by Burke, John
Four Stars for Danger
John Burke
© John Burke 1970
John Burke has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in 1970 by John Long Ltd.
This edition published in 2017 by Endeavour Press Ltd.
Table of Contents
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 One
Just as she was getting hungry and wondering if she had miscalculated the distance and wondering why she had been crazy enough to make this detour anyway, Ellen drove past a road that wasn’t there.
She braked, jarred on for twenty yards, stopped, and reached for her map.
The turn-off was clearly marked. Bryncroeso Hall was clearly marked. She looked up. A belt of firs and beeches encircled the mountain, with heather packed like hazy moss on the higher slopes. Above a dark swatch of woodland she could make out the pseudo-Elizabethan chimneys of the Hall itself. Twisting into a steep turn and losing itself in the sombre green shadows was the paler flicker of the byroad. The only trouble was that it no longer joined up with the road she was on.
Ellen slipped into reverse and backed towards the raw new mound of earth she had fleetingly seen before putting her brakes on. She was almost level with it when a white Cortina came round the bend behind her. It swung wildly out, slid at an angle across the road, and stopped. The driver sat quite still for a moment, then turned slowly on to the grass verge ahead. He got out and walked back.
Ellen ought to have felt chastened. Instead, she felt angry. It would have to be him.
He bent towards her open window.
“Oh. It’s you.”
“As if you didn’t know,” said Ellen pettishly.
“You realise you’re lucky not to have had a bash up the back bumper?”
“I was just looking...”
“You weren’t looking,” said the young man. “Not where you ought to have been looking, anyway.”
“I wish you’d stop following me.”
“Following you?” He shook his head. His eyes were a deep brown, and the shrewd little wrinkles in their corners were deep, too, as though he spent a lot of his time peering into sun and sky and distance, seeking something. “No,” he said, “the only thing I’m following is an itinerary.”
“Well, it’s very odd.”
He straightened up and turned away to study the slope, just as she had done. After a moment he said: “Something is certainly very odd.”
He crossed the road and examined the earth and rubble blocking what should have been the entrance to the byroad. Ellen’s first impulse was to drive on and leave him to it. She was growing even hungrier. There must be another way up to the place. Try the Welsh lamb, whatever else you might say about the place, you ought to try the Welsh lamb. She could almost hear Fiona’s husky, fretful voice; and she was dying, right now, to try the Welsh lamb.
Instead, she got out and went to have a look for herself.
Propped against the hedge was a notice which read:
DANGER
NO ENTRY
ROAD SUBSIDENCE
The surface looked perfectly all right from here. But of course there was no way of telling what happened to it once it began to climb through the woods.
“Wonder how it happened, and how long it’ll take them to clear it?”
He produced a notebook from his pocket as he walked back to the Cortina. A map lay folded open on the seat. He leaned in to check a reference and jotted something in the notebook.
Ellen said: “There must be another way in.”
“There is. A driveway a hundred yards further on. At any rate, there used to be.”
“I’ll try that.”
“I know where we can get a reasonable bite to eat, if that’s what’s worrying you.”
“Thank you.” She made it as frosty as possible. “I like to eat on my own.”
“Or else with a ravenous coachload,” he reminded her.
Ellen got back into her car, cursed second gear for the crunch it made, and drove slowly on.
Sure enough there was another entrance, framed by two tall stone gateposts. Unfortunately the imposing iron gates were shut. Shut and, she observed as she halted, secured by a massive old padlock.
There was another notice. This one read:
CLOSED FOR
REDECORATION
“In July?” Here he was again, drawing up alongside and leaning across to speak through the open window. “It makes no sense.”
“It’s ridiculous.” She ought never to have listened to that exasperating woman, ought not to have been distracted from her set programme, ought to be miles away from here. “Absolutely ridiculous,” she raged, not so much to this intrusive stranger as to herself and the distant Fiona.
He said: “They’ll never get a tourist recommendation this way.”
“I’ll see to that,” said Ellen fervently.
He stared. “As a matter of interest, why’s it so important to you? What are you doing this far off the beaten track?”
“I could ask you the same thing.”
“I asked first.”
Ellen slipped into gear again, this time without a sound, and drove irritably on.
In the seventeenth century a daring young woman named Celia Fiennes rode sidesaddle round the country and reported, with peculiar spelling and wayward punctuation, on what she saw and tasted in every kind of place from stately mansions to deplorable taverns. At the end of the seventh decade of the twentieth century Ellen Sawyer was driving round the country in her red Fiat reporting on what she saw and tasted in converted mansions and deplorable taverns. As a gimmick she had suggested that her route should follow that of the doughty Miss Fiennes, but it would thereby have omitted too many places which had since grown important – “And ninety per cent of our readers won’t have heard of her anyway,” Alec had said.
