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

by J. A. Lang

  “So that’s what happened?” She spoke quietly, but her tone was accusatory.

  “Careful, Karole,” growled the mayor.

  There was the sound of a chair scraping back. “Careful? Me? When I’ve been telling you to be nothing but careful—”

  “All right, all right, enough! I’ve got to go down to the police station to speak to that policewoman, God help me. I’ll talk to you when I get back. Fine mess you’ve landed me in.”

  “Me? What on earth do you mean by—” But the door slammed again.

  Arthur gestured urgently to Chef Maurice. Together, crouching low to avoid being noticed, they hobbled off to report this latest exchange to PC Lucy.

  From across the Town Hall gardens, their departure was watched by a young mother walking with her little girl.

  “See over there, dear,” said the mother. “If you don’t sit up straight, you’ll end up all bent over like those gentlemen there. And we don’t want that now, do we?”

  “Looks like Karole was telling the truth,” said PC Lucy, sitting back in her swivel chair.

  “Play it again,” demanded Chef Maurice, leaning in closer to the screen. He and Arthur had spent the last twenty minutes waiting impatiently outside the police station, while PC Lucy dealt with a red-faced and extremely unhelpful Mayor Gifford, who’d finally stormed off with dire threats to phone up the Chief Inspector at his Corfu holiday villa and get him to ‘put his damn staff on a leash’.

  PC Lucy hit ‘play’ and the video jumped to life once more. It showed a wobbly close-up of a little boy wearing a red cape, with a petulant expression on his frosting-covered mouth.

  “Come on, Billy, smile over here, show Mummy what you’re eating,” cajoled a sugary voice from off-camera.

  But little Billy seemed more interested in the antics of the giant furry rabbit in the distance. “Look, Mummy! She’s stealing his bunny tail! Can I have a bunny tail too?”

  “Don’t be silly, darling, she’s helping him pin it back on. Like pinning the tail on the donkey. See, he’s all fixed now. And Superman doesn’t have a bunny tail, now, does he?”

  In the background, as Billy contemplated his bunny-tail-less future, Mayor Gifford twisted around to inspect Angie’s work, nodded briefly at her, then walked off, tail bobbing, while Angie pulled herself to her feet and dusted the grass off her long skirt.

  PC Lucy paused the video.

  “But it makes no sense,” said Arthur, voicing the thought they all shared. “What on earth would Mayor Gifford have to gain by murdering Miranda Matthews?”

  “You did tell me his wife has inherited some money from Miranda,” said PC Lucy.

  “Only for the use of the cookery school. She can’t touch the money herself. And Rory Gifford’s not exactly known to be hard up. The whole scenario is ridiculous.”

  PC Lucy thought about Angie Gifford’s rather worn tweed skirt in the video. No, the mayor did not seem like a man who would spend a lot on his wife, let alone set about to murder her best friend in the aim of small monetary gain.

  “Bof, it is clear. Monsieur Gifford must be arrested and put to the questioning.”

  “I’m afraid that’s out of the question. We don’t have nearly enough to go on.” PC Lucy dreaded to think what Chief Inspector Grant would have to say, coming back from his holidays to find the Mayor of Cowton down in the cells because of the lightest of circumstantial evidence. “Plus, there’s no motive here.”

  “Hmm, you are correct. A motive is required.” Chef Maurice stopped as he noticed the large-lens camera sitting on PC Sara’s desk. “Aha! The camera of Mademoiselle Miranda. What happened of the pictures inside it?”

  “Miranda must have used a new memory card, or wiped it recently. There were only two photos, taken on the Saturday morning of the Fayre down by Warren’s Creek. Both,” she added, before Chef Maurice could get excited, “of a family of river otters.”

  Chef Maurice paused. “Otter? That is a type of bird, perhaps?”

  A quick trawl of the Internet produced several photographs of the water-loving mammal in question.

  “Ah, une loutre! Of the river. But for me, I am in preference of the loutre of the sea. They have, I am told, a great appreciation of seafood. Come, I show you.”

  Another quick online foray produced a wildlife video of a group of sea otters, enjoying their dinner of fresh crab and other maritime bounty. They were awfully cute, PC Lucy had to admit.

