MURDER ON THE GREEN
The Old Forge Cafe
H.V. Coombs

Published by AVON

A Division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

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London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018

Copyright © H.V. Coombs 2018

The following are copyright lines to be used as applicable

Cover design © Becky Glibbery 2018

Cover photograph© Shutterstock.com

H.V. Coombs asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Ebook Edition © June 2018 ISBN: 9780008235802

Version: 2018-04-19

‘Good food is the foundation of genuine happiness.’

Auguste Escoffier

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

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

Keep Reading …

About the Publisher

Chapter One

I hadn’t been outside at seven p.m. on a Thursday in years, not with a full kitchen to run. But I knew that if you parked your car carefully – not by the side of the green which, as the many signs point out, is strictly forbidden – and strolled around, you’d think to yourself, ‘What a peaceful place.’ It’s what I had thought when I’d moved here.

The green, with its fenced-off play area, a couple of mothers exercising children before bed in the summer, and maybe a dog walker or two, seems like a nice place to raise a family or live a quiet life. Even the tasteful Parish information noticeboard gives details of Zumba classes and yoga in the village hall. Locals 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 and her assistant waiter.

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

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 unbelievably hot. My jacket was sodden with perspiration. 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 bandanna 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 were like a jet taking off, the hiss and bubble of the deep-fat fryer, the clang of the pans on the stove, the crash of fridges as we frantically opened and closed them, the crackle of the cheque machine as new orders came into the kitchen …

I added the cheque to the row of five that were already lined up in chronological order above the pass. 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 side.

‘Service …’ Jess, my waitress, 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 little locker fridge 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 five 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?

The hallmark 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.

Francis stood there rooted to the spot.

I lost my ability to suppress my urges. Time to scream.

‘Please, HURRY UP!’

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 OK, Ben?’ 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 an article on mindfulness. Whoever had written it had probably never worked in a commercial kitchen, but I was determined to take their comments on board, regardless.

I crashed a pan on the stove to vent some mindfulness on metal rather than Francis.

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.

Now was far from enjoyable.

So, while I cooked fifteen meals, (Francis doing the vegetables, silently, miserably, like a kicked dog) I frantically made a red pepper relish, buying time from the table by sending them some pâté and home-made 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 covered 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 bandanna 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 OK, Francis,’ I said, patting him on the back (it was like stroking a horse), ‘but please don’t do it again.’

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 had come to enjoy 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 is frizzy hair – mainly because I haven’t got any.

Silver linings.

‘I was thinking exactly the same thing this morning, while I was shaving,’ I said. ‘Perhaps I should start wearing foundation.’

‘Well, you’ll need more than that,’ she said as she drank some beer, and looked at me with real concern. ‘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.’

‘Ben,’ 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 coat.

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

‘I will.’

She stood looking down at me. ‘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 next day on my morning run, I turned in to the path that bordered Ferguson’s Field (I’d been here six months, and I was gradually beginning to learn the names of places).

I was tired, I was short of money and my back ached horribly, but I ran on. I might die exhausted, penniless and in pain but at least I’d die fit and 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.

My immediate thought was that it was going to be a housing development, which surprised me. The field not only belonged to the Earl, but it also abutted on his garden. I say garden, I should have said ‘gardens’ or estate. It was pretty sizeable. Earl Hampden was well known for his opposition to housing developments, so it seemed most odd he would try to put one up next to where he lived.

I stopped and read the document properly. 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.

Later, during a lull in the lunchtime service, I asked Francis 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.

‘The Marlow House Festival?’

‘Opera, Chef,’ he said. Anyone else might have added this in a condescending way, but not Francis. He was condescension-free.

‘Opera?’ I repeated, somewhat stupidly.

‘Yeah, opera, singing …’ He looked at me, puzzled. I started work on a dessert cheque: a strawberry pavlova with Chantilly cream.

‘I know what opera is, Francis.’

‘Well,’ he began, walking over to the sink and starting to load plates and cutlery into the enormous Hobart dishwasher, ‘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 that we listened to in the kitchen, playing undemanding, uncontroversial Seventies and Eighties 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 a river, no, not the Thames, not the Misbourne, not even the Chess, it’s Pussycat with “Mississippi” …’

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

Jess shook her head. ‘No, you won’t – it’s fully catered. He gets a firm from London usually: steak, lobster, that kind of thing. I think that’s how he makes his money out of it.’ She scowled at the radio. ‘Who the hell is this?’

‘Pussycat,’ I said. ‘I think they might be Dutch …’

‘For heaven’s sake,’ said Jess. She sighed. The radio was a source of friction between us – she craved something more modern, but it was my kitchen and my radio.

‘What do they use for kitchens?’ I asked. My interest was piqued.

‘My dad says that they use the kitchens at the house,’ said Francis.

I’d forgotten that Francis’s dad was the Earl’s Head Gardener. Francis was always a reliable source of information about the peculiar character who was our local aristocrat.

‘They’re not massive,’ said Francis, keen to be in the unusual position of being able to show off his knowledge, ‘but they’re well equipped. Marlow House has always done big parties, weddings, stuff like that, particularly with the last Earl, but the new Earl isn’t so keen on people in the house. The opera lot are confined to the field and the gardens this year.’

It’s funny how your mind works. I was unable to cope with my current workload, but part of me was annoyed that the Earl, who admittedly I hardly knew, would hire these London caterers instead of me. There was no way on earth that I could have managed to squeeze in doing food and drink for three hundred people a night – the logistics would be daunting, together with running my own business – but I would have liked to have been asked.

I shook my head in irritation at myself. There I was, getting cross that I hadn’t been given something I couldn’t have coped with.

I have anger management problems that I have to constantly work on, but at least I was just cross, not furious. That was something.

A journey of ten thousand miles begins with a single step.

And news of the Earl’s opera event was like the tossed pebble that starts the avalanche.

Chapter Three

‘Sack the bastard!’ Graeme Strickland was his usual forthright self. We were in one of Hampden Street’s two pubs. The grotty one. The Three Bells. Diagonally opposite the common from where my restaurant was. Grotty décor, grotty toilets, grotty furniture. It was a wonder we came here at all, but it was quiet 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 the stove morning, lunchtime, noon and night, it was a blessed relief from our respective workplaces.

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

It really was a horrible place.

Strickland was on a split shift from his restaurant and was allowing himself two pints. Theoretically he should have been working ten a.m. until three p.m., six p.m. until ten p.m. In reality it was more nine a.m. to three p.m., five p.m. to midnight. Six days a week. He had his own way of coping with the endless hours. He’d 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 Street. 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.

We tended to choose the Three Bells, first off because it was no threat to either of us. Malcolm’s food ran to crisps and sometimes, if he’d been on a gourmet spending spree, pork scratchings. The second reason was that the Three Bells was round the corner and therefore the perfect place to grab a quick drink mid-shift. There had been an article on the Michelin system of awards in the trade press the other day. 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.

‘French bastards!’ he’d said when last year’s annual results had been announced and he had been ignored.

The Charlie was not mellowing his mood. I had stupidly moaned to him about Francis’s lack of ability. It was not only stupid, it was unfair too.

It wasn’t Francis’s fault.

I had hired Francis as a kitchen porter, a person who washes dishes, not as a chef. It wasn’t as if he had misrepresented himself to get a job. He had never said he was a chef. He never wanted to be a chef.

In the old days I would have raged at Francis, screamed and shouted and got rid of him. Now, courtesy of the Tao Te Ching, which I read daily to help with my anger management, I was working on my personality rather than his. The way of the Tao. I decided not to share this with Strickland – he would have thought I was mad.

‘Well, I can’t really do that,’ I said, taking a sip of my drink. ‘I can’t fire Francis.’

Before Strickland could say anything, I changed the subject. ‘And how about you – how are things at the King’s Head?’

He frowned. ‘I’ve got this sodding awful restaurant manager. He keeps harassing my waitresses.’

‘Sack the bastard!’ I said, parroting his advice to me. At least I just had an amiable oaf.

He took a mouthful of lager, and shook his head regretfully. ‘He’s very clever, it’s either when no one’s looking, wandering hands sort of stuff, or verbal, or it’s just creepy behaviour, like staring down a blouse, that kind of thing. But it’s never that bloody obvious.’ He sniffed loudly and stared at me through coke-crazed eyes. ‘Perhaps you could beat him up for me, Ben.’

‘I don’t do that sort of thing!’ I protested.

‘Course you don’t …’ There was polite disbelief in his tone.

Serve time for GBH and people, understandably, think you’re violent. A reputation is a hard thing to shake. Particularly in a village. Strickland continued, ‘Anyway, one of these days he’ll go too far. Probably grab a customer – I wouldn’t put it past him, he’s a sick bastard.’

‘Why’d you hire him?’ I was genuinely interested.

Strickland looked at me. He was a small, dapper, good-looking man, never a hair out of place.

‘He came highly recommended, glowing CV.’

‘Probably from someone desperate to get shot of him,’ I said. ‘You know the way it is with troublemakers and the incompetent; just please get out of my life and I’ll give you a fantastic reference and a generous payout.’

‘It’s the only explanation,’ said Strickland mournfully. He looked quite depressed, as anyone would, with an unsackable member of staff. I changed the subject.

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

Strickland nodded. ‘Yeah, and I know who’s doing the catering for it too.’

The way that he said it made me sure that he had won the contract for it. He would be well placed to do it. He had the expertise. He’d been at the top of the tree for twenty years, from a spotty faced kid to thirty-six-year-old head chef. He also had phenomenal energy – it wouldn’t have surprised me to learn that he was going to do it single-handedly.

Probably in his break.

‘Who’s that then?’ I asked.

His smile broadened, ‘Have a guess …’

I felt a stab of envy. Undeserved, but I had to acknowledge it was there. ‘I really don’t know …’

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

Chapter Four

So, Justin McCleish, famous TV chef, was going to be running the show. Not Graeme Strickland. Well, that was surprising, to say the least. Everyone knows Justin.

McCleish had worked his way up from being a chef who cropped up on Saturday Kitchen and MasterChef: The Professionals, to having his own TV series on BBC2. The most obvious thing about him, other than his ability to cook, was his extreme good looks. He had a seductive, half-Italian, half-British pronunciation, and a model wife. The former made women swoon, the latter attracted a male audience. Some people even learned a bit about cooking.

Strickland nodded his head.

‘Yeah, thought that would surprise you. He’s going to be running a pop-up restaurant for the Earl’s opera in some marquee, hundred-quid five-course tasting menu, hundred and fifty with matched wines and two-hundred-quid ‘deluxe’ truffle and champagne option. What do you make of that then?’

Hampden Street could do with some excitement. Since January when there had been a murder nearby, things had been remarkably quiet. The most talked about thing was currently a village debate about parking near the village hall.

Half the village wanted restrictions, half the village didn’t. Temperatures were running high.

That had ruffled more feathers than the murder and subsequent arrest of a local for the killing. Parking was always a hot topic here. Murder seemed a bit meh for the village, a bit, who cares … Parking though …

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

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

‘So, Justin McCleish is moving to the village. Exciting times!’ I said.

