by J. A. Lang
He looked up into Alf’s hopeful face.
“This . . . dish, it is all your own creation?”
Alf nodded vigorously, while Patrick, face impassive, stood off to one side with his arms folded.
“It is, um, très inventif. The colours, the arrangement. Oui, I am . . . most impressed.”
Having run out of words with which to stall the inevitable, Chef Maurice picked up his fork and speared a slice of mackerel, an orange cube and an olive, then dragged the combination through the vivid red sauce. With a look to the heavens, he took a deep breath and shovelled the whole thing into his mouth.
“Mmmmph!”
“Is it okay, chef?”
Cheeks bulging, Chef Maurice gave his commis chef a desperate thumbs up.
“You sure, chef?”
There was a gulping noise, like a tennis ball being sucked down a pipe.
“Truly . . . excellent,” he coughed. “The cherry sauce, perhaps a little too sharp, you must use more sugar. But . . . oui,” he said, watching Patrick’s face out of the corner of his eye, “this is . . . very good. I am very happy with your work.”
At this moment, the crunch of gravel outside indicated a vehicle pulling up in the backyard.
“Ah, Patrick, that must be Monsieur Royston with our delivery of meat. If you will go to aid him . . .”
After Patrick had disappeared outside to help lug in the cold boxes, Chef Maurice whipped around to face his commis chef.
“Tell me. It was Patrick, n’est-ce pas, who made the recipe for this dish?”
“Er . . .”
“Bah! Come. It is not possible for anyone without a great talent to invent a dish of such”—Chef Maurice shuddered—“unnatural joining of flavours. This is the work of one chef, and one chef only.”
“Well, he did give me a bit of a hand with the—”
“Hah! So, Patrick wishes to play a game of the culinary chicken? Then he will have his game!” He strode over to the shelves along the back wall, grabbed down a decanter of cognac and poured himself a large measure. “Ah, that is much better.”
“Morning,” said PC Lucy, ducking through the back door, closely followed by Patrick with a whole lamb carcass over one shoulder. “Maurice, are you and Arthur free this morning? I’ve got an interview with someone I thought you might want to meet.”
“Ah, so you have made the arrest of Monsieur le mayor?”
“No, I’ve got Sara and Alistair looking into that this morning. But guess who’s back in the country?”
Chef Maurice paused. Dorothy had been all atwitter about a member of the Royal Family who had cut short her trip to Australasia, raising speculation of yet another Royal Pregnancy, but something told him this was probably not who PC Lucy was referring to.
“Gaby Florence,” continued PC Lucy. “Remember Miranda’s ex-co-host? Apparently India didn’t agree with her, so she flew back in yesterday. She lives in Hertfordshire, so I was going to drive over for a little chat.”
Chef Maurice narrowed his eyes. “This invitation, it is une ruse, to keep us from the investigation of Monsieur le mayor. Hah, he has the police, how do you say, in his pyjamas!”
“In his pockets, chef,” murmured Patrick.
“As you wish.” PC Lucy shrugged. “I just figured you’d be interested in what she has to say. Plus this way, it saves petrol and all.”
Chef Maurice gave this idea its due consideration. Getting a lift to Hertfordshire with PC Lucy did hold a certain appeal. His trusty little Citroën had been making some odd noises of late, and Arthur’s idea of putting pedal to the metal was the liberal application of the footbrake whenever he came close to hitting the speed limit.
“Very well. Let us go to collect Arthur.” He headed for the door, hesitated, then marched back to the table and dipped a finger in one of the virulent green blobs.
“Aha! As I thought. Avocado and garlic!”
With that, he stomped away, decanter and glass in hand.
While they idled outside Arthur’s cottage, Chef Maurice gargling noisily with cognac, PC Lucy wondered if she was doing the right thing, bringing the two of them along on what was technically an official police visit. Chief Inspector Grant had already been none too pleased to have his team upstaged in the last two murder enquiries the year before, and expectations would be riding high on this current case.
