A Taste of Death: The gripping new murder mystery that will keep you guessing

His pectoral muscles were massive. In retrospect I should have said, ‘I wish your brains were as big as your tits,’ but it’s easy to be wise after the event.

Now I go for a leaner, more natural look. More Tao.

Mrs Cope had left me a full-length mirror in the room that had been her bedroom and was now mine. I was sleeping on a mattress on the floor, my few clothes in a built-in wardrobe.

I tried to kid myself that I liked this minimalist look, but, in truth, it was rather depressing and the carpet that Mrs Cope had bequeathed me – well, threadbare would be a euphemism. It was stained and moth-eaten. Frankly, it was nasty.

Well, I could always take my mind off the carpet by looking out of the window. I had a view across the common and in the daylight I could see Dave Whitfield’s house with the charred mess of his obelisk and behind it, trees and fields.

I finished my yoga, squared up in front of the mirror and did some shadow boxing. I had been quite good at boxing when I was young, as an amateur, and had come back to it in my late thirties, obviously just for fun. Far too old to compete. I did some basic simple combinations, left jab, straight right, left hook etc., using the timer on my phone for three-minute rounds. Then the front doorbell sounded. I rolled my eyes, pulled a tracksuit on and went downstairs to investigate.

‘Do come in, DI Slattery,’ I said, as I opened the door.

‘Thank you.’ He didn’t sound terribly thankful. I had forgotten his intimidating bulk, he filled the door frame.

Slattery was a big man. He looked at me coldly. His eyes were brown and hard. With his glossy black hair and slightly swarthy colouring he did look a bit like an over the hill romantic lead from a soap-opera. A modern-day ageing Heathcliff.

Perhaps I ought to hum a bit of Kate Bush’s ‘Wuthering Heights’, as played a lot on Beech Tree FM ‘home of local radio, coming at you through the trees …!’

Heathcliff …

Perhaps it would relax him. I looked at his unfriendly face. Perhaps not.

There was no back room at the restaurant. Just the eating area, toilets and kitchen. We could have gone upstairs but there were no chairs and while I couldn’t speak for DI Slattery, I personally had no great wish to sit next to him on my mattress.

For a moment I envisioned the idea: it would be worth it, just to see the look on his face. ‘Do take a seat …’

Or, sinking sexily down on to the mattress and patting it suggestively, maybe undoing a button or two on my chef’s jacket in a saucy way.

‘Let’s make ourselves comfy, shall we—’ a seductive smile as I had no hair to toss alluringly back ‘—I can call you Michael, can’t I, Detective Inspector? Let’s not be formal …’

I waved him to a table in the restaurant. I did not want to switch machines that had been cleaned on again. He would have to do without the offer of hospitality. No coffee or cake for you, Mr Policeman.

‘How can I help you?’

He sat opposite me, giving me a sardonic once over. It was such a classic policeman’s look, polite scepticism with a hint of amused contempt.

‘How long have you been here?’ he asked.

‘On this earth?’ I said innocently.

He rolled his eyes. ‘In this village.’

‘Since the first of January,’ I said. He knew that anyway.

He nodded. ‘And during this time we have had two crimes: a break-in and a fire bomb.’ There was something accusatory about his tone, as if it were my fault.

‘A bomb?’

‘Mm-hm, Mr Whitfield’s obelisk was set alight with an incendiary device which was detonated with a timer made from a mobile phone. Are you good with electronics, Ben?’

‘No,’ I said, shrugging. ‘It’s unfortunate, the crimewave, but it’s nothing to do with me.’

Slattery looked at me sceptically.

‘Pure coincidence,’ I said firmly.

He nodded thoughtfully and then said, ‘Of course, you’ve been in trouble with the law before.’

There was the obvious implication that he had run me through the system because I was a suspicious blot on the landscape; the veiled threat of ‘I’m on to you, Sonny Jim’ and the implicit threat that he would make sure knowledge of my chequered past would return to haunt me.

Was a conviction for GBH considered all that terrible these days? It had certainly finished my teaching career. I had been running a university English language programme, but in catering nobody had batted an eyelid.

Would the good citizens of Hampden Green care about my two-year jail sentence? It would have been different if I’d poisoned someone, that was obvious. That would be a hard one to contend with as a purveyor of food.

Or if I’d been sent down because I was a sex pervert. Bestiality, for example. Who knows what horrors might lurk in the food? But a spot of good old-fashioned violence? I was about to say, surely GBH never hurt anyone, but that’s obviously not the case.

Slattery was still waiting for a comment on his revelation. Go ahead, I thought, any publicity is good publicity. I’m a chef, not a vicar.

I thought about saying something profound, something philosophical. But Slattery wasn’t interested in abstract conceptions of justice. He was a man who was looking at a new neighbour and really not caring for what he saw.

I said, ‘The past is the past. I can assure you, DI Slattery, that I haven’t come here to disrupt your lovely, friendly village.’

He gave me the message he had come to deliver.

‘If you step a millimetre out of line …’ He leaned forward and indicated the distance with thumb and forefinger in case I was unsure of distance. His fingers were a couple of centimetres in front of my face. He stood up and jabbed a finger at me. ‘You, smart-ass, have been officially warned.’

He let himself out, closing the door in a restrained, passive-aggressive way that suggested he would like to have slammed it.

I had been very calm with Slattery, but inside that was far from the case.

I was suddenly furious. For the last eight days I had been averaging six hours’ sleep a night. I was very tired, and there was no end in sight to the insane hours I had been working. I was under stress: would my business succeed or go under? I wasn’t eating well, chefs never do, snatching bits and pieces here and there. Arsey customers like Whitfield, and now this … I snapped.

A kitchen is a good place for letting off steam. I picked up my rolling pin, about half a metre long, a cylinder of heavy plastic and, with a shout, whipped it down on one of the stainless-steel work-surfaces.

CRAAAAASH !

The noise was deafening. I kind of wished that it was Slattery that had stopped its downward progress.

What was I thinking! I breathed deeply. Dan Tian breathing as recommended by Qi Gong. Anger had put me inside for two years, I was supposed to be transcending all of that.

I looked down at the metal top of the table. There was a massive dent in it now. Oh well, at least it hadn’t been someone’s head.

Gradually I felt calm restore itself. I picked up the rolling pin. Time to use it for its intended purpose as a tool not a weapon.

I put a pack of digestive biscuits into a steel bowl and started banging them gently with the end of the rolling pin to reduce them to crumbs. That was better. We all need a goal. We all need to transcend our circumstances. We all need a star to follow.

Nelson Mandela had a vision of the ending of apartheid.