Christopher Brookmyre - Parlabane 04 (29 page)

Parlabane's constitution wasn't easily disturbed, and certainly not by mere imagination, but he knew it might be a while before any more farmers' arses featured on his metaphorical menu.

Joanna got up from the table, drawing her eyes off Rory with undisguised loathing. 'I'm sorry, everybody, but this isn't my idea of a joke. I'm going to bed.'

170

'What about puds?' asked Liz.

'Do you think I've any appetite after that?' she retorted accusingly. Liz made a less then penitent Oops! expression once Joanna's eyes were averted, a few shared smirks defying the awkwardness of the moment.

'I'm off too,' said Max, with restrained but discernible indignation. 'Not to bed, but you'll forgive me if I don't want to hang around the dining table. I'll be in the snooker room later if anyone fancies a game,' he added, trailing a late olive branch.

'Yeah, we'll have a few frames,' Rory called after him. 'Just as soon as we've finished our chilled monkey-brain desserts.'

171

The Mark of a Man

'Are you sure you're all right?' Sir Lachlan was asking, hirpling along behind Alison as she hurried for the kitchen, its atmosphere of heat and pressure promising a sanctuary of the familiar as her heart thumped. She felt inexplicably cold in the corridor, and needed the embrace of that sometimes stifling warmth like a lost toddler needed a hug from her mummy. She'd never understood what people meant when they said they felt like someone had walked over their grave, until she'd seen that man's dinner plate. It was daft. She didn't believe in any sixth-sense nonsense, but she knew that events and circumstances could conspire - no, coincide - to give the most rational person the shivers, and such a confluence had washed over her in that dining room. Overheated, dehydrated and running on empty, she was well primed to let her imagination off the leash when she glimpsed those leftovers.

'I'm fine,' she told him as he nipped in front and held the door open for her.

'Just gave myself a fright. It's silly. Ger'll laugh, wait and see.'

'Ger'll laugh at what?' the new head chef asked, pouring whisky into individual steel measures for warming prior to combustion atop dessert. Alison put the pile of plates down on the worktop above the dishwasher, the branded meat on top, surrounded by scraped-away parmesan and uneaten veg. 'That doesn't mean anything to you, does it?' she asked. 'I mean, I've only heard you describe. . . '

Ger's gaze locked upon the plate as though it might rise up and strike if he took his eyes off it. The 'cattle-mark' the guest had referred to was a small logo, blackened on the skin by the heat but still legible. It was in the shape of three interlinked capital Ds.

Sir Lachlan had taken hold of the whisky bottle as soon as Ger put it down, and was poking around in the wrong cupboard for some glasses.

'Well, if you're feeling better, Alison,' Sir Lachlan said, 'I think a wee dram might be in order in recognition of both your efforts, and in recognition particularly of the creative talents of this man here. It won't be the last time you hear this, Gerard, I'm certain, and I'm sure it counts more if it comes from the guests rather than the proprietor, but bugger it, I'd like to heartily propose that we toast the chef.'

173

Ger looked up at last from the plate, his face a picture of ashen disbelief. It wasn't the reaction Alison was hoping for, and it didn't look very likely that he'd laugh.

'No, you can't,' he said, his voice hollow, throat dry. He gulped, his eyes returning to the uneaten meat.

'Oh, don't be so modest. Why ever not?'

'Because it looks like I've already shallow-fried him.'

'What?'

'The chef. Mathieson. I think that's his tattoo.'

'What the devil are you talking about?' Sir Lachlan asked. Ger remained still, breathing deeply in a demanding effort to retain calm.

'Mathieson was in a boy band in the late Eighties.'

'A boy band?'

'You know, like a pop group. One-hit wonders. They were called Three-D. This was their logo.'

'Hang on,' Alison interrupted, relief hitting her like a cooling breeze. 'Okay, I get it. Panic over: this was the bastard's revenge. He took the meat then got someone - a mate probably - to turn up at the door and sell us this stuff.
He
marked it with the logo for a sick joke.'

Ger shook his head, slowly and solemnly. 'I didn't even know he had a tattoo, so how could he assume anyone would recognise it? Fair enough, I wound him up yesterday by playing his song, but he'd no way of knowing I'd seen their logo or would remember what it looked like.'

