Murder on the Green

I watched anxiously as she tasted it. I’m a huge fan of the aubergine, but it’s a divisive vegetable.

Clare frowned at first and then her face brightened. She pushed her jet-black bird’s nest of hair away from her forehead. ‘I think that’s great.’

I felt immensely relieved. The other dishes all went down well.

‘And how much will all this come to?’ she asked. I tapped the tablet, seeking shelter in the white screen with the figures in black. I hate the whole business of asking for money. I find it embarrassing, ridiculously so.

The invoice I was quoting from had actually been prepared by Jess. She had seen my original quote and said, ‘Are you crazy? No wonder you can’t afford any staff. Give it to me.’

I propped the tablet up between Clare and me, creating a kind of shield while she frowned at the numbers.

‘It’s not cheap I’m afraid,’ I apologised (I could almost hear Jess’s exasperated voice: ‘FFS, man up, you’re not a charity’).

‘That’s not a problem,’ said Esther cheerfully. ‘Clare’s husband’s job is as a treasurer – he’s got loads of money.’

Clare rolled her eyes, then looked closely at the figures in front of her and nodded in agreement. ‘That looks fine,’ she said.

I was pathetically grateful. God knows why. When you compared my invoice to a lot of things – the work being done on my old Volvo, plumbing, that kind of stuff – it was perfectly reasonable. And they would certainly get their money’s worth. The witches of Milton Keynes were going to be very well fed; it would be a NoBWic do to remember.

‘Where’s the Feast being held?’ I asked. I wondered if it would be in her house and garden like Esther had done previously. Clare sounded wealthy. I knew vaguely that only large companies had treasury departments and treasurers so I was guessing that her house would be sizeable. Particularly in North Bucks where property was a lot cheaper than round here.

‘It’s going to be at the local cricket club.’ Clare smiled. ‘I thought we’d need space to do our rituals if the weather is bad. We can always use the pavilion. It might be the Summer Solstice but that’s no guarantee of anything. I’ll text you my address and postcode and you can come round a few days before – shall we say the thirtieth of May?’

I checked my calendar on my phone. ‘That’d be great.’

‘We’ll talk things over at my place …’ She pushed a hand through her hair. ‘Then we’ll go down … down to the cricket club …’ Clare batted her eyelashes at me, and I smiled nervously. She had managed to imbue the words ‘cricket club’ with a kind of lascivious air, as if a cricket club were some kind of orgiastic hot-house.

I stood up. ‘Ladies,’ I said, ‘it’s been a pleasure.’

As I left, I thought with relief of my impending stakeout of the porn shop on Monday. It would be a lot less scary than a meeting at Clare’s house.

Chapter Eleven (#ulink_fd1abe25-57de-5115-ad8b-3158960c93bc)

I got up early the next day and drove to Byfield, the nearest big town, about half an hour by car from my place. I was at the station by seven-thirty. It was more or less an hour to Marylebone although there were faster trains that did it in forty minutes. The platform was already thronging with bleary-looking commuters, less than thrilled by the prospect of a day’s work in London.

I was feeling a mixture of emotions: the thrill of the chase (which one of Justin’s team would turn up to collect the money?), apprehension (there was obviously going to be a confrontation, possibly violent, certainly abusive) and a certain sense of worry (that the whole thing might be absolutely futile and nobody would show up).

On balance, I suspected that someone would come to collect the money. The fact that the payment was made on a Monday, a day that everyone in the team had off, was a strong indicator that he or she would come to pick up the cash. And it was a lot of money. What successful blackmailer would be able to resist going straightaway to grab that money-stuffed envelope?

The alley – it was called a mews, but it wasn’t – off Greek Street in Soho in the centre of London was a place that I knew relatively well. Not because I used to buy porn there, but because I used to work round the corner in an airless basement kitchen of a forty-cover restaurant that did steak and very little else.

I would stand, hunched over a chargrill in the tiny room, while the ticket machine spooled out infinite requests for fillet, ribeye and sirloin and the commis endlessly fried thin chips, or ‘pommes allumettes’ as they were rather pretentiously described on the menu, and plated up garnishes for me. After a week in there, no matter how much I showered and scrubbed myself raw, a faint, pervasive odour of charred meat clung to me wherever I went. My girlfriend at the time didn’t like it, but if I went anywhere that had cats or dogs, be it friends’ flats, parks or pubs, I attracted an interested animal audience.

Swings and roundabouts, I guess.

The shop front was whited out, the legend ‘EROS SHOP ADULT BOOKS, DVDS AND MAGS’ emblazoned in blue across the top. I wondered how it was surviving in this age of downloadable porn. I guessed it must have a predominantly elderly clientele. It was nine-thirty a.m. and the place had only just opened. There was a small independent café opposite with a window overlooking the porn emporium. I sat there with a good view of the door and ordered a cup of tea.

At ten o’clock I saw Justin enter the alley and stride into the shop. He was wearing a hoody to hide his long hair and sunglasses to help disguise his face. I waited and a few minutes later Justin exited the shop.

Time passed. I ordered more tea and watched several men enter the shop opposite. They fell into two groups: either furtive, looking around guiltily before going in, or feigning nonchalance. Nobody really wants to be seen to be going into a porn shop – it’s not something to feel proud about. I pondered this too. I was getting to do a lot of thinking today.

Once again, I wondered who the Judas figure would be. It was all too easy to imagine, the resentment building up inside as you worked your butt off in Justin’s successful restaurant while he got all the plaudits, the money, the beautiful wife, all the gifts the world could throw at him, and you were there slaving away for a comparative pittance. But now you could think, as you watched him, I’ve cut you down to size; I’ve got my revenge.