However, when it came to interviews, she had to admit that Chef Maurice possessed the rare and little-appreciated skill of being an extremely charismatic listener. Perhaps it was something to do with his patent foreignness, but give him five minutes of sympathetic conversation, and he could make even the stiffest of British upper lips start to tremble.
Plus, the chef had been entirely correct in his suspicions that by bringing him and Arthur along, she was preventing them from spending the day rooting through Mayor Gifford’s dustbins, climbing through his office windows, or even attempting a bout of breaking and entering in a hunt for more ‘evidence’.
“Nice day for a road trip,” said Arthur, climbing into the back seat. “We better get moving, though, before the neighbours tell Meryl I’ve been seen riding around in a police car again. So Gaby Florence is back from her stint of aura-cleansing?”
“So Adam Monroe tells me. She messaged him when she landed yesterday.”
“Helpful sort of fellow, isn’t he?”
“Troublemaker, more like. I get the feeling that sending us round to Gaby’s is his way of getting back at her for having dragged him to the Spring Fayre in the first place. I hear a few of the tabloids got wind of them both being there, and have been raking up the mud again about him and Miranda. And Gaby too.”
“What about her?”
PC Lucy swung the car out into the narrow lane leading out of Beakley. “Turns out there’s more to her falling-out with Miranda than we thought. After she was dropped from the show, she apparently tried to run Miranda over with her car, just outside the TV studios. She missed her, though, and nothing concrete could be proved at the time. But she got a police caution.”
“More than a bit of bad feeling there, then.”
“Looks like it.”
Gaby Florence lived in a cul-de-sac of low red-brick flats on the outskirts of Hemel Hempstead. From the lack of cars, it seemed that most of her neighbours were out at work. Even so, PC Lucy stopped the car several doors down from Gaby’s—nothing got interviewees’ backs up like parking a yellow-and-blue-checked car right outside their home for everyone to see.
“The cognac stays in the car,” she told Chef Maurice, who looked puzzled at the idea that he would have brought his best cognac in to share with a complete stranger.
Gaby answered the door wearing a brightly patterned kaftan, black leggings, and jewelled sandals. Her long red hair was tied back with a length of beaded leather cord.
“PC Gavistone,” said PC Lucy, holding up her badge. “We spoke earlier on the phone?”
“Sure, come on in.” Gaby stepped back to let them through, with only the mildest of glances at Chef Maurice and Arthur. Perhaps she took them for plainclothes detectives or, worse still, thought PC Lucy, her superior officers.
“Can I get you something to drink?” said Gaby, in the tones of one completely disinclined to do so. “Except there’s no milk in the house. I haven’t had time to go out yet.”
They declined, all three being fond of a little milk in their tea, and PC Lucy got down to business.
“Miss Florence, I understand you were at the Beakley Spring Fayre last Saturday, in the company of Mr Adam Monroe?”
Gaby’s expression was sour. “Look, it was just a bit of a joke, okay? If I’d known what was going to happen, I’d have never gone along in a million years. I just thought it’d be a bit of a laugh, seeing Miranda’s face when I turned up with Adam. I hadn’t seen her in years, but I heard she never really got over him, even after all that drama.”
PC Lucy thought about the framed photo she’d seen in Miranda’s bedside table drawer.
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“Did you speak to Miss Matthews at any point during the Fayre?”
Gaby hesitated, then nodded. “She came up to us, right at the start. All hugs and kisses and asking what I was up to nowadays, you know, just so she could tell us what she had going on. Some plans for a fancy country cookery school, she said. That made me laugh. That woman couldn’t cook you a decent meal to, well, save her life. The only reason she was all right on TV was her culinary assistants doing it all for her. Why she would want to open a cookery school beats me. Guess she wanted to have everyone fawning over her in person.”
“I see. And can I ask you where you were during the hours of half past twelve and quarter past one last Saturday?”
“So that’s when it happened, then? Well, you can forget about me. I was with Adam the whole time, he’ll tell you. We never left the Fayre.”