  “But, to return to the investigation,” said Chef Maurice, after the fifth consecutive video, “it seems now that our task is to discover the motive of Monsieur le mayor. And for that, mademoiselle, you may leave it to us.”

  With this gallant pronouncement, Chef Maurice got up and strutted out of the office. Arthur gave PC Lucy a helpless little shrug, then followed his friend outside.

  PC Lucy turned back to her desk. In circumstances such as these, she found it was best not to pry too deeply into Chef Maurice’s plans. But she set her phone to ringer, just in case the pair should get themselves arrested for stalking Mayor Gifford all around Cowton.

  She stared unseeingly at the screen. What had Miranda really been doing down at Warren’s Creek that day? The pictures from her camera suggested a spot of wildlife photography, but it was no otter, no matter how camera-shy, who had clubbed her over the head with a length of iron piping.

  As for Mayor Gifford, what had he been up to, sneaking around in the woods that very same morning? The idea that his being there had nothing to do with Miranda could be dismissed as far too much of a coincidence. But if he wasn’t involved in the murder, why hadn’t he owned up to being down there in the first place?

  She clicked on a video of a young sea otter ferociously bashing a clam against a wall of rock, without much result.

  It was, she thought, a rather good metaphor for how she was beginning to feel about the whole Miranda Matthews case.

  It had not been difficult to wrangle a dinner invitation out of Angie for that evening, which came as a pleasant surprise to both Arthur and Chef Maurice.

  Food critics and professional chefs both suffer from a below-average number of dinner invitations from friends and acquaintances, due to fear of criticism, dissatisfaction, and, in the case of Chef Maurice in particular, having their larders severely depleted and their drinks cupboards emptied of the good brandy.

  Perhaps Angie would have thought twice about her invitation had she known that the pair’s plans included breaking into her husband’s home study and subjecting it to a thorough search for ‘murderous clues’. However, as such, she gave them the time of half past seven and begged them not to bring anything along; it would just be a simple dinner, rustled up from whatever she had in the fridge and pantry.

  Thus, at seven thirty on the dot—Arthur being a stickler for punctuality—they deposited themselves on the bristly doormat outside the Giffords’ residence, a detached mock-Tudor house situated in one of Cowton’s more affluent areas. The rest of the street was dominated by newly built, honey-stoned Cotswold cottages, and spring flowers bloomed on the grass verges by the roadside.

  “You’re right on time. Do come inside,” said Angie, as she swung open the door. “Oh, you really shouldn’t have,” she added, graciously accepting the bottle of Bordeaux from Chef Maurice’s outstretched hands, as well as the glossy box of chocolates that Arthur had liberated from Meryl’s not-so-secret stash.

  She led them through to the back of the house, which had been converted into a kitchen-cum-dining-area—an abomination, thought Arthur, that was all the rage nowadays in modern homes. He had also observed, these last few years, that kitchen design had become something of a lesson in landform geography, with islands, peninsulas and (in one particular high-end case) whole archipelagos sprouting up from the rustic Italian tile floors.

  “I’m afraid Rory won’t be joining us,” said Angie, peering into the oven at a large casserole dish. “He has to attend a dinner for the Cowton Small Business Association.”

 
“Ah, that is a shame,” said Chef Maurice, who, with Arthur, had spent the afternoon flipping through the local event listings to ascertain that Mayor Gifford would, indeed, be otherwise occupied this evening.

  As they settled down around the table with aperitifs in hand, Mayor Gifford popped his blond head into the kitchen and bestowed a megawatt smile on his two visitors, on the off-chance they might be members of his voting public. He was accompanied by a dour-faced Paul Whittaker, who was carrying a briefcase and wearing the look of a man condemned to an evening of jovial company, when he would much rather be at home enjoying a rereading of the Iliad in the original Ancient Greek.

  “Sorry I can’t stay for dinner. I’m sure Angie has cooked up a feast, as she always does. Has she been showing off all her new gadgets? Not that anyone knows what half these buttons do, least of all the lady of the house.” Mayor Gifford planted a kiss on his wife’s cheek, then headed for the door. “Don’t forget, Go With Gifford!”

