A Taste of Death: The gripping new murder mystery that will keep you guessing. H.V. Coombs
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were half a dozen scaffolders in there who worked for a company based just up the road, Marathon Scaffolding. They all wore company sweatshirts saying ‘Marathon’.
They nodded at me in a condescending way. They weren’t interested in me, they weren’t interested in food. In a blue-collar hierarchy chefs don’t fare too well. We work with effeminate food, not heavy, manly things like bricks, steel, roof tiles, concrete, joists (what even is a joist? One day I’d ask one of the roofers who hung out next to, but not with the scaffolders – they considered themselves superior, a cut above in the building pyramid), and scaffolding.
The catering trade was, however, present in the pub. Quite well represented by four young male chefs from the pub round the corner, the King’s Head. I say pub, it was now a four-rosette restaurant. The King’s Head was knocking on the Michelin star door, asking to be let in. The chefs looked very young, very frail and very pallid compared to the muscular, weather-beaten scaffolders.
They must be on split shifts, the nightmare side of working in a kitchen, ten till three, five thirty to eleven thirty and there was nothing for them to do in the couple of hours off that they had, other than come here. There was an enormous Scottish guy with them, six four, overweight, Dougie by name, an affable bear of a man. He was the King’s Head’s sous-chef, the man directly below the head-chef.
‘Afternoon, sir,’ Malcolm, the landlord, said to me. It’s one of the oddities of life that many landlords seem to detest the general public and Malcolm was one of them. He looked at his customers with an expression of total dislike, boredom or irritation. He was a red-faced, cadaverous man, extremely silent but when he spoke it was in a hoarse whisper, as if from beyond the grave. I had never seen him smile. I’m not saying he didn’t do it, perhaps he was a closet laugh-a-minute kind of guy, but if so, he hid it well.
I wasn’t complaining. I didn’t want a successful pub with an affable landlord. They might start doing food and I would suffer. Malcolm only did crisps and nuts; the occasional packet of pork scratchings was his idea of a gourmet treat, that and a ‘seafood snack’ that stank like cat food. He was no threat to business at all.
I said hello, ordered and watched as he fetched me a Coke.
‘I’ll get that,’ said a voice behind me.
I turned. It was a man I’d seen before in the pub, stocky, short-haired but balding. Like Whitfield, who I’d seen him drinking with when I came in, a devotee of tattoos, although he favoured ones that were more abstract (tribal, Maori-style) and monochromatic.
‘Thanks,’ I said. His eyes were half closed and he smelled strongly of weed; he looked extremely stoned. He extended his hand, ‘Hi, I’m Craig.’
‘Ben.’ We shook hands.
‘Do you want to come and join us?’ He gestured at the table. Whitfield too looked the worse for wear, eyes glazed. I guessed he’d been smoking weed too. Maybe it was the stress of having the obelisk burn down.
I decided to give it a miss. The idea of spending time with people who are stoned is less than enthralling. Fine if you’re sitting in a prison cell with a great deal of time on your hands, but not in the real world where you could be doing something a tad more exciting.
‘No, I’m fine,’ I said. ‘I’ve got to get back to the kitchen in a minute. I’ve got a cheesecake to make.’
What could be more exciting than that?
Craig nodded sympathetically, patted me amiably on the arm and wandered off back to his table and Whitfield. Maybe he wasn’t a cheesecake kind of guy. He didn’t even ask me if it was baked (New York style) or the more usual with mascarpone or Philadelphia. Oh well.
I drank my Coke by myself, listening to the clack and bang of pool balls from my fellow chefs, the rumble of manly conversation about football from the builders, Craig Scott and Dave Whitfield in catatonic silence, the landlord staring into the middle distance, avoiding eye contact with everyone. I finished it, and headed for the exit. As I reached it, the door opened and a tall man of about sixty with iron-grey hair and an expensive suit came in, accompanied by a girl a third of his age, hanging on to his arm. She was showing a lot of flesh, wearing a very short skirt and vertiginous heels. The two of them joined Whitfield and Craig at their table.
Before I left the pub I looked back at the red-faced alcoholic landlord, the aggressive, rowdy scaffolders, the shattered-looking chefs by the pool table, the stoned forms of Whitfield and Craig – and the sinister, ageing businessman and his mistress. It was like some morality play, drunkenness, violence, exhaustion, greed and lust all in the one room.
It hadn’t taken me long to realise that, pretty though it might be, Hampden Green was certainly no paradise.
Et in Arcadia Ego.
I had made lime jelly in an ice cube mould and used slightly less liquid so the jelly cubes were quite firm and easy to handle. There was a healthy drop of tequila in the mixture and I carefully placed a meringue circle on a plate, piped Chantilly cream over it, added some passionfruit compote, three tequila and lime jelly cubes and a jaunty little meringue hat. I garnished this with a twist of kiwi.
‘Ta da!’ I said, pleased with my handiwork.
‘That’s beautiful,’ said Jess admiringly.
‘Thank you,’ I said.
‘A work of art, I’m sure the Earl will appreciate it.’
‘Well, take it away then,’ I said, and got on with the next order. The Earl? Had I heard right. The door swung to behind Jess as she carried my artwork out.
I had now learned quite a bit about her. She was twenty. She had a giant Schnauzer called Siegfried. She had studied maths, further maths, physics and chemistry at A level and had straight A-stars in all four. She liked the theatre, she still swam competitively. She had liked middle distance running, ‘but I grew to be totally the wrong shape …’ she sighed.
She also loved eating cream. ‘I’m Miss Dairy Queen,’ she confided to me and if I had been whipping the stuff would clean the mixing bowl with a spatula and eat it.
God knows how she kept so slim. Maybe all that swimming.
I carried on making soup, green pea and parsnip. I blitzed it with a stick-blender, it was certainly vivid. I tasted it – well, if you liked that kind of thing it was lovely – I seasoned it with salt and pepper.
Later I would make slightly curried mini pea fritters as a garnish and, when I served it, I’d float one in the centre of the bowl so the brown of the fritter contrasted with the emerald of the soup. Class!
‘So we’ve got an earl in?’ I said.
Jess had returned. She put the plates down by the dishwasher and I started cleaning them. A commercial dishwasher has a cycle that takes around three minutes but you have to give what goes into it a quick clean in the sink first or otherwise the machine would break down under the weight of leftover food. In a busy kitchen the dishwasher’s sink ends up looking like a particularly horrible minestrone. There never seems to be enough time to empty it and refill it.
I was spending a great deal of time washing up. I thought, God we need a kitchen porter. Then I suddenly recalled, with alarm, Jess will be back at uni soon. I’d need another waitress.
My waitress answered my question regarding the aristocracy. ‘Of course there’s an earl.’ She shook her head at my stupidity. I reflected I was very lucky that she didn’t have any annoying mannerisms like saying ‘Duh!’ whenever I expressed ignorance at local affairs. ‘Earl Hampden, he lives at Marlow House,’ she added.
‘What’s