Just Desserts (4 page)

‘It's a great place this, isn't it?' said Barry. He was glad that words, words of any kind, had come to him. He had thought he might become speechless under the dazzling spotlight of this goddess.

‘Soutters?' Michelle looked round at her surroundings as if viewing them objectively for the first time, as if his words had surprised her and were worthy of her attention. ‘Yes. It's a wonderful place for a function like this. They've got both the décor and the food just right. And they look after you well without pretending to be servile. I like that in a restaurant.'

‘Yes.' Barry couldn't think of anything else to say in the face of such sophistication. He couldn't even start to compare one restaurant with another, as this divine creature was able to do. Now, if it came to which caffs served the best fry-ups for breakfast, that would be a different matter. But it never would come to that, he thought glumly.

‘I've never been here before. I think I'd like to come again, on a less formal occasion.' She looked round appreciatively at the antique candlesticks, the glitter of fine wines in wine glasses, the log flames which winked cheerfully in the old fireplace.

Barry wanted to say that she should come here again with him, that they should enjoy an intimate evening together in one of the alcoves of this magical place. He made no such invitation, of course; such monstrous presumption was well beyond his powers. He looked away from those large and humorous grey eyes, which seemed to see into his very soul, and said desperately, ‘It's very good of your dad to lay on an evening like this for his workforce.'

He had been rather proud of himself for that; with his mind reeling from the sight and the scent and the presence of this magical girl, he had come up with something which seemed safe. And he had managed to deliver it without the air of a sycophant, mainly because it was genuinely felt.

But Michelle's brow clouded for a moment with the idea. She seemed about to say something about it, even to argue with him. Instead, she merely shook her head minimally, flashed him a final, almost apologetic smile, and moved on.

It was both a disappointment and a relief to Barry Hooper. He felt the tension easing away from his limbs as his toes uncurled in his shoes. In a moment, he was answering the more maternal and infinitely less emotionally demanding queries of Mrs Fitch about his work with her husband.

The evening proceeded successfully. The food and the wine were consumed without haste and with much enjoyment. Most people had eschewed the turkey and trimmings which would surfeit their palates in the season to come in favour of the more appealing menu offered by Fred Soutter's kitchen, and there was much comparing one dish with another, even a little sampling of other people's choices. And as the hours slipped by, there was recourse inevitably to the cloakrooms in the basement of the old building.

For better or for worse – and not all clients approve of them – these are a feature of Soutters. Where the ambience above is perfect and nothing rules but good taste, the toilet facilities are designed to shock and to amuse. There is a Hogarthian vigour about the cartoons and other adornments which enliven these normally dull facilities. Many a maiden aunt has been denied a visit to Soutters because of the embellishments which make the ladies' room there so individual. That is no doubt an unjustified estimate of the narrowness of experience of the modern maiden aunt, but old prejudices die hard.

For by modern standards, this vulgar picture gallery is really quite mild. Nevertheless, on the evening of the Camellia Park celebration, the visits to the basement caused much astonished hilarity as the evening proceeded. Whispering behind hands from returning diners caused others to visit the nether regions of this surprising place, only for them to return minutes later with whoops of confirming laughter.

Wine-loosened tongues lost all inhibitions after the startling Rabelaisia of the basement; anecdotes grew ever bolder as the decibel level rose inexorably amidst the impeccable furnishings of the restaurant.

None of this was surprising to Fred Soutter, listening discreetly in his kitchen. When you had developed a place like this and run it for years, there was very little in even the wide ranges of human nature that you hadn't seen before. He listened to the cacophony amongst his customers, judged it with his expertise to be a happy cacophony, and was contented with the evening and the enjoyment his food and his setting was providing.

It was because of the level of noise at the tables that Fred Soutter was the only one who heard the screams.

With the desserts served and the coffee and petits fours ready to serve, the chef was preparing to make his customary sortie among the clientele to ensure that they had enjoyed his food and been delighted with their evening. He had no fears on this night that there would be any complaints.

