Chef Maurice and the Bunny-Boiler Bake Off (Chef Maurice Cotswold Mysteries Book 3)

by J. A. Lang

  “Comment?” Chef Maurice looked up from slicing yet another joint of sirloin. A perfectly even tranche of moist, just-pink beef fell to the chopping board as he spoke. “Hah, you think you are ready to be a head chef—that you are, as they say, worth the salt! And yet, you cannot even find it?”

  Patrick sighed, walked over and grabbed the stainless steel tub from beside his boss’s elbow.

  Chef Maurice tut-tutted. “Alf, the roast potatoes. They are in?”

  “Oui, chef!” Alf, tipped a pot of boiled potatoes into a sizzling tray of goose fat, shoved it back into the oven and slammed the door. “How comes people always say someone is ‘worth their salt’, anyway?”

  “Humph,” said Chef Maurice, now tonging a generous three slices of beef onto each waiting plate. “It is because of the English and their idiots.”

  “You mean idioms,” said Patrick. “It’s not the English who have idiots.” This last part was muttered under his breath.

  “Aha, I have the answer.” Chef Maurice jabbed his tongs in the air, like an orchestra conductor struck with a good idea. “It is because salt brings out the best flavour in a dish, but it cannot improve a dish that is already bad. So a man who is worth his salt, is one who already has worth!”

  At that thought, he grabbed the salt tub back off Patrick.

  “A more common theory,” said Patrick, “is that it comes from how the Romans used to pay their soldiers in salt, because it was so valuable back then. It’s where the word ‘salary’ comes from, too.”

  “Cor,” said Alf, giving the tub of salt a look of newfound respect. Then he frowned. “So what did they do when it rained and their salt got all wet? Wouldn’t it just disappear?”

  “Good question,” said Patrick, with the faintly worried look of a man who has suddenly had his long-held beliefs put to the test.

  “The Roman soldiers,” said Chef Maurice, slicing away, “also had the most grave punishments for those who deserted their armies.”

  He moved off to check on the latest batch of Yorkshire puddings, and that was the end of that discussion.

  Aside from the busy reservations diary, Chef Maurice had another reason for putting his nascent murder case on a brief hold. The important thing about crime investigation, he knew, especially the bits requiring the somewhat illegal entering of a property that did not belong to you, was to always make sure to take along a friend. Ideally one who could not run as fast as you.

  Arthur, currently up in London at a food writing symposium, fitted this role abundantly well, so it wasn’t until the Monday morning after that the two friends could be found loitering across the street from the doorway leading up to Miranda Matthews’ flat, which occupied the space above a milliner’s shop on Cowton’s High Street.

  The door was open, but the yellow-and-blue-checked police car pulled up on the curb outside was currently deterring any move on their part.

  “So what exactly are we planning to do once the police finish their business up there?” said Arthur. “It’s not like they’re going to hand us the keys as they leave.”

  “Ah, do not worry. When you were away just now to buy the coffee, I went to make some preparations.” Chef Maurice adjusted his pork-pie hat, the one he kept for special outings, and blew on his styrofoam cup of black coffee. “Now, we simply wait.”

  Arthur decided it was best not to ask his friend what these preparations had entailed. When one spent any length of time around Chef Maurice, one soon learnt that plausible deniability was a good position to be able to maintain.

  “Don’t you think we should have started off talking to people who knew Miranda? Instead of indulging in a light spot of breaking and entering?”

  “Bah. People, they can lie. But to see a person’s home, it is like stepping into the soul of the owner. The house, it is an Englishman’s castle, is it not?”

  “Yes, and that’s why we don’t go around mounting attacks on those belonging to other people.” Across the street, the police were filing out down the narrow staircase. Thankfully for Arthur and Chef Maurice, PC Lucy was not amongst their number—she would certainly have questioned their motive for standing around drinking takeaway coffee in the High Street at ten in the morning—but they did catch a glimpse of PC Alistair, struggling down the steps carrying an overflowing box of papers and a laptop.

  The door thudded shut behind the policemen, who then climbed into their car and made a quick departure, accompanied by a spurt of sirens.

