A Taste To Die For - A Honey Driver Murder Mystery (Honey Driver Mysteries) (8 page)

And why shouldn’t they be? Glyn Davis was seventy-eight but still raised his own steers and, after the slaughterhouse had done the necessary, he still butchered them himself too. Trevor Davis, his brother, took care of the general administration. ‘He’s got more of a head for it, being younger than me,’ Glyn had once explained. Trevor was only seventy-six.

‘Poor Mr Davis,’ said Honey as they headed for the kitchen.

Lindsey put her right. ‘Not Mr Davis. Mr Mead.’

ʻ
Mead
? What happened?ʼ

ʻHe tried to persuade Smudger into buying our meat from him.ʼ

ʻAnd?ʼ

ʻSmudger simmered and showed him the door.ʼ

The kitchen door swung on its hinges. Smudger appeared looking as though his head was about to blow off.

Honey prepared herself. Lindsey followed.

Smudger was red in the face and glared when she came in. ‘Tell whoever the duff nut is on reception that the next time they send a supplier into my kitchen without telling me first, I’ll pickle their nuts in vinegar!’

Lindsey mumbled an apology.

Honey felt, rather than saw, her daughter’s awkwardness.

‘Smudger. No nuts,’ said Honey. ‘Lindsey didn’t know he didn’t have an appointment.’

Eyes like billiard balls, Smudger glowered. ‘Just don’t!’

Muttering to himself, he stormed back to the kitchen. She raised her eyes to heaven. Why do I put up with it? The answer came in parts. Number one, he was a good chef. Number two, firing him and employing another meant getting used to someone. Compatibility was important. And Smudger and she were compatible – most of the time.

Honey considered all this as she and Lindsey returned to reception suitably chastened.

Sighing, Lindsey picked up a pen, fiddled with it and poked it through her hair to an itchy spot on her scalp. She avoided meeting her mother’s eyes, bit her bottom lip and looked apologetic. ‘The phone rang before I could tell Smudger that Mr Mead wanted to see him. As I answered it, he sneaked through into the kitchen. He said Grandma had suggested he pop in.’

Honey rolled her eyes, wishing her mother would keep out of her business. And what had her mother got to do with Roland Mead anyway?

First things first. Smooth the ego of the Head Chef.

Placating difficult customers was as nothing to placating difficult chefs. Like wild animals they were extremely territorial. No one was allowed into their space without permission.

‘OK, OK. I’ll sneak out there and go on bended knee.’

Usually, Lindsey would have responded, saying something like,
He’s only a chef not the Queen
, or
He only bites when there’s a full moon
. Today she said nothing and didn’t meet her mother’s eyes. Honey knew how she was feeling; neither of them showing a willingness to cross the awkward zone that had come into being at the time of Oliver Stafford’s death and Lindsey’s confession.

It was gone two in the morning and Brian Brodie sat alone at a table in his own restaurant, staring at a dark spot on the wall where the damp was coming through.

He’d sat staring a lot since Oliver Stafford’s murder, wondering what he should do. Was there any real point in talking to the police?

The sound of something moving in the kitchen made him shiver. He knew instinctively who it was. Flight and fight fought unequally inside him. He couldn’t do either. He just had to stand and face the music simply because there was nowhere and no one to run to.

Shaking like a jelly, he got up slowly, droplets of sweat hot on his forehead but freezing instantly. His hands were moist. He rubbed them down his thighs as he stared in the direction of the kitchen. He had to go out there. He had to see. He had to explain that he wouldn’t relate anything Oliver had told him.

The kitchen was warm and almost dark. By the blue hue of the fly-zapper hanging in a dark corner, he looked around him. The stainless steel equipment shone icily cold in the bluish glow. Shadows fell blackly on to a greyish floor. The kitchen was empty, and yet he wasn’t sure …

‘I’ve not spoken to the police,’ he said, his voice tremulous and a looseness in his bowels. ‘I won’t say anything.’

No response. He sighed with relief, his heart hammering against his rib cage. No one. No one at all.

