Chef Maurice and the Wrath of Grapes (Chef Maurice Culinary Mysteries Book 2) (18 page)

Patrick had long ago taken over doing the restaurant’s accounts, after realising that his boss’s approach to finances was exactly the same as his approach to making a perfectly seasoned steak tartare—you kept playing around with the amounts until it all balanced out. Unfortunately, this method did not generally sit well with Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs department.

“Patrick,” said Chef Maurice huffily, “is not head chef.”

He navigated the trolley over a particularly bumpy patch of cobblestones and turned up St John’s Lane, which had been recently colonised by several chic eateries and cafes.

He came to a sudden halt. “Arthur!
Regarde.
It is Monsieur Gilles!” He pointed across the road to a small, nondescript coffee shop. In the window, wearing a black coat and a furtive expression, was Sir William’s butler.

“Butlers are allowed days off too, I’m sure,” said Arthur. “Can you see who he’s with?”

But the bold lettering across the front window obscured the face of the man sitting opposite Gilles. Chef Maurice and Arthur watched as the butler reached into his coat and withdrew a rectangular item wrapped in brown paper, about the size of a photo album. He handed it over the table, where it was received by two gloved hands. The unidentified man then stood up and nodded at Gilles.

Chef Maurice gave a yelp and grabbed hold of Arthur’s arm.

“It is him! The man who attacked me at Bourne Hall, the night of Sir William’s murder!”

The tall man with the white-blond crew cut was now exiting the cafe, fiddling with the clasp of his briefcase. He then set off down the road at a brisk pace.

“
Allons-y!
We must follow him.”

“Well, I don’t know about
must
,” said Arthur, but Chef Maurice was already hurrying across the road, trolley bouncing along in front of him. A red double-decker bus blared its horn as it narrowly missed flattening the pursuing chef.

Up ahead, the blond man continued on, oblivious.

“What about Gilles?” whispered Arthur, as he struggled to keep up.

Chef Maurice stopped and turned around. The top of Gilles’s hat was just disappearing around a corner.

“Bah, we know where to find him. But this other one . . . ”

“Fantastic, let’s leave the butler and follow the heavily armed mystery man instead,” muttered Arthur as they hurried on.

Indeed, this would, later on, turn out to have been their first mistake.

Their target had now reached the main road and joined the queue to board a waiting bus. Thankfully, he climbed the stairs to the upper deck, while Arthur and Chef Maurice manoeuvred the goose trolley into the open bay next to the winding stairwell.

“Excuse me!” said a voice behind them, in tones that suggested imminent warfare rather than apology.

They turned to find a well-dressed grandmother, silk scarf knotted around her neck, with a pushchair full of two-year-old toddler.

“This space is for wheelchairs and buggies!” she said, moving forward an inch to suggest that the battle charge was about to commence.

Chef Maurice looked at her, looked at the little boy, then back up at her. “But this too”—he patted the styrofoam box—“is a buggy.”

“No, it isn’t,” snapped the grandmother, while her grandson gazed up at the big white box.

“Can I havva ride?”

“
Certainement!
”

Before anyone could object, Chef Maurice had scooped up the little boy and placed him atop the trolley’s little basket. The toddler looked around the bus, eyes wide at this chance to see the world from up above.

The grandmother opened her mouth, but Chef Maurice nodded at her and said, “See,
madame
, there is now space for you to fold the buggy.”

The nearby commuters were silent behind their newspapers, but Arthur could feel the tension of a dozen strangers waiting on tenterhooks for the grandmother to make her next move.

“
Oooopla!
” said Chef Maurice, grabbing the little boy as the bus came to a sudden stop. Passengers shuffled down the stairs and towards the exit, including the blond man, who stared out of the bus window impatiently.

“Sorry,
mon petit
, we must now go.” He dumped the boy back into his grandmother’s arms and hurried for the door.

It took the combined efforts of Arthur and Chef Maurice to lift the trolley to the ground, and by the time they were back on the pavement their target was a good distance ahead.

Chefs are used to making split-second decisions. After all, it only takes a second for a hollandaise to curdle, a duck breast to go from pinkly juicy to overcooked. In addition, head chefs, especially those in the mould of Chef Maurice, are used to having their words obeyed without question.

The two facts combined possibly explain Chef Maurice’s next move, which, incidentally, would turn out to be the second mistake of the day.

He cupped his hands around his mouth. “Stop right where you are!”

The man turned, gave them one look, and took off down a side street.

Chef Maurice swore, fixed his grip on the trolley’s handle, and accelerated forwards along the pavement.

As has been noted previously, chefs are not generally built for long-distance running, and their quarry had a good thirty-metre head start.

Arthur would later point out that their progress also hadn’t been helped by bringing along several kilos of frozen goose.

Eventually they came to a stop down a blind alleyway, panting and wheezing.

“He has disappeared!” said Chef Maurice indignantly.

“Maybe he . . . went over . . . the wall,” breathed Arthur, though he cast a doubtful look at the barbed wire over the brickwork. “Are you . . . sure . . . he came down here?”

“I am most certain.”

“Well, then maybe . . . ” Arthur’s gaze settled on the back door of the red-brick building to their right. It sat just half an inch open, the latch not having caught fully. Beside the door, a keypad gave a little beep of distress.

