Chef Maurice and a Spot of Truffle (Chef Maurice Mysteries Book 1) (13 page)

Chef Maurice, on the other hand, had simply donned the large pork-pie hat that he saved for special occasions.

“It is a good disguise,
non
?” he said, noticing Arthur’s stare.

Arthur was about to point out that, hat or no hat, it wasn’t hard to recognise the only man in Beakley with a moustache large enough to warrant its own postcode, when a VW Beetle roared into the lay-by and pulled up in front of them.

Two girls in their late teens, who had apparently dressed in expectation of a day at the beach, rather than a chilly autumn evening, jumped out and tottered off down the slope.

Arthur and Chef Maurice scrambled out of the car and hurried over to the ridge. They could see the top of the girls’ heads as they picked their way down the zigzag path towards the cottages.

“We must get close enough to observe their conversation,” whispered Chef Maurice. He took a step forward and a branch cracked loudly underfoot.

“Quick! Get down!” He grabbed Arthur’s leg and dragged him into the long grass.

“Ouch! Maurice, you really didn’t have to—”

But Chef Maurice was already creeping away down the slope, bent double and using his hands as paddles to part a way through the grassy wilderness.

They could hear the girls’ voices raised in complaint.

“—almost snapped my heel. Beats me why PJ makes us come round this way. It’s not like there’s much going on in this place.”

“Ow, I think I’ve got a stone in my shoe. Yeah, well, he can come next week, now that he’s back, and save us all this faff.”

Arthur, concentrating on the conversation, almost tripped over Chef Maurice, who was lying flat on the ground in a small clearing in the grass. A few metres in front of him was a very plump brown rabbit. It twitched its nose at them.

“Come here, little
lapin
,” whispered Chef Maurice, inching forward on his elbows, his hat raised in one hand.

“Maurice, what do you think you’re—”

“Did you hear that?” One of the girls stopped walking.

“What?”

“I thought I heard something. Coming from over there?”

“You sure?”

There was a rustle as one of them took a tentative step into the tall grass.

Arthur gave Chef Maurice a ‘what do we do now?’ look.

Chef Maurice sighed, replaced his hat and picked up a nearby stick. He gave the rabbit a gentle prod in the direction of the voices.

The rabbit wrinkled its nose and gave him a reproachful look.

“I think I just saw something—”

“
Allez-y!
” whispered Chef Maurice, and gave the rabbit a harder prod. This time it took the hint, and lopped off in the direction of the cottages.

A few moments later, one of the girls squealed.

“Aww!”

“Just a rabbit,” said the other.

“But isn’t it cute?”

“Chrissy, come
on
 . . . ”

The girls finished their descent, adjusted their clothing and rapped on Ollie’s back door.

No answer.

“What’s all this yellow tape for?”

“Dunno, maybe he’s doing building work?”

“Do you think he’s forgotten we’re coming?”

“He’s not like that. Maybe PJ changed the day. Told you we should have called him when we landed.”

“I told you, my phone’s out of juice. What did you do with yours?”

“It’s back at the bottom of the hotel pool— Don’t look at me like that. It slipped.”

“Funny how you managed to hold onto your tenth cocktail pretty fine. So what do we do now?”

“Let’s go meet the others. Maybe PJ’s already been and didn’t tell us.”

Bickering half-heartedly, the two girls traipsed back up the hill.

Arthur nudged Chef Maurice.

“Eh?”

Arthur stabbed his finger towards the lay-by, and made the frantic ‘driving along holding the steering wheel’ motion that people make when pretending to drive a car, and which would lead to severe pile-ups if they ever tried it in a real vehicle.

“Ah! A chase!”

“Shhh!”

They clambered back up the hill, taking a straight path through the overgrowth. Up ahead, there was the sound of slamming doors and wheels on gravel.

“Hurry up before we lose them!”

Arthur ran the rest of the way up the hill, his knees sending out fiery sparks of protest, and wrenched open the passenger door. He turned around, but Chef Maurice was nowhere to be seen.

“Maurice!”

Chef Maurice appeared, puffing, over the crest of the hill, carrying his upturned hat in both hands. In the hat sat a very plump brown rabbit, its feet upturned, twitching its nose at the surroundings.

