Incompetence

by Rob Grant

  She disappears into the bedroom. There, she has what she claims is a small marital dispute with her martini-enriched husband. There is yelling, there are threats of lethal action, there is some projectile activity, no more percussive or sustained than an all-out American gunship assault on a Vietnamese village. But all this comes under the heading of normal familial interplay, it would seem, and is irrelevant to subsequent events, since it is followed by a noisy bout of make-up sex, which, to the waiters' ears at least, sounds even more violent and dangerous than the original argument.

  8.05 p.m. The interior designer leaves.

  The party planner asks the chef if he has any aspirin, though she denies she has a headache. The chef tries to persuade her to sit and gather her energies for a few minutes, but she's far too busy to rest.

  Even though she has an exceptionally unhealthy-looking grey pallor and is quite blatantly ill, the waiter hits on her again.

  8.32 p.m. The first guests arrive again.

  Shamelessly, the Lunghers are now the first to arrive, twice. Most people would have had second thoughts about returning at all after their original faux pas. But then, the Lunghers are German, and therefore impervious to embarrassment.

  8.32-8.55 p.m. The rest of the guests arrive.

  That is to say, twenty-three of the twenty-four invitees show up. The twenty-fourth, the hostess's brother, is unable to attend. Ironically, he is bedridden with food poisoning.

  Cocktails are served.

  As are the canaps.

  There is no definitively comprehensive list of the components of the canaps, but they are typical of the current fashion for unusual foodstuffs to tempt the chicly jaded middle-class palate. Certainly, they memorably include mini blinis with sour cream and frog 'caviar', tiny tartlets of emu foie gras foam, liquorice bark 'canoes' stuffed with dry-roasted Granny Smith pips, nasturtium crisps, and some rather brutal-sounding, but evidently popular ennemis mortels: bruschetta spread with cat liver pate and dog butter. Conversation is lively, laughter abounds. Sophisticated fun is had.

  8.55 p.m. The host emerges from the bedroom.

  Though the lighting is fashionably low, he is wearing sunglasses. He meets and greets.

  The party planner takes the host to one side and explains that the chef is ready to serve dinner, and enquires politely as to the approximate ETA of the hostess. The host assures her that his wife will emerge in exceptionally short order.

  10.17 p.m. The hostess finally does emerge.

  The canaps have long since run out, even the frogspawn blinis, the guests are all rather too drunk, and the chef is very close to a murderous rage. The hostess appears oblivious to this. She swoops round the room like a Stuka in strafe mode, machine-gunning air kisses and compliments.

  10.18 p.m. The party planner announces that dinner is served.

  10.30 p.m. The guests are all seated at the table, and the starters are served.

  Now, who ate what, how much of it and when is of critical importance here, so bear with this.

  Of the twenty-five remaining diners, six are vegetarian, two are full-on vegan, three are piscatorians -- vegetarians who eat fish, and five are a bizarre kind of quasi vegetarian who eat fish and chicken. This is quite an unusual haul of pernickety eaters for a French table, and no doubt reflects the pan-European nature of the event, by which I mean there are many English people present. It does very little, though, for the chef's patience.

  Fortunately, the first three light courses are mostly unsullied by meat, and it would appear that most of the guests ate most of them. A Gascon bean and slow-roasted tomato soup is rejected by only one of the guests, largely because the waitress describes the dish to him as 'Gascon fuck piss shit bean soup wank', which largely dims his appetite. And only the vegans feel compelled to turn down a much acclaimed melting red pepper jelly tartlet, because the pastry contains animal fat. Of course, the jelly is made from veal bones, but the chef neglects to bring attention to the fact, and the vegetarian contingent don't appear to suffer any ill effects.

  At least, not yet.

  Finally, in the trilogy of relatively uncontroversial starters, there is a small pasta dish: tagliolini with fresh cep mushrooms. Wild mushrooms are obviously high on the suspicious substances list -- there are some wild mushrooms which are so poisonous, you could die from just handling them -- but these ceps are unlikely candidates: they came from a very reputable supplier, and many other clients enjoyed mushrooms from the same batch without adverse reactions. Surprisingly, the ceps are the most expensive single ingredient in the entire repast. The plates, reportedly, come back clean.

  So, most people ate most of the three first courses.

  The party planner does not eat, officially, though by all accounts she appears to have availed herself of the canaps, more out of nervous energy than hunger, and the kitchen staff thoughtfully prepare small versions of the dishes for her to sample, once the meal is underway.

  The razor clams are less of a hit. They are long, yellowy orange molluscs in thin grey pearlescent tubular shells. Like oysters, they are served live, on their shells, but, unlike oysters, they actually move. They squirm. They twitch. They wriggle away from your touch if you prod them. Now, it's probably programmed deep into human genetic make-up to avoid food that is still fidgeting, and though they are greeted with 'oohs' and 'ahhs' of admiration, and excite much conversation, all but five of them are returned uninjured, having been poked around warily on their shells without managing to excite the appetites even of many of the supposed omnivores. Still, as far as the hostess is concerned, they have done their job. The party will be talked about.

  Boy, will the party be talked about.