He went across to the oven. Tins of dough were proving prior to being baked into bread. He peered in; saw two tins were pushed too far to the back. They’d burn once the oven came on. He reached in, his head resting on his arm, half in and half out of the oven. That’s when the heavy object came down on the nape of his neck, severing the spinal cord.

He lay like that amongst the proving loaves until five o’clock, when the timer clicked and the oven came on.

At breakfast time, Honey was humming her way around reception. On spotting Lindsey, she felt a surge of motherly love, that old protectiveness that makes a tiger out of a pussy cat.

‘Lindsey, I’m sorry …’

The phone rang. Lindsey pounced on it and her mother knew why. The phone ringing was like a chance to draw breath, prepare herself for home truths and all the old tears and apologies between parent and child.

Lindsey’s expression altered as she took the call. Raising her eyes she looked directly at her mother.

Honey’s nerves went on full-scale alert as she read Lindsey’s expression. Something bad had happened.

‘It’s Steve Doherty. Another chef’s been found murdered.’

‘Jesus!’ Honey closed her eyes and tried not to imagine another throat cut, another life lost.

Lindsey seemed to read what she was thinking. ‘It’s not the same as the other one.’

Honey opened her eyes. Lindsey looked right back at her but didn’t say a word. Honey read her expression. Not the same method, she read there. But something worse. Much worse.

Chapter Ten

At first they wouldn’t let her in; ‘Extenuating circumstances,’ said the uniformed constable standing outside. He wouldn’t let on what extenuating circumstances, but a nervous tic developed beneath his right eye when she pressed him. Never mind. She’d find out in due course.

To while away the time she went around the corner to Bonhams in order to collect the ‘brazier’ as Alistair insisted on calling it. She loitered on the way, welcoming the smell of greenery in Queen Square where office workers and young women with babies were sitting on the grass in the sun. The trees were rustling in the breeze and the traffic was lazy and not too congested.

An empty bench lured her into sitting down for a while. She rummaged in her bag and brought out Sylvester Pardoe’s address in the Cotswolds town of Broadway, a place of haute cuisine and high prices. OK, this was a police investigation, but there was nothing to stop her phoning him and enquiring as to the reason why he’d dropped out of the judging panel. She could say she was a journalist and not give her real name.

Strike while the iron’s hot.

‘Hello?’

The voice on the other end of her phone put her through to Sylvester Pardoe. She rattled off the lie, but wished she’d thought it through a bit more when he asked for her name.

‘Mary Jane Jefferies,’ she said, and automatically gave the name of the hotel.

‘I suppose you know that the winner of the competition was murdered,’ she added. ‘Would you like to comment as to why you withdrew? I mean, did you have a premonition that something bad would happen?’

She winced at her own lies. They sounded so lame.

There was a pause.

‘Are you for real?’

Honey panicked. ‘Of course I am. Why shouldn’t I be?’

A pause again. She could almost feel his distrust coming over the airwaves.

‘Personal reasons.’

‘May I ask what they were?’ Honey asked.

‘No. You may not.’

The line went dead.

‘Friendly,’ she muttered, disconnecting her phone and pushing it down inside her bag. What next?

It was a hop and skip from there to Bonhams and the ugly bra that awaited her, but a few more minutes to unwind wouldn’t go amiss.

A man she thought was vaguely familiar joined her, sitting at the far end of the bench. Unfolding a brown paper bag from his pocket, he began to eat a crusty roll. Recognising a free lunch when they saw one, a host of pigeons converged around his feet. One of them was more resolute than the others, attacking its comrades each time they dared dive at the same crumb it fancied.

The man laughed at their antics. She looked at him. He looked back.

‘I knows you,’ he said in a broad West-Country accent.

Honey frowned. Did she know him? Did she want to admit knowing him? He had rustic cheeks and thatched eyebrows.

‘You knows who I am,’ he said expansively, spreading his hands palms outwards.

She stared blankly. Did she?

‘Of course, of course, of course,’ he said, on seeing her expression. ‘You don’t recognise me without me clothes.’