‘Yep, into the Old Vicarage,’ Strickland replied, raising his eyebrows.

The Old Vicarage was massive and had belonged to a shady businessman who was facing a ruinous divorce and had needed to sell up quickly.

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

This was an easy one to answer. His name cropped up a lot in conversation. Coincidentally, I had recently mentally listed the main reasons I disliked Justin McCleish – several times.

The case for the prosecution:

His looks – the long, dark hair, the designer stubble, the faux ethnic jewellery, the hippy/surfer dude vibe. He was in his late thirties. This was a look he was too old for, in my opinion.

His causes – Jamie Oliver has his school dinners/sugar tax; Hugh has his sustainable fish thing; Gordon Ramsay, swearing and bad temper; Marco Pierre White, inscrutably weird behaviour. The low-hanging fruit have gone. Justin had his ‘feed the poor’ crusade, meals-on-a-budget ideas.

And last but not least, Aurora McCleish, his skimpily dressed Italian wife, heavily and sexily tattooed and annoyingly beautiful, who floated in and out of shot on his TV programmes.

‘What do you think of him?’ repeated Strickland, insistently.

I paused for thought. I had to confess, I didn’t like him.

I thought I was jealous, but no, that was the wrong word. I was envious. I wanted the freedom from financial worry that Justin had. I bet he didn’t wake up in the morning concerned about his unpaid bills. If I was honest, that was probably why I didn’t like him; he was successful and I resented it. I wished that I could float through life like he did.

I tried to rise above this. A big part of the new post-prison Ben Hunter was tranquillity and that meant not slagging other people off, hard as it might be.

‘I don’t know,’ I said judiciously. ‘I’m sure he’s very nice.’

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

Chapter Five

Speak of the devil and he will come. The very next day, much to my surprise, I met both Justin and his wife.

Jess had announced their presence. Normally, Jess does her job running my restaurant with a mixture of good-natured efficiency and ironic detachment. For her, it’s a well-paid holiday job, a distraction from studying IT, which is where her future lies. She rarely gets excited – why should she? Working in the hospitality business is not her dream. But today was different.

She had come running in to the kitchen an hour earlier.

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

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

‘Gordon Bennett!’ he said. That, for Francis, constitutes great excitement. It was a measure too, of Justin McCleish’s fame, that Francis knew who he was. His knowledge of people is usually confined to cricketers and rugby players.

‘Can everyone just calm down,’ I said, my heart thundering with adrenaline. It’s Justin McCleish, and HIS WIFE, in MY restaurant! ‘They’re just customers.’

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

Justin had lamb fillet with an anchovy and caper dressing garnished with a mint sauce and rosti potatoes, and Aurora, a chicken Caesar salad. I scrutinised every single ingredient on their plates as if I were performing brain surgery.

Jess kept us updated every time she came in to the kitchen.

‘They’ve started, they look happy! They like the sourdough bread. Oh, God, this is so exciting!’

A bit later: ‘They’re halfway through, they still look happy and there are three paparazzi outside on the green! And they’ve parked illegally!’

She was a true child of Hampden Green. If the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse turned up, someone would point to the sign, ‘No Riding On The Common (£100 fine)’.

When the plates came back we all stared at them like doctors looking at a life or death X-ray.

‘Blimey, clean plates!’ said Francis.

I shrugged. They liked it!

‘Don’t sound so surprised, Francis.’ My voice was dismissive. Inside, I was shouting to myself, ‘He ate everything!’

They had dessert.

Cue another update from my waitress: ‘Justin’s having the strawberry bavarois and Aurora’s having the lemon posset with almond shortbread.’ She added, ‘God she’s even more beautiful in real life than on Instagram.’

Then, more clean plates, compliments to the chef and the following bombshell: ‘He wants to meet you!’ Jess looked at me adoringly. Normally she treats me as if I were slightly half-witted, an amiable old fool. Now I was transmuted from lead to gold by the alchemical hand of Justin McCleish, sprinkled with his TV stardust.

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

I compromised by saying nothing, hoping I didn’t come across as totally idiotic.

He was the first famous person I had ever met. It was a strange sensation. I couldn’t help but scrutinise him as intensely as I had his food when I’d sent it out from the kitchen half an hour earlier. It was hard work not staring at him too obviously.

In the flesh he was smaller than I had expected, and surprisingly slender. TV gives little indication of size unless people are helpfully standing next to something that has a recognisable benchmark height, a postbox for example, or a Labrador. Justin was also more handsome in real life than he was on the screen – he certainly didn’t disappoint there. He was ridiculously good-looking in an Italian way and I remembered hearing that his mother was from Le Marche, near Ancona.

That was the part of Italy that Claudia Ferrante, my ex, was from. If I ever saw her again I could ask her if she had known the family. I felt a sudden lurch of sadness in my otherwise happy day. Claudia was a match for Aurora in looks and formidably bright. Jess thought we should get back together. Fat chance.

I put the thought of my ex to one side and concentrated on Justin. He looked very stylish and had an even bronze tan. Standing next to him, I felt pallid. Chefs rarely get to see the sunshine and I was no exception. I also felt very bald, my shaven head glinting next to Justin’s luxuriant long hair that reached to his shoulders. He was like a Seventies rock star but one dressed by Henry Holland.

He put an arm around me in a friendly way as Jess took our picture together on her phone.

It was unusual for Jess to rave about anyone; normally she treated people and events with a healthy scepticism.

The McCleishes had been a big hit with all concerned. Damn, I thought, Justin even smelt good. I had just finished a busy service in the forty-degree heat of the kitchen and I suspected that I exuded an aroma of sweat, strain, and food.

I consoled myself with the thought that Justin probably couldn’t do a hundred slow, consecutive press-ups like I had that morning after getting out of bed. But why would he want to? He doubtless had someone who could do that for him.

I think I was coming off poorly in the comparison stakes.

‘I enjoyed my lamb,’ he said, encouragingly. He had quite a strong accent. I should have known this from TV but it had never occurred to me he would actually talk like that. ‘And the bavarois was excellent.’

Thank God I hadn’t known it was destined for him when I had originally made it, I thought. There is something very unnerving about cooking for a celebrity chef or a food critic. You feel every little thing is going to be inspected to the nth degree. Graeme Strickland would have laughed at my nervousness, but I wasn’t an insanely overconfident megalomaniac like he was, nor was I as good a chef. Strickland was touched with the hand of genius.

But, I thought smugly to myself, Justin McCleish wasn’t in his restaurant. He was here.

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

Justin (as I would now come to think of him) gave my kitchen a cursory glance. I was very proud of it, but a kitchen is a kitchen. What was I going to say?

‘Could we, erm, have a quiet word somewhere?’ Justin said, nodding his head to the side.

That was a harder question to answer than it sounded.

The downstairs of the Old Forge Café was taken up by the kitchen, dry store (a glorified cupboard) and the restaurant. Upstairs was my accommodation. To say it was spartan was to oversell it. There was virtually nothing up there at all.

Virtually, though, was a massive leap from nothing at all.

I had bought a bed, a huge step up from sleeping on a mattress on the floor, and the sizeable living room did have a TV balanced on a beer crate and a secondary beer crate (or IT suite as I liked to call it) where my laptop sat. Justin might think I was merely eccentric. He might think that I viewed the accumulation of material objects, like furniture, with scorn. Or he might realise the truth – that I was embarrassingly poor and that all my money had gone into kitchen equipment.

I wasn’t going to have him know that.

So, upstairs was out of the question. It was embarrassing. No one likes revealing how poor they are. Downstairs was equally impossible – no privacy.

‘Let’s go outside and I’ll show you my walk-in fridge,’ I suggested. ‘It’s new!’ I added proudly, instantly regretting it. Justin wouldn’t have boasted about his fridge; the company would have given him one for free and then paid him a fortune to endorse it.

Justin brightened. ‘Good idea!’ he said.

We crossed the little yard at the back of the kitchen.

We walked out of the kitchen into the little yard, which, luckily, I keep immaculate. I’ve even started growing herbs in large terracotta pots, which seems to be working well. Justin nodded his approval and then we disappeared into the walk-in. I pulled the door to behind us and said with a polite gesture, ‘Take a seat …’

Justin looked around the fridge, about the length of a shipping container with racking inside. He sat down on a sack of Yukon Gold potatoes and looked up at me. I leaned against the fridge door, smiling politely. I wondered what this was all about. You don’t go and have a conversation in an industrial fridge to make idle chit-chat.

Justin looked up at me and brushed his long hair back from his face. He was very brown and there was a smattering of designer stubble on his upper lip and chin.

‘I was talking to Danny Ward, the head chef at the Cloisters – remember him?’

I nodded. Danny – a tubby, lecherous Scot with a look of infinite cunning, pebble-thick glasses, balding red hair and a whiney Fife accent – was the proud possessor of a Michelin star (Strickland was extremely jealous) and I’d worked for him as a chef de partie in charge of his sauces.

The restaurant was in St Albans and the kitchen fronted on to the staff car park that was covered in pea shingle. What really stuck in my mind wasn’t the food but Danny’s personal life. Danny was having an affair with a married woman, and her husband, who was a roofer as solidly built as St Albans Cathedral but slightly larger (according to Danny), had vowed bloody revenge.

One of my jobs, aside from the sauces, was to check every time we heard the scrunch of tyres in the car park, that it wasn’t the jealous roofer hellbent on GBH. Whenever a car or a van arrived, Danny would go and find something to do in the cellar until I told him the coast was clear.

‘He told me about you and the builder …’ Justin said, looking at me expectantly.

‘Oh,’ I said, disappointed. I had hoped Danny would have praised me for my exceptional saucier abilities, not for dealing with some psychotic workman.

‘He said that you beat him up.’

I shook my head. ‘No, well, I reasoned with him.’

I remembered the incident well. One day the builder had actually arrived. I was beginning to think that maybe he was a figment of Danny’s imagination.

I’d marched into the car park when I saw his van pulling in. Danny had shrieked, ‘It’s him, it’s him, I’m dead …’ and gone to hide. The builder was short, stocky, aggrieved, and wearing a plaid shirt. What is it with builders and plaid shirts?

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

He ignored my parking advice.

‘Where’s the Scottish bastard!’ he demanded.

‘Hiding’ would have sounded disloyal. I told him he couldn’t go into the kitchen (a health and safety issue, I’d said) and to go away, and he took a swing at me.

I ducked the punch and, as I straightened up, I hit him with a solid left hook to his body and a right cross that snapped his head back. He was unconscious as he hit the ground. I was worried that I’d hit him too hard if truth be told. I thought I might have seriously injured him, but thankfully he came to almost immediately.

He’d sworn at me, got back into his van and driven off, and that was the end of it. The affair fizzled out, my contract ended – I was covering for someone who came back – and we went our separate ways. I’d all but forgotten about it until today.

‘Well, whatever,’ said Justin, clearly disbelieving my statement about reasoning with him. He made a mildly Italian gesture with his hands to indicate this.

He carried on, ‘He also said that you were a man who could be relied on to keep his mouth shut.’

