H.V. Coombs - Murder on the Green

He ignored my parking advice.

‘Where’s the Scottish bastard!’ he demanded.

‘Hiding’ would have sounded disloyal. I told him he couldn’t go into the kitchen (a health and safety issue, I’d said) and to go away, and he took a swing at me.

I ducked the punch and, as I straightened up, I hit him with a solid left hook to his body and a right cross that snapped his head back. He was unconscious as he hit the ground. I was worried that I’d hit him too hard if truth be told. I thought I might have seriously injured him, but thankfully he came to almost immediately.

He’d sworn at me, got back into his van and driven off, and that was the end of it. The affair fizzled out, my contract ended – I was covering for someone who came back – and we went our separate ways. I’d all but forgotten about it until today.

‘Well, whatever,’ said Justin, clearly disbelieving my statement about reasoning with him. He made a mildly Italian gesture with his hands to indicate this.

He carried on, ‘He also said that you were a man who could be relied on to keep his mouth shut.’

I shrugged. ‘Well, I suppose I didn’t tell his brigade about the affair he was having.’

Justin said, ‘No, you didn’t.’

He looked at me admiringly, I guess justifiably so. Sharing a cramped kitchen space with other chefs for ten hours a day, you do tend to gossip. To have kept my mouth shut, especially about something so beefy, as Jess would put it, did show a great deal of self-control. Justin carried on.

‘And I heard on the grapevine about you solving that murder that happened around here, earlier this year.’

I didn’t know what to say, so I tried to look enigmatic. Justin frowned. Perhaps he mistook my enigmatic look for stupidity. It’s probably not hard to do. He looked me in the eye. ‘How would you like to come and work for me for a while?’

I blinked in disbelief, and Justin must have misread this as reluctance. He carried on in an encouraging tone.

‘It’d look good on your CV.’

He was really serious. I blinked again, in surprise this time. It most certainly would look good on my CV. Better than that, it would be great for business. It was a job offer to die for. Word would get around that I had been hired by one of the most famous TV chefs in Britain and it would have a dramatic effect on bookings. Kaleidoscopic images of wealth and renown and IKEA furniture danced through my brain. I would be able to afford a three-piece suite! Maybe a new shower. Oh, brave new world! Then reality bit. Savagely.

‘Well, Justin, I’d love to,’ I said reluctantly, ‘but I haven’t got anyone to take care of my restaurant – there’s only me. I just can’t.’

Justin shook his head confidently. A BAFTA award nomination and a prime slot on BBC2 had obviously done wonders for his self-esteem. People didn’t say no to him.

Aurora hadn’t. And he hadn’t even been famous then.

‘That’s not a problem, I’ll lend you one of mine. He’ll fill in for you while you’re gone. I’ve seen your menu; it’s nice, but let’s face it, it’s not rocket science.’

That was a bit uncalled for, I thought.

‘And I’ll pay well.’

I was thoroughly confused. Why did he want me to work for him?

‘Why do you need help?’ I asked.

He suddenly looked away, as if he had gone unaccountably shy. Then he turned his head back to me. ‘Because I’m being blackmailed,’ he said. It was that straightforward. It certainly wasn’t the answer that I had been expecting.

Blackmailed! What could he have been up to? Lurid possibilities swirled around my head.

‘Oh, right.’ I didn’t know what else to say. I stared blankly at him, sitting there looking poised, elegant and successful on the sack of potatoes.

‘Could you be a bit more specific?’ I asked.

Justin looked around the fridge as if seeking inspiration. Thank God everything was labelled and day-dotted. He picked up a plastic tub that said ‘smoked hadok’ in Francis’s wonky writing. He opened it, peered inside and absent-mindedly sniffed it, obviously checking it hadn’t gone off.

Either he was very interested in fish and fish storage or the blackmail story was a sensitive one.

‘I did something unprofessional in my youth and it’s come back to haunt me …’ he finally said. ‘It’s nothing sexual. But I really want to know who’s behind it, and of course, it goes without saying I want it stopped.’

‘It sounds like you need a private detective or a minder, not a chef,’ I said. I said it in a jocular, aren’t I funny, kind of way. Justin grinned at me and nodded.

‘You may be right, however, I don’t know any private detectives. But I do know chefs and you’re the one I need to help me. It’s one of my brigade, it has to be, and I need to know which one and I need to know soon. It’s tearing me apart.’

The penny dropped. It had taken a while – it should have been obvious from the word go. Justin didn’t want me around for my cooking skills. He wanted a protector. In all honesty, I felt a bit deflated. I had been so excited thinking that he rated me for my cooking abilities when all he really wanted was someone who could hit people and was discreet.

I didn’t know what to say. I sat there in disappointed silence.

‘Please,’ he said.

I looked into his sincere, pleading brown eyes.

I did some swift calculating. I’d get help in the kitchen, and I could treat my new job – tracking down and scaring off the blackmailer – as a paid mini-break.

‘OK,’ I said. It would still be working for one of Britain’s leading chefs; nobody would need to know exactly why. Everyone would think he’d hired me because I was a great chef and not because Justin wanted help of a very different kind.

We shook hands.

And so, the miracle had happened and I had gained a chef to help in the running of my kitchen and the chance to work alongside one of Britain’s top maîtres de cuisine.

I just didn’t expect things to work out the way they did.

‘We’ll need a cover story,’ I said. Justin was still comfortably perched on the potato sack looking overly pleased with the way this conversation had gone.

He smiled. ‘I was thinking that I would tell them I’m doing a thing on British pub and restaurant cooking and you would be my helper, as someone who is used to relatively simple menus.’

‘What, to keep you grounded, no foams or emulsions …’

‘Exactly. And you need to understand how I work, so you’ll be working with my chefs,’ he said.

‘Will they believe that?’ I asked.

Justin snorted. ‘I’m the head chef. They’ll believe what they’re told to believe.’

‘Fair enough,’ I said. ‘Who’s going to be looking after my kitchen?’

‘I’m lending you Andrea, my sous-chef. He’s good.’

I nodded. The sous-chef deputises for the head chef in the kitchen, covers for them when they’re on holiday or ill. If I wasn’t in my kitchen, I would need someone of sous-chef ability to replace me.

‘What if he’s the blackmailer?’ I asked.

‘Well, you can see what you think of the others first and keep him in mind for later,’ Justin said. ‘Besides, they’ll talk more freely if he’s not there – he’s quite a forceful character.’

And so, a couple of days later, I found myself being introduced to Justin’s team.

‘Hello, everybody.’ Justin McCleish was all smiles as he introduced me to the assembled group. ‘This is Ben Hunter, the chef I’ve told you about, who’ll be joining our team as of today …’ He turned to me, waving a proprietorial arm. ‘There are other people on the books but these are my key players …’