Chef Maurice and a Spot of Truffle (Chef Maurice Mysteries Book 1) (11 page)

In smaller writing below:
No dogs, no salesmen, no TV chefs.

Arthur’s knock was answered with a speed that suggested the door’s owner had been lurking behind it the whole time. Miss Fey, though small in stature, had the kind of tough, desiccated look that told any onlookers that neither sleet nor snow nor nuclear warheads would get in her way. Her face was nut-brown from many summers spent outdoors and she wore her hair in a long white plait.

She eyed them through the wedge of open door, then flung it open and stuck out a gnarled hand.

“You must be that newspaper chappy,” she said. “I’m Miss Fey. That’s Miss with an eye and two esses. None of this mumbly Ms nonsense, got that?”

“Completely,” said Arthur. “And thank you for agreeing to this interview. This is a friend of mine—”

“You’re that chef from that little place down in Beakley,” said Miss Fey, her beady eyes roaming across Chef Maurice’s face. “I came visiting a few years ago, you might remember, but you said you already had a mushroom supplier. Not so much the case now, eh?”

Her eyes glinted as she watched for their reaction.

“Ah, it is good to see you again,” lied Chef Maurice, who had the memory of a Nobel Prize winner when it came to food, but the recall ability of a distracted goldfish when it came to names and faces. “So I see you have heard the sad tale of Monsieur Ollie?”

“Sad tale? Codswallop. He got what was coming to him in my opinion. Nasty piece of work, that boy was.”

“He was?” said Arthur, who was a perennial Believer in People.

“Dyed in the wool. Tricked me out of my best morel patch last year. Must have been following me, the little thief—not a chance he’d have found it himself. Picked the whole lot clean out after I left. Didn’t even leave the small ones, and bad business, that is. Mushroom picking ain’t a snatch-and-go. You’ve got to respect the woods. That boy, he had no respect.”

“So you were not a friend of his,
madame
.”

“Hah, you can say that. Then again, not many were. Oh, he had his lady friends, quite a number I heard, but when push came to shove . . . no, that boy didn’t have many friends. Enemies, now, that’s another matter.”

She left this pronouncement hanging tantalisingly in the air, then clapped her hands together. “Right, enough speaking ill of them that deserves it. You wanted to learn about mushrooms, didn’t you?” She darted inside and reappeared in a wool jacket and broad-brimmed hat, carrying a large empty basket. “Then let’s go.”

Chef Maurice saw Arthur glance down at his spotless leather brogues with a look of dismay. The chef himself was wearing his usual steel-capped boots, which the manufacturers claimed were oil-proof, flame-proof, blade-proof, and capable of withstanding the pressure of a tap-dancing elephant in stilettos. A little mud wasn’t going to do them any harm.

They struck out eastwards, with Miss Fey leading the way.

“See here, this is your winter chanterelle,” she said, bending down to pluck up an orange-brown specimen. “They love sweet chestnut trees. Find a good tree and every year you’ll find them in exactly the same spot.” She patted the tree next to her. “People think it’s all about eyes to the ground, but it’s actually all about the trees. This wood is like an old friend. Know your trees, and you’ll know your mushrooms.”

She stooped down again and plucked up another mushroom, almost identical to the first.

“Now this one”—she held out the new mushroom in her hand—“might look a lot like our first one. But see the gills here?” She flipped it over. “The true winter chanterelle has forked ridges. This one doesn’t. We call them false chanterelles. Dangerous little things, can put you in hospital for a week.”

“A risky business,” murmured Arthur, making notes.

Miss Fey turned her sharp eyes on him. “You don’t know the half of it.”

“What is this one?” asked Chef Maurice, squatting down next to a small ring of spindly grey mushrooms with dull brown caps.

“Those are your liberty caps. Eat those, and you’ll be seeing dancing pink giraffes for three days. They call them magic, but can’t see what’s so magic about them myself. They’re a Class A drug nowadays, they’ll lock you up for life if they catch you with them.”

Chef Maurice withdrew his hand.

“Worth much, are they?” asked Arthur.

“Not enough to be worth the trouble to most people,” said Miss Fey. “Not that you’d catch me touching those things for any sum of money. Law’s there for a reason, I always say.”

Chef Maurice cocked his head. There was something in the way she’d said it . . .

