Dick Francis - Dead Heat

“No problem,” he said. “Come to dinner instead. You choose where. I’ll pay.”

“OK,” I said. “How about the OXO Tower?” I had always liked their food.

“Fine. I’ll make the reservation. Eight o’clock suit you?”

I mentally calculated train times. “Make it eight-thirty.”

“Fine,” he said again. “Eight-thirty on Friday at the OXO.”

He hung up, and I lay back on the bed, thinking about what the future might bring. How ambitious was I? What did I want from my life?

I would be thirty-two in November. Seven years ago I had been the youngest chef ever to be awarded a Michelin star. But, by now, there were two younger than me, each with two stars. I was no longer seen by the media as the bright young thing of whom much was expected, I was more the established chef who was now thought to be making his fortune. The truth was that I was doing all right, but the Hay Net was both too small and too provincial to be a serious cash generator. Whereas nationally I was only a minor celebrity chef, at the local level I was well known and admired, at least I was before last Friday, and I enjoyed it. Did I want to give that up to seek fame and fortune in London? What else in my life was important?

I had always wanted a family, to have children of my own. In that respect, so far I had been a singular failure, literally. A few relationships with girls had come and gone. Mostly gone. Restaurant work is never very conducive to interactions of a sexual nature. The hours are antisocial by their very design: having dinners out is other people’s social activity. Exhausting evenings and late nights are not ideal preparations for lovemaking, and I could remember more than a few occasions when I had been so tired that I had simply gone to sleep in the middle of the act, something not greatly appreciated by the other party.

But being alone was not something that kept me awake nights, worrying. I was not actively searching for a partner. I never had. But if the opportunity arose, I would take it. If not, then I would go on living alone, working hard and keeping my eyes open so as not to miss the chance if it came along. London, I thought, might well increase the probability of such a chance.

The telephone rang on the bedside table. I sat up and picked up the receiver.

“Hello,” I said.

“Morning, Mr. Moreton,” said Angela Milne. “Lovely day.”

“Yes, lovely,” I said. My heart rate rose a notch. “Do you have any news for me?”

“Yes, indeed I have,” she said. “I’m afraid I have some good news and some bad news. Which do you want first?”

“The good news, I suppose,” I said.

“The swabs taken by James Ward in your kitchen are all clear.”

“Good,” I said. I hadn’t expected otherwise. “So what’s the bad news?”

“You poisoned everyone with phytohemagglutinin.”

“Phyto…What?” I said.

“Phytohemagglutinin,” she repeated. “And, yes, I did need to look up how to pronounce it.”

“But what is it?” I asked.

“Kidney bean lectin.”

“And what’s that when it’s at home?”

“It’s the stuff in red kidney beans that makes them poisonous,” she said. “You gave your guests kidney beans that hadn’t been properly cooked.”

I thought back hard to last Friday’s dinner. “But I didn’t serve any kidney beans.”

“You must have,” she said. “Maybe in a salad or something?”

“No,” I said confidently, “there were definitely no kidney beans in that dinner. I made everything from scratch, and I swear to you there were no kidney beans, red or otherwise, in any of it. The tests must be mistaken.”

“Samples were taken from sixteen different individuals at the hospital and all of them contained phyto what’s-its-name.” She didn’t actually say that it was me that must be mistaken and not the tests, but the tone of her voice implied it.

“Oh.” I was confused. I knew there were no kidney beans in that dinner. At least, I hadn’t knowingly put any in it. “I’ll have to check the ingredients on the supplier’s invoice.”

“Perhaps you should,” she said. She paused briefly. “In the meantime, I will have to write an official report stating that the poisoning was due to an ingestion of incorrectly prepared kidney beans. The report will be sent to the Food Standards Agency.”

I would have preferred to have been given a criminal record.

“I’m sorry, Max,” she went on, “but I have to warn you that the Forest Heath District Council, that’s the district council for Newmarket racetrack, may choose to send the report to the Crown Prosecution Service for them to consider whether proceedings should be mounted against you under section 7 of the Food Safety Act.” She paused, as if thinking. “I don’t suppose I should really be calling you at all.”

Perhaps I was going to get the criminal record as well.

“Well, thank you for warning me,” I said. “What are the penalties?”

“Maximum penalty is an unlimited fine and two years’ imprisonment, but it won’t come to that. That would be for a deliberate act. At worst, you would get an official caution.”

Even an official caution counted as a criminal record. Maybe enough to put an end to any London aspirations. It also might be the death knell of the Hay Net.

“I’ll write just the facts,” she said. “I will emphasize that no one was really seriously ill, not life-threatening or anything. All those who went to the hospital were either discharged immediately or went home the following day. Maybe they will just give you a written warning for the future.”

“Thanks,” I said.

She hung up, and I sat and stared at the telephone in my hand.

Kidney beans! Every chef, every cook, every housewife, even every schoolboy, knows that kidney beans have to be boiled to make them safe to eat. It was inconceivable that I would have included kidney beans in any recipe without boiling them vigorously first to destroy the poisons in them. It just didn’t make sense. But there was no escaping the fact that I had been ill, and so had nearly everyone else, and that tests on sixteen people had shown that kidney bean lectin was present in them. The situation was crazy. There had to be another explanation. And I intended to find it.

I SAT IN my office at the restaurant and searched the Internet for information on kidney beans. Sure enough, phytohemagglutinin was the stuff in them that made people ill. I discovered that it was a protein that was broken down and rendered harmless by boiling. Interestingly-or not-I also found out that the same stuff was used to stimulate mitotic division of lymphocytes maintained in a cell culture and facilitate cytogenetic studies of chromosomes, whatever that all meant.

I dug around on my paper-strewn desk to find the delivery note and invoice from Leigh Foods Ltd, the supplier I had used for all of last Friday’s ingredients. Everything I had used was listed: the Norwegian cold smoked salmon; the smoked trout and the mackerel fillets; the herbs, wine, cream, olive oil, shallots, garlic cloves, lemon juice and mustard I had used in the dill sauce; the chicken breasts, the cherries, the pancetta and the fresh truffles, wild chanterelle mushrooms, shallots, wine and the cream I had used to make the sauce; all the butter, eggs, sugar, vanilla pods and so on for the brûlées-everything, including the salt and pepper-and not a hint of a kidney bean to be seen. The only ingredient I could think of that I had used and which wasn’t listed was some brandy I had added to the truffle and chanterelle sauce, to give it a bit of zing, and I was damn sure there were no kidney beans floating in that.

So where did the toxin come from? I had brought in rolls for the occasion, but surely they weren’t stuffed full of beans? The wine? But wouldn’t it affect the taste? And how would it get in the bottles?