Crusher (12 page)

“Fine, he can tell that to the police.”

“Don’t tell the police. Please, Finn. You don’t know what he’s like.”

“I won’t tell them I spoke to you, I promise,” I said.

She turned away to sip her wine as if she was ashamed of me watching her.

“He’s in the phone book,” she said finally. “Under
Haulage
. Jonno Kendrick.”

“OK,” I said. A glance at my watch told me I had less than an hour to get to Pimlico for this job interview at the restaurant. I was on the wrong side of West London and rush hour was just starting. “I have to go,” I said. I turned and headed for the door.

“Finn, wait.” She plonked her wineglass down and came after me. “Promise me you won’t do anything stupid.”

“Thanks, Elsa. And thanks for … making Dad happy,” I said.

“Stay a bit longer,” she said. “Have a proper drink.” She grinned. She had a lovely shy smile that went all the way to her eyes. “I won’t tell anyone if you don’t.”

“Sorry, Elsa, I really do have a job interview,” I said.

“Call them. Put it off. You’ve been through a terrible experience, Finn. We both have.” She laid her hand on my arm and looked at me, and abruptly I found myself wondering what she’d done as a social worker to get herself suspended. She must have caught what I was thinking, because she pulled her hand away and started playing with her hair.

“Bye,” I said, as I turned the latch.

“Take care, OK?”

She shut the door behind me and I hurried back towards the main street. That was weird, I thought. Did she really just make a pass at me? I’d started off afraid I’d never get into her house, and ended up worried I’d never get out. I wondered if Dad had felt the same way.

I arrived at the Iron Bridge five minutes late and sweating. The doors were open, but it was too early for any customers. The decor was muted and classy, with discreet lighting glinting off crystal wineglasses and spotless cutlery laid out on crisp cream linen. It wasn’t cutting-edge trendy or chintzy nostalgic, it was just timeless and cool. A waitress all in black apart from a white cotton apron was flitting like a hummingbird from table to table, deftly arranging tiny pots of flowers. She looked up as I entered, and I could see that the staff were chosen as carefully as the decor. Slim and curvy with perfect skin and dark brown eyes, she was Malaysian, or Chinese perhaps. She approached me with a wide, relaxed smile. If my jeans and trainers and sweatshirt made me look more like a mugger than a customer, she didn’t let her opinion show.

“Hi there, can I help you?”

“I’m here to see Mr. Eccles? About a job.”

She blinked. Of course, I thought, Eccles is a celebrity chef, he’s on telly, he doesn’t do his own hiring and firing. I should have asked for the major-domo, or whatever the manager is called in a place like this.

“I’ll find out if he’s available,” she said at last. “Who shall I say is asking for him?”

“Maguire,” I said. “Finn Maguire.” I didn’t mention the Guvnor and I didn’t intend to. Whoever interviewed me would know who’d recommended me, I thought, and besides, I was a bit embarrassed by the association.

“Take a seat,” she said, waving a graceful hand. I thanked her, but I didn’t sit down. While she headed out back I tried not to fidget or put my hands in my pockets. The place intimidated me, but I didn’t want to look like a total chav.

She returned a few minutes later and gave me a practised smile. “Would you come this way, please?” Standing aside, she gestured for me to precede her towards the back of the restaurant. By the swing doors leading to the kitchen was an unadorned door so discreet it was almost invisible. I stopped, unsure whether it opened with a push or lowered like a drawbridge. I may not have looked like a chav, but I may well have looked like the village idiot. The waitress stepped ahead of me, pushed the door open gently, and directed me down a
dim corridor painted dark red. “Chef is in the office,” she said. “First door on the left.”

I knocked on the first door and waited. I wasn’t sure I heard anyone tell me to come in, but I just wanted to get this ordeal over with, so I opened the door and entered.

Eccles’s office was in much the same understated decor as the restaurant, but it was dominated by a sleek desk of pale wood with a computer perched on it—one of those super-slick ones with everything integrated into the massive screen. I noticed the office had its own kitchen en suite. It seemed odd, when there was a fully equipped commercial kitchen next door, but maybe Eccles liked to work up his new recipes in a private setting.