  “Allons-y! The investigation, it begins.” Chef Maurice lost no time in hurrying across the road, narrowly missing an altercation with one of the trundling local buses. At Miranda’s front door, he looked around carefully, then drew a teaspoon out from his jacket and jabbed it into the gap between the doorframe and lock. The door popped open.

  “How the—?”

  Arthur leaned in closer. A wine cork (stamped, he noticed, with the name of one of the more exclusive Burgundian domaines) had been wedged into the rectangular metal opening where the lock catch would normally sit.

  “Where the heck did you learn to do that?” he asked, as they shuffled quickly into the cramped hallway and closed the door behind them.

  “Ah, I saw it in a detective programme last year. It was fortunate that the lock here was of a similar construction.”

  The narrow staircase leading up to Miranda Matthews’ flat was dark and slightly dingy, a complete contrast to the architectural marvel above. It was a bright, airy space, spanning the width of the two shops below, with a line of sash windows facing the street and letting in the warm spring sunshine. The floors were washed oak, resembling the pale grey of an upmarket beach hut, and the walls were painted a subtle yet luxurious shade of off-white. The furniture was modern but comfortable, all soft curves and polished wood surfaces.

  “Bit of a fan of wildlife photography, it seems,” said Arthur, admiring a series of framed black-and-white prints, each featuring a dramatic close-up animal portrait. A pensive gorilla knitted his brows at the camera, a toothy lioness yawned in the dusty shade, and a giraffe stood staring regally out across a sunset plain. “Isn’t that a Western lowland gorilla?” he added, having recently watched a documentary on the subject. “Of the genus gorilla, species gorilla, subspecies gorilla?”

  Chef Maurice, who usually confined his interest in the animal kingdom to the more edible species, rubbed his moustache. “The Gorilla gorilla gorilla?”

  “Afraid so.”

  “Interessant.”

  In the open-plan kitchen, which was of course kitted out with all the latest culinary mod-cons, Arthur’s gaze was drawn to the blown-up magazine cover shoot hung up by the window. It showed a twenty-something-year-old Miranda, arms linked cheerfully with a young woman with flame-red wavy hair. They both wore pastel-coloured aprons and flirty smiles aimed at the camera.

  “Gosh, that brings back memories. Cook It Right! Prime Saturday night TV—I remember Meryl making us watch it every week. Always wondered what happened to that other girl. What was her name, Gaby something-or-other?”

  Chef Maurice, who was busy rummaging through the kitchen cupboards, shrugged.

  “She got booted off the show pretty early, I recall. Got mixed up in some kind of scandal.”

  “Scandal?” Chef Maurice looked up from sniffing a jar of artichokes that he’d found in the fridge. He shook his head sadly at the rest of its contents, which consisted of several bottles of sparkling water, a jar of pasta sauce, and a brown-edged lettuce. A chef’s fridge it was not.

  “Yes, I think it might have been to do with drugs. Or something shady going on with one of the producers. I’m sure we could find out, if we need.”

  “Hmm, we will see.” The lettuce was duly consigned to the rubbish chute, and they migrated into one of the bedrooms, which had been converted into a spacious home office. A glass-topped desk was covered in stacks of folders and papers, all showing the hand-sketched logo of a little thatched roof and the words below: ‘The Little Cowton Kitchen’. T
here were also printouts of kitchen layouts, equipment purchase lists and class timing plans.

  “Mademoiselle Miranda was to open a school of cookery?” said Chef Maurice, in the same manner as one just informed that Cruella de Vil was toying with the idea of opening a dog-grooming parlour.

  “Well—” started Arthur, but further comment was curtailed by the sound of the door clicking shut downstairs and the thump of rising footsteps.

  “Quick, mon ami! This could be the murderer, returning to destroy the evidence. We must hide and observe.” With that, Chef Maurice launched himself into the nearby closet.

  Arthur looked around frantically. Miranda’s office did not appear to offer many choices when it came to bodily concealment. Hiding under a glass desk definitely wouldn’t win him the ‘Camouflage of the Year’ award. There would have been the standing-behind-the-door option, except that Miranda had installed sliding doors throughout the flat. As for the wardrobe, the clatter of hangers from inside indicated that Chef Maurice was already more than fully occupying the space within.