Alec was consulting editor (an imposing title whose precise meaning even he couldn’t explain) to the Lucullus Press’s range of travel and food guides. It was he who had put up to the board and their American associates the idea of what he tentatively called The Girl’s Good Grub Guide. This stuck as a working title long after the publicity boys began to think gravely about the final name which must carry it to bestsellerdom. Ladies Must Eat...The Gentle Gastronome...Food for the Fair (“Makes me think of candy floss,” snorted Alec)...Suggestions came and went. Most members of staff opted, in memos and conversation, for the contraction Grubby Girls.
The idea was not entirely original. Few profitable ideas in publishing ever are. There had been plenty of articles in magazines and newspapers on the changing role of women in society: any editor with space to fill at short notice could always rustle up some writer willing to moan about injustice to women in the home, in the office, in the entertainment world, and on trains and buses. More than one distinguished novelist, reporter or television personality – television having invented ‘personality’ as a substitute for professional skill of any kind – had from time to time sounded off about bad service in restaurants, embarrassing moments in hotels, and the insolence of taxi-drivers who avoided women passengers because they were believed not to tip lavishly enough.
All Alec proposed was that the essence of such resentments and revelations should be compressed between the covers of a book. It would give the results of a careful study of hotels a
nd restaurants throughout the British Isles as seen through the eyes of a young, attractive, modern woman travelling alone.
“The new young woman,” Alec told his employers, his editors, publicists and sales staff until they could all have recited it in their sleep, “is no longer merely a man’s diffident and deferential companion. Today she has a career of her own, a car of her own, tastes of her own. Women are becoming connoisseurs. They are not just run-of-the-mill cooks in their own cramped kitchens. They dine out alone, or with friends. They know their food and they know their wine. But how are they treated in public places? Where can a woman go and know she’ll be regarded as the equal of some expense-account executive male? Where will she get good service, respect, and value for money? What should she look for and what should she avoid?”
It sounded straightforward enough to start with. Then it began to expand. There must be a tie-in with the needs of foreign visitors, particularly with the American market. More and more ladies were coming to Britain from the United States for holidays; some alone, some with dyspeptic husbands who could be parked out of the way while the womenfolk sought the pleasures of olde-worlde shops and not such ancient food; and some in organised or disorganised package tours – “Granddaughters of the American Gastronomic Revolution,” as Alec put it.
What, then, had the eating places of the land to offer ladies on their own, ladies in couples, ladies en masse?
At the age of twenty-six years and seven months, with coppery hair and green-flecked eyes and a sensitive palate and a staunch digestion, Ellen Sawyer was despatched to find out.
She was to visit widely advertised establishments and lesser-known ones, on some of which they had already collected good or bad reports. She must seek out new places. Every area of the country had to be represented, even if only to be condemned. How satisfactory were booking arrangements; how warm or otherwise the welcome if you arrived unannounced; how well placed or contemptuously tucked away the table to which you, solitary, would be escorted?
Each day it was her duty to eat a representative lunch and dinner and still retain a keen enough critical faculty to make notes on the quality of the breakfast wherever she stayed. So many marks for the standard of the ingredients, so many for preparation and presentation, so many for service, so many for the wine list, so many for the atmosphere, so many for the view from the lavatory window – and, indeed, the condition of the loo itself.
Ellen’s father had been catering manager to a chain of Home Counties hotels. She knew the ideals and knew the adaptations, the short cuts, the dodges and the fiddles.
There was a way of wafting a door to and fro so that the aroma of a few Costa Rican beans scorching on a grill could stimulate the customer’s appetite for the instant coffee that was actually going to be served. Surplus fried eggs could always be found a home in the fridge until next day. The shredding, moistening and crisping of the sad outer leaves of a lettuce; the addition of the workable minimum of stock to the maximum of powdered soup; the sleight of hand with a truthfully labelled wine bottle and the decanting of a warmed substitute, or the removal of a bottle when still a quarter full to add to tomorrow’s Carafe Maison...she had written about all this in magazines and was now being launched on a full-scale book.
Mornings and afternoons she tried to make time for a long walk, fighting off the twin dangers of obesity and literary flatulence.
She discovered esoteric marvels in her homeland. There was a Chinese restaurant in Stoke on Trent where everything other than lychees was served with chips. There were ten more such in Liverpool. She carried away a bemused recollection, of which she was unwilling to commit more than a scribble to paper, of La Gourmande Magnifique in Cleethorpes. Among her hoard of menus and advertisements, just to prove she wasn’t inventing it all, was a clipping which boasted of Real English Country Cooking – our speciality, curry.
It was in a much-publicised hotel some miles from Chester that she first met the man with the narrowed brown eyes and the quizzical mouth.
She had been grimly enjoying the perils of the evening meal. It could not be called either dinner or supper. It was, at best, an early evening meal: typed notices in lift and in each bedroom announced that last orders would not be taken after 8.30 p.m.