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

Justin said, ‘No, you didn’t.’

He looked at me admiringly, I guess justifiably so. Sharing a cramped kitchen space with other chefs for ten hours a day, you do tend to gossip. To have kept my mouth shut, especially about something so beefy, as Jess would put it, did show a great deal of self-control. Justin carried on.

‘And I heard on the grapevine about you solving that murder that happened around here, earlier this year.’

I didn’t know what to say, so I tried to look enigmatic. Justin frowned. Perhaps he mistook my enigmatic look for stupidity. It’s probably not hard to do. He looked me in the eye. ‘How would you like to come and work for me for a while?’

I blinked in disbelief, and Justin must have misread this as reluctance. He carried on in an encouraging tone.

‘It’d look good on your CV.’

He was really serious. I blinked again, in surprise this time. It most certainly would look good on my CV. Better than that, it would be great for business. It was a job offer to die for. Word would get around that I had been hired by one of the most famous TV chefs in Britain and it would have a dramatic effect on bookings. Kaleidoscopic images of wealth and renown and IKEA furniture danced through my brain. I would be able to afford a three-piece suite! Maybe a new shower. Oh, brave new world! Then reality bit. Savagely.

‘Well, Justin, I’d love to,’ I said reluctantly, ‘but I haven’t got anyone to take care of my restaurant – there’s only me. I just can’t.’

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

Aurora hadn’t. And he hadn’t even been famous then.

‘That’s not a problem, I’ll lend you one of mine. He’ll fill in for you while you’re gone. I’ve seen your menu; it’s nice, but let’s face it, it’s not rocket science.’

That was a bit uncalled for, I thought.

‘And I’ll pay well.’

I was thoroughly confused. Why did he want me to work for him?

‘Why do you need help?’ I asked.

He suddenly looked away, as if he had gone unaccountably shy. Then he turned his head back to me. ‘Because I’m being blackmailed,’ he said. It was that straightforward. It certainly wasn’t the answer that I had been expecting.

Blackmailed! What could he have been up to? Lurid possibilities swirled around my head.

‘Oh, right.’ I didn’t know what else to say. I stared blankly at him, sitting there looking poised, elegant and successful on the sack of potatoes.

‘Could you be a bit more specific?’ I asked.

Justin looked around the fridge as if seeking inspiration. Thank God everything was labelled and day-dotted. He picked up a plastic tub that said ‘smoked hadok’ in Francis’s wonky writing. He opened it, peered inside and absent-mindedly sniffed it, obviously checking it hadn’t gone off.

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

‘I did something unprofessional in my youth and it’s come back to haunt me …’ he finally said. ‘It’s nothing sexual. But I really want to know who’s behind it, and of course, it goes without saying I want it stopped.’

‘It sounds like you need a private detective or a minder, not a chef,’ I said. I said it in a jocular, aren’t I funny, kind of way. Justin grinned at me and nodded.

‘You may be right, however, I don’t know any private detectives. But I do know chefs and you’re the one I need to help me. It’s one of my brigade, it has to be, and I need to know which one and I need to know soon. It’s tearing me apart.’

The penny dropped. It had taken a while – it should have been obvious from the word go. Justin didn’t want me around for my cooking skills. He wanted a protector. In all honesty, I felt a bit deflated. I had been so excited thinking that he rated me for my cooking abilities when all he really wanted was someone who could hit people and was discreet.

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

‘Please,’ he said.

I looked into his sincere, pleading brown eyes.

I did some swift calculating. I’d get help in the kitchen, and I could treat my new job – tracking down and scaring off the blackmailer – as a paid mini-break.

‘OK,’ I said. It would still be working for one of Britain’s leading chefs; nobody would need to know exactly why. Everyone would think he’d hired me because I was a great chef and not because Justin wanted help of a very different kind.

We shook hands.

And so, the miracle had happened and I had gained a chef to help in the running of my kitchen and the chance to work alongside one of Britain’s top maîtres de cuisine.

I just didn’t expect things to work out the way they did.

Chapter Six

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

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

‘What, to keep you grounded, no foams or emulsions …’

‘Exactly. And you need to understand how I work, so you’ll be working with my chefs,’ he said.

‘Will they believe that?’ I asked.

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

‘Fair enough,’ I said. ‘Who’s going to be looking after my kitchen?’

‘I’m lending you Andrea, my sous-chef. He’s good.’

I nodded. The sous-chef deputises for the head chef in the kitchen, covers for them when they’re on holiday or ill. If I wasn’t in my kitchen, I would need someone of sous-chef ability to replace me.

‘What if he’s the blackmailer?’ I asked.

‘Well, you can see what you think of the others first and keep him in mind for later,’ Justin said. ‘Besides, they’ll talk more freely if he’s not there – he’s quite a forceful character.’

And so, a couple of days later, I found myself being introduced to Justin’s team.

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

We were in the dining room of the Old Vicarage where Justin had just finished a briefing to his kitchen team. There would be other agency chefs working alongside them, but this was the core group and therefore they made up my main suspects.

The ‘key players’ looked far from overjoyed at the news that I was joining them. Perhaps they hadn’t read the Bucks Free Press when it had described the Old Forge Café as a welcome addition to eating in the Chilterns.

Never mind, I’d e-mail them the link. I’m sure they could hardly wait.

Introductions were made.

‘This is Andrea, my sous.’ Justin pointed out the gloomy chef to me. ‘He’ll be the one looking after your kitchen …’

As I studied his face, I hoped for my kitchen’s sake that he was nicer than he looked.

Andrea shook my proffered hand with little enthusiasm. He was tall and thin with a downturned mouth like a shark, which made him look both bad-tempered and dangerous at the same time. He was very pallid in an unhealthy way, like he had never seen the light of day. Mind you, we all were.

I was then introduced to Tom, his development chef, a quiet, tough-looking guy in his mid-thirties with a hipster beard.

‘Pleased to meet you.’

‘Likewise.’

Tom’s grip was vice-like, powerful, as we shook hands. He was wearing an Iron Man hoody to proclaim how fit he was. I was suitably impressed. I couldn’t swim three miles, cycle a hundred-odd kilometres and then run a marathon, much less one after another. He ran his eyes over me in a considered, evaluating way.

‘This is Gregor, my pastry chef.’ I didn’t think Gregor was Iron Man material. He was medium height, slightly overweight, as befits a pastry chef, and worried-looking, with an incipient double chin and a lot of black stubble. He was one of those men who I guessed had to shave twice a day. He nodded at me, unimpressed.

I had two more chefs to meet, two more chief suspects. I quickly added adjectives to the faces to help me remember them: Andrea was Grumpy; Tom, Thoughtful; Gregor, Unhappy.

There was Octavia, who wasn’t Italian but, judging by her voice, simply very, very upper-class. She was the intern. She was tall, blonde, and I’d guess in her early twenties. She smiled at me with glacial contempt.

She went on my mental list as Arrogant.

And lastly there was Murdo, a young Scottish chef, also tall but gangly as opposed to the willowy Octavia. He had a mop of curly ginger hair, some of it skywards-pointing in a poorly assembled top-knot – he reminded me of an overgrown schoolboy. He was the only one who showed any enthusiasm at all to be introduced to me.

His jacket was partially unbuttoned. There was a black T-shirt with red lettering – ‘Cannibal Corpse,’ it said. I hoped that was the name of some rock band, and not the name of a restaurant he had worked in.

Well, if it was a band, it probably wouldn’t get much airplay on Beech Tree FM. Rick Astley’s ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ had been playing on my journey over. I guessed that Cannibal Corpse probably would not be covering it.

‘Hi,’ he said and blushed furiously.

Bashful.

Well, those were the prime suspects, and bringing up the rear were the two others in the McCleish entourage. There was his agent/manager, Charlotte, a short, buxom woman with thick glasses and unruly brown hair tied back in a bun. Wisps of it stuck out here and there in an untidy way. She smiled politely and gave a nervous laugh as she shook my hand. She looked kind, intelligent and motherly.

‘And this is my assistant, Douglas,’ Charlotte said.

By way of contrast, Douglas was skinny and angular with horn-rimmed glasses, a bald spot clearly visible under thinning hair, and a prominent Adam’s apple. He was one of those people whose looks never seem to change throughout their lives. He was probably in his early twenties but looked about forty in a paradoxically ageless way. He had probably looked forty when he was at school and he would probably look forty when he was drawing his pension.

He appeared nervous, like a skittish horse. He practically twitched as she introduced him to me. I smiled sympathetically, as I reflected that it must have been tough for him to deal with Justin’s kitchen team. Chefs are poorly paid, grossly overworked and, in general, have an awful life. But what they do have, and this has evolved like a protective carapace, is an aggressive sense of their own importance.

Douglas, the non-chef, would have been viewed with borderline contempt. He was certainly unhappy with his lot.

I filed the two non-chefs in my mind as Motherly and Twitchy.

The chefs were all wearing whites. Douglas wore an ill-judged short-sleeved shirt that accentuated his thin arms, and unfortunate blue polyester slacks. He looked like his mum had dressed him.

Andrea, as if he had been reading my thoughts, turned his head to look at Douglas and gave him a hostile stare. Douglas caught his glance and twitched uncomfortably. I saw his knuckles whiten as they tightened around a clipboard he was holding. There was obviously little love lost between the two of them.

The chefs looked at me with suspicion. Whether or not they liked each other, they were used to working as a unit. It would take a while before they accepted me and relaxed long enough to talk freely. Alcohol would probably help in the euphoria after service had finished.

But he was right. They wouldn’t suspect me of anything. And crucially, neither would the blackmailer. All I had to do was pretend to be thick. I could imagine Jess saying that it was a role I had been born to play.

I carried on with my expert detective evaluation of possible extortionists. Someone here was blackmailing Justin.

I looked at Justin’s team and said winningly, ‘I’m sure it’ll be an education working with all of you.’ I took my phone out. ‘Can I have a picture, to savour the moment I met a star of the present—’ I nodded at Justin ‘—and stars of the future!’

How glib was that, I thought. I’m Mister Suave. Nobody looked impressed or flattered but they all obligingly shuffled into position, as I held the phone up and checked all of my suspects were in the frame.

Click.

I put my phone away.

The door opened and a tall figure stood framed in it – another one of Justin’s team?

‘Justin! I heard you were all here …’ He looked like he had been auditioning for a part in The Three Musketeers, and sounded like it too. His accent was very French and he had shoulder-length hair, a large nose and a Van Dyke-style combination of moustache and goatee.

‘Jean-Claude!’ Justin put his arms around him and they kissed on both cheeks. Andrea’s face brightened. He walked up to Jean-Claude (d’Artagnan, I thought to myself) and kissed him as well. I managed to restrain myself. They started speaking to each other in French.

‘Ben,’ said Justin eventually, ‘this is Jean-Claude Touraine. He used to work for us at the old restaurant in Marylebone before … well, before he moved on.’

We shook hands. Jean-Claude smiled politely, while Justin grinned around at his team.