  The footsteps had now reached the living room.

  Chef Maurice stuck his head out of the wardrobe. “Why do you not hide? We must not be discovered!”

  “Easy for you to say,” hissed Arthur, eying up the bookcase in the corner. Perhaps if he shifted it forward a tad . . .

  He had just managed to wedge half a hip and an entire leg behind the thing, when he heard a sharp intake of breath behind him.

  “Mr Wordington-Smythe! What on earth are you doing with that bookcase?”

  “Delivery for the kitchen,” announced Dorothy, moving aside to allow through a blue-overalled man wheeling a waist-high cardboard box.

  “Sign here, sir.” A weathered clipboard was thrust under Patrick’s nose.

  Once the man was gone, Patrick and Alf circled the box warily, looking for any hint as to its contents. One could never tell what odd ingredient or item might have last caught their head chef’s eye. Last month it had been a pair of life-sized stone pigs, which now stood guard outside the front door of Le Cochon Rouge, one of them wearing a flowerpot on its head.

  Unfortunately, this box was simply labelled as for the attention of ‘Le Cochon Rouge, Beakley’, with a return address of some Lincolnshire business park.

  Alf tapped a wooden spoon against the side, ears cocked.

  “I don’t think it’s going to bite you, luv,” said Dorothy, watching the antics of the two chefs, hands on hips.

  “That’s what chef said about those spider crabs last week,” said Alf. The crustaceans that passed through their kitchens seemed to always have a bit of a soft spot for the young commis chef—or at least an unerring ability to find his soft spots, and pinch down hard on them.

  “Better get this open, then. Might be something perishable.” Patrick grabbed a paring knife and slit open the top of the box. A shiny leaflet fluttered down at his feet.

  The logo looked tantalisingly familiar.

  Surely it couldn’t be . . .

  He quickly cut away the rest of the cardboard.

  “Cor!” said Alf, mouth agape in wonderment. Then he looked at Patrick. “So what is it?”

  Their kitchen newcomer was a large, gleaming contraption, made of stainless steel, adorned with a row of dials with complicated-looking pictograms, and rather resembling the result of an illicit encounter between a food blender and a galactic spacecraft.

  “It’s a brand-new TM5000 Deluxe Professional ThermoMash,” said Patrick, in awed tones. “It can do practically anything. It chops, stews, mashes, makes ice cream, stocks, bread, cheese. Apparently you can set it to make a perfect hollandaise in ten seconds flat.”

  “Humph, don’t see what’s so impressive about that,” said Alf, crossing his arms and glaring at the machine with the look of a man whose job prospects are suddenly under threat.

  “I’ve been on at chef to get us one of these for months. I wonder what made him suddenly—” Patrick stopped.

  Dorothy, who hadn’t worked this many years alongside chefs without developing an acute sense of self-preservation, chose this moment to nip away into the dining room, mumbling something about the napkins needing another ironing.

  “Alf?” said Patrick.

  “Er, yes?”

  “When exactly did chef put in this order?”

  “Um . . . Might have been after you left last night. I might have showed him how to order one on the Internet.”

  “Might have?”

  “Um . . .”

  Despite his escalating feelings of exasperation, Patrick had to admit he was also rather impressed. Chef Maurice must really want him to stay, to have been willing to set foot within two metres of a computer monitor.

  (It wasn’t that the head chef was I.T.-illiterate; one could consider him as more techno-embattled, waging a constant war with the electronic devices in his life. The attempted use of an electronic alarm clock had resulted in several mornings of unintentional 3 a.m. starts—which had been accompanied by a series of predawn phone calls to the rest of his kitchen staff, demanding to know why they had yet to turn up to work. His ancient mobile phone appeared only able to dial the Croatian talking clock, and the robotic vacuum cleaner, bought for him one Christmas by an optimistic Meryl, had managed on its first day to get into his chest of drawers and consume all his socks.)

  However, even in the face of his head chef’s technological efforts, Patrick was determined to be a man unswayed by such means of persuasion.