“He tells me you disappeared for quite some time during lunch. While he was at the shooting stand?”
“Crossing all his T’s, isn’t he?” Gaby’s lip curled. “Yeah, I remember now, there was a giant queue for the loos. Feel free to check up on that one if you like. Someone must have noticed me, I was fairly hopping up and down for a pee.”
“Mademoiselle, is it true that you once made attempts to run Mademoiselle Miranda over with your car?”
“I should have known that would come up eventually. Look, that was years ago now. I don’t think I really even meant to hurt her. I was driving past the studio—this was a few days after they told me they were dropping me from the show—and she gave me this smirking kind of smile and waved, and I just knew it, right then, that she was the one responsible for the whole thing.”
“Perhaps you will like to explain to us more, this ‘whole thing’?” Chef Maurice reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a somewhat squashed packet of teacakes, which he proceeded to hand around.
“The number of times I’ve told this story, and still no one listens . . . Okay, so Miranda and I had just signed up with this big production company to make a new cookery show. Bigger budget, better time slot, everyone was talking about this being our big break. So Gav, our manager, took us out to dinner to celebrate, and afterwards we went on to this club his friend owned, met up with some of his mates in the media. It was one of them who brought along the coke. I swear, I’d never thought to touch the stuff in a million years, but Miranda and Gav kept egging me on . . .” There was a hard, bitter look in Gaby’s eyes.
“Anyway,” she continued, “the pictures got out, and that was the end of things. Gav paid the press off, but the company wouldn’t touch me with a barge pole after that. I thought it was just my bad luck, it could have been any of us in the photos, until that day when I saw Miranda standing there laughing at me, and it all fell into place. She was well into all her arty photography, lugging around that camera of hers, taking pictures of pigeons and tramps. And all of us, of course. The club wouldn’t have let the press in. It had to have been her.”
“So it was then you drove your car at Mademoiselle Miranda.”
“I was just trying to scare her. I was horrifically sleep-deprived anyway at that point, what with all the drama. It was like going into a trance. Next thing I knew they were pulling me out of my seat and telling me I’d taken out a whole row of bollards. Miranda didn’t even get a scratch. She made a big deal of it to the press, of course. And after all I did for us and our show! I wrote the recipes, wrote the scripts, taught her to look halfway competent on camera. Still, I guess she got what she deserved in the end.”
“Not a kind thought, mademoiselle,” said Chef Maurice, but handed her a teacake anyway.
“What made you return to the UK so soon?” asked PC Lucy. “I understood you had plans to be in India for the whole month.”
“There’s no law about changing your travel plans, is there? Yeah, I’d booked for the whole four weeks, but the place was a complete nightmare, nothing like the website. Great big ants all over the place, and they put me in this hut with a giant German woman who snored like a freight train. And then the woman who runs the whole show, she tried to steal my mobile phone! I mean, they told us we weren’t supposed to have them with us, but it wasn’t like I was going to call anyone, I just wanted it with me for emergencies. And for picking up my texts. Then they went and searched all our rooms. Well, that was the last straw! That and all that horrible vegetarian stuff they made us eat,” said the co-author of the bestselling cookbook, Cook It Right with Veg!
Back in the car, PC Lucy let out a long breath. “Well, that was interesting.”
“All rather too pat for my liking,” said Arthur. “She was at the Fayre, has a damn good motive, and hightailed off to India right after the news broke. That doesn’t say innocent bystander to me.”
“It doesn’t explain why she’d come back so soon, though. Even if the food was that dire.”
Chef Maurice was staring out of the car window into Gaby’s dark living room. “Perhaps we have it all the wrong way up,” he murmured to himself.
“Have all what, old chap?”
“Remember how Madame Caruthers told us how Mademoiselle Miranda would steal the secrets of the other girls at the school? And remember Signor Gallo, with the story of Mademoiselle Miranda following him, to make plans of seduction in his direction?”