“Maurice, come on! We’re on a stake-out, not an animal rescue mission.”

“I thought he would make a good friend for Hamilton.”

“When we get Hamilton back, we can go get a rabbit. Now put that one back where you found it, heaven knows where it’s been!”

There was the squeal of brakes as the girls’ car reached the bottom of the hill.

“Get in the car!”

A moment later, after a precipitous U-turn that left Arthur clutching the dashboard with one hand and his stomach with the other, they were barrelling down the hill after the VW Beetle.

The chase was on.

PC Lucy surveyed her troops. Two large onions. A bag of arborio rice. Chicken stock, shop-bought—but still, better than a stock cube, surely? A small wedge of parmesan, slivers of which she kept popping into her mouth. A large block of butter.

(She could hear her mother’s voice, saying one could never have enough butter when it came to dinnertime. Witnesses to Mrs Gavistone’s impressive bearing might have begged to differ.)

The gourmet food store in Cowton had only had one packet of dried mushrooms left on its shelves. PC Lucy snipped it open and tipped the whole lot into the pot. It didn’t look like much. And the last thing she wanted was for Patrick to think she’d skimped on ingredients. Still, it would have to do. Unless . . .

Her gaze slid across the room to a large clear plastic box containing the various bags of dried mushrooms she’d removed from Ollie’s lodgings, if only for the purpose of stopping Chef Maurice from getting at them. She’d been meaning to lug the box down to the station, though frankly the evidence room—which also served as the broom cupboard—was full enough as it was.

No. It would probably be unprofessional to start cooking the evidence from a murder case. She’d just have to manage with what she had.

Sara had written down her mother’s supposedly famous recipe for mushroom risotto.

“Isn’t your mum from Skegness?”

“So?”

PC Lucy had stared at the recipe. She was no culinary wizard, but she was fairly sure that risotto wasn’t usually made with beef suet. Nor was it fried. Or served with gravy.

So she’d had to make do with a recipe she’d found on the Internet. Forty-eight people had ‘liked’ it and there were only two complaints, one of which pointed out sniffily that the recipe was a little heavy on the carbs.

Still, there was one secret weapon in her arsenal, in the form of a heftily priced bottle of French wine that the man in the gourmet food shop had promised would set her dish dancing on the palate. If Patrick liked wine even half as much as his boss did, hopefully she was in with a chance that he’d be sloshed enough to not notice her cooking too much . . .

She stuck a spoon into the cloggy mess at the bottom of the pot. It tasted like two-day-old rice pudding.

In desperation, she threw in the last wodge of parmesan, which just sat there, sinking slowly like a cheesy Titanic.

She wondered if Chef Maurice would still let her eat at Le Cochon Rouge after she served his sous-chef a dish of congealed cheese-and-rice-based sludge.

Her gaze wandered again to the box of concentrated mushroomy goodness sitting in the corner.

Surely no one would notice if just a handful went missing.

She lifted up the lid and the deep meaty fragrance of wild mushrooms hit her nostrils.

Just one handful. What harm could it do . . . ?

* * *

There are certain conventions best adhered to when one is tailing another vehicle. There’s the surreptitious hanging back, maintaining a safe twenty metres’ distance between you and your prey. In busy traffic, best to leave at least three cars as a buffer zone, just in case. Inconspicuous attire is also recommended.

There should not, on the other hand, be any tailgating, horning at the targeted car when you think it’s driving too slowly, nor subsequently trying to overtake when they don’t take the hint.

“Maurice,” said Arthur, gripping the side of the car as they took a hairpin bend at more than double the recommended speed, “I don’t think you’ve grasped the fundamental concept of tailing someone. Namely, that you stay
behind
.”

“But this way, they do not think we are following them.”

“We
aren’t
following them. We might have even lost them, there were a lot of turn-offs back there . . . ”

He craned his neck to see out of the back windscreen. In the distance, the girls’ car appeared round the bend.

“There they are. Pull over!”

“But they will—”

“Just pull over! And try to look inconspicuous.”

“Bah!” But he pulled over nonetheless. A few moments later, the VW Beetle puttered past them.

“Right, after them!” said Arthur, straightening up from his ducked position. Chef Maurice threw aside the newspaper he’d been pretending to read and stomped on the accelerator.

