’ Jess said, pulling a face. ‘She’s Table Seven all right. What’s he going to do?’

‘I have absolutely no idea, but I wouldn’t like Graeme Strickland as an enemy, he’s very obsessive. What’s her name by the way, did you check?’

‘Mel Craig.’

‘Well, I’ll remember that. We certainly don’t want anything more to do with her, that’s for sure. If she tries to book again, we’re full. I suppose we should thank God she’s not a food critic.’

Jess smiled. ‘That’s all we need.’

‘If you don’t like her,’ Francis asked innocently, ‘why have you bought her book?’

Jess and I looked at him in puzzlement.

‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

By way of reply he turned the book over. There on the jacket was a photo of the author. ‘Oh, no,’ I wailed to myself in anguish. ‘Tranquillity Girl how could you!’

Dr Melanie Thomas and Mel Craig were one and the same.

Chapter Three

You wait years to meet one podcaster and then two come along at once. I was up at half past six for my run and I put my ear-buds in and looked at the podcasts stored on my phone. I rested my forefinger on the Zen-like icon of Dr Thomas’s mindfulness app. Bitch, I thought and mindfully deleted it.

The podcast app suggested several other ones I might be interested in. Cooking? The podcast they suggested was done by non-professionals including a restaurant critic that I particularly detested. A wordy ignoramus, and if I see the word ‘smorgasbord’ (unless used by a Scandinavian) I feel like screaming. Ditto ‘succulent’, ‘bivalve’ and ‘nestle’. So I rejected that suggestion. Then I saw one by a podcaster called Lance Thurston.

Lance was an anti-woke, right-wing broadcaster. I’d heard him described as a cut-price Joe Rogan (by Esther Bartlett, our local Wiccan witch, community leader and close personal friend) or ‘that wanker’, by Jess. The only reason he’d ever been mentioned in my hearing was because he lived relatively nearby. There are quite a few celebrities and well-known people who live in the Chilterns. The area is both pretty and accessible to London. Lance had eaten in my restaurant a couple of times but I’d been kind of underwhelmed. He was famous in a way that wasn’t that famous; I guess he was a C list in the fame stakes, maybe rising to a B on occasion. The kind of level that might get you a place on Celebrity Big Brother or a night-club opening in Watford. He was well-known mainly because he was controversial. He’d provoked a hornet’s nest of outrage with some possibly (he denied that they were) anti-gay sentiments expressed on air; this had of course, massively boosted his ratings. The Green movement too were frequently mocked. This had led to speculation from a Green spokesperson as to the size of Lance’s penis. This had then, in turn led to condemnation of the penis remark by men’s groups activists who pointed to issues of low self-esteem and embarrassment regarding male sexual dysfunction. All of this was meat and drink to Lance; controversy was the oxygen he needed.

More seriously for Lance was the hostility he had aroused locally from the Bucks SOBs. This acronym stood not for Sons of Bitches, but Save our Beeches. Bucks is famous for beech trees; the SOBs were an environmentalist protest group dedicated to saving woodland in general and trees in particular. They were led by a charismatic Timothée Chalamet lookalike called Roland Sylvanus. Jess had pointed out when I’d remarked on his weird name, Sylvanus, that it meant woods or something like it in Latin, and it was a safe assumption that it wasn’t his real surname which was probably something prosaic like Dobbs or Smith.

Now the SOBs were not fearless keyboard warriors like the social media mob who seem very brave about expressing their outrage on the usual outlets; the SOBs did stuff.

For a start, they’d graffitied his sports car, a Ferrari, the fuel consumption of which Lance had controversially bragged about as being around twenty miles per gallon. Lance liked imperial units of measurement. Although mpg is standard in the UK, Lance’s voice would linger lovingly over the word, ‘gallon’, like an ageing roué would lasciviously pronounce the words, ‘suspender-belt’ or ‘negligée’. I had the impression that pounds and ounces, gallons, pints and quarts made Lance hot. Anyway, the SOBs sometimes congregated outside his house in fancy dress, protesting at his championing of fossil fuels. They pursued him at industry awards. Lance for his part excoriated them as sandal-wearing, bearded loons and left-wing thugs. They were sworn enemies.