There was something about that statement that wasn’t quite right. He was wearing corduroy trousers and a denim shirt. He wasn’t
without
clothes. He was wearing clothes. And she didn’t recall seeing a red-faced man naked – not lately, anyway!

‘I’m sorry?’

He reached down and retrieved something from the paper carrier bag he’d placed on the ground. He placed it on his head.

Honey recognised the tri-corner hat of the sedan-chair bearer. ‘Now you knows me,’ he said with a cheery grin.

‘Ah, yes. Of course I do,’ she said brightly.

‘I used to run a pub. Got fed up of that though. Good class of customers, but that don’t mean they weren’t no bother. We had bother all right, though not too often. You got a hotel?’ he asked seemingly as an afterthought.

She told him she did.

‘Got chefs to deal with then. They can be right aggro they can. I remember one real bad set-to. Two chefs going hammer and tongs at each other. Award-winning chefs too they was. They’d ʼave killed each other if I ʼadn’t stepped in and sorted them out.’

‘I can see that.’ She certainly could. His broad shoulders matched his broad Somerset accent.

Her appraisal was too evident. Looking pleased as Punch, he rolled his shoulders. ‘I need broad shoulders for what I do now. And they suits the costume, don’t you think?’

It was on her mind to say that the three-cornered hat and the Marks and Spencer polyester mix trousers didn’t go that well together. He seemed to read her thoughts.

‘I’m on half-day today.’

She had visions of one bearer struggling with the sedan chair all by himself.

‘There’s three of us. We take it in shifts. You know one of our bearers.’

He handed her a business card, the sort created by any half-decent software package.

‘I do?’ She looked for enlightenment on the grubby card. All it said was Sedate Sedans and gave a telephone number.

‘Clint. You know. Rodney Eastwood.’

Her jaw dropped. Clint did the washing up on a casual basis, was a bouncer at the Zodiac in the wee hours, and helped out at Oxfam when needed. She shook her head in amazement. ‘How many jobs does that boy have?’

The man grinned. ‘At least he works for his bread. Can’t say fairer than that, eh? There ain’t no shame in having more than one job. I got more than one meself. Sometimes I do a bit of furniture bumping for the antiques auctions, you know, lifting stuff from lorries and getting it into their auction rooms.’

A vision of voluptuous underwear sprang to mind. Lot 69 or whatever it was. Honey made her excuses to leave.

‘I’ll see you around some time.’ Bits of his conversation – a certain bit in particular, caused her to pause.

‘You don’t happen to know the name of the chefs who were fighting, do you?’

‘Once met, never forgotten,’ he said with a jerk of his head and a shake of a finger. ‘Oliver Stafford and Sylvester Pardoe. Hated each other they did. Pardoe was a regular customer. Stafford was chasing one of my barmaids.’

‘Par for the course from what I hear,’ she said, walking backwards before turning to head more quickly in the direction of Bonhams.

‘Any time you want two burly men to pick you up, just give us a ring,’ he shouted after her.

Misinterpreting what was actually being said, curiosity popped on to lunch-time faces.

Blushing like a virgin bride, Honey ran past the mothers with babies and the office workers with their brie baguettes and Diet Pepsis. She arrived at Bonhams still red in the face, but more so from breathlessness than embarrassment.

Alistair was sitting at his desk some way behind the counter.

‘I came for my purchase.’

He got up slowly from his chair, stretching each limb in turn, not moving towards her and the counter until he was sure he’d reached full extension.

‘I thought you might have put it into the next auction seeing as you don’t want it,’ he said eyeing her in his slow, perfunctory manner.

‘The thought did occur to me, but then I considered making it part of a fancy dress outfit – you know – Madonna on Tour.’

Alistair pursed his lips and gave her what her mother called an old-fashioned look.

‘You won’t want to wear it, hen. Not unless Madonna has put on a wee bit of weight since her adoring fans last saw her.’

With slow deliberation, Alistair pulled the unwanted article from beneath the counter.