  “I must congratulate you on a most pleasing kitchen,” said Chef Maurice, looking around in approval at the solid beech countertops and pastel-blue cupboards. From out in the hallway, they heard the front door bang shut.

  “Actually, it was all Rory’s choice,” said Angie, pulling a pan off the stove to check on the new potatoes. “I quite fancied one of those modern-style kitchens, they’re so practical and easy to clean, but Rory insisted we go rustic. Said it would go down better with the voters, when the papers come to take pictures in here. Still,” she said, patting the front of the stainless steel oven set high in the wall, “I got my way when it came to this one.”

  “Ah, quelle merveille!” Chef Maurice got up to peer in admiration at the range of shiny controls. “It does the injection of the steam, oui?”

  “That’s right. And has the temperature probe function for roasting. I even made baguettes in it the other day, using the stone base, you can just about see it in there. It’s all a matter of the right humidity levels . . .”

  Chef Maurice nodded along politely as Angie expounded her theories about crust-to-crumb ratios and bread baking temperatures. For the sake of their upcoming plans to raid Mayor Gifford’s study, he was on his best behaviour, managing to avoid any comment on the peculiar English obsession with home breadmaking, when every Frenchman knew that the best way to obtain a perfectly made baguette was to simply pop down to the local boulangerie.

  Arthur, leaning back in his chair, glanced out into the dark garden beside him, accessible through a set of mock-Tudor bi-fold doors. Dusk had fallen, and the only light source came from the kitchen, flooding a pale glow across the patio and grass. A set of nightmare-esque shapes at the back of the lawn caught his eye. He blinked, and the strange objects reconciled themselves into a paint-splattered ladder, various lengths of sawn-off timber, an old cast-iron Victorian stove, parts strewn all around, and a cluster of garden gnomes—all of whom were, oddly enough, blond.

  “Oh, don’t look at that mess,” said Angie, waving an oven glove towards the garden. “It’s all the rubbish from the old kitchen. The builders keep saying they’ll be back to pick it up, but the way things are going, it’ll be Christmas by the time they come.”

  Over a dinner of olive-oil-poached sea trout with garlic-and-dill-infused crème fraîche sauce, Angie filled them in on her own investigations. She’d returned to Miranda’s flat that afternoon in search of further clues, but to her dismay, the police had been there since, this time conducting a far more thorough clear-out.

  “I mean, they already took her computer the first time, but this time they took all her paper files, all the Little Cowton Kitchen documents, even her photography equipment. I do hope they’ll be careful with it all.”

  “Sounds like the police might be finally taking a look at the cookery school angle,” said Arthur.

  “If they do, they only follow behind in our steps,” huffed Chef Maurice. He turned to Angie. “Tell me, did Mademoiselle Miranda come often to your house here? She and Monsieur Gifford, they were also on the good terms?”

  “Miranda and Rory? I’m afraid they didn’t really get along. I mean, they were perfectly nice to each other in company. I thought Miranda, especially, was making a big effort to try and get to know him, but Rory didn’t really take it the right way. He’d say things like, ‘Why does she want to know where I play golf at, and what restaurants I go to?’ I tried to tell him she was just being friendly, but it wasn’t much good. I think he never really approved of me being friends with ‘a celebrity’ like Miranda.” Angie’s cheeks turned pink. “He said she didn’t get the right sort of press, and he didn’t like us—I mean, me and Miranda—being seen together in public. I know this next election is a huge stepping stone in Rory’s career, but I still don’t think he needed to be so serious about it all. In the end, we mostly met at Miranda’s flat to work on the cookery school. Less fuss all round, that way.”

  For dessert, Angie coaxed her new oven into producing a picture-perfect lemon soufflé, its edges sharp and crisp as a new twenty-pound note.

  “Simply marvellous. Best dessert I’ve had in ages,” said Arthur, folding his napkin beside his empty ramekin, while Chef Maurice expressed his concerns about the whereabouts of the second portions.

  “Oh, you flatter me, really!” said Angie, smiling as she collected up the empty dishes.

  Chef Maurice furrowed his brow, and Arthur was required to ram his toe against the chef’s ankle before he opened his mouth to explain that he was not, in fact, joking about seconds.