  By now a number of the guests have asked for aspirin, and one or two of them appear to suffer some kind of sporadic stabbing pains in their chests.

  The hostess begins to worry that the evening which started so well is beginning to flounder. It is when the eel is served that things start to go rather badly awry.

  10.55 p.m. The vomiting begins.

  The party planner is the first to suffer. The chef recalls that she had been looking greener and queasier for the past hour, and was growing more and more unsteady on her feet, but he'd assumed that was because of the stress and tensions of the day. He tries to cheer her up by showing her, with a flourish, his piece de resistance: the Electric Eel a l'Italien, which is decorated with cleverly crafted sugar-worked light bulbs that actually glow.

  She puts a rather unconvincing, brave, green face on things, attempts to make suitably impressed noises, then throws up, violently and uncontrollably, over the chef's hands, three of the plated meals and most of a waiter. This occurs in the kitchen, out of sight of the dinner party, and though one of the female waiters claims the vomiting was blatantly audible at the table, none of the guests acknowledges it.

  By now, almost everyone seems to be struggling to conceal a headache. A couple of guests are clearly experiencing breathing problems. Conversation around the table is growing more and more subdued and stilted.

  In the staff washroom, behind the kitchen, the party planner is still throwing up, while the waiter she decorated with her stomach contents is optimistically trying to sponge down his uniform. He is amazed at the amount of vomit the young woman is able to disgorge, while at the same time making curiously tuneful groans of distress at operatic volume. Brilliantly realising her powers of resistance will be at their lowest ebb at this moment, he takes the opportunity to proposition her again.

  The chef, meanwhile, has managed to sanitise the kitchen again, re-portion the eel, and the fish course is served.

  11.10 p.m. (approximately) The vomiting stops.

  As the final plate is delivered, the chef notices that the party planner is no longer making sick noises. He makes a final check on the horse ragout, before popping into the washroom.

  The party planner is on her knees with her face in the toilet bowl. He asks if he can help.

  She does not reply.

&n
bsp; She does not move.

  Gently, he puts his hands on her shoulders and lifts her head out of the bowl. Her eyes are open, but there is no life in them. She doesn't appear to be breathing.

  The chef puts two fingers to her neck. There is a pulse, but it seems unusually faint. He puts his hands under her armpits and drags her out into the kitchen.

  He tries to sit her in a chair, but she keeps sliding off. In the end, he lays her on the floor, puts a cushion under her head and covers her with a rug.

  He takes out his mobile phone and calls an ambulance.

  Unfortunately, he is far, far too late.

  11.22 p.m. The vomiting begins again.

  The hostess is really beginning to worry now. Conversation has all but ceased around the table, and nobody is touching the eel. She tries desperately to get things going again, but it's all she can do to elicit a polite nod in response to her prompts. A few people can't help groaning. Someone expels a long, unearthly fart that seems to last for many, many minutes, varying impressively in timbre and tone, like an alpine horn player being thrown off a rather big... alp. The perpetrator does not even apologise, but no one seems to care.

  Mr and Mrs Lungher are the first to go. Naturally. They are seated at opposite corners of the table, and they launch their first plumes almost simultaneously, each looking painfully in the other's direction, so their discharged loads arc towards the stunning floral centrepiece in the middle of the table, giving almost total coverage of the tablecloth.

  This is too much for the many guests who've been struggling against the inevitable. A concerto of vomiting begins. There is a decidedly unchivalric rush for the lavatory, in which two of the smaller women who have probably fainted are quite badly trampled.

  The toilet facilities are, of course, wretchedly inadequate to cope with even a small proportion of the guests' sudden irresistible requirements, even though the bath, the sink, the bidet and the shower tray are all amply put to use. The afflicted who are excluded fight, literally, for space at the windows in the dining room and the bedroom, and the long streaks of multicoloured vomit they produce down the face of the white-stuccoed apartment block are clearly visible many kilometres away, and probably will remain so for the foreseeable future.

  11.35 p.m. The ambulance arrives.

  Nineteen minutes after the chef's phone call. Quite an impressive response time for a Saturday night in Paris. Unfortunately, as he leaps from the decelerating vehicle, one of the team slips on a slick pool of puke and twists his ankle badly.

  Crouching to attend to him, his partner is hit on the head by an impressive plume of projectile vomit which has been accelerating at thirty-two feet per second for thirty-nine floors. His collar-bone is snapped and he is rendered unconscious, so the third team member is forced to devote his attention to reviving the other two, and a second ambulance is summoned.

  The chef, who by now has abandoned all hope that his main course or any of his clever puddings will be able to tease the guests' appetites back to normal, and realising that he may never be allowed near a balloon whisk ever in his life again, returns to the kitchen to escape the chundering melee. He catches the waiter unbuttoning the party planner's blouse and slipping his hand inside her bra.

  She is comatose.

  The waiter's claim that he was loosening her clothing in accordance with his first aid training fails to impress the chef, who attacks the waiter violently with a ladle.

  11.42 p.m. (probably) The party planner dies.

  Having assuaged a good part of his rage on the sex addict waiter, the chef checks the party planner's pulse again, and finds none. He gives her mouth-to-mouth and heart massage for several minutes, but the cause is clearly lost.