‘And now if you will excuse me, I need to speak to Ben. You’ll all get the chance to get to know him better once we start work in the pop-up kitchen over at the Earl’s. I’m very excited and I know you are too.’

They were so well disciplined they managed to conceal their excitement well. Andrea even managed a yawn.

As Justin took me by the arm and led me away to his study, I took a last look back at his brigade and my new workmates. I wondered which one of them, d’Artagnan, Arrogant, Thoughtful, Grumpy, Bashful, Unhappy, Motherly or Twitchy, was the Judas figure who was blackmailing Justin.

They all looked plausible as suspects to me.

Chapter Seven

‘Ma dai! But who is this … Justin, you should have told me that the new man was coming this morning …’

It was Aurora who came into the study just after us.

‘Carissima,’ said Justin. They kissed each other’s cheeks and they briefly spoke together in machine-gun-like Italian that I couldn’t begin to understand. Aurora moved over to me and shook my hand.

She was wearing a strappy white cropped T-shirt that showed off her body, and tight low-cut hipster jeans to reveal her infamous tattoo of the swan rising from the very dark blue fabric, its head and beak coiling around her pierced navel. The T-shirt had the word Liar emblazoned on it.

The overall effect of meeting Aurora was like being hit by a truckload of sensuality.

‘It’s Ben, isn’t it?’

There was certainly no danger of me forgetting her name.

‘It certainly is, Aurora,’ I said warmly. She smiled warmly back at me and kissed me on the cheek. It was a gesture designed to put me at my ease. I remember thinking what a kind person she was.

On her Instagram account she came across as overtly sexual, flirting with the camera, provocative poses, artfully disarranged clothing. The reality was mitigated by a very heartfelt welcome and a feeling that she was a very pleasant person.

Our meeting before at my restaurant had been brief, as I’d spent most of the time with Justin.

‘And how is Jess?’ she asked.

How sweet of her to remember, I thought. ‘She’s fine,’ I said.

‘You are a lucky man to have such a talented girl to work for you, as lovely as she is intelligent.’ She smiled brightly at me.

‘Thank you.’ I turned my attention away from her and looked around the study. The Old Vicarage had been extensively renovated twenty years ago and it still bore the hallmarks of its previous owner, the shady businessman. I was pleased to see that the study was furnished in true old-fashioned gangster style from the Seventies. In the fire sale of the house, Justin had obviously bought everything, contents included, and hadn’t got round to changing anything.

I inventoried a white shag carpet, a large black desk with those clicky metallic balls that bang into each other in an annoying, metronomic way, black leather sofas and a glass-and-chrome coffee table. There were even a couple of enormous nude portraits of women done in coloured pastels on a black background. I know very little about art, but they were awful. At least, I assumed this kitsch tat wasn’t Justin’s doing – it would have been retro gone mad.

As it was, in his ripped jeans, shoulder-length hair and ornate jewellery, he clashed horribly with his own furniture. He had a latte in front of him and had pulled a Diet Coke for me from a small fridge under the desk.

Justin leaned forward and lifted one of the silver metal balls and released it. The two of us watched in fascination as it banged into the others and they swayed metronomically back and forth.

‘Tasteful, eh,’ he said, grinning at me. ‘I’ve got an intercom too.’ He pointed at a teak box with a silver mesh speaker and three switches. He clicked one and spoke into it, ‘Send him in, Miss Jones.’

Another grin.

He said, ‘There’s a speaker on the desk out there in the hall so a secretary can sit there and do whatever you tell her to do. It’s weird how things used to work.’

I nodded, as we both contemplated the past. The days of secretaries and intercoms. The last time I had seen an intercom was when I was a kid at school outside the headmaster’s office. Longer ago than I cared to think about.

I caught a sudden glimpse of myself in an enormous mirror (with a chrome frame). With my shaved head, glasses (I didn’t need them particularly, but I’d got them with a two-for-one offer when I’d bought some expensive reading glasses, which I do need – the tortoiseshell frames make me look more intelligent, which is easier than becoming more intelligent), over-tight shirt and hipster-style trousers and shoes, I fitted in uncomfortably well with the décor.

I looked like a gangster pimp from the Sixties.

Back to the present.

‘What do you make of Justin’s team, Ben?’ asked Aurora taking a seat next to Justin behind the big desk.

She leaned over and kissed him affectionately. Justin ruffled her hair. I felt a pang of envy – I had nobody’s hair to ruffle. The best I could muster was to pat Francis on the back. I shifted in my chair. It was a leather Chesterfield and fiendishly uncomfortable.

‘One big, happy family,’ I said.

Aurora laughed, scornfully, and sat upright. She pushed her hair back imperiously. ‘Wait until you get to know them,’ she said. ‘Gregor’s a moody depressive, Murdo’s heavily into drugs, Octavia’s man-mad, Tom’s violent and Andrea harasses the waitresses.’

She had my attention with the last comment. ‘What does Andrea do?’

‘Nothing really,’ said Justin quickly.

‘He pesters waitresses,’ said Aurora. ‘We’ve had to warn him about it, now Jean-Claude, well, come si dice …’

Justin was looking at me imploringly. He made an equivocal gesture with his hand.

‘I’ve told him to be on his best behaviour at your place, Ben. There won’t be any trouble.’

I sat upright and narrowed my eyes. ‘I hope not, Justin, for his sake. No one harasses my staff,’ I warned. I was thinking of Jess.

‘Nobody will; now, if we can move on …?’

I tore my mind away from potential unpleasant scenarios involving Andrea.

‘And what are you being blackmailed about?’ I asked, settling back in my leather seat.

He looked uncomfortable, shifting his weight in his Charles and Ray Eames-style executive chair.

‘I’d rather not say.’

‘You can tell him, Justin,’ said Aurora. ‘I think Ben is very trustworthy.’ She beamed at me and tugged his hair playfully. ‘Justin is naturally very suspicious. I think it’s his Scottish blood coming out.’

Justin examined his fingertips.

‘It’s very delicate.’

I’m sure it is, I thought to myself. It would be, if blackmail was involved.

‘Well, I think you should tell me,’ I said.

‘Why should I do that?’ Justin still looked uncomfortable, and he folded his arms across his body defensively. ‘What difference does it make? I just want you to find out who’s doing it, so we can make them stop.’

I sighed. ‘Because I need to know the hold he or she has over you, so I can better neutralise the risk.’

‘OK,’ he said, sulkily, ‘they’ve got evidence of plagiarism.’

‘Tell me more about it.’ I tried on an encouraging smile like Oprah Winfrey when she wants someone famous to explain whatever crime or indiscretion they’ve been up to. Plagiarism? What was he on about?

‘OK,’ he sighed. ‘Here’s what happened then.’ He looked at Aurora.

‘Bravissimo!’ she said, standing up and clapping her hands. ‘Mio caro, Ben needs to know.’

‘Fine, but it’s against my better judgement.’

And Justin began to tell me his life story.

Chapter Eight

‘I’m thirty-eight,’ Justin said, and pulled a face. ‘Terrible isn’t it! And I started working in a kitchen when I was fourteen – that’s twenty-four years, my God, nearly a quarter of a century.’

He stood up and walked restlessly around the large study. He gazed up at one of the lurid nudes, and continued speaking.

‘My mama was from Le Marche, by way of Scotland, but I was born in England, where I lived, so my Italian was quite poor as a child.’

I nodded. That explained his slightly odd pronunciation, mainly Italian but with certain definitive London vowel sounds.

‘We moved back to Italy where her family were originally from, back in the day. I was twelve. My parents were looking after holiday homes for British owners. I got a part-time job when I was at school as a pot-washer, my first kitchen job – you don’t really need much language. And then I got promoted. You can understand that.’

‘Indeed I can,’ I said. That’s more or less how Francis had ended up being a chef for me. The big difference being that he had no talent and Justin was a genius.

‘Now,’ said Justin, tearing his gaze away from the painting and looking at me, ‘the thing was, the restaurant that I was working in was amazingly good, though I didn’t know it at the time. Who knows anything when they’re a teenager? Besides, I had other things to worry about …’

He rested a hand on Aurora’s shoulder and she patted it then kissed it.

‘And I rose through the ranks. Well, it was a small place, thirty covers max, and great regional cooking. Fifteen years later when I got my place in London, I re-created her menu. She was dead by then and I stole all her recipes.’

He paused and stared into space. ‘I mean all of them,’ he confessed. ‘That first TV series, that was all her stuff, and I passed it off as my own. My signature dishes, the zabaglione, the saltimbocca with a twist, they’re hers. And my first cookery book …’ He shook his head sadly, got up, went to the safe in the corner, (of course, there had to be a safe, here in the lair) and spun the dial this way and that. It clicked open and he reached inside and returned with a paperback book.

I examined it. Mia Cucina by Alessandra Bonini. Its spine was cracked, the pages were yellowed, the typeface looked ridiculously old-fashioned and the cover was faded. It was hard to believe that behind all the glossy footage on TV of Justin making gnocchi, twirling the crank handle of the pasta machine as he turned pasta dough into lasagne, chopping onions with amazing speed (he was incredible with a knife and I should know; I was good but he was awesome), lay this long-forgotten book.

I flipped through the pages, which were heavily annotated in biro and pencil. There was hardly any white margin left.

‘That’s her book. Long since out of print, the publisher no longer exists.’ He pulled a face. ‘If you look at Justin does Italy, it’s pretty much the same book. I just translated it. More or less the same recipes in the same order.’

‘So that’s it? You nicked a load of recipes? It’s hardly the crime of the century.’

It didn’t seem a blackmailable offence. Not in cooking. Everything is based on everything else. Even molecular gastronomy techniques, foams, gels et cetera are not exactly copyright. Nothing is new under the sun.

‘It is when your name is Justin McCleish … and, just for your information, stealing published recipes is a very big deal indeed.’ It was Charlotte, his agent, who had slipped into the room unnoticed by me. ‘For one thing, aside from being sued, no reputable publisher would ever touch him again with a bargepole.’

‘Oh,’ I said, suitably chastened. I felt I had not made a very good impression on her. I made a mental note to work harder on my intellectual side. Next time I would bring a book, show her that I could read. A difficult book. Jacques Derrida, he’d do. He was a dead French intellectual. God knows what theories or philosophy he had propounded. Jess would doubtless fill in the blanks.

‘Justin isn’t just a chef …’ she said.

‘Isn’t he?’ I was confused momentarily.

‘No,’ she said firmly, ‘he’s also a brand. And the brand is integrity.’

I looked across at Justin who seemed a lot more relaxed now he had Charlotte to do his speaking for him.

‘Most of the people who watch Justin are never going to cook what he’s showing them.’

‘They’re not?’ I felt somehow disappointed.

‘No, they like what it represents. These are people who haven’t got the time or the inclination to cook, but they do like Justin – he’s Mr Nice Guy.’ Charlotte warmed to her theme, her eyes flashing behind the thick lenses of her glasses.

‘If they thought he had stolen some old woman’s heritage, it would be terrible for Justin, a real game changer and not in a good way.’

I began to see what she meant, and it complicated things a lot. I frowned.

‘So, discretion is in order?’