Chris Eccles himself was seated at the desk, in chef’s whites, looking through a pile of receipts and scribbling figures onto a pad beside him, ignoring the computer. It figured somehow; he always made a big deal on his TV show about preparing ingredients by hand. I walked up to the desk, a little nervously, and cleared my throat. He looked up, unsmiling, and examined me over the narrow designer glasses that had become one of his trademarks.

“Hi. I’m Finn Maguire.”

Eccles glanced at his watch. It was seven minutes past five. I had the impression he wanted to bollock me, but he merely jerked his chin at the chair facing his desk.
I sat down and laid my hands in my lap, wishing I’d gone home from the undertaker’s to change and shower instead of chasing Elsa Kendrick across West London.

“I’m told you have kitchen experience,” said Eccles. Straight in, no small talk. His tone was neutral, as if the decision had already been made and he was only going through the motions. On camera he had a twinge of Geordie to his accent; in real life it seemed he didn’t bother.

“I don’t, I’m sorry. Only serving at a fast-food place.”

Now he looked pained. “Which one?”

“Does it matter?”

“And what sort of position did you have in mind?”

“Anything, Mr. Eccles, I’m really not fussy.”

“Front of house?”

“Waiting tables, you mean?”

“Yes, waiting tables. Serving customers. Handling wine.”

“I could do that, but … I don’t think I’d do your place justice.”

Now his jaw was working. It was a strong, square jaw, and he had thick black hair that rarely did what it was told. Viewers—not all of them female—used to swoon at the way he rolled up his sleeves and wrestled with his ingredients, twinkling for the camera. But he wasn’t twinkling now, now he was looking really pissed
off, as if some zany celeb had come in and asked him to do egg and beans on toast and serve it on a plastic tray, naked apart from his apron.

“Sorry, Mr. Maguire, but do you consider waiting on the public beneath you? Because that’s what we do here.”

“No, no. Look, Mr. Eccles, I think you might have got the wrong idea. I know who it was that suggested you see me”—
told you to hire me
, I guessed, but that was probably better left unsaid—“but I’m not one of his—I mean, I don’t expect—”

I took a deep breath and started again. “Thing is, I really do need a job. A proper job, and I really will do anything. Cleaning toilets, washing out bins, I don’t mind. I mean, if I’m good enough, and you think I could handle it, I’d love to learn to work front of house, someday. But believe me, you don’t want me out there any time soon, not unless your customers like their food in their laps.”

Eccles looked thoughtful, as if he wanted to believe me, but thought this might be some sort of trap.

“And what will you tell our mutual friend?”

Obviously he meant McGovern, and obviously McGovern was no friend of his.

“I won’t tell him anything. Even if you don’t have anything for me to do, and send me home. He owed
me a favour, and meeting you was the favour. He never promised me a job. It’s up to you. Honestly.”

Eccles took his glasses off and tapped the arm against his teeth. It was a weird moment—I’d seen him do that on telly, in a commercial for Irish butter. “Come with me,” was all he said. He stood, pushed back his chair and strode out of the room, me scampering after him like Igor after Dr. Frankenstein.

As we entered the kitchen a low hum of activity jumped in volume. There was a lot of clattering of pans and shouts of “Yes, Chef!” Clearly all the kitchen staff were terrified of Eccles and determined to look busy and efficient. He led me past one counter where a frantic girl folded and crimped tiny sculptures of pastry, and another where a chef, his hands glittering with scales, gutted and filleted a gleaming pile of fish. Right at the back of the kitchen a tall lugubrious bloke in chef’s whites topped off with incongruous long black rubber gauntlets was scraping what looked like dried egg off a stainless-steel pan.

“Gordon,” said Eccles. The tall chef turned and practically jumped to attention, barking, “Yes, Chef!”

“You’re on fish,” said Eccles. “Go help Eric. And listen very carefully to what he tells you.”

Gordon beamed in delight and tugged frantically at his rubber gloves. He was being promoted, I realized.
How many eons had he been serving his apprenticeship here, scrubbing pots?

“Yes, Chef. Thank you, Chef,” he babbled. Eccles merely jerked his head for him to get a move on. Picking up Gordon’s discarded gloves, he slapped them against my chest.

“Got a dishwasher at home?”

“No.”

“You know how to wash up, then.”

“Yes.”

“
Yes, Chef
. You want overalls?”

“I’m fine like this, Chef,” I said.

“So get stuck in.”

And he walked away.

