H.V. Coombs - Murder on the Green

I stood up gloomily and walked the other way.

My back was now starting to ache.

More negative emotions for my hips to deal with, as my yoga teacher would say. I made my painful way to Tottenham Court Road tube station and home.

‘And what time did this alleged incident take place?’

It was seven p.m. on Monday. It was all very different from the narrow, cosmopolitan streets of Soho. Outside the Old Forge Café, it was a beautiful summer evening. The village green that my restaurant fronted on to was lush and verdant. The sound of families with their small children in the playground diagonally opposite carried clearly in the warm air. I could hear a tractor in the large field behind the green. The beer garden of the Three Bells was full of cheery, tipsy builders. In short, all was well with the world.

With one or two exceptions.

One being that my relationship with Justin and his blackmail problem had irrevocably and dramatically changed.

Andrea was dead, stabbed seemingly, and DI Slattery was keen to know about his relationship with me. Slattery was sitting opposite me, accompanied by a colleague with acne whose name I hadn’t caught. He looked ridiculously young to be a policeman. The three of us were sitting in my empty restaurant. Like many places, we closed on a Monday, my one day off a week.

‘Oh, about ten or eleven this morning.’

My mind had replayed this scenario over and over again. The wait in the café opposite EROS, following Andrea through Soho, the fight in the park, the humiliating incident with the women. Up until then it had all been, well, not exactly light-hearted – Andrea had revealed himself as an unpleasant, sex-obsessed predator and blood had been shed – but relatively unserious.

And now this. It could hardly be more serious.

‘Mm-hmm.’ He consulted his notebook and read back, ‘… I had received a text message that Andrea Lombardi had sexually harassed one of my waitresses and when challenged about it, he became abusive, both verbally and physically, forcing me to defend myself vigorously.’

Slattery gave me a sharp look. He knew about my past, my time inside for violence.

‘Vigorously? What does that mean?’

I shrugged. ‘With vigour, energetically. Um, a punch may have been thrown.’

I was beginning to relax a little. I am no stranger to being questioned by the police and at the moment I was perfectly prepared to be as co-operative as possible. I had nothing to hide personally, nothing to feel guilty about. The shock was beginning to wear off. And it had been a shock, the thought that this strong, vital, if unpleasant man, was now lying in a refrigerator in a morgue somewhere.

The younger detective looked at me angrily. ‘His right eye was swollen shut. So that was you then? What happened afterwards …?’ He leant forward aggressively. ‘Did you follow him home? You must have had quite a grudge against him to hit him that hard.’

I stared at him disbelievingly. Was he really suggesting that I had stabbed Andrea to death?

Slattery pushed a hand through his thick, salt and pepper hair. He glanced at his colleague, a look that seemed to say, ‘Turn it down a bit.’

Slattery was a big, burly man. He looked like a gamekeeper with a weathered, tanned face and very powerful forearms. He lived in Hampden Green and had a reputation in the village for possibly being a bent cop, and certainly no stranger to violence. I could well believe it. People were very wary around him.

‘So, he came on to Jess Turner and you belted him.’ Slattery’s tone of voice was sympathetic, kind of, we’ve all been there …

‘Rather more than “came on to her”,’ I said, angrily. ‘He grabbed hold of her, but in a nutshell, yes. And that did the trick. He left me, perfectly alive and well and that was the end of the matter.’

The youthful colleague leant forward. ‘What bothers us is, what were you doing up in London anyway? How did you know that Mr Lombardi would be up there? Were you following him?’

I had absolutely no intention of telling them anything about the business with Justin McCleish. That was Justin’s business.

‘How could I be following him? I don’t know where he lived.’

‘Well, what were you doing in London then?’ persisted the detective.

What was I doing in London? I tried to come up with a plausible explanation.

‘I was going to visit Dennys in Dean Street,’ I said.

The kid-cop seized on this remark. ‘ Who is Denny?’ He managed to make the name sound suspicious, fraught with criminality.

‘Could you go and wait in the car, Paul?’ said Slattery with a tone of exasperated impatience. His colleague blinked angrily as if Slattery had slapped him in the face. The DI added for his benefit, ‘Dennys is a shop; it sells catering equipment. It’s in Soho.’

Paul stood up, gave me a final glare, and slunk away, out of the kitchen.

I looked at Slattery. ‘So what exactly happened to Andrea?’ I asked.

‘He was found by his flatmate at two o’clock this afternoon.’ Slattery looked at me with interest. ‘Someone had stabbed him, in the back. Repeatedly.’

I digested this information.

I could honestly say that I wasn’t heartbroken.

‘Well, that’s too bad,’ I said. ‘I guess that you’re going to have a pretty long list of suspects.’

‘And why is that then?’ asked Slattery. ‘By the way, I’ll have that coffee that you’ve forgotten to offer me.’

I looked at him without enthusiasm. Since I had moved to the village the DI hadn’t exactly showered me with unconditional friendship. That’s painting things with rather a rosy glow. He had been actively hostile.

I sighed and went into the restaurant to switch on the coffee machine. Slattery followed. For a big man he was light on his feet. While I was making Slattery his Americano I explained about Andrea’s reputation as told to me by Justin. A ‘ladies’ man’ in Andrea’s eyes, a sex pest in the eyes of the rest of the world.

‘I’d look into aggrieved husbands and boyfriends if I were you, and maybe work colleagues, waiters and waitresses in particular. I’ll bet he was universally hated by Front of House.’ I didn’t need to guess, I just knew he’d have been horrible to the waiting staff.

Slattery nodded and made a note. ‘You’ve had him working here, I believe. What was he like?’

I shook my head in amazement at the village grapevine.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘he was rude, a pain in the arse, charmless. Good chef, mind you, no gripes about his actual work.’

I handed Slattery his coffee.

‘You mentioned a sexual assault on Jess?’

‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘He grabbed Jess from behind, her backside to be precise. And then travelled upwards. So when she apprised me of the situation and I encountered him … well …’ I shrugged. ‘You know the rest.’

‘And you didn’t go back to his flat in Acton and kill him?’ Slattery’s tone wasn’t accusing, more wistful, as if he really had been hoping that was the case but was prepared to accept the fact that it wasn’t.

‘No, I’d already made my point, hadn’t I?’

‘I suppose so,’ said Slattery. We both fell silent for a while. I spoke first.

‘Acton! Was that where he was living?’

I don’t know why I was so surprised but it seemed an odd choice for an Italian chef to live. Well, he had to live somewhere I suppose.

‘It was indeed.’ Slattery looked grim. He fell silent and drank his coffee. ‘How was Andrea viewed by his fellow chefs?’ he asked.

I shrugged. ‘How on earth would I know?’

‘You’ve met them. You’ve been working with them. Andrea obviously knew his killer – he invited them in. Whoever it was that killed him had a pretty hefty grudge against him. You don’t stab someone in their own flat on a whim. There were no signs of a struggle or an argument. It was all very clinical.’