Was it Tom, the development chef? He was my favourite choice. But perhaps it was a wild card like Octavia?

I drank another three cups of tea and played with my phone. The girl behind the counter must have wondered what I was doing in there. A few more guilty-looking men entered the shop, each leaving shortly afterwards with a plain blue plastic bag in hand.

I ordered another tea; my bladder was uncomfortably full but I worried that the moment I used the café’s loo would be the moment my quarry walked into the shop.

I shifted uncomfortably on my stool then took my phone out and scrolled through the photo album to look again at the selfie I had taken of myself and Justin’s brigade.

There they all were, the suspects.

Andrea, face thunderous with disapproval, if not naked hatred. Tall, sinewy, disappointment and resentment etched into the lines on his face. I had worked with sous-chefs like him before, those who would never be quite good enough to make it as a head chef. I guessed he had tried and failed a couple of times, let down by lack of imagination or an inability to inspire his team. I knew him to be competent but I guessed that his main attraction for Justin was that he would be able to keep order in his kitchen, the way that a kindly officer in the army might use a terrifying Sergeant Major to keep the troops in order.

Next to him was Tom, Justin’s development chef. He would be the one to help Justin turn theory into reality and also help come up with new ideas for Justin’s TV shows. I had googled him and found his LinkedIn profile. He had come a long way in a short time. I counted two Michelin-starred restaurants he had worked in. But that’s often the way with being a chef – it’s a pretty steep learning curve. He had a tough, competent face and a powerful physique, with bull-like shoulders. He was heavily tattooed and had a hipster beard.

I guessed that of all of the brigade he looked the most likely blackmailer. He had the kind of face that spoke of self-love, the kind of man that I suspected would have no qualms about trampling someone underfoot to get ahead. And bodybuilders are famously narcissistic. There was also an air of violence about him. Maybe it’s because I have spent time in prison where you inevitably become attuned to that kind of thing, but I can sense it in a person and I’m rarely wrong.

Then Murdo, tall and gangly with his man bun adding another couple of inches to his height. I felt that I could disregard him. He was the youngest of the brigade. Surely blackmail was not a young person’s activity?

My attention shifted to the women in the photo. Octavia, the posh intern. Because of TV showing the more glamorous side of things, the privately educated, or the university-educated come to that, were dipping their toes into the catering sea, but they were still an unusual occurrence in the kitchen. It was no surprise to find one with Justin, who had his employees working essentially civilised hours. Charlotte had described their days.

Right now, they were engaged in the run-up to the Earl’s opera fortnight, which actually ran to nearly three weeks. The pop-up restaurant would keep them busy for the last week of June, which would be the setting-up time, and then the first three weeks of July. The Marylebone restaurant was still very much going but that coasted along, its wheels oiled by Justin’s growing fame.

I had asked Charlotte how they spent their time when there wasn’t such a gig available. Their usual work was in the development kitchen for a forthcoming TV series. That was the bulk of it. I gathered that there were public cookery displays at gastro-fairs and exhibitions, and TV appearances, mainly on daytime shows. Even a five-minute Justin slot involved quite a few hours’ prep to make sure that everything was seamless and there were no glitches.

Charlotte ran everything behind the scenes while Douglas, her timid sidekick, did all the humdrum but time-consuming work, mainly involving numbers. I gathered he was indispensable. He worked out not only staff costings, expenses and the like, but also liaised with Tom on dish costs. When a dish appeared in a magazine, it was Douglas who would tot up how many calories and how much it would cost, down to the last spurt of balsamic vinegar. I had to do this for the restaurant and knew what a chore it could be.

I wondered idly if he might be the one turning the screws on Justin. He was obviously good at organising things; I couldn’t imagine Charlotte hiring him otherwise. But he seemed such an unlikely criminal. I have to say that most criminals I have met look the part, myself included.

I gathered that Octavia often played the role of the clueless viewer at home during the testing. When the team had perfected a recipe, they would try the instructions on the intern to see if it made sense.

Was Octavia smarting under the lack of respect that the others were showing her? I could sympathise.

Did the fact that she was incompetent compared to the other chefs rankle with her? I doubted she was used to being the underdog. I was pretty sure she didn’t need the money if she was the blackmailer, but she might be enjoying making Justin sweat.

Standing next to her was the jowly, petulant-looking Gregor. Four thousand would buy a lot in Hungary. I had managed to learn that much about him, that and the fact that he had been a pastry chef at the Ritz. I had worked with a fair few chefs from Eastern Europe and they tended to think that the Brits were like spoiled children and didn’t know the meaning of hard work or hardship come to that.

And then last, but not least, Aurora.

I didn’t need a picture of her to remember her. That imperious, beautiful face, the oval brown eyes, the lustrous, coarse-looking dark hair cut in an artful, tousled boyish way, the very full sensual lips, the hint of an amazing body under the T-shirt that had shown her swan tattoo. Could envy of Justin’s good fortune in having her cause someone in the team to want to poison Justin’s happiness, to bring him down even more? You could do considerable jailtime for blackmail. I should know.

I had been in prison with a guy doing two years for setting up fake social media accounts pretending to be a woman and then extorting money from men who had been conned into sending compromising photos and texts.

It was a big risk to run. But hatred of Justin could be as big a part as love of money. And surely you would have to seriously dislike someone to be able to work with them, smile with them, laugh with them, when all the while you were stabbing them in the back?

Charlotte had told me that the image, the brand, of Justin was what they were protecting and I believed her. But could there be more to it? Nothing was ever as simple as it appeared.