“But probably best not to—” he began, but Chef Maurice was already barrelling through the door, goose first.

A few moments later, alarms blaring and red lights flashing, they were surrounded by serious-looking men in dark uniforms.

They later agreed that entering the building might have been a bit of a mistake.

If so, that would have made it the third one of the day.

PC Lucy sat down at the end of the train carriage, with Hamilton in his hamper on the seat beside her, and tried not to make eye contact with the other passengers. Apparently her police uniform made her the general face of Authority in these parts, and so far she’d been subjected to twelve complaints about the rising rail fares, nine gripes about delays and cancellations, two requests that she arrest the Minister of Transport and make him ride ‘his own effing trains’, and one plea to locate a child’s toy bunny that had been left on the 10.46 to Brighton last year and had never been returned, despite several strongly worded letters.

Then she’d tried to give up her seat to the wizened old lady who’d got on at Reading, bent double by the weight of half a dozen shopping bags. The woman had looked mortally offended, and now stood swaying in the aisle, throwing PC Lucy the occasional dirty look.

Somewhat surprisingly, Hamilton’s presence on the train had caused no more than the occasional surreptitious glance from behind the rows of newspapers. Commuters were clearly a hardened bunch, for whom it would take a lot more than a snuffling pink snout to cause comment.

Her phone buzzed, and several commuters narrowed their eyes at her as she dared to pick it up.

“Hello?” she whispered. “PC Gavistone here. I’m on a train.”

She listened for a while to the gabbled voice at the other end of the line.

“Sorry, Arthur, I didn’t quite catch that, you broke in where?”

More gabbling.

“Why on earth would you break into the Metropolitan Police Art Fraud departme— Ah. Well, that explains . . . well, not very much. No! Don’t pass me over. I don’t want to speak to him.”

She wondered briefly if there was a way to arrest Chef Maurice for being a Bloody Public Nuisance.

“Okay, fine, I’ll speak to the Superintendent.”

A short conversation with the Superintendent of the Art Fraud Unit ensued, in which she confirmed that she did indeed know of a certain Mr Manchot and Mr Wordington-Smythe and, no, they were not known to be art criminals of any description. She considered asking the Superintendent to keep them there overnight as punishment, but decided against it, if only for Patrick’s and Alf’s sakes. December was a busy enough period for the restaurant, without their head chef being temporarily behind bars.

She hung up and let out a big sigh. Today had not been the most fruitful of days. Paloni had been closeted away somewhere by his PR team, doing interviews for his new film, while Resnick’s secretary had refused point blank to give out any information, only stating that his boss was out of the office ‘on business’. She’d had PC Sara look into Resnick’s financials for any motives hidden there, but the wine critic had come out clean as a whistle. Auction records indicated he’d been earning a hefty sum each year through the commission on Sir William’s various purchases, a trend that had showed no signs of abating. If anything, the man would have had a strong motive for keeping Sir William alive and wine collecting for as many years as possible.

As for the Lafoutes, the news of Bertie’s inheritance certainly threw a new light onto the case, but it was going to take more than one dusty handkerchief to convince her that wobbly-chinned Bertie Lafoute was capable of cold-blooded murder. Now his wife, on the other hand . . .

Her phone buzzed again, and she groaned when she recognised the number.

“Hi, how’s it going? . . . Yes, of course we’re still on for Sunday. Did Fred confirm he can make it too? . . . Okay, great— No, don’t come round, I’m absolutely knackered, I’ve been up in London all day . . . Yes. Okay, see you then. Love you too.”

She shut her phone and closed her eyes.

“Why does life have to be so complicated?” she asked the world in general.

Hamilton, tearing himself away from a staring match with the five-year-old girl in the seat opposite, gave her a look that said she’d brought this all upon herself, didn’t she know that?

I know, she thought. But not for much longer. She’d sort out everything on Sunday; then there’d be no more lies. All she had to do was avoid Patrick until their date next Tuesday. With the hours he worked, and the Sir William case keeping her busy, how hard could that possibly be?

The next morning was not a morning for good news.

Patrick, having been apprised of Chef Maurice’s recent poultry expenditure, disappeared into the restaurant’s little back office and came out half an hour later with dark pronouncements about cash flow tightening, reduced profitability, and, putting this all into terms that his boss might understand, the potential slashing of January’s cheese budget.

This was followed by a call put through to Bourne Hall, which revealed an even more alarming discovery. Gilles had vanished, along with several extremely valuable bottles from Sir William’s cellar.

“Well, I guess that’s it, then,” said Dorothy, who was at the kitchen table polishing the cutlery. “It was the butler who done it. Funny job, when you think about it, being cooped up in that big house all year, ’xcept when Sir William took off to France for his holidays.”

“A paid-for annual holiday to France sounds all right to me,” said Patrick.

“But it does not make sense!” said Chef Maurice, who was occupying the other end of the table, taste-testing three venison dishes that Patrick was trying to get onto the menu. “If Monsieur Gilles was the one to attack Sir William, why does he choose a night when there are many guests who might witness the crime?”

“He might have been trying to spread the suspicion around,” suggested Patrick.

“And also, it is
impossible
! Monsieur Gilles was all the time with me and Arthur.”

“But he had an accomplice, right?” said Alf, who was flipping through his new wine book. “The American hitman who was here, the one you chased through London yesterday?”