Pulling on the rubber gauntlets I surveyed the teetering stack of pans to my left, encrusted with pastry, dried-on egg and what looked like fish skins burned onto stainless steel. I squirted soap into the vast shiny sink, turned the hot tap on full blast, picked up a handful of steel wool and started to whistle.

After half an hour I was wishing I had asked for overalls, because it was hot steamy work, and my T-shirt was clinging to my torso with sweat. I didn’t think it was the sort of kitchen where going topless was encouraged—the kitchen staff were all in full buttoned-up
uniform, though it was as hot as Hell’s boiler house in there. Eccles moved among them calmly, rarely raising his voice except to be heard over the hiss and roar of the pans and burners. He saved the histrionics and drama for his TV shows, I guessed. Gordon came to see how I was getting on at one point, and I got him to show me where the overalls were. They were so big and loose they let in a cool draught, so wearing just them as a top I could toss my sweaty T-shirt to one side and keep going.

In the course of the evening the noise and activity rose to a roar, and the dirty pans piled up like shrapnel from a battlefield, but I scrubbed them down, rinsed them off, stacked them on the worktop to my right and kept going. At one point the pastry chef I’d noticed earlier dashed over, plonked down cutlery and a plate of salad with a chunk of salmon baked in pastry, and ran off again. I ate it in snatches so as not to slow down my output. It was bloody delicious. Apart from that, everyone else in the kitchen pretty much ignored my existence, which was fine by me.

I noticed the noise diminishing before I ever thought to look at the clock. It was gone half eleven, and the pile of pans had shrunk to the extent I could actually count them. By twelve I was rinsing down the sink with a cloth, unaware that Eccles had come to watch me. When
I sensed him there and looked round, he was standing with his arms folded and a vague grin on his face as if he’d won a bet.

“That’ll do,” he said.

“Do I get the job?”

He snorted. Reaching into the rear pocket of his chef’s trousers he produced a slim wallet, opened it, deftly thumbed out five twenties and handed them to me. I stared at them.

“For seven hours’ work?”

His look told me not to ask stupid questions.

“Thanks very much, Mr. Eccles.” The rubber gauntlets slurped as I peeled them off.

“Your name’s Finn?” he asked, as if he hadn’t really been listening earlier.

“Yeah.”

“Sort out your shifts with Josie, the manager, OK? And if you can’t make it for any reason, call her.”

“I won’t,” I said. “I mean, I will. I mean, I’ll be here, Chef.”

He nodded and walked out, to reverent murmurs of “Night, Chef.” I chucked the overalls into a laundry basket, wrung out my T-shirt and tugged it back on.

On the Tube home I kept touching the notes folded in my pocket as if they might vanish like fairy gold. I’d
signed up for seven nights a week, with two days off every fortnight. A hundred quid a night, seven nights a week … But maybe that was just a starting bonus. Maybe once Eccles put me on the books properly he’d start paying me the statutory minimum. No, I thought. He’s paying me over the odds because he thinks I’m part of some protection scam, and if he doesn’t stuff my pockets I’ll go running to the Guvnor. But I’d told him it wasn’t like that—all I’d wanted was a fair night’s pay for a fair night’s work. Maybe I should tell him again, I thought. A hundred pounds a night, though … bollocks, I’d tell him sometime soon.

Then I remembered—the money hadn’t really been the point, not originally. The point had been to get inside one of the Guvnor’s businesses, to see if I could dig up the truth about who killed Dad. But if Eccles’s restaurant was just a cover for some criminal operation, it was a pretty elaborate and expensive one. Restaurants could launder money, I supposed—I had been paid in cash, after all—but not on the scale of a bookie’s or a casino. Did the Guvnor invest in the Iron Bridge because he wanted part of a classy and upmarket establishment to complement his usual nightclubs and brothels? But if Eccles was that scared of McGovern, how the hell did he end up in business with him?

Unless he was never given an option.

I wasn’t sure how much I could find out about the Guvnor by washing pans every evening, but suddenly I realized I was too knackered to think about it any more. It was nearly one when I turned into my own street, and I was so shattered I could barely lift my feet. I didn’t notice the girl till I was practically beside her; she’d been hidden by a bay window of the house that poked out onto the pavement, two doors up from mine. In fact, I walked right past her, and she had to call to me from under the hood of the anorak that was hiding her face in shadow.