Murder on the Green

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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