Also on the sworn enemy list, a fairly lengthy one in Lance’s case, (basically anyone to the left of GB News was, in his view, a metropolitan, leftie, woke, snowflake) was Jess’s hero, Dr Susannah Young.

‘I’m reading her book, it’s called Can Someone Tell That Bloody Woman to Shut Up!. It’s her collected journalism from 1980–2000,’ Jess had mentioned earlier. Jess was prone to sudden enthusiasms about things, as we all are I suppose at that age. Taylor Swift was a constant, others came and went. Right now this Dr Young was her current fad.

‘1980!’ I marvelled. ‘Was she some sort of child prodigy?’

Jess shook her head. ‘She’s a boomer, not that you’d know it, born 1960, but she started young, younger than me…’ she said wistfully. ‘She was a columnist for Spare Rib when she was my age.’

I was only half-listening, uninterested in Dr Young. ‘Is that to do with barbecuing, spare ribs?’

‘No, Charlie,’ Jess said coldly, ‘it was an iconic feminist magazine, nothing to do with barbecues.’

‘Oh.’

Since Lance looked as if he were becoming a regular of sorts – he was booked in again – I thought that I’d give his views a listen in case Jess (not to mention Dr Young) had unfairly maligned him. Jess was only twenty-two after all and issues for her were very black and white. I was double her age, forty-four, and I’ve found, on the whole, life is more nuanced than I’d imagined when I was younger.

I put the ear-phones in, downloaded his latest episode and set off on my run.

‘And another thing about electric cars,’ sputtered Lance’s guest, some guy from a motoring magazine, ‘is that the batteries that power them weigh a ton, quite literally. The average electric car battery weighs around five hundred kilos, and an average electric car is thirty per cent heavier than its petrol counterpart.’

‘But I guess they do save weight by being driven by people with emptier heads because of their smaller brains?’ quipped Lance. ‘I mean the people, the SOBs who damaged my car with spray paint, are noticeably stupid. They are also hypocrites…’

‘Definitely,’ his guest said. ‘If they were so keen on the environment they would have keyed your car with their message, not used environmentally damaging spray paints.’

‘Exactly,’ Lance said, ‘they use VOCs, that’s Volatile Organic Compounds, dear listeners, which give you cancer, and hydrocarbons and they’re terrible for the environment, but that’s just it with the woke brigade, they don’t really care about the environment. If they did you’d see them on public transport.’ He paused for dramatic effect. ‘Have you ever seen a young person on a bus in the countryside? Oh no… not them, the hypocrites, the milquetoasts, no, they won’t get on a bus with the plebs and the poor and the old because they are too important saving the planet to actually do something useful. They’ve all got cars or use Ubers, it’s okay when they do it, but not me… and have you ever seen a young person on a bike in the countryside? No. They’ve lost the use of their limbs through playing video games… they’ve atrophied.’

‘It’s Darwin in reverse,’ said his guest.

‘Exactly. Oh, by the way, SOBs,’ Lance said, ‘I got rid of the Ferrari after you damaged it, and I bought a car with even higher fuel consumption, just to spite you…’

‘More than the Ferrari? What are you driving Lance, a traction engine?’ asked the guest.

I’d had enough of the car stuff. I fast-forwarded it… Blah blah Ulez… blah blah, twenty minute neighbourhoods… Blah, blah, gay rights activists.

I stopped and put my running music on, that was far more inspiring than Lance. The weird thing was though that not only was he incredibly popular with his audience, there seemed to be a lot of them. Every Just Stop Oil protest brought a new peak in Lance’s audience figures. Maybe he was secretly financing them.

I was now running near the Earl’s house. The footpath ran through one of his many fields that lay next to Marlow House, which was the family home.