‘Absolutely. I, we, do not want the police involved, nor the media.’

It seemed a bit of a tall order.

‘So tell me the mechanics of the blackmail,’ I said.

Charlotte looked at Justin and he handed me a piece of paper. ‘These are the instructions for paying the money.’

I examined it with interest. I had never seen a blackmail note before and I imagined something luridly old-fashioned, like words cut out of newspapers and magazines then stuck to a sheet of paper. How hopelessly out of date that was.

Of course, it was nothing like that at all. It was prosaically boring.

It was a piece of A4, the words printed in some nondescript font, telling Justin that he should take four thousand in cash in a plain brown envelope, go to the EROS Shop in Vantry’s Alley off Greek Street in Soho and ask to speak to Greg. He was to hand it over saying, ‘This is for Mick,’ and then leave.

‘How many times have you done this?’ I asked.

‘Three,’ said Justin. I sipped my Diet Coke and we looked at each other, evaluating.

‘In three months,’ he added.

‘That’s a thousand pounds a week,’ I said helpfully, for once managing a quick calculation. Justin was getting his money’s worth already.

‘It is indeed,’ he said before draining his latte.

‘Twelve thousand pounds!’ I marvelled.

‘You can certainly do maths,’ said Justin, drily.

Charlotte leaned forward.

‘Now,’ she said, ‘this coming Monday is payday. I want you to follow Justin to the sex shop and then you can hang around outside and find out who “Mick” is.’

I raised my eyebrows. ‘But, Charlotte, that’s assuming a lot of things. What if “Mick” is a third party, a go-between? I wouldn’t recognise him. What if he doesn’t even exist and the sex shop guy takes the money home and then gives it …’

She cut me off with an impatient gesture.

‘If any of these scenarios happen, we’ll come up with an alternative plan. I’ll deal with what-ifs. You’re not being paid to think – that’s my job.’

I wasn’t being paid to think, or cook.

‘Tomorrow we try this.’ Charlotte leaned forward and tapped my knee for emphasis. ‘I think you probably saw the blackmailer this morning when you met the team. It’s almost certainly why the payment is made on a Monday, which is not a working day for Team McCleish. I want a name; it’s your job to get it.’

‘And then what?’ I asked.

‘I’m coming to that,’ she said.

I looked at Justin, who shrugged.

‘All of this is Charlotte’s idea,’ he said, unhappily. She shook her head sadly, in a kind of motherly way, as though Justin was a teenager going through an awkward time and she was stepping up to the plate because he couldn’t or wouldn’t.

She looked at me through her unflattering glasses, and her eyes were hard.

‘There’s a lot riding on this. As I said earlier, if word of this gets out it could be quite a big news story. Top chef steals recipes. And would the estate of Alessandra Bonini be entitled to compensation? It’s something we could well do without.’

‘And you want me to find out the identity of the blackmailer …’

‘And reason with him,’ said Charlotte. ‘Reason with him a lot, to the extent that he might need medical attention and then point out that should he persist, complain or make a pest of himself in any way, shape or form, further reasoning of a more robust nature will take place.’ She paused and tapped the table for emphasis.

‘That’s why I want you to stake out the shop, why I haven’t done it myself,’ she said.

‘To be honest,’ I said truthfully, ‘I’m not keen on the idea.’

Not only had I felt I had renounced violence, which was a moral decision, I had already done time for GBH and was not keen on a course of action that might lead to me being banged up again. Charlotte frowned – it wasn’t what she wanted to hear.

‘What if it was Octavia?’ I pointed out. ‘I could hardly beat her up could I?’

Charlotte rolled her eyes. ‘Tell you what,’ she said, ‘call me when whoever it is shows up and I’ll give you further instructions. Would that help?’

‘I’m still not sure …’

Charlotte looked at me in a measured way; then she said something that made me change my mind.

‘You can have three months of blackmail payments to stop this nonsense. What do you say?’

‘Twelve thousand pounds?’ I said.

‘He’s good at maths,’ Justin contributed.

That would buy me six months of chef help. It was a deal-clincher in my view.

I stood up quickly. ‘I’ve always loved Soho,’ I said. I was suddenly very decisive. It was amazing how money could concentrate the mind. ‘And in prison I learned to be very persuasive. I’ll be in touch.’

‘I knew you were a reasonable man,’ said Charlotte. We shook hands.

‘Would you like to stay and have lunch with us?’ offered Justin.

‘I’m afraid not,’ I said, standing up. ‘I have to go and sort out things in my own restaurant, tell them the exciting news that they’ll be working with Andrea.’

From what I had seen of him it would be a hard sell.

Chapter Nine

Two days later I was selling Andrea to my unenthusiastic staff.

‘There’s a lot going on in a Bakewell tart,’ I said to Andrea as we stood in the kitchen of the Old Forge Café, while he bit dubiously into a slice. I looked at his sour, pallid face, and wished that Justin had employed a more amenable sous-chef. I could quite understand him lending me the most competent of his brigade but on reflection I think I would have preferred just about anyone to Andrea. He chewed, swallowed and said, ‘Non è male. Not too bad.’

It wasn’t as if I’d given him a piece of dung to eat, but the look on his face was far from ecstatic. Well, I thought huffily, what did Italy have in the way of desserts apart from tiramisu and ice cream?

To be honest, I didn’t really know the answer to my own rhetorical question. I am not an expert on ‘la dolce vita’. Panna cotta, I thought suddenly. I loved panna cotta, and that was Italian. But to be indifferent to my rather wonderful sweet pastry, the almond-y heaven of the frangipane and the raspberry jam, home-made by Esther Bartlett, one of my most enthusiastic customers, and a white witch to boot, well … perhaps she would curse him.

Andrea looked around my kitchen with grudging respect. It was a very pleasant kitchen to work in. Airy, large, pride of place given to my double Hobart combi oven, which had been more than just ruinously financially expensive, it had nearly cost me my life.

Andrea performed well. No surprise there, given his pedigree. He was remorselessly efficient, but without any joy in his work, like some sort of savage machine. We’d had a busy lunch, and I let him get on with cooking all the mains while I hovered by the pass, helping Francis with the starters and plating things up for the various dishes, taking pictures so Andrea would be able to replicate layout, with Francis doing the vegetables.

With three people, the job was euphorically easy – normally it was just the two of us. We had chatted whilst we worked.

Well, I had chatted.

‘So, what’s Justin like to work with?’

Silence. Banter, the oil that makes the engine of the kitchen bearable, was conspicuous by its absence.

‘Here’s the lamb …’ Slam. Andrea’s movements by the stove were jerky, and rather odd. I had worked with Strickland once and he had not only been poetry in motion, but he obviously revelled in his skill – the sheer joy that is to be had in having achieved mastery of whatever it is that you can do.

Andrea, on the other hand, was like a life-sized marionette moved by invisible strings. His thin face, with its dark five-o’clock shadow, expressed a sour hatred of life in general and me in particular.

Maybe he thought that having to work here, in the hell-hole of the Old Forge Café, was an insult, a cruel punishment visited upon him by Justin.

I quickly sliced up the lamb fillet, placed it on its bed of wilted rocket and drizzled some rosemary-infused jus over it, then added a little spoon of cranberry and port jelly. Andrea had cooked it to perfection.

‘Service, please!’ I called, asking for it to be taken away.

Jessica came in to the kitchen and I said, ‘Table 12 please, Jessica.’

She looked over my shoulder at Andrea. I turned and looked at him closely. I had been studiously avoiding looking at him. By that, I don’t mean so much physically as character-wise. I had hoped that he was a rough diamond, that when you got to know him you’d think he was actually quite nice. But Jess was a good judge of character, and when I saw the expression on her face, I knew that I had been deluding myself. The scales fell from my eyes. He was a bloody good chef but I suddenly realised the truth. He was horrible.

We both saw a tall, pasty man in chef’s whites and an old-fashioned toque – a high, old-fashioned chef’s hat, which you hardly ever see nowadays. Its effect on Andrea was to make him look even taller and thinner, and with his white jacket and white linen apron he looked weirdly like an animated tube of toothpaste. He was ignoring me, but staring at Jessica.

Jess was my very own personal hero, saving me from many a close call. She had dark hair, large brown eyes, a look of extreme intelligence and was always demurely dressed for work. Jess was not someone given to displays of cleavage.

Andrea came over to the pass to introduce himself to Jess, a horribly sickly smile on his face.

‘Allo, my name is Andrea, I work for Justin McCleish—’ in case there were any chance of mistaking the fact that he was too good to work for me ‘—but I will be ’ere for the next few weeks … and you are?’

This speech would maybe have gone down a little better if he had been talking to Jess’s face rather than where it said ‘Old Forge Café’ on her apron.

She looked at Andrea with as much enthusiasm as he had me earlier, and he returned to his position at the stove. Jess shook her head. ‘What a plonker,’ she said dismissively to me.

The rest of the service passed by in a pleasantly hectic blur.

For me, it was a delight having a competent grill cook. All I had to do was plate up and help Francis whenever he stumbled, which was often, with a starter or a vegetable accompaniment.

The downside was the contempt that Andrea obviously held me in, his irritation obvious at being expelled from Justin’s side and forced into the hell of mediocrity that was the Old Forge Café.

I tried once or twice to get him to talk about life with Justin, to try and get some feel of their relationship, but it was useless. Any idea of getting useful clues from Andrea rapidly disappeared.

The last dessert cheque was done at about two-thirty and we started cleaning down the kitchen. Andrea disappeared outside to have a cigarette, and I took the opportunity to explain to Jess that she would have to put up with him for a bit.

‘But he’s so creepy,’ she grumbled, ‘and he keeps staring at me.’

‘It won’t be for long,’ I promised her.

‘How long?’

I decided to be honest with Jess as to why Justin had employed me.

‘Well, the situation is this …’ I scratched my head. ‘Justin is being blackmailed and he wants me to find out who it is and frighten him or her off. That won’t take too long.’

I briefly sketched in the background, and Jess’s expression became one of tender concern.

‘So he doesn’t want you for your cooking ability?’ Jess patted me sorrowfully on the shoulder.

I shook my head. Her large eyes regarded me sympathetically, which was nice on one level but added to my sense of inadequacy. My waitress seemed to have made it her duty to try and protect me from life and its hardships, which was great but a little demeaning.

‘That won’t take too long? Are you sure?’ asked Jess. ‘I mean, your last out-of-the-kitchen activity was hardly a resounding success, was it?’

She had that look that she habitually wore around me that told me she was certain that she was right and I was wrong. Unless it was a question of food. Her eyes held mine with the natural superiority that parents have over small children.

‘Anyway, the only good thing to come out of that was your getting to see Claudia again,’ she said, referring to my ex.

‘I dare say, but she’s engaged, and not to me.’

‘She gave you her phone number …’

‘Justin has every faith in me. I’m sure he knows what he is doing,’ I said, emphatically, shutting down the Claudia conversation.

‘You’re an idiot.’ Jess shook her head, but in a nice way.