  The hostess appears to be the only one of the diners unaffected by sickness. She races around the room in a panic, cooing useless words of comfort and asking people who are quite clearly nanoseconds away from terminal corpsehood if they're feeling all right.

  She comes across one of the B-list celebrities, who famously plays a surgeon in a popular Eurowide TV hospital show, and asks if he can use any of his medical expertise to help the others. Bizarrely, he agrees, and starts examining an unconscious woman, before his stomach cramps get the better of him again, and he collapses, groaning, to the floor.

  11.52 p.m. More medical assistance arrives. This time it's a paramedic on an ambulance motorbike. He fails to hear the urgent warnings of the first ambulance team, brakes far too hard on a slippery bilious slick and skids sideways into the metal railings around the apartment building. Fortunately, he appears to be relatively unscathed. He gets up immediately and dashes into the building.

  Unfortunately, he is almost certainly suffering from shock, and possibly even a minor concussion, because he eschews the obvious benefits of the elevator and elects to race up the emergency stairs to the thirty-ninth floor. Between floors twenty-two and twenty-three, he decides to lie down for a little rest, and he sleeps, undiscovered, for thirty-six hours.

  11.55 p.m. A third emergency team arrives.

  This time in a fire engine.

  This is standard practice. Should the primary emergency service prove unable to respond to a call out, the fire service is the de facto back-up. The firemen are trained to give rudimentary medical assistance, and that training is fairly broad.

  Sadly, it does not cover lethal poisoning.

  Still, the firemen are at least able to assist the first, injury-ridden medical team up to the apartment, and they are capable of finding the elevator and staying awake till they get there.

  12.02 p.m. The medical team actually arrives at the disaster scene.

  Forty-six minutes after the chef's first desperate phone call.

  Things are not pretty.

  Every square centimetre of every conceivable surface is dripping with vomit, including the ceiling and the frighteningly expensive Venetian crystal chandelier.

  Most of the guests are draped, immobile, around the room. A few of them are still sufficiently fit to manage a spot of aimless crawling. Only one or two are still retching. The hostess is sitting in the corner of the room, sobbing gently.

  The stink is close to unendurable, and the firefighters put on their smoke masks.

  The chef, the sous-chef and two of the waiters are doing what they can to bring comfort to the few who are still capable of caring.

  In the kitchen, a fireman finds another waiter, with a bruised face and a bloody nose, who appears to be attempting to strip the knickers off a woman's corpse. He gives the waiter a savage kicking.

  Most of the victims are comatose by the time they're stretchered down to the ambulance, and only two of them survive as far as the hospital.

  ===OO=OOO=OO===

  On the night, Twenty-five are dead, including all of the guests, the host, and the party planner. The commis chef and one of the waiters survive as far as the hospital's ICU. The commis pulls through, but two days later the waiter expires. The only survivors unaffected by the poison are the hostess, the chef, the sous-chef and the three remaining waiters.

  Now, here's a shortlist of the investigating officer's problems. As far as he can tell, there doesn't seem to be any kind of sensible link between who ate what, and who died and who survived. Autopsy results, even if they were accurate, would be scant use in this regard, in that none of the victims had any stomach contents to report on. The hostess, who, of course, originally approved the menu, claims to have eaten everything, up to and including the eel. She didn't eat all the food exhaustively, it being her habit, as is apparently the fashion in her circle, always to leave half of what she's served. The chef insists he tasted everything, quite frequently at various stages in the cooking process, in order to adjust the seasoning correctly. The party planner had little nibbles of a few of the dishes, but probably no more than the chef. And yet she was the first to succumb to the poison, and the first to die.

  It's obvious to you, of course, when the poison was administered, and it's obvious to me. Bu
t then we have the benefit of a clean and probably accurate report.

  The forensic reports, as you might expect, are ambiguous: four separate pathologists conducted the autopsies, including Dr Rutter, and, naturally, they disagree over just about everything, including the cause of death. The majority verdict, though, is cyanide poisoning.

  Superintendent Debary's conclusion is that it's manslaughter by catering carelessness, and arrests the chef. But Superintendent Debary is wrong.

  It's murder of course.

  In fact it's another perfect murder.

  FIFTEEN

  It's a perfect murder, because even when you know how it was done, there's no way to prove it.

  I put the report together in the Paris apartment, rather than the hotel room, because I had my computer there, and I figured I'd be undisturbed.

  I needed to consult with a toxicologist who actually knew what he was talking about. Such people still do exist, but they're never going to climb the career ladder, and they're a dying breed.

  I called up a guy I've used before. He's a research assistant in London University's poison and toxicology department; one Jonhan Linder. He's been a research assistant there for forty-two years, and he's unlikely to make professor for the next forty-two. He's possibly the world's leading authority on toxins, and if I told you what his take-home pay was, you'd be weeping from now till Christmas.

  He came on screen almost immediately, and smiled when he saw my face. I was a guy who gave him interesting problems, and he liked that.

  I laid out the Fabrizi story for him, and he listened intently.

  'Frogspawn?' he asked.