They were approaching the northern edge of Cowton, Beakley’s nearest large town and home to the country’s smallest watchtower, an annual Goose Fair, and a particular type of local cider that dissolved your teeth and brain cells in equal amounts. Chef Maurice swore by the latter as part of his secret recipe for copper pan cleaner.

The lack of traffic meant they were now directly behind their prey, who seemed oblivious, bopping along in their car to whichever hair-gel-endorsing young male was dominating the pop charts that week.

“Where do you reckon they’re going?”

“I do not know, but I am hoping there is food.”

A few minutes later, they followed the VW Beetle into the car park of an old pub building of similar construction to Le Cochon Rouge, but in much worse repair. To add insult to injury, this particular pub had been converted into a bar-cum-nightclub, its name picked out in fluorescent tubing.

“‘The Office’,” read Arthur, as they pulled up on the other side of the car park. “Presumably named so that you’re technically telling the truth when you phone home saying you’re stuck here at midnight with your secretary.”

“You have a secretary?”

“Only Horace. And he’s not so good at the filing.”

They watched the two girls complete their requisite reapplication of make-up, then shimmy out of their car and into The Office.

Inside, the owners had decided upon a monochrome theme, with dingy black carpet, black walls and black painted booths. Even the barman’s teeth were black.

However, the decor—or lack thereof—didn’t seem to be deterring the local crowd, mostly made up of trendy-looking youths in their late teens and early twenties, decked out in outfits that seemed to consist of a strategic combination of rips and tears, and boasting enough piercings to set off airport security with a single earlobe.

Just by stepping through the door, Arthur and Chef Maurice probably doubled the average age in the room.

They stopped at the bar to pick up a pint of locally brewed ale for Arthur and a large brandy and bag of pork scratchings for Chef Maurice, then wandered with studied nonchalance over to a booth by the far wall, which sat back-to-back with a larger booth containing the two girls they’d just tailed, along with an assortment of jaded youths of both sexes, their faces mostly obscured in the low lighting.

“ . . . didn’t come out on Monday?”

“None of your business what I get up to in my free time.”

“Bet PJ’s mum didn’t let him out to play, that’s why.”

“Don’t talk to me about my mum,” sniped the voice named PJ. “You won’t believe the rubbish she’s been having me do this holiday.”

“Like cleaning your room, I’ll bet . . . ”

On the other side of the booth, one of the girls was recounting her day.

“ . . . so then we got up and drove over to Beakley, tried going round to Ollie’s, but—”

“You did
what
?” That was PJ again, who had the kind of high-pitched whiny voice that makes one itch to apply some boot to the speaker’s behind.

“Went over to Ollie’s. Don’t worry, we parked up the hill like usual, no one saw us.”

“Jeez,” added the other girl, “you get so wound up about your mate—”

“He’s not my mate, and—”

“—and anyway, he wasn’t even in.”

“Of course he wasn’t in, don’t you read the papers? He got murdered up in Farnley Woods last week!”

Far from producing the hushed awe that this news possibly deserved, the two girls leapt upon this tidbit like birds on the early worm.

“You’re freaking kidding me—”

“How, where, what, you’ve gotta tell me—”

“I never liked the way he looked at me—”

“Have they found the murderer yet?”

Another male voice roused itself from its pint to relay the tale of the forager’s sad demise, roughly as it had been recounted every day since in the local paper—which had been bolstering their coverage with snippets from concerned neighbours (Mrs Eldridge), local residents (Mrs Eldridge) and the village leaders (Mrs Eldridge).

“That’s crazy,” breathed one of the girls. “Do you think the police will find out about—”

Several voices shushed her into silence.

“Did anyone see you today?” said the voice of PJ. “Because if they did—”

“No one saw us,” said one of the girls. “And even if they did, we weren’t doing anything wrong.” She gasped, then giggled. “Wait, you didn’t do it, did you?”

“Don’t be daft,” said PJ sharply.

“You did say you owed him—”

“I paid him off ages ago. More’s the pity,” the youth muttered.

“So the papers haven’t said anything about Ollie and all the—”

“Shhhhh! Honestly, Chrissy . . . ”

The conversation continued in lowered tones. Arthur and Chef Maurice paused, drinks halfway to their lips, and sat up higher in their seats to listen.