Murder on the Green

‘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.