Death with Blue Ribbon

Death With Blue Ribbon

Carolus Deene becomes involved in his latest adventure when a famous restaurateur is threatened by a protection racketeer. Then a well-known gourmand is murdered under extraordinary circumstances. Carolus's investigations in the world of pretentious catering lead him into great personal danger—horrifically so when a second murder, that of a member of the protection-racket gang, takes place.

Discovering the connection between two such seemingly disparate crimes, and extricating himself from tricky situations, Carolus exploits his
penchant
for solving mysteries in masterly fashion—aided and abetted by an author with a sure satirical touch and a nice sense of humour.

Published in 1994 by

Academy Chicago Publishers

262 West Erie Street

Chicago, Illinois 60610

Copyright © Leo Bruce 1969

Printed and bound in the USA

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in Publication Data

Bruce, Leo, 1903-1980.

Death with blue ribbon / Leo Bruce.

p. cm.

ISBN 0-89733-345-4

I. Title.

PR6005.RG673D46 1990

  823′.912—dc20

90-228

CIP  

A tall thin man in a well-cut morning suit sat at an ornate desk in his office facing two unexpected callers. He was trying to control the nervous tremors which were making his leg twitch.

‘This is nothing short of blackmail!' he said in a voice which he hoped would sound firm.

One of his callers, a coarse-featured man in his middle thirties, laughed heartily. He slapped his knee and released his laughter with no inhibition. But his eyes did not laugh, the tall man noted. His eyes remained cold.

‘Blackmail, eh? That's good, Mr Rowlands.'

‘The name is Rolland,' said the tall man, making it sound very French.

‘Now,
it is. Yves Rolland. You were Ivor Rowlands not so long ago. But never mind about that. Let's get back to what we were discussing. Here are you, the owner of a very successful business. Everyone knows the Haute Cuisine Restaurant at Farringforth. Here are we, friendly callers who want to be helpful. And you talk about blackmail. I don't call that polite.'

He laughed again, less uproariously but with the same chilly fixed expression of the eyes.

‘What you propose is that I should pay you protection money. Protection against what?
You're
the only people I need protection against!'

‘Oh dear!' laughed the other who had given his name as Jimmie Rivers. ‘But you've got something there, Mr Rowlands. You've stated the case in a nutshell. We supply the need for protection, as you call it, as well as a twenty-four-hour-a-day security service. That's a politer name. You need that service, Mr Rowlands, and you're going to need it a lot more.'

‘It's monstrous. I shall report it to the police.'

‘You really mustn't make me laugh like this. It's not good for me. The police! And what do you think they would do for you? Make a note of the matter. Ask you to report anything further. And meanwhile what should
we
be doing? It wouldn't look well at all for you to appear a changed man after you'd come out of hospital would it? Teeth all smashed, no nose to speak of, eyesight gone very likely—that's if there was anything to take to hospital, which I doubt. So what would you tell the police then? No, Mr Rowlands, let's talk sense. We're not begging. There are a lot of us. A lot of hungry mouths to feed. We're really giving you a chance …'

‘You're threatening to beat me up if I don't buy you off?'

‘Oh dear, no. I was only just saying what might happen if you mentioned to anyone,
anyone,
even your wife, mind you, that we'd happened to be passing and called in for a chat. I haven't introduced my friend, by the way. This is “Razor” Gray. Mr Rowlands. Razor's not very talkative—except when he's called upon.'

The third man made no acknowledgement of the introduction but continued to regard Rolland with contemptuous hostility. He was seedy in appearance but looked as though he had strength of the steel wire kind.

‘Oh no,' went on Jimmie Rivers cheerfully. ‘Nothing violent about us except in cases of emergency, like when silly chatter
has to be stopped. We're business men. We offer a complete security service. Security for
you
against any mishaps which might leave you disfigured, crippled, blind or otherwise incapacitated, and security for your business against any little trouble in your restaurant, causing inconvenience to your customers, like food poisoning and so on.'

‘Food poisoning?' gasped Rolland.

‘Just an illustration. Suppose someone ate something which caused sudden vomiting and made a claim for damages and that. See what I mean? Never do with a restaurant called the Haute Cuisine, would it? Or one or two coming in, like me and Razor might, and causing trouble, breakages, people hurt, when all your customers had expected was to dine quietly in a nice place like this. You know how these things might blow up if there happened to be a party of four, say, looking for trouble. You'd be covered against all that.'

‘But no one makes trouble here.'

‘That's not to say they wouldn't, is it? We wouldn't want you to have that sort of headache, Mr Rowlands. Ours is a very comprehensive service. Just like an insurance policy, really.'

Rolland seemed to be collecting himself for a last stand.

‘And you provide the risks as well,' he said bitterly.

‘Not if you were to use our service. But I haven't come to argue about it. I'm not a salesman. I'm doing you a good turn. Giving you a chance. All you have to do …'

‘Yes?'