'Wait a minute,' Sir Lachlan said, screwing up his eyes in confused consternation. 'Are you saying. . . You're
not
saying. . . '

'That we've just cooked the fuckin' chef, yes.'

'So how come you didn't spot this tattoo when you were preparing the meat? How come it only came to light on a dinner plate?'

'I don't know. I washed the meat and coated it. Yes, I'd have expected to notice something like that, but. . . '

'But what, man?'

'A few pieces had a membrane above the meat. Tattoos can penetrate well beneath the top layers of the dermis. Underneath, the marking would be faint, but would show up if. . . ' Ger swallowed. 'Would show up if heated.'

'No,' said Sir Lachlan. 'I don't. . . I mean, I can't. . . You can't. . . No. Where did it come from, for God's sake? No, I simply don't believe it. There must be a more reasonable explanation.'

'Look. A man turned up at the back door and sold us some unidentified meat that he claimed was ostrich. I bought it because we were desperate, and we were desperate because our chef got binned and cleared oot the fridge. A piece of skin on that meat bears a mark with, shall we say, a significance 174

regardin' the personal history of our departed head chef. Those are the facts. If you can combine them to produce a conclusion that
doesnae
involve me offering Long Pig as my debut dish, I'd be delighted to hear it.'

Sir Lachlan gripped the whisky bottle by the neck and put it to his lips, swigging it back straight. 'God almighty, how the hell could this have happened?'

he asked no-one in particular. 'It just can't be true. After everything that's gone on here and everything I've worked to overcome, I refuse to believe that when we finally look like turning the corner, we feed the bloody head chef to our guests as an entree.' He took another swig and looked imploringly at his employees. 'I mean, what the bloody hell else can go wrong here? Is one of the guests going to reveal himself as an Egon Ronay researcher? "Charming location, atmospheric establishment, menu ideal for South American planecrash survivors. Avoid March as hotel is booked out by the annual Sawney Bean ancestral family gathering."'

Alison took the bottle from him and placed it down away from his grasp.

'With respect, sir, I don't think the hotel's reputation is the issue right now.'

'She's right,' agreed Ger. 'What we fed the guests is a secondary consideration. The primary one is how it got to the kitchen. If this is how it looks, then Mathieson was murdered here today; in fact, murdered, skinned, butchered and sold back to his place of erstwhile employment within a couple of hours of leaving.'

'By someone whose face Ger and I have both seen,' Alison remembered with a chill. 'Oh, God, he even had bloodstains on his boots. I thought he was a poacher. What kind of sick bastard would butcher somebody and sell him for meat? And what kind of nutter would do it at the expense of letting us see his face? We could identify him.'

'The kind of nutter who doesn't expect you to tell anybody,' Ger said, quiet and cold.

'Why the hell wouldn't we. . . ' Her words tailed off, the answer sinking in before she could finish her question.

175

After-Dinner Games

Vale appropriated the role of sommelier after what was unanimously deemed to be an irredeemable lapse in service, opening and distributing the bottle of Shiraz that had lain on the sideboard since Sir Lachlan's hurried departure. He had a lithe elegance about him as he moved around the table filling glasses, a mercurial alertness about his features, neither of these properties tallying with Emily's notions of long-serving civil-service desk-jockeys. Perhaps his late career-change to photography had truly liberated the guy's spirit. She would like to think so.

'I don't think Sir Lachlan will mind,' Vale assured them. 'Though we'd probably best lay off making free with the optics in the lounge.'

'At least for another half-hour,' added Rory.

There were four of them remaining around the table, following a slew of exits in the wake of Joanna and Max. Emily wasn't sure whether it was the wine, the fatigue or merely the perspective afforded by having been briefly in fear for her life earlier on, but she couldn't motivate herself to empathise with Joanna's indignation nor feel any disapproval of those making light of her and Max's discomfiture. Perhaps, just perhaps, with her PR hat definitely lying crumpled and discarded in a corner somewhere and her guilt-driven leftist reflexes dampened by last night's rancour, she was learning to lighten up a little.

Kathy and Liz had both expressed their regret at opting to forego dessert, but cited a combination of exhaustion and grave doubt as to whether they'd be seeing it before dawn, given the speed of service thus far. The everconciliatory Toby had gone off to join Max in his mooted game of snooker, an act of amelioration perhaps intended to prevent the latter from thinking he'd painted himself into a huffy corner. Rory had made his own gesture of solidarity by suggesting that Toby take the open bottle from the table plus a couple of glasses, though he might not have been so generous had he known their host wouldn't be back to replace it.