Any resentment that I may have felt at being put in my place by a girl half my age (twenty-two to forty-five) was tempered by the fact that she was indisputably brighter than me, and the fact that I am very often wrong about things. For example, the time she had just alluded to, when I had fallen in love with a murderer (not that I had known at the time – I’m not that stupid) and had nearly died because of it.

So, no, it hadn’t been an unqualified success at all.

This, I reflected, was the man that Justin McCleish had hired to save his bacon. I consoled myself with the fact that surely he knew what he was doing.

‘Anyway,’ I tried to cheer her up, ‘you’re in charge of the kitchen while I’m away. Remember, Andrea is working for you, not vice versa. You’re on tonight, aren’t you?’

‘Sure am,’ said Jess. She didn’t look very excited by the thought.

‘Well, I’m off to see Esther. I’ll be back by close of service, when you can let me know what the Godfather out there is like when he’s on his own.’

‘I just can’t wait,’ said Jess sarcastically and went through into the dining room. You can’t bang a swing door behind you but, somehow, she managed to give the impression of doing just that.

Chapter Ten

I guess all villages have their movers and shakers and Esther Bartlett was prominent in Hampden Green. She was a Parish Councillor, she led the village litter clean-up days and she sang in the local church choir. Despite this, she was also the local white witch, High Priestess of the local coven and the Chair of SoBuNPag (South Bucks Neo Pagans). The witches were quite big on acronyms. She liked her food – she was a regular customer of mine and used me for catering for her parties, both secular and religious.

I was at Esther’s house to discuss a catering project with an associate of hers. Historically I had done quite well out of witches parties. They liked their food.

‘More tea?’ asked Esther. She had kind, blunt features resting on top of her several chins and a pair of very shrewd blue eyes. She was a big lady, who tended to favour voluminous flowing caftans. She was wearing one today, a riot of crimson paisley.

I nodded. ‘Please.’

She poured and smiled at me.

She was one of my favourite customers and her home-made jam made my Bakewell tarts all the better in my opinion. Though it still rankled that Andrea hadn’t noticed.

‘I hear that you’re working with the Justin McCleish!’ said Esther. ‘We’re all very impressed. What’s he like?’

‘Very nice,’ I said. ‘He’s doing a book on English gastro-pub food and wants my input, which is very flattering. So I’ll be with him and his team up at the Earl’s place, helping out, to get a sense of his cooking style.’

‘What’s his wife like?’ said Clare Reynolds. She was the other person at the table, another devotee of the Craft.

Clare was far more occult-looking than Esther, with wiry, jet-black, backcombed hair, hawkish features and a lot of eye make-up. In her black and purple clothes, she looked very goth-like, reminding me eerily of Robert Smith from The Cure.

She was the Chair of NoBWic, North Bucks Wiccans, a sister organisation to SoBuNPag and based in Milton Keynes. It’s not a place that has much of a mystical ring to it – Avebury, yes, Mont Saint Michel, yes, Tibet, yes, Glastonbury Tor, yes, Avalon, yes … Milton Keynes? No.

‘Aurora is very nice,’ I said.

‘I heard she was a bit of a bitch, man-mad!’ Clare said.

I shook my head. ‘I think that’s just the TV marketing people – they want her to float around looking gorgeous to attract male viewers – she’s actually not like that. She seems very sweet-natured.’

She had also made good on her promise to hire Jess to improve her computer skills. Jess was in raptures.

‘Anyway … food …’

Clare was keen on hiring me to do the catering for the NoBWic Midsummer Festival, also known as Summer Solstice or …

‘We call it Litha, the most powerful day of the year for the Sun God,’ said Clare dreamily. ‘… we shall leap sky-clad through the sacred fires …’

I looked dubiously at Esther who I found hard to imagine leaping naked through anything, much less a sacred bonfire. She caught my eye and grinned. I blushed, feeling sure she knew exactly what I had been thinking.

‘Well, let’s hear some of Ben’s ideas for the catering …’

‘Oh yes,’ said Clare, ‘I was at the feast of Imbolc that you did here for Esther. I loved the vegetarian lasagne.’

I gave a tight smile. Vegetarian lasagne is so clichéd, but it seems to dog my footsteps. People like it and I can’t get away from it. When I die, it’ll be on my gravestone.

Here Lies Ben Hunter

He cooked a mean Vegetable Lasagne

‘Well—’ I brought out my tablet ‘—the fact that you’re celebrating with fire kind of conjures up a barbecue …’ I showed them photos of mini-burgers, marinated lamb kebabs, teriyaki-style chicken and tofu brochettes. ‘I decided to go with the fire theme with the salads, beetroot and lentil, the redness mirroring the fire.’

‘Cool,’ murmured Clare. She was giving me a rather ‘come hither’ look. Her eyes, surrounded by the dramatic mascara and eyeliner, smouldered. I felt slightly nervous. She leaned over the table to get a better look at the image on the screen and I averted my eyes from her low-cut blouse.

I tried to take my mind off things by looking around me at my surroundings. I had been in Esther’s kitchen before, using it for the aforementioned Feast of Imbolc. It was a massive room, extremely well equipped. The three of us were seated on stools around the centre island with which every large kitchen these days seems to be furnished. I had already made a small stack of plates and now I unzipped the cool-bag I had with me and plated up some of the salads. ‘This is a Lebanese dish, “moussakaat batinjan”; it’s a kind of aubergine stew.’

I watched anxiously as she tasted it. I’m a huge fan of the aubergine, but it’s a divisive vegetable.

Clare frowned at first and then her face brightened. She pushed her jet-black bird’s nest of hair away from her forehead. ‘I think that’s great.’

I felt immensely relieved. The other dishes all went down well.

‘And how much will all this come to?’ she asked. I tapped the tablet, seeking shelter in the white screen with the figures in black. I hate the whole business of asking for money. I find it embarrassing, ridiculously so.

The invoice I was quoting from had actually been prepared by Jess. She had seen my original quote and said, ‘Are you crazy? No wonder you can’t afford any staff. Give it to me.’

I propped the tablet up between Clare and me, creating a kind of shield while she frowned at the numbers.

‘It’s not cheap I’m afraid,’ I apologised (I could almost hear Jess’s exasperated voice: ‘FFS, man up, you’re not a charity’).

‘That’s not a problem,’ said Esther cheerfully. ‘Clare’s husband’s job is as a treasurer – he’s got loads of money.’

Clare rolled her eyes, then looked closely at the figures in front of her and nodded in agreement. ‘That looks fine,’ she said.

I was pathetically grateful. God knows why. When you compared my invoice to a lot of things – the work being done on my old Volvo, plumbing, that kind of stuff – it was perfectly reasonable. And they would certainly get their money’s worth. The witches of Milton Keynes were going to be very well fed; it would be a NoBWic do to remember.

‘Where’s the Feast being held?’ I asked. I wondered if it would be in her house and garden like Esther had done previously. Clare sounded wealthy. I knew vaguely that only large companies had treasury departments and treasurers so I was guessing that her house would be sizeable. Particularly in North Bucks where property was a lot cheaper than round here.

‘It’s going to be at the local cricket club.’ Clare smiled. ‘I thought we’d need space to do our rituals if the weather is bad. We can always use the pavilion. It might be the Summer Solstice but that’s no guarantee of anything. I’ll text you my address and postcode and you can come round a few days before – shall we say the thirtieth of May?’

I checked my calendar on my phone. ‘That’d be great.’

‘We’ll talk things over at my place …’ She pushed a hand through her hair. ‘Then we’ll go down … down to the cricket club …’ Clare batted her eyelashes at me, and I smiled nervously. She had managed to imbue the words ‘cricket club’ with a kind of lascivious air, as if a cricket club were some kind of orgiastic hot-house.

I stood up. ‘Ladies,’ I said, ‘it’s been a pleasure.’

As I left, I thought with relief of my impending stakeout of the porn shop on Monday. It would be a lot less scary than a meeting at Clare’s house.

Chapter Eleven

I got up early the next day and drove to Byfield, the nearest big town, about half an hour by car from my place. I was at the station by seven-thirty. It was more or less an hour to Marylebone although there were faster trains that did it in forty minutes. The platform was already thronging with bleary-looking commuters, less than thrilled by the prospect of a day’s work in London.

I was feeling a mixture of emotions: the thrill of the chase (which one of Justin’s team would turn up to collect the money?), apprehension (there was obviously going to be a confrontation, possibly violent, certainly abusive) and a certain sense of worry (that the whole thing might be absolutely futile and nobody would show up).

On balance, I suspected that someone would come to collect the money. The fact that the payment was made on a Monday, a day that everyone in the team had off, was a strong indicator that he or she would come to pick up the cash. And it was a lot of money. What successful blackmailer would be able to resist going straightaway to grab that money-stuffed envelope?

The alley – it was called a mews, but it wasn’t – off Greek Street in Soho in the centre of London was a place that I knew relatively well. Not because I used to buy porn there, but because I used to work round the corner in an airless basement kitchen of a forty-cover restaurant that did steak and very little else.

I would stand, hunched over a chargrill in the tiny room, while the ticket machine spooled out infinite requests for fillet, ribeye and sirloin and the commis endlessly fried thin chips, or ‘pommes allumettes’ as they were rather pretentiously described on the menu, and plated up garnishes for me. After a week in there, no matter how much I showered and scrubbed myself raw, a faint, pervasive odour of charred meat clung to me wherever I went. My girlfriend at the time didn’t like it, but if I went anywhere that had cats or dogs, be it friends’ flats, parks or pubs, I attracted an interested animal audience.

Swings and roundabouts, I guess.

The shop front was whited out, the legend ‘EROS SHOP ADULT BOOKS, DVDS AND MAGS’ emblazoned in blue across the top. I wondered how it was surviving in this age of downloadable porn. I guessed it must have a predominantly elderly clientele. It was nine-thirty a.m. and the place had only just opened. There was a small independent café opposite with a window overlooking the porn emporium. I sat there with a good view of the door and ordered a cup of tea.

At ten o’clock I saw Justin enter the alley and stride into the shop. He was wearing a hoody to hide his long hair and sunglasses to help disguise his face. I waited and a few minutes later Justin exited the shop.

Time passed. I ordered more tea and watched several men enter the shop opposite. They fell into two groups: either furtive, looking around guiltily before going in, or feigning nonchalance. Nobody really wants to be seen to be going into a porn shop – it’s not something to feel proud about. I pondered this too. I was getting to do a lot of thinking today.

Once again, I wondered who the Judas figure would be. It was all too easy to imagine, the resentment building up inside as you worked your butt off in Justin’s successful restaurant while he got all the plaudits, the money, the beautiful wife, all the gifts the world could throw at him, and you were there slaving away for a comparative pittance. But now you could think, as you watched him, I’ve cut you down to size; I’ve got my revenge.

Was it Tom, the development chef? He was my favourite choice. But perhaps it was a wild card like Octavia?

I drank another three cups of tea and played with my phone. The girl behind the counter must have wondered what I was doing in there. A few more guilty-looking men entered the shop, each leaving shortly afterwards with a plain blue plastic bag in hand.