‘Is pay. Our little charges are so moderate, really, when you think of the money you're making. You can't take it with you, you know.'

Pale and hoarse, Rolland asked, ‘And what are those little charges?'

‘Nothing really. Fifty a week. It's chicken-feed. Only you don't want to have to pay collection charges as well, do you? So we arrange to collect it as a lump sum in advance. One grand will keep you covered for twenty weeks. Nearly five months. Think of that. You wouldn't see us again till—where are we now? January the second—not till somewhere in May. Like the swallows. Back in the Spring.'

‘I won't pay it. This can't happen in England.'

Jimmie Rivers started to laugh again. To say his laugh got on Rolland's nerves was a gross understatement. Rolland's nerves were stretched about as far as they would go.

‘There you go again!' Rivers said. ‘Wishful thinking. They
are
happening, Mr Rowlands. They happen every day in restaurants like yours. Classy, you know. Menu in French. Head waiter tarted up in tails. First-class
chef.
It's just where they
do
happen.'

‘But why restaurants?' cried Rolland desperately.

‘Oh, not only restaurants. Gambling clubs. Hotels. Casinos. Don't you read the papers? You're one of the lucky ones. Given a chance to use our service before anything happens. We haven't even given you a frightener yet.'

‘A frightener?'

‘You know. A little something to show which way the wind's blowing. Headlines like
Shots in Famous Restaurant.
The press get these things so quickly. I think you have a wonderful opportunity. What's fifty nicker? You spend that on electricity. But there you are. I shan't try to persuade you.'

‘I haven't got a thousand pounds.'

‘Of course you haven't!' said Rivers genially. ‘Not in the till.
But there's plenty of time before the banks close. We could slip down together, couldn't we? I happen to know you have an account locally. No trouble at all. Only we should have to go at once. No point in wasting time. Razor and I have come a long way to do you this favour. We shouldn't want any messing about. Like telephoning anyone. Or chatting up the cashier at the bank. Just a quiet little transfer. Like you were drawing for wages, or New Year bonuses. All over in a minute until next May. You'd be able to sleep at night as sound as a baby. And may your restaurant continue to flourish!' he ended rhetorically.

Rolland, famous for his dictatorial behaviour with customers, the
restaurateur
who had earned headlines by telling a party to leave because one of them had asked for tomato ketchup with his
canard pressé,
a martinet with his highlypaid staff, now sat pale and sweating at his expensive desk. When he thought of the long climb into this position of wealth and authority it seemed even more fantastic that it should be threatened now by this confident and amused rogue and his sinister friend. Fantastic, yes, but it was not fantasy. All he had learned in his unscrupulous and utterly selfish career told him that he faced reality.

He looked back to his home in Woolwich and to his father, a professional waiter all his long working life, and to his own schooldays. He had not been a popular boy, having nothing, in schoolboy eyes, to justify his air of superiority. So far from feeling any indignation on his father's behalf for those years of meanly rewarded servitude, he had borrowed his life savings to start his first café and when this failed had made no attempt to repay the loan and watched his father spend the rest of his life keeping up a miserable show of respectability in conditions
of semi-starvation. A series of dubious enterprises on borrowed money, tawdry little clubs full of
décor
and decadents, had brought him at last to acquaintance with Tony Brown in whom he recognised ability, for Tony was a born cook with a flair for artful catering. The two had decided on partnership on a fifty-fifty basis, Tony to run the kitchen of a restaurant they were to start and Rolland the business as a whole. They had planned to start in a small way and go forward cautiously.

They had actually found premises and paid a couple of thousand, supplied by Tony, for the lease when Rolland announced that he was about to marry a woman twenty years older than himself with a very large and unprotected fortune. He had bought the Fleur-de-Lys, an obscure pub thirty miles from London in a rift of unspoilt country and built onto it the splendid restaurant which he called the Haute Cuisine so that Tony, now known as Antoine, had no remedy but to become his
chef
at a high salary with a minute percentage of profits and no say in the business of which he was to have been part proprietor.

It was a squalid life-story but Rolland saw in it only his heroic career from modest beginnings to immense success. It was his shrewdness, his determination, his enterprise which had made him at less than forty years of age a famous
restaurateur
whose photograph and idealised biography had appeared in the illustrated supplement of a Sunday newspaper.

Though he had some knowledge of catering and menu language he would have puzzled a Frenchman, brought up in the tradition of real cooking, by his basic ignorance of the kitchen. But he made up for this in gastronomic arrogance and lectured his customers on wines and food, on what to drink with what, and on why his food was so much better than his rivals'. He
had realised the value of a few specialities and had cashed in on one of those anomalies of taste and fashion by which
scampi
on a menu had become a status symbol in the English catering trade. He had been one of the first to import these mediocre shellfish frozen and had persuaded Antoine to produce a dish of them, deadened under a curried sauce with an admixture of coconut,
flambé
at the customer's table and called
Scampi à la Rolland.
It had helped to make his restaurant thrive.