Honey stared. It was salmon pink and conical, ever decreasing circlets of stitching finally ending in sharp points, as unlike breastly shapes as it was possible to be. And it was large. Not lovely, lustful large, but horrendous, Hammer Horror large.

She shook her head as she held it up before her face, her arms at full stretch. ‘I don’t know anyone that size.’

Alistair had that deadpan expression even when he was happy, or sad or just nothing. But his eyes twinkled, though his voice was flat as a pancake.

‘Do you go ten-pin bowling?’

‘I have done.’

‘Do you have your own bowls and are you in need of storage bags?’

She shook her head.

Alistair shook his too.

Honey held it up at eye level and eyed it thoughtfully. ‘A pair of hanging baskets?’

Alistair nodded. ‘They’d take a good few geraniums.’

Chapter Eleven

Ambience, thought Honey as she entered the latest catering establishment to boast a dead chef in its kitchen. Steve had been loath to give her the details, except the name; Brian Brodie. His restaurant was the Samuel Pepys, named after the great seventeenth-century diarist.

‘That’s two chefs who took part in the Grande Epicure dead in suspicious circumstances,’ she said excitedly, her mind working overtime. ‘Two dead and one to go.’

Steve looked puzzled. ‘What’s this Grandie thing got to do with it?’

‘Grande Epicure. It’s a competition run in France for top flight chefs. The competition’s very hot. A chef would kill to win it.’

There followed a pause.

‘Would they now? Was your chef one of the participants by any chance?’ Steve sounded stern.

Honey made a face. Why couldn’t she engage her brain before opening her mouth? The genes, of course. Her mother was just the same.

‘He had an alibi.’

‘For both murders?’

She stuck her neck out. ‘I’m almost certain.’

‘Almost?’

Suddenly Honey didn’t like the tone of his voice. ‘I trust Smudger.’ She knew she sounded defensive, but she believed in supporting her staff, though this normally amounted to inter-staff disputes or customer grievances. Murder wasn’t usually on the list.

Now she had something extra to tell him. Sylvester Pardoe and Oliver Stafford had had a fight.

Before leaving the Green River, she’d told Lindsey to inform Casper of the latest murder. She was expecting him to ring and prepared herself accordingly. No sign of being uptight would filter into his voice, but he wouldn’t be pleased. She’d bet a pound to a penny on that.

Her phone played a snatch of the 1812 overture, a thunderous and apt introduction for a man like him.

‘Casper.’

‘Are the press there?’

She glanced out at the small crowd gathering on the pavement; recognised a few freelance reporters and photographers.

‘I’m afraid so.’

Casper grunted an acknowledgement. Casper St John Gervais never allowed sympathy to get in the way of practical considerations. Still, what he said next was a bit surprising.

‘On the plus side, the Samuel Pepys will have its fifteen seconds of fame.’

Well, that was to the point. Honey couldn’t help a hint of sarcasm creeping into her voice. ‘Quite so, Casper. I can just see a full-page advertisement on the Dining Out page in the
Bath Chronicle
.’

‘Quite. Let me know the details toute de suite.’

He rang off.

Honey pulled a face. My, but that man was mercenary! She really couldn’t believe that Casper would consider an ad on the Dining Out page all the same. For her part she was feeling regretful on two counts. Number one: she and Lindsey had just been about to make a breakthrough in their lately strained relationship. Number two: she wished she’d visited Brian Brodie before this happened.

The Samuel Pepys was a place of terracotta floors and exposed stone walls. An interior designer with a swish Chelsea background and the right connections had been engaged to upgrade the decor when Brodie had bought the place. Oak Windsor chairs had been replaced by designer wickerwork, stained dark tables by light oak and dripping candles by twelve-volt LED lighting.

‘Must have cost a fortune,’ Honey muttered as she took everything in.

Someone went to fetch Steve who was still exchanging details with the initial forensic team. She spent the waiting time peering at a wall mounted menu.

British based cooking … emphasis placed on home-grown produce … free-range Suffolk chickens, Dublin Bay prawns and Wye Valley salmon and asparagus … happy lives … optimum taste.