Then he heard the screams. They came from somewhere in the basement. And they were prolonged, high-pitched, hysterical.

Joanne Moss was standing just inside the open doorway of the gents' cloakroom. That in itself was startling, but what lay beyond her was awful enough to banish any petty thoughts of decorum.

The corpse lay on the floor near the urinal, its right leg twisted unnaturally beneath it. The eyes were open, the expression fixed in a permanent ghastly stare of astonishment and agony. The rigid fingers clutched at a chest from which the blood still seeped into the enlarging pool beneath his side.

Patrick Nayland had not died peacefully.

S
uperintendent John Lambert had been looking forward to a quiet day. The meeting with the District Crime Squad shouldn't take more than an hour. And the one with the National Paedophile Unit had been cancelled because they had a big secret operation planned for today.

He could spend the morning tidying up the paperwork which he hoped would persuade the Crown Prosecution Service that a GBH case was worth taking to court. With a little luck, he might get away early in the afternoon for nine holes of golf at the Ross-on-Wye club. It was bitterly cold, but a weak sun was struggling to rise over the Malvern Hills as he drove towards the police station at Oldford; perhaps the frost would be gone by lunchtime.

The news of the violent death at Soutters Restaurant in Newent was waiting for him when he reached his desk at eight fifteen on the morning of Thursday, the fourteenth of December. He sighed automatically as the prospect of golf vanished more swiftly than the winter sun. But regret was overtaken within seconds by a sharper feeling: excitement.

Every successful CID man must have a strain of the hunter strong within him. Murder is the vilest crime, but still the most stimulating, to a senior detective. Even a veteran like John Lambert felt the familiar half-guilty elation at the prospect of pitting his wits against a murderer. He knew Soutters quite well, having been there for a number of family celebrations. It was such an unlikely place for a murder that his interest quickened further.

He was already a little miffed that he hadn't been called out on the previous night. When he arrived at the restaurant, the photographer was long gone and the scenes of crime team had almost completed its work. Inspector Chris Rushton, his junior by more than twenty years, looked up apprehensively from his notes as his grizzled chief came into Soutters. ‘It's murder all right. No question about that. I've given the “suspicious circumstances” go-ahead to the press.'

‘Why didn't anyone fetch me out last night?'

‘It was late when the news came in. I didn't get here myself until nearly midnight. I'd have called you from here if I thought it right to disturb you. But there wasn't much we could do last night. Some of the people were drunk; all of them were shocked and exhausted. We took brief statements from all of them and sent them home.'

He had all of the phrases ready. They came out like a prepared statement, but because he was nervous, they came a little too quickly. Lambert knew that Rushton had rushed here hoping for a confession, hoping to find someone standing like a conspirator over the bleeding body of Caesar, literally red-handed. A prompt arrest, a murder solved within the hour, a feather in the cap of the eager and efficient young DI Rushton. John Lambert smiled sourly; twenty-five years ago, when he had been a young man carving out a career and a reputation in the CID, he might have behaved in the same way.

That didn't make it right. He said, ‘I may be a dinosaur as far as you and the other youngsters are concerned, Chris, but I'm not quite extinct. When there's a crime as serious as this, I like to be in from the beginning. And you needn't fear you're going to embarrass me in someone else's bed if you call after midnight. I'm not a free agent with lots of offers, like you!'

Rushton's smile was as sour as his chief's had been, for very different reasons. John Lambert had referred to his status as a divorced man, but the handsome and well-presented Inspector carried with him an unfortunate stiffness of manner, which meant that he had found it difficult to create new relationships. He said, ‘It's not going to be an easy one, this. I thought at first that it would be, but it isn't.' He immediately looked guilty, as if he had confessed that he had sped here last night in search of kudos.

‘What did the police surgeon have to say?'