“There are other pickers, perhaps, who think different?”

She gave him an appraising look. “Might be. You hear a thing or two. Us pickers, we always have an ear to the ground, so to speak.”

“But it would not do to speak ill of the dead,
n’est-ce pas
?”

Miss Fey gave him a humourless smile. “You ask a lot of questions, Mr Maurice. You’re not Belgian, are you?”

“I am French,
madame
.”

“Is that so? I knew a Belgian once, a little fellow. He asked a lot of questions too.”

After another twenty minutes of poking around in the leaf mould, Foraging 101 was deemed complete and they retired to Miss Fey’s cosy front room, which reeked of dried mushrooms and old books. Chef Maurice wandered up and down the bookshelves as Miss Fey clattered about in the kitchen.

The Handy Hedgerow Guide
.
Tales from the Deep Woods
.
The Nettle: Rituals, Remedies and Rhymes
.

From up in the far corner, he pulled down a thin red volume titled:
Annals of European Mycology and Biotechnology, Vol. XIX
.

The text was small and dense, written by serious people who knew serious stuff, such as how to deploy a footnote to devastating effect.

Chef Maurice shut the book and placed it carefully back on the shelf.

“Milk, sugar, gentlemen?”

Their host reappeared with a tray laden with a blue-and-white china tea set, a steaming apricot pie and generous slices of lemon poppy seed cake.

“Milk and three sugars,” said Chef Maurice automatically. He then noticed the size of the sugar cube in her dainty tongs. “And two more sugars.
Merci
.”

They settled back into the well-worn chintz armchairs.

Chef Maurice sought around for a suitable teatime topic.

“I wonder,
madame
, if you are familiar with the English truffle?”

The cake knife clattered off the tray and hit the rug.

“Deary me, excuse my butter fingers,” said Miss Fey, putting on her glasses and bending down to retrieve the knife. “You were saying— Oh yes, English truffles. Poor specimens, I’ll say, when you think about what you can find elsewhere. We get the summer truffle in some parts, and I’ve heard rumours of a few patches of Burgundy truffles, but those who know of them keep their lips tight, as you can imagine.”

“But none of the black Périgord? And the white truffle of Alba?”

She gave him a steady look from over her spectacles. “I do hope someone hasn’t been pulling your leg, Mr Maurice. We don’t have any of the likes of them in these parts.” She stirred her tea slowly. “I’d know, believe me.”

And that was the end of that conversational vein.

Arthur moved into interview mode, pen poised, while Chef Maurice decided to investigate the maximum of pie and cake that could fit onto a single small plate.

Even so, he kept one eye on Miss Fey, though this resulted in a certain amount of crumb fallout in the process.

As they left, she presented them each with a basket of fresh wild mushrooms. Chef Maurice, in line with his own expectations, got the bigger one.

“My number’s on the card there,” said Miss Fey, tucking it in behind a pile of white puffballs. “Should you be needing a new supplier at some point . . . ”

“What a nice lady,” said Arthur as he manoeuvred the car back down the lane.

“Mmmm.” Chef Maurice looked over his shoulder at the cottage as they pulled round a bend, just in time to see a curtain twitch shut.

He had the distinct feeling there was more than met the eye when it came to Miss Fey.

* * *

They spent the rest of the afternoon driving around the roads surrounding Laithwaites Manor with the windows rolled down, shouting Hamilton’s name.

At least, Chef Maurice did. Arthur pulled his hat lower down on his forehead and crossed his fingers that Brenda’s neighbours weren’t the trigger-happy hunting types.

Eventually, no micro-pigs forthcoming, they drove in silence back to Le Cochon Rouge, Chef Maurice soothing his raw throat with a dose of medicinal cognac.

In the kitchens, dinner prep was underway. Patrick looked up from julienning a stack of leeks.

“A cool box arrived with your name on it, chef. Marked private. I put it in the walk-in.”

It was a small polystyrene container, about the size of a shoebox. Scrawled across the top was the message,
For Mr Manchot. PRIVATE.

Chef Maurice levered the box open with a long spatula.

(Ever since the incident with a particularly truculent crab, this had been the official Cochon Rouge policy on opening mysterious packages. Alf still claimed to have the occasional nightmare about crustaceans.)

Inside, he found a handwritten note.

Keep your snout out of business that doesn’t concern you, if you ever want to see your pig again.