I ordered another tea; my bladder was uncomfortably full but I worried that the moment I used the café’s loo would be the moment my quarry walked into the shop.

I shifted uncomfortably on my stool then took my phone out and scrolled through the photo album to look again at the selfie I had taken of myself and Justin’s brigade.

There they all were, the suspects.

Andrea, face thunderous with disapproval, if not naked hatred. Tall, sinewy, disappointment and resentment etched into the lines on his face. I had worked with sous-chefs like him before, those who would never be quite good enough to make it as a head chef. I guessed he had tried and failed a couple of times, let down by lack of imagination or an inability to inspire his team. I knew him to be competent but I guessed that his main attraction for Justin was that he would be able to keep order in his kitchen, the way that a kindly officer in the army might use a terrifying Sergeant Major to keep the troops in order.

Next to him was Tom, Justin’s development chef. He would be the one to help Justin turn theory into reality and also help come up with new ideas for Justin’s TV shows. I had googled him and found his LinkedIn profile. He had come a long way in a short time. I counted two Michelin-starred restaurants he had worked in. But that’s often the way with being a chef – it’s a pretty steep learning curve. He had a tough, competent face and a powerful physique, with bull-like shoulders. He was heavily tattooed and had a hipster beard.

I guessed that of all of the brigade he looked the most likely blackmailer. He had the kind of face that spoke of self-love, the kind of man that I suspected would have no qualms about trampling someone underfoot to get ahead. And bodybuilders are famously narcissistic. There was also an air of violence about him. Maybe it’s because I have spent time in prison where you inevitably become attuned to that kind of thing, but I can sense it in a person and I’m rarely wrong.

Then Murdo, tall and gangly with his man bun adding another couple of inches to his height. I felt that I could disregard him. He was the youngest of the brigade. Surely blackmail was not a young person’s activity?

My attention shifted to the women in the photo. Octavia, the posh intern. Because of TV showing the more glamorous side of things, the privately educated, or the university-educated come to that, were dipping their toes into the catering sea, but they were still an unusual occurrence in the kitchen. It was no surprise to find one with Justin, who had his employees working essentially civilised hours. Charlotte had described their days.

Right now, they were engaged in the run-up to the Earl’s opera fortnight, which actually ran to nearly three weeks. The pop-up restaurant would keep them busy for the last week of June, which would be the setting-up time, and then the first three weeks of July. The Marylebone restaurant was still very much going but that coasted along, its wheels oiled by Justin’s growing fame.

I had asked Charlotte how they spent their time when there wasn’t such a gig available. Their usual work was in the development kitchen for a forthcoming TV series. That was the bulk of it. I gathered that there were public cookery displays at gastro-fairs and exhibitions, and TV appearances, mainly on daytime shows. Even a five-minute Justin slot involved quite a few hours’ prep to make sure that everything was seamless and there were no glitches.

Charlotte ran everything behind the scenes while Douglas, her timid sidekick, did all the humdrum but time-consuming work, mainly involving numbers. I gathered he was indispensable. He worked out not only staff costings, expenses and the like, but also liaised with Tom on dish costs. When a dish appeared in a magazine, it was Douglas who would tot up how many calories and how much it would cost, down to the last spurt of balsamic vinegar. I had to do this for the restaurant and knew what a chore it could be.

I wondered idly if he might be the one turning the screws on Justin. He was obviously good at organising things; I couldn’t imagine Charlotte hiring him otherwise. But he seemed such an unlikely criminal. I have to say that most criminals I have met look the part, myself included.

I gathered that Octavia often played the role of the clueless viewer at home during the testing. When the team had perfected a recipe, they would try the instructions on the intern to see if it made sense.

Was Octavia smarting under the lack of respect that the others were showing her? I could sympathise.

Did the fact that she was incompetent compared to the other chefs rankle with her? I doubted she was used to being the underdog. I was pretty sure she didn’t need the money if she was the blackmailer, but she might be enjoying making Justin sweat.

Standing next to her was the jowly, petulant-looking Gregor. Four thousand would buy a lot in Hungary. I had managed to learn that much about him, that and the fact that he had been a pastry chef at the Ritz. I had worked with a fair few chefs from Eastern Europe and they tended to think that the Brits were like spoiled children and didn’t know the meaning of hard work or hardship come to that.

And then last, but not least, Aurora.

I didn’t need a picture of her to remember her. That imperious, beautiful face, the oval brown eyes, the lustrous, coarse-looking dark hair cut in an artful, tousled boyish way, the very full sensual lips, the hint of an amazing body under the T-shirt that had shown her swan tattoo. Could envy of Justin’s good fortune in having her cause someone in the team to want to poison Justin’s happiness, to bring him down even more? You could do considerable jailtime for blackmail. I should know.

I had been in prison with a guy doing two years for setting up fake social media accounts pretending to be a woman and then extorting money from men who had been conned into sending compromising photos and texts.

It was a big risk to run. But hatred of Justin could be as big a part as love of money. And surely you would have to seriously dislike someone to be able to work with them, smile with them, laugh with them, when all the while you were stabbing them in the back?

Charlotte had told me that the image, the brand, of Justin was what they were protecting and I believed her. But could there be more to it? Nothing was ever as simple as it appeared.

The pain in my bladder was intolerable and I slid off my stool. At the precise moment that I thought, ‘I don’t care if I miss anyone’, I saw Justin’s blackmailer turn into the alley and head straight for the shop door.

Chapter Twelve

I quickly used the café’s facilities to relieve my aching bladder and hurried back to my place at the window.

I called Justin.

‘It’s me.’

‘I know, any news?’

At that moment, Andrea left the shop and stood for a moment, holding one of its plain blue carrier bags. He looked around him with the same cold distaste that he had used in my kitchen. I had to hand it to him, there was no furtive scuttling away or the fixed look of determination on his face that the shop’s other customers had, the kind of look that was supposed to indicate that no, they hadn’t been in the sex shop, that they’d just happened to have passed it.

Andrea, by contrast, had his usual scowl in place. His expression said, yes, I have just bought a load of porn, what are you going to do about it?

Part of me was relieved that it was him, that it wasn’t someone I’d liked – Murdo, for example – but part of me was also disappointed. I didn’t like Andrea, but he hadn’t struck me as two-faced. My feelings weren’t important though. I had done the most important part of my job.

‘It’s Andrea,’ I said. ‘What do you want me to do?’

‘Nothing, I need to think.’ Justin sounded confused, panic-stricken almost. I guessed, for whatever reason, that of all his suspects, Andrea had been for him the least likely. I had to guess because Justin had refused to tell me who he most suspected. He said it might prejudice me.

‘Give me that …’

There was background noise. A new voice on the phone, which I recognised as Charlotte’s.

‘Go after him, get the money back and warn him off.’ She certainly sounded decisive. Time to implement Part Two of her plan.

Andrea lit a cigarette – no vaping for him – and walked out of the alley into Greek Street. I followed him, hoping he wouldn’t turn around and recognise me. The narrow streets of Soho were no place for an argument that might get physical.

I left the café, my phone still pressed to my ear. I think I had some kind of half-baked idea that I could hide behind it, like people in the old days used to behind a newspaper. You can’t see me, I’m invisible, I have an iPhone pressed to my ear.

He didn’t turn around. I walked behind him, keeping about twenty metres back. Soho was quiet at that time of morning. The creative types who worked in film and advertising were shut up in their offices and workplaces, and it was too early for the crowds who would flock here to eat and drink at lunchtime in the long, thin, fashionable streets.

‘Threaten him?’ I wanted clarification.

‘Yes, say you’ll, oh I don’t know, break his arms or something, scare him!’ came Charlotte’s confident reply.

‘I’ll do my best,’ I said, ending the call.

All this was going to her head. It was a suggestion I had no intention of following. I was not going to assault someone in central London purely on her say-so.

The morning in the narrow Soho streets was uncomfortably warm. Andrea was dressed for the occasion in skintight white jeans and a form-fitting T-shirt. I wondered how much space four thousand pounds in notes would take up? Not a great deal probably, but he had to be carrying it in the plastic bag; there would be no room in those jeans.

I hid in a doorway while Andrea checked out the menu of a restaurant in Greek Street. Well, mate, I thought to myself, as of today, you’ll be looking for another job. Very soon you’ll be back breaking your balls doing seventy-hour weeks in Soho.

I fiddled with my phone and checked my texts. I read the text I had received from Jess then I switched my phone off. We close early on a Sunday after lunch and I hadn’t been around for the Sunday service. I had left Andrea to get on with it by himself. This was the first time I’d communicated with Jess since the previous morning.

A cold rage was rising inside me.

Click. And that is how I felt now, click, as if someone had pushed a button in me. A button marked ‘anger’.

It’s your unlucky day, Andrea, I thought grimly.

Part of me is civilised and genteel. Part of me is hard-working conscientious chef. And part of me is a former ABA Southern Welterweight challenger and a man who did two years inside for violence. Sometimes, just sometimes, I can be a man who you really do not want to meet.

I followed Andrea now, up the road to Soho Square. Charlotte was going to get her money’s worth at last.

Chapter Thirteen

Soho Square is a small, rectangular garden surrounded by offices that used to be residential houses, and a couple of churches. Despite the proximity of Oxford Street and the Charing Cross Road, it’s often pleasantly quiet. The garden in the centre is mainly grass, with a kind of hut in it and a statue of King Charles II. I thought to myself that King Charles had doubtless seen a great deal of violence in his life and now he was going to see a bit more.

At lunchtime this place would be carpeted with office workers eating al fresco, but right now there was nobody but myself and Andrea. I caught up with him just as he went through the entrance gate.

‘I want a word with you!’

He turned around in surprise. He saw me and his expression changed from one of minor petulance to one of maximum irritability.

‘What are you doing here?’ He scowled at me.

I reflected that the Italian accent, generally so charming, was conspicuously not so pleasant coming from the sous-chef.

‘You’ve been harassing my staff,’ I said quietly, moving in close to him. Andrea was taller than me and I wanted to be in range.

There was, in all fairness to Andrea, no feigned indignation, no pantomime of incredulity.

He sneered. ‘What did that bitch say then? I just tried to play with her tette.’

He mimed, or started to mime, holding a pair of breasts. I’ve never really liked mime and I didn’t mime punching him; I hit him in the face with a right hook that sent him sprawling onto the grass. King Charles II stared stonily ahead, ignoring the commoners brawling at his feet.

Andrea sat up, or rather pushed himself upright with one hand, then looked at me, or in my general direction – he was quite dazed.

I glared at him. There was no question that the fight, if you could call it that, was over. Andrea shook his head to clear it and gazed at me with hatred.

I snatched the plastic bag off him.

‘Don’t ever come near my restaurant again,’ I said, pleasantly. ‘Oh, and by the way, Justin says he knows what you’ve been up to, and as of this moment, you’re sacked. And, if you cause him any more grief, I’m going to finish what I started here, OK?’

He climbed unsteadily to his feet and rubbed the side of his face. I had hit him on the jaw and cheekbone but the skin hadn’t split. I guessed that the next day he would have a stunning black eye. Good. I felt a lot calmer now and considerably more cheerful.