For her first course Ellen opted for the hors-d’oeuvre. Always an interesting test. The trolley at the end of the dining room appeared to carry a reasonable array of dishes, but what she received was a plate scattered with a few sardines, some cocktail onions, olives, washy celery and some tomatoes.
Ellen braced herself and said: “May I see the trolley?”
“It’s these tables,” said the waiter. “Makes it difficult, see.”
He went away.
A middle-aged man and woman three tables away looked round apprehensively and disapprovingly. They obviously didn’t like troublemakers.
Ellen made a note, breathed a sigh, and ate.
The menu had some fine flourishes and a lot of spelling mistakes. She chose the Tournedos Chasseur and asked for the wine list. She was not too surprised when the mushrooms proved to be button mushrooms from a tin, the onions most assuredly somebody’s discarded French-fried, and the overall coating a thick brown gravy. The wine list did not appear.
“The wine list, please,” she repeated amiably.
“We’ve got a nice carafe,” said the waiter. “Rouge or white?”
“A list?” She kept it amiable.
He sighed and went away. When he returned and she had selected a halfbottle of Morgon from the uninspiring catalogue, she said: “I’d like it now, please. With my main course.”
The waiter raised his right eyebrow. The restaurant was no more than a quarter full, but it took a long time for him to come back with the right bottle and a corkscrew. In the interim Ellen worked away at a baffling problem: how could a portion of beef so thick and plump have got itself charred right the way through?
A glowing red puddle formed in the bottom of her glass. She tasted it.
The waiter watched her derisively. “All right, then?”
“Thank you, yes.”
It was strange that a red wine could be so chill on a warm evening like this, but Ellen wrote it down in her mind to experience and on paper to posterity. She persevered. She had drunk only one glass and eaten half the blistered beef when the waiter unexpectedly reappeared at her elbow.
“What d’you want for after?”
Ellen champed on a splintering mouthful, gulped, and managed to say: “I haven’t finished this course yet.”
“The chef wants to go home.”
“But it’s only ten past eight.”
“There aren’t enough people here to make it worth him staying.”
Ellen’s tongue cleaned the fragments from her gums and back teeth. She felt a sort of masochistic joy at this final surliness.
The waiter went on, full of sweet reason in spite of her silent provocation: “It’s all right if you want ice-cream or fruit salad or cheese – or the strawberry flan without custard. If you want custard, or our Pancake Pen-y-bryn – that’s our Welsh delicacy, you see – then you’ll have to hurry.”
“I want,” said Ellen firmly, “to finish this course in peace before it gets any colder. I will then decide what else I need.”
“Colder? We’ve never had any complaints before, miss.”
“May I take it that you’ll register this complaint?”
The waiter turned away. A brief glimpse of his profile as he passed the man and woman some tables away showed that he was making a despairing face at them. They returned feeble grins and looked hastily down at their plates again.
Before the waiter could reach the serving door, a young man stood up from a corner table and barred his path.
“Bill, sir?”
“Not yet. I merely want you to know that if the chef does not hold himself at the disposal of that young lady, I shall insist on seeing the manager.”
“Now just a minute, sir...”
&n
bsp; “You will tell the chef to wait until the lady is ready to order her sweet.”
The waiter made a despairing gesture at the array of empty tables. They offered no consolation. This time the man and woman did not display the feeblest of grins. An elderly man near one wall unfolded a newspaper and glared resolutely into it. The waiter lunged through the serving door.
The young man approached Ellen’s table.
“Hope you didn’t mind my stepping in, but I can’t stand that sort of attitude.”
“I was managing very well, thank you.” Ellen did not wish to sound ungracious, but she had no intention of allowing her scientific investigation to be ruined by the intrusion of any Lochinvar, Lohengrin, or anyone of that ilk.
“You shouldn’t be put in a position like that. It’s absolutely essential to take a firm line.”
“Just what I was taking.”
His smile was pleasant but infuriating: its polite tolerance was the last thing she could stand.
He said: “It’s a bit alarming when you’re on your own.”
“I am not alarmed. I enjoy being on my own.”
The serving door opened a crack. Against the yellow light from beyond was silhouetted what could only be part of the waiter’s head.
Ellen added quietly: “I’d like to finish my meal and cope with its problems my own way. But thank you.”
The gallant rescuer returned to his table. The serving door plopped gentry shut again.
Ellen forced down the unappetising mess that was left. Then there was a long pause. Evidently the waiter had changed his tactics. She would now be kept in suspense for as long as they could spin it out.
Nobody in the room spoke.
At last the waiter ambled down the aisle between tables. He picked up her plate and rearranged the knife and fork as though their positioning offended him. “Yes, miss? What’s it to be?”
Ellen inhaled deeply. The thought of anything hot or sweet was too much for her. She said:
“Cheese.”
“Cheese? But after what you said...” The waiter consulted the ceiling, the young man, and the serving door. Then he said: “Cheddar or Danish blue?”