They heard the distinctive slam of the heavy front doors from down the corridor.

'Sounds like Grieg's back,' Rory observed.

177

'Could be Baxter,' Emily suggested.

'Nah. Him and Campbell are hiding in a cupboard somewhere, waiting for us to go and investigate. Major tactical misjudgement, if you ask me. After dinner, a few bevs and a hard day's yomping in yellow, they've seriously miscalculated if they think we can be arsed playing hide and seek. Actually, maybe it's Sardines they're playing, and that explains why all the bloody staff have disappeared.'

But Rory was wrong. It was Baxter who emerged from the corridor, hair and clothes damp from the rain.

'Campbell show up?' he asked, a little breathless from running.

'No, not that we're aware,' Parlabane replied.

'Shit.'

'Where have you been?' Emily inquired. 'You've been ages. You missed dinner, and that's saying something, the time it took.'

'Sorry. What did you have?' he asked distractedly, as though from automatic politeness.

'
Man
flesh,' boomed Rory, looking around for a response, but nobody was laughing. Baxter's face, in conjunction with the duration of his absence, suggested all was not well.

'Look, I'm sorry to be a party-pooper, but I think we might have a wee problem.' His voice was low and a little too controlled, hinting at great efforts to constrain a less sober delivery. The phrase 'wee problem' sounded anything but.

'What's up?' Parlabane asked.

'More a matter of what's down. As in the bridge.'

'The bridge? Down how?'

'Down as in one end is bent and mangled and the other is dangling into the ravine. You remember that clap of thunder earlier? Well, I don't think that's what it was.'

'You've just come from there?' Parlabane asked. 'On foot?'

'Yeah. The road's longer than it seems because of the loops, but on foot you can take a few short cuts. I went out that way looking for Francis. We had something planned for tomorrow involving a hidden shelter in the woods. I'll come clean, he wasn't going to retrieve the SIM cards - he was going to hide them there and tell you all they'd gone missing. Then we were all going to

"discover" them tomorrow, big Abracadabra moment. But there was no sign of him anywhere. I think something might be going very wrong.'

'Nah, nice try, Donald, but we're not biting,' said Rory. 'We're too tired. Have a seat. There's still some wine left.'

'Rory, this is not part of the UML Experience, all right? My colleague is missing and I need you all to be serious for a minute. The fucking bridge is 178

down. The
bridge
! You know, the thing connecting this place with the only road out of here? It's wrecked. Do you think our budget stretches to shit like that? It certainly wouldn't stretch to repairing it.'

'Whereas fibs and porkies cost nothing,' said Parlabane. 'Why don't you take a seat and wait for Grieg. He'll be able to verify things one way or the other, unless he's driven the minibus into the ravine, of which he strikes me as being entirely capable.'

'The fucking minibus is right outside,' Baxter stated angrily. 'He hasn't driven it anywhere.'

'It's what?'

'It's at the front door, where it's been since this afternoon. Go and look, for God's sake. Jesus Christ, we've got a serious situation on our hands and I'm stuck in some kind of boy-who-cried-wolf nightmare.'

'So where's Grieg?' Emily asked, checking her watch and doing some disturbing arithmetic regarding the time since Joanna's singularly gormless companion had left.

'Having a beer somewhere with Campbell and all the missing staff members who've in on this nonsense,' scoffed Rory.

'Missing staff?' asked Baxter.

'One of the waitresses is AWOL, according to Sir Lachlan,' said Parlabane.

'And we've not seen him or any other staff for a wee while either.'

'Does this not tell you anything?' Baxter challenged Rory. 'I mean, you aren't noticing a pattern here at all?'

Rory stood up and handed Baxter a glass of wine, which he initially made to bat away, but thought better of it and downed the lot like it was water. If this was merely his latest in-character performance, then it was one Stanislavsky would have approved of.

'Look, there's a simple way to get to the bottom of this,' Rory said. 'We phone the cops, tell them about the bridge. If you're shitting us, you won't allow that to happen, like earlier today. Sorry if having your bluff called buggers up your plans, but better the flaws get ironed out during this dry run, eh?'