“Was she?” said PC Lucy, with some degree of horror. The Cowton Police Station put in the occasional late-night pizza order to The Spaghetti Tree, and the sight of Signor Gallo huffing and puffing his way up the High Street on his one-gear bicycle was not her idea of a particularly lust-inducing prospect.
“Oui, she followed him, but not to steal him from his wife. She wished, I think, to discover his secrets. To gather information to be used against him. Most probable, in the aim to stop his bid for the site of the cookery school.”
“Blackmail?” said Arthur.
“Could be,” said PC Lucy, as she turned the car back in the direction of Cowton. For some reason, she’d had trouble believing that the envelope Arthur had found in Mayor Gifford’s study was evidence of a sordid affair. Blackmail, however, sounded much more up Miranda’s alley.
“Change of tack, guys,” she announced, a few hours later, as she strode into the main office at the Cowton Police Station. “We need to find out what Miranda Matthews was blackmailing Mayor Gifford about. And has anyone been to the shops? I’m dying for a cup of tea.”
But PC Sara and PC Alistair were engrossed in whatever was showing on the latter’s computer screen, and made no response.
“Hello? Earth to Sara? Al? What are you two up to?”
PC Sara managed to tear her gaze away from the screen. “Sorry? Did you say something about blackmail?”
“There’s a chance Miranda was blackmailing the mayor about something. We need to find out what it was.” She saw PC Sara’s gaze migrating back to the computer even as she spoke. “What are you looking at that’s so fascinating?”
“The lab sent us the encrypted files from Miranda’s computer,” said PC Alistair.
“And it looks like Miranda was up to quite a bit more than just birdwatching in her spare time.” PC Sara swung the screen around to reveal a grainy photo of a couple, both in a state of some undress, taken through the slanted blinds of a tall window. Zooming out, their location was revealed as one of the second-floor rooms at the Cotswold Grand Hotel, an eighteenth-century building not far off the Cowton High Street. Tasteful wrought-iron lamps illuminated the handsome stone facade, and the full moon cast a soft glow across the cobbled street below. If you ignored the cavorting couple, barely visible at this distance behind the blinds, it would make a nice print for the living room wall, thought PC Lucy.
“The Carlton Arms is just across from the Cotswold Grand, and has a roof terrace which isn’t used much, apart from in the summer,” said PC Sara. “So we reckon Miranda must have set herself up there with a long-range lens.” She clicked forward a few more photos. “These are just the beginning shots, by the way. It gets seriousl
y kinky after that.”
PC Alistair coughed, looking rather red around the collar.
“Now that’s a back that could do with a good waxing,” said Arthur, coming up behind them. “Is that who I think it is?”
“If you’re thinking it’s our illustrious mayor, then you’re right,” said PC Sara, clicking on through the photos.
Chef Maurice watched the increasingly scandalous photos flick by, tilting his head back and forth like a parrot watching tennis, as the couple managed a series of increasingly outré antics. “And the femme, is that not Mademoiselle Karole?”
“Right, I want all the evidence gone back over, in the light of all . . . this,” said PC Lucy, trying not to stare at the large, now naked, male behind in the photo. “The Chief will want this case watertight before we make a move.”
After all, she thought, it wasn’t every day that you set out to arrest the Mayor of Cowton on the charge of murder.
Chapter 12
For the rest of the afternoon, the evidence flowed in fast and furious, like beer from a shaken barrel.
The heavy stump of piping found at the crime scene was identified as the same type of iron as the old Victorian stove sitting in the Giffords’ back garden.
A pink bunny suit, original tail missing, was found hanging in the downstairs closet. The mud on the feet corresponded to that of the riverbank near Warren’s Creek.
Scraps of photographic paper were recovered from the grate in the mayor’s home study. (PC Lucy was surprised to find that, despite the room’s cardboard books and reproduction artwork, it did contain a fully functioning fireplace.) Various hefty payments were also discovered going from Mayor Gifford’s personal bank account to that of Miranda Matthews over the course of the last few weeks.