  “We’re sending it back,” he said firmly.

  “We are?” said Alf, in hopeful tones.

  “I’m not having chef think he can bribe me into staying. It’s my decision, and I’m perfectly capable of making it without the help of a TM Professional—”

  “—Deluxe Professional—”

  “—Deluxe Professional ThermoMash. With the extra pasta-rolling attachment, too,” sighed Patrick, tucking the leaflet back in amongst the stainless steel rotors.

  Despite his claims to the contrary, he was aware that he was still no closer to making any decision than he’d been last night, when his mother had dropped her manor-house-sized bombshell on them all.

  He’d been back and forth with himself on the merits of the new venture—his first head chef position, the chance to make a name for himself—and the downsides—starting life yet again in another village, and the prospect of Chef Maurice chasing him all around Beakley with a frying pan if he handed in his resignation. And then, of course, there was Lucy to think about. The Lake District was by no means an easy commute from the Cotswolds, and what with them both working long shifts and irregular hours . . .

  Still, Patrick was looking forward to being able to discuss the whole matter with someone more sane than his current kitchen compatriots. Of course, he fully expected his girlfriend to drop the occasional heavy hint that she wanted him to stay—that was only natural.

  But PC Lucy had a sound, level head, and he had a feeling she’d be infinitely more helpful when it came to thinking through his decision than a crazed French chef with a suddenly very large budget for culinary equipment.

  Back at Miranda Matthews’ flat, it took a while to persuade Angie Gifford that the England Observer’s food critic had not, in fact, been attempting to steal Miranda’s solid-walnut bookcase, but instead had merely been trying to conceal himself behind said item in case she, Angie Gifford, had turned out to be a lead-pipe-wielding attacker.

  Angie looked less than convinced, too, at the explanation that the two of them had simply stepped inside the flat after noticing the front door left unlocked, and, being good Cotswolds neighbours, had wanted to check that nothing had been taken.

  “We might ask you the question, Madame Gifford, why you also are found here in the flat of Mademoiselle Miranda,” said Chef Maurice sternly, having now left the confines of his wardrobe hideout. (A sudden appearance, it should be noted, that had not done much to soothe Angie Gifford’s already frazzled nerves.)

 
; “Miranda left me a set of her keys when she first moved in, as I was the only person she knew around here. The police told me they were coming this morning, so I wanted to pop in and check they hadn’t made a mess of things. And pick up some of the paperwork for the cookery school.” She indicated the brochures on the desk.

  “You knew of these plans of Mademoiselle Miranda?”

  “Of course, it was our project together,” said Angie, oblivious to Chef Maurice’s look of moustache-quivering indignation. She ran a hand across a glossy flyer. “We weren’t going to tell anyone yet, seeing as we hadn’t secured the site. And I didn’t want anyone at Lady Eleanor to know I was thinking of leaving. I’m afraid some of the other teachers are a bit stuck in their ways. They treat it as a huge scandal whenever someone leaves to go to another school, let alone thinks about doing something like this.”

  “Other teachers such as Madame Caruthers, for example?”

  “Oh, yes, I dread to think what she’d have said to me. Not that she’ll even be around next year—she’s retiring this summer, you know—but teaching’s been her whole life. She simply can’t understand anyone wanting to do anything different.”

  “But you’d still be teaching cookery, wouldn’t you?” said Arthur.

  Angie gave a little sigh. “If only Edith would see it like that. But I can just imagine her, complaining that all we’d be doing is catering to pampered housewives. But we had all kinds of plans, running subsidised classes for young parents, setting up a Sunday charity kitchen, that sort of thing. It wasn’t all going to be cupcakes.”

  “You speak, madame, as if your cookery school will no longer take place.”

  Angie stared down at the brochure, open at a picture of herself and Miranda posing in front of an old-fashioned stove. “I don’t see how it can, now. You see, it was Miranda who was going to provide the financing for the first few years, until we turned a profit. I have a small amount of savings of my own, but not nearly enough—and Rory was dead set against putting any of our money into the business. Said it would be a conflict of interest, what with the council having the final say in who gets the site lease.”