I saw two figures on the path ahead of me with a few dogs running ahead of them. At first I thought they must be professional dog walkers, like Della, since there seemed to be a fair number of animals, but as we drew nearer to each other I saw that it was Bryony and some kid of her own age that I didn’t know. Bryony was early twenties like Jess, they’d been in the same year together at school. I slowed down and stopped to speak to her.

Bryony was the girlfriend of the aristocrat who owned much of the land and a fair number of properties for a couple of miles around where we were standing. Above the treeline in the distance I could see the grey tiles of the roof of the Earl’s ancestral home standing proud above the landscape.

Bryony’s short blonde hair shone in the early morning sun. She was wearing a tight T-shirt that clung to her perfect chest. You could see from quite some distance away that she was wearing nothing underneath. She was wearing baggy camouflage trousers and army boots. Her arms were a riot of tattoos. I knew them well, I particularly admired the tree with the snake coiled around representing the Adam and Eve story from the Bible and high on her right arm the Hebrew words ‘the serpent beguiled me and I ate’. Together with the apple.

I smiled; I liked Bryony. Five dogs of various shapes and sizes, animals that the Earl had rescued – he was big on animal welfare, frolicked around.

‘Hi Bryony…’

‘Hi Charlie…’ She indicated the guy she was with. ‘This is Roland.’ Oh my God, I thought, the leader of the SOBs.

‘Hi, nice to meet you,’ he said. Roland was about my height and slim with a mop of dark, curly hair and intense blue eyes. He had quite a triangular face with high, pronounced cheekbones. He was strikingly good-looking. It was the face of a visionary or a poet. I couldn’t imagine Roland fixing a washing machine, or working in a kitchen, come to that. So this is Lance Thurston’s sworn enemy, I thought.

‘Roland wanted to see the gardens. Unfortunately James is away in Sumatra at the moment.’ I nodded. James was the Earl, Bryony’s boyfriend, or sugar-daddy, depending which way you looked at it.

‘Orangutans?’ I asked.

She nodded. ‘Yeah, the Sumatran orangutan, it’s really endangered.’

The three of us fell silent, contemplating the plight of the orangutan. Roland was wearing slim-fit torn jeans; he had great legs I noticed. They were slim but looked muscular through the tight denim. Under the collar of his worn denim jacket he had seriously elegant trap muscles. His fingers were long and strong… I snapped myself out of this daydream.

‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘I’d better get going.’ I smiled at Roland. ‘Nice to have met you. See you around Bryony.’

‘Sure.’

I sped off across the field. As I did so I could smell the compost scent of weed as Bryony lit up a blunt and the aromatic smoke drifted across the grass. I wondered if Roland’s interests were really about gardening or if they lay more in Bryony. He was achingly cute. If I was the Earl, I’d be seriously worried.

Chapter Four

‘So how many will there be at this party?’ I asked politely. I looked at the man sitting opposite me in my restaurant. It was nearly 10 o’clock and I was done for the evening. The place was almost empty apart from a few customers. Lance was shorter than I had imagined, with a bull-neck and very beefy biceps that he was showing off via a short-sleeved flowery shirt. Despite the muscles and the tattoos you could tell he was not the real McCoy when it came to scary masculinity. The key to knowing someone is a tough guy lies in their eyes and their demeanour, not in their physique. Looking at him, I could see someone who could pretend to be tough, but wasn’t. Well, I’d heard the podcast, now I was meeting the real thing. And what I concluded was that here was someone who would talk the talk but fail to walk the walk.

Following his dinner, a mini beef Wellington, a mushroom sauce, rösti potato and green beans, a lemon mousse for dessert, he had, via Jess, asked me if I would be interested in catering for his birthday party on 30 August, in just over three weeks’ time.

Yes I would. Very much so.

Now Lance Thurston scratched his shaved head.

‘About a hundred and fifty guests,’ he said, ‘give or take.’

‘A hundred and fifty,’ I said, thoughtfully. ‘And what did you have in mind?’

‘A buffet.’

I nodded. ‘Hot or cold?’

He looked at me like I was crazy. ‘Does it matter?’