Under the note was a shrink-wrapped packet of bacon.

Chef Maurice jabbed at the frying pan with a wooden spoon. Sizzling fat spluttered onto the hob.

“You’re not actually cooking that bacon, are you?”

Patrick kicked the mud off his boots in the kitchen doorway. Morning light filtered in through the small windows, and brown leaves jumped and swirled outside in the yard.

“And why should I not?”

“How can you be completely sure it’s not . . . Hamilton?”

Chef Maurice lifted up a streaky brown rasher with his spoon. “It is much too large. And from the smell, I conclude this is from a British Saddleback pig.”

“Still, I can’t believe you’re eating bacon today.”

“But why not? My
grand-père
, he owned two horses, for the fields. And my
grand-mère
still made horsemeat stew every Sunday in the winter.”

“Touching.” Patrick poked his head into the walk-in fridge and noticed the basket Chef Maurice had returned with yesterday. “Are we putting these new mushrooms on the menu?”

“They are not enough,” said Chef Maurice, assembling himself a bacon-and-egg sandwich between two thick slices of country loaf. “Instead, we will make sautéed wild mushrooms with tarragon and chives on sourdough bread for the staff meal. To test the quality, of course.”

“Sounds good to me, chef. Um, do you know if Arthur is coming in for lunch today?”

Arthur had a standing lunch reservation every day at Le Cochon Rouge, and made use of it most days of the week when he was in Beakley and Meryl was out at work. On busy days when all other tables were booked out and they had to give away his table, he’d kick up a huge fuss, claiming to be their best and most loyal customer, then finally agree to eat standing in the kitchens.

“He did not say. What do you require of him?”

Patrick’s ears reddened slightly. “I just needed to ask his advice about something . . . ”

“Bah! A good chef never asks the advice of a food critic!”

“No, no, er, it wasn’t about cooking. Um . . . ”

Chef Maurice looked puzzled, then his eyes lit up. “Ah, then it must be about—”

“I printed out those flyers you wanted,” said Patrick desperately, thrusting a stack of paper into Chef Maurice’s hands.

“Ah,
très bien
! Most impressive!”

Chef Maurice had no love for modern technology, and to judge by the dents in the old battered desktop computer now collecting dust in his office, modern technology felt the same way about him.

Earlier in the year, Patrick’s short-lived experiment with an online reservations system had ended abruptly when Chef Maurice leant his elbow on the keyboard and accidentally cancelled every reservation across the Valentine’s Day weekend. This resulted in a severe overbooking of tables, and thus a string of highly disgruntled would-be paramours were forced to sit outside in the impromptu ‘decking area’, cobbled together from borrowed garden furniture and a few old picnic benches, while their dates stayed muffled up in their thick coats—not exactly the best scenario for fanning the flickering flames of a nascent romance.

Chef Maurice turned the flyer this way and that. “It is a good picture,
non
?”

It bore the missive: PIG MISSING. REWARD OFFERED. APPLY AT LE COCHON ROUGE.

Below was a grainy photo of Hamilton, taken by Dorothy on Hamilton’s first day at the restaurant.

“What reward are we offering, chef?”

“That’s depends,” said Chef Maurice darkly, “on in what condition they find my pig.”

“We could offer a three-course dinner for two here at the restaurant.”

Chef Maurice liked that idea. It sounded suitably generous, while having the added benefit of his not having to withdraw any money from his actual bank account.

“Have you heard from Mademoiselle Lucy?”

Patrick looked up in panic. “What do you mean?”

“Eh? About the case, of course! My Hamilton! Have the police any developments?”

“What? How should I know? Why do you think I’d know anything?”

The two men looked at each other in mutual incomprehension.

“I go,” said Chef Maurice finally, “to make a distribution of these papers.”

Arthur had been oddly unwilling to demand a full-page ad from his editors at the England Observer, but offered to help pin up the notices all around Beakley and the nearby villages.

“No word yet from the police?”

“Pah! I telephone them. They say it is under control.”

“Which could mean anything, I’m sure. Still, I suppose they do have a murder investigation going on, which I imagine takes precedence.”

Chef Maurice hammered a flyer onto a nearby telegraph pole.

“Eh? You are saying that until they find the murderer of Monsieur Ollie, they will not look for Hamilton?”