‘Not much.' Rushton shrugged, happy to get back to the routine of an investigation. Chris was good at routine. ‘The deceased is Patrick Nayland, who was hosting the evening and paying for everything.'

Lambert raised an eyebrow. ‘The Nayland who owns that new golf course on the way into Gloucester?'

‘That's the man.'

‘I know him. Knew him.' Lambert smiled at himself, caught out in the wrong tense, as shocked relatives often were after a death. He tried not to sound as if he were rebuking Rushton again as he said, ‘Corpse has been removed, I suppose?'

‘Yes, sir.' Chris had embarrassed himself again: he knew that the older man didn't like to be addressed as ‘sir' or even ‘guv', but the words continued to slip through his lips on occasions. ‘The pathologist said there was nothing further to be learned here, so the meat wagon took the body away at about two o'clock this morning.'

Lambert wondered how much sleep his spruce-looking Inspector had enjoyed last night. Youth was a wonderful thing: you had to be careful not to resent it. ‘So how did he die?'

‘Multiple stab wounds, sir.'

‘Weapon?'

‘Not discovered, so far.' He narrowly avoided another ‘sir', like a man teetering on the edge of a steep drop. ‘I've got two uniformed officers searching the surrounding area.'

But both of them knew that if the weapon hadn't turned up by this time, they were unlikely to find it. Lambert had a sneaking feeling that if this hadn't been such a middle-class gathering, Rushton would have insisted on having the guests and their belongings searched before they left. Even at one o'clock in the morning, the rougher clientele of one of the more dubious pubs in Gloucester might not have been allowed to depart so easily.

The Superintendent stood silently for a few minutes in the basement cloakroom where Patrick Nayland had fallen, trying to visualize the scene at the moment of his death. The scenes of crime team was concluding the task of collecting whatever tiny scraps of evidence it could, even from the urinal near which the dead man's head had lain. There would be plenty of DNA evidence around here, thought Lambert sourly, most of it irrelevant and the mass of it, he feared, tending to confuse rather than illuminate this killing.

He climbed the stairs to the restaurant above, feeling irritated anew that he had not been called out last night. Empty chairs seemed now to stare mockingly at him, the open windows seemed to be encouraging secrets to leak away from the tight confines of the intimate eating place into the empty air outside. He would have liked to have been here last night, studying the shocked white faces in the immediate aftermath of this death, trying to determine which if any of them was not as scandalized as it pretended to be.

People were at their most vulnerable and their least guarded in the hours following a killing. Because few murders were revealed as quickly as this one had been, you didn't often get the chance to see the reactions of suspects in this key period. And he had been denied it.

John Lambert was an anachronism among superintendents, in that he didn't direct a murder hunt from behind his desk at the station. He left DI Rushton to collate the vast mountain of information which poured in from a murder-hunt team, whilst he pursued the investigation directly in the world outside. His methods were tolerated, because they had brought results. And he wasn't going to change now, in the last years of his service.

Rushton was a good officer, Lambert told himself, meticulous to a fault. He wouldn't have missed anything last night. It was egomania in him to imagine that he might have picked up what his Inspector had missed. He tried to silence those mischievous cells at the back of his brain which insisted that Rushton was a creature of routine, not imagination, who would have done exactly what the book said he should do last night, but perhaps missed some reaction in one of the diners in the restaurant which he should have picked up as significant.

He knocked on a door and went through to the private living quarters above the restaurant of Fred and Paula Soutter. Paula was white-faced and shocked, though it was now ten hours after the discovery of the body of the man who had hosted what had seemed such a successful evening. Lambert knew the pair, for he had used the restaurant often enough himself. He smiled at Paula Soutter as encouragingly as he could and turned to her husband. ‘Sorry about all this, Fred!' The movement of his head took in the three police cars outside, the plastic tapes around the entrance, the ‘Closed until Further Notice' sign by the entrance to Soutters.

‘Can't be helped.' Fred shrugged shoulders which had had to cope with all manner of culinary crises over the years.