I thought he’d got off lightly. I was very fond of Jess and he’d really upset her.

He glared at me with hatred. He wasn’t savouring the moment, that was for sure. However, I didn’t like Andrea and I wasn’t going to pass on any mindfulness techniques to him. He spat at my feet.

‘Justin knows what?’ he demanded.

I frowned – maybe I wasn’t getting through to him.

‘About your stupid extortion, and if it carries on, I won’t tap you gently like I just did, capisce?’

‘Tell Justin, vaffanculo.’

He made an Italian gesture by grabbing his right bicep with his left hand and fist pumping the air. I don’t speak Italian too brilliantly but Andrea was clearly adept at miming. It was brave of him to do it since the first one had cost him a black eye and maybe a tooth or two (there had been blood in his saliva).

He got to his feet and dusted himself down, then turned on his heel and strode off in the direction of Oxford Street with his characteristic, jerky, high-shouldered walk.

Well, I thought, watching him depart, that was all over and had gone remarkably well. Two birds with one stone. I had avenged Jess and dealt with the blackmail problem. I felt very pleased with myself and a great deal richer.

I sat down on a wooden bench and contemplated Charles II, who returned my stare. Stonily. I looked around me to see if my tête-à-tête with Andrea had attracted any attention. It seemed not. The gardens were still empty apart from two stylish women in their twenties walking towards me from the direction I had come in. They obviously hadn’t seen anything untoward.

I opened the bag and took out a manila A4 envelope. I opened it and shook out its contents onto my knees. Not four thousand pounds in banknotes.

Two DVDs – Schoolgirl Super Sluts, and Office Orgy Secretaries – fell into my lap, their front covers lavishly, luridly illustrated. I picked them up, one in each hand, and looked at them disbelievingly. They were shrink-wrapped, the money obviously wasn’t hidden inside.

I stared at them again, the stupid way you do when you can’t believe something’s happened, like endlessly patting your pockets up and down if you’ve lost your car keys or wallet.

No. No mistake. Just then, the two women passed me on my bench while I stared at the DVDs, the half-naked women and Day-Glo lettering both highly visible.

I glanced up. Our eyes met. The women’s faces wore expressions of unalloyed contempt, disgust and dislike. I was holding a DVD in each hand and I smiled weakly and gave a helpless shrug as if to say, things are not what they seem, these are not mine.

I conspicuously failed to get my message over. I think it came across more as a kind of leer.

‘You effing old pervert!’ one snarled at me as they walked by.

‘You dirty old slaphead!’ added the other.

Their heels clicked angrily past me. Slaphead, I thought faintly.

I put the boxes back in the bag and the bag in the bin next to the bench.

Savour the moment, I thought gloomily thinking back to my mindfulness project. Savour the moment. I stared mournfully at the backs of the two women as they reached the far side of the square.

I was going off mindfulness.

One of them turned towards me, her fingers curved, her thumbnail touching the tip of her ring finger and jiggled her hand up and down.

More mime. It was becoming that kind of day.

She shouted something but a taxi horn blared so all I caught was a word that sounded like ‘… anchor!’

I stood up gloomily and walked the other way.

My back was now starting to ache.

More negative emotions for my hips to deal with, as my yoga teacher would say. I made my painful way to Tottenham Court Road tube station and home.

Chapter Fourteen

‘And what time did this alleged incident take place?’

It was seven p.m. on Monday. It was all very different from the narrow, cosmopolitan streets of Soho. Outside the Old Forge Café, it was a beautiful summer evening. The village green that my restaurant fronted on to was lush and verdant. The sound of families with their small children in the playground diagonally opposite carried clearly in the warm air. I could hear a tractor in the large field behind the green. The beer garden of the Three Bells was full of cheery, tipsy builders. In short, all was well with the world.

With one or two exceptions.

One being that my relationship with Justin and his blackmail problem had irrevocably and dramatically changed.

Andrea was dead, stabbed seemingly, and DI Slattery was keen to know about his relationship with me. Slattery was sitting opposite me, accompanied by a colleague with acne whose name I hadn’t caught. He looked ridiculously young to be a policeman. The three of us were sitting in my empty restaurant. Like many places, we closed on a Monday, my one day off a week.

‘Oh, about ten or eleven this morning.’

My mind had replayed this scenario over and over again. The wait in the café opposite EROS, following Andrea through Soho, the fight in the park, the humiliating incident with the women. Up until then it had all been, well, not exactly light-hearted – Andrea had revealed himself as an unpleasant, sex-obsessed predator and blood had been shed – but relatively unserious.

And now this. It could hardly be more serious.

‘Mm-hmm.’ He consulted his notebook and read back, ‘… I had received a text message that Andrea Lombardi had sexually harassed one of my waitresses and when challenged about it, he became abusive, both verbally and physically, forcing me to defend myself vigorously.’

Slattery gave me a sharp look. He knew about my past, my time inside for violence.

‘Vigorously? What does that mean?’

I shrugged. ‘With vigour, energetically. Um, a punch may have been thrown.’

I was beginning to relax a little. I am no stranger to being questioned by the police and at the moment I was perfectly prepared to be as co-operative as possible. I had nothing to hide personally, nothing to feel guilty about. The shock was beginning to wear off. And it had been a shock, the thought that this strong, vital, if unpleasant man, was now lying in a refrigerator in a morgue somewhere.

The younger detective looked at me angrily. ‘His right eye was swollen shut. So that was you then? What happened afterwards …?’ He leant forward aggressively. ‘Did you follow him home? You must have had quite a grudge against him to hit him that hard.’

I stared at him disbelievingly. Was he really suggesting that I had stabbed Andrea to death?

Slattery pushed a hand through his thick, salt and pepper hair. He glanced at his colleague, a look that seemed to say, ‘Turn it down a bit.’

Slattery was a big, burly man. He looked like a gamekeeper with a weathered, tanned face and very powerful forearms. He lived in Hampden Green and had a reputation in the village for possibly being a bent cop, and certainly no stranger to violence. I could well believe it. People were very wary around him.

‘So, he came on to Jess Turner and you belted him.’ Slattery’s tone of voice was sympathetic, kind of, we’ve all been there …

‘Rather more than “came on to her”,’ I said, angrily. ‘He grabbed hold of her, but in a nutshell, yes. And that did the trick. He left me, perfectly alive and well and that was the end of the matter.’

The youthful colleague leant forward. ‘What bothers us is, what were you doing up in London anyway? How did you know that Mr Lombardi would be up there? Were you following him?’

I had absolutely no intention of telling them anything about the business with Justin McCleish. That was Justin’s business.

‘How could I be following him? I don’t know where he lived.’

‘Well, what were you doing in London then?’ persisted the detective.

What was I doing in London? I tried to come up with a plausible explanation.

‘I was going to visit Dennys in Dean Street,’ I said.

The kid-cop seized on this remark. ‘Who is Denny?’ He managed to make the name sound suspicious, fraught with criminality.

‘Could you go and wait in the car, Paul?’ said Slattery with a tone of exasperated impatience. His colleague blinked angrily as if Slattery had slapped him in the face. The DI added for his benefit, ‘Dennys is a shop; it sells catering equipment. It’s in Soho.’

Paul stood up, gave me a final glare, and slunk away, out of the kitchen.

I looked at Slattery. ‘So what exactly happened to Andrea?’ I asked.

‘He was found by his flatmate at two o’clock this afternoon.’ Slattery looked at me with interest. ‘Someone had stabbed him, in the back. Repeatedly.’

I digested this information.

I could honestly say that I wasn’t heartbroken.

‘Well, that’s too bad,’ I said. ‘I guess that you’re going to have a pretty long list of suspects.’

‘And why is that then?’ asked Slattery. ‘By the way, I’ll have that coffee that you’ve forgotten to offer me.’

I looked at him without enthusiasm. Since I had moved to the village the DI hadn’t exactly showered me with unconditional friendship. That’s painting things with rather a rosy glow. He had been actively hostile.

I sighed and went into the restaurant to switch on the coffee machine. Slattery followed. For a big man he was light on his feet. While I was making Slattery his Americano I explained about Andrea’s reputation as told to me by Justin. A ‘ladies’ man’ in Andrea’s eyes, a sex pest in the eyes of the rest of the world.

‘I’d look into aggrieved husbands and boyfriends if I were you, and maybe work colleagues, waiters and waitresses in particular. I’ll bet he was universally hated by Front of House.’ I didn’t need to guess, I just knew he’d have been horrible to the waiting staff.

Slattery nodded and made a note. ‘You’ve had him working here, I believe. What was he like?’

I shook my head in amazement at the village grapevine.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘he was rude, a pain in the arse, charmless. Good chef, mind you, no gripes about his actual work.’

I handed Slattery his coffee.

‘You mentioned a sexual assault on Jess?’

‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘He grabbed Jess from behind, her backside to be precise. And then travelled upwards. So when she apprised me of the situation and I encountered him … well …’ I shrugged. ‘You know the rest.’

‘And you didn’t go back to his flat in Acton and kill him?’ Slattery’s tone wasn’t accusing, more wistful, as if he really had been hoping that was the case but was prepared to accept the fact that it wasn’t.

‘No, I’d already made my point, hadn’t I?’

‘I suppose so,’ said Slattery. We both fell silent for a while. I spoke first.

‘Acton! Was that where he was living?’

I don’t know why I was so surprised but it seemed an odd choice for an Italian chef to live. Well, he had to live somewhere I suppose.

‘It was indeed.’ Slattery looked grim. He fell silent and drank his coffee. ‘How was Andrea viewed by his fellow chefs?’ he asked.

I shrugged. ‘How on earth would I know?’

‘You’ve met them. You’ve been working with them. Andrea obviously knew his killer – he invited them in. Whoever it was that killed him had a pretty hefty grudge against him. You don’t stab someone in their own flat on a whim. There were no signs of a struggle or an argument. It was all very clinical.’

‘I haven’t started yet – they move in to the Earl’s kitchen tomorrow and I’m joining later in the week, so I really don’t know.’ I looked at him questioningly. ‘So you really do think one of Andrea’s colleagues killed him?’

Slattery folded his arms and said, ‘Andrea Lombardi worked from ten a.m. until ten p.m. five days a week, usually six. He went to his local pub, the Crown, in Acton and got pissed on his day off. He didn’t have a regular girlfriend that we know of, but he did have a huge amount of porn, mainly in DVD form. His laptop was clean. He didn’t have any friends or family that we can see. We found some drugs, coke, some weed, nothing unusual. He had a healthy bank balance with no signs of unusual activity. So, in the absence of any obvious suspects, work colleagues are the most likely pool of suspects.’

‘Well, that’s all very logical, DI Slattery.’

I wondered why he was including me in his investigation. Slattery didn’t like me at all. To his credit, he made no bones about it.

‘So, I’m asking you …’ Slattery’s teeth weren’t gritted but they might as well have been, asking me to help him was a sure sign of desperation. ‘If you were to choose a candidate from the small pool of suspects, who would it be?’

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