  “So nice to serve dinner to such a good pair of appetites,” Angie continued, from over by the sink. “That’s why I could never work as a chef like you, Maurice. I like to see the end results when it comes to my work. That’s the nice thing about teaching, you get to see the girls grow up over the years. I don’t think I could stand being cooped up in the kitchens, with no idea what was going on out front. I’d want to be out there too, standing and watching over the poor diners as they ate!”

  As she filled the sink with hot soapy water, Arthur and Chef Maurice exchanged a silent nod. The covert operation portion of the evening had arrived.

  Chef Maurice, claiming he could not live with himself to see Angie do all the washing up after producing such a fine meal, took the sponge from her hands and commandeered the sink area. Soon, soap suds were flying and Angie stood at the ready, tea towel in hand, as the onslaught of clean crockery began.

  Chef Maurice had, correctly, deduced that Angie was the type of woman who knew the exact latitude and longitude for every piece of cookery equipment in her domain, and so he took great pains to conduct his washing up in as haphazard a manner as possible, such that Angie was forced to rush to and fro across the kitchen, stowing away each item with care before the next came shooting out from the sink.

  Amidst this whirl of activity, Arthur backed quietly out of the room, mumbling something about a search for the bathroom, then tiptoed across the hallway into Mayor Gifford’s study. The mayor had apparently been taking classes from the Henry VIII school of interior design—there was copious wood-panelling, a fireplace fit for a roast hog, and all that was missing was tapestries on the walls and a stag’s head over the mantelpiece.

  Donning a pair of leather gloves, Arthur hurried over to Mayor Gifford’s king-sized desk. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for, but a man’s desk drawers seemed a reasonable place to begin.

  As he passed the bookcase, he stopped to examine one of the leather-bound volumes at random (you never knew what someone might be hiding in a hollowed-out hardback), only to find that the entire shelf was filled with cardboard replicas, of the type found adorning the cabinets in those cut-price furniture warehouses.

  For Arthur, an inveterate bibliophile, this was reason enough to start harbouring deep suspicions about the moral fibre of Cowton’s mayor.

  The top desk drawer was full of stationery odds and ends, while the middle one contained a thick folder of newspaper clippings, all featuring the desk’s owner in
various commanding poses. So far, so unincriminating.

  The bottom drawer, however, revealed a large brown envelope, hidden under a pile of magazines for the discerning gentleman. The envelope was addressed to one Mayor Gifford, with no address and no postmark.

  Arthur eased the envelope open. It was empty, apart from a scrap of notepaper bearing the following missive:

  Plenty more where these came from . . . I’ll be seeing you soon, lover boy . . .

  The note was signed off with a curly M.M. and a red lipstick kiss.

  Chapter 11

  In Chef Maurice’s opinion, the world of policing operated at a pace of mind-boggling slowness. His own customers, he told PC Lucy, would have been completely up in arms if he took that long to get tangible results onto a warm plate and out into the dining room.

  However, this reasoning had held little sway with the policewoman, who had been roused from a quiet evening in bed with a good novel to be regaled with tales of his and Arthur’s high derring-do in the lair of the philandering Mayor Gifford.

  She’d listened, bookmark in hand, then firmly instructed them to their respective beds, forbidding them on pain of pain from conducting any more undercover missions for the remainder of the night, and grudgingly promising to look into matters first thing the following morning.

  The next morning came, after a fitful night’s rest for Chef Maurice—his mind had been racing at such a pace that it had taken him a whole five minutes to fall asleep, even with the help of a dose of single malt whisky—but when he got down to the kitchens, he found himself facing a form of culinary conundrum that took his mind off the Miranda Matthews case altogether.

  He sat at the kitchen table, staring down at a square white plate displaying a slab of sickly-looking mackerel, hacked into zigzag slices, sitting in a pool of what might have been its own congealed blood, but was more likely some form of raspberry or cherry coulis. Around the plate, dotted like remnants from the bottom of a fridge, were tiny cubes of orange jelly, a wrinkled black olive or two, and bright green blobs of what looked like cottage cheese that had just returned from a visit to a nuclear reactor.