‘I doubt the chickens, prawns and salmon would quite see it that way,’ she muttered, then realised what she was doing. ‘I must stop talking to myself, I must stop talking to myself, I must …’

‘Honey. Are you talking to yourself?’ Steve had been fetched quicker than she’d expected. Day-old stubble contrasted with deep blue eyes and too-long dark hair curling over his collar. A little longer and he’d need to tie it back ‘Tom Jones’-style – Tom Jones the eighteenth-century rake, that was, not Tom Jones the singer.

Her smile wasn’t quite natural. ‘Whatever makes you think that?’

His eyes ran over her like maple syrup over ice cream. ‘You’re looking good.’

She was wearing jeans and a sailor-type top with an interesting neckline; just a hint of cleavage rather than the full Rhone Valley.

‘It’s the latest thing for murder scenes and straight from the Paris catwalk.’

‘Nice.’

Nice was the height of flattery coming from Steve Doherty, and it made her glow. It also made her fancy him more, though she wouldn’t tell him that. He’d get too cocky if he thought he had the upper hand. Letting him know how much she fancied him would
definitely
be giving him the upper hand. She turned flippant. ‘So what’s on the menu?’

‘A dead chef. Cooked to perfection.’

She pulled a face. ‘Are you serious?’ All her enthusiasm for telling him about Pardoe turned to smoke.

‘Yep. As crisp as a turkey, though without the trimmings.’

It wasn’t funny and he hadn’t meant it to be. Steve’s expression was deadly serious. He had to cope with this sort of thing regularly. Being flippant helped him do that.

Honey gulped down her revulsion and followed him. They went through a door that led into a corridor with a red quarry-tile floor. Halfway along another door opened into the kitchen. The aroma of roast pork drifted out each time it swung open. She sniffed and immediately felt sick. There was something odd about it, a hint of toasted aftershave. She didn’t need anyone to tell her the nature of the meat.

Steve held his arm across, roughly at the same height as the police incident tape. ‘You can’t go in. None of us can until this lot have done their thing.’

On the other side the Scene of Crimes people and forensic were doing their thing. The Medical Examiner was first to emerge. It was his job to formally state that the victim was dead, though how anyone could not be dead after roasting on gas mark 7 would be a miracle.

He spoke directly to Steve.

‘Most definitely dead. Blow to the back of the head. Can’t say when, but can say when his head began to cook. He was already dead when the oven came on.’

Honey felt her stomach heaving. How could anyone say that without throwing up?

She’d never get used to this kind of thing. Finding a perpetrator was one thing. Actually seeing the dead was something else. It was the puzzle that intrigued her. The murdered only made her sick and also a little sad.

Steve looked perplexed.

The Medical Examiner went into detail. ‘The oven’s got a timer on it. The commis chef says that it’s always set to turn on automatically for five o’clock in the morning. They make their own bread you see.’

The thought of bread and the smell of roasting meat on an empty stomach was too much. Honey was vaguely aware of the floor coming up to meet her nose. She was also vaguely aware of being hurried along the corridor.

‘He got hit on the back of the head and fell forward onto a shelf,’ Steve explained once she’d come round and vowed never to eat pork ever again. She was sitting in a fashionably minimalist club chair, Steve’s arm hovering protectively around her.

As her eyes began to focus, they alighted on a slim blonde with an orange suntan and a skirt that showed more than it covered. She was sobbing into a man-size handkerchief – or it could have been a napkin. Honey caught herself hoping that the Samuel Pepys had a good laundry service.

Steve saw where she was looking. ‘That’s Sandy Brown, Brian Brodie’s girlfriend.’

Honey recalled her conversation with Richard Carmelli, the commis chef at the Beau Brummell, but couldn’t remember the details too clearly.

‘Not his wife?’ Her voice sounded hollow as though she were speaking from the bottom of a rabbit hole.

His smile kind of floated in and out of her vision as he shook his head. Her eyelids felt heavy.

She sighed. ‘I feel like going to bed.’

His smile smothered his face. He whispered in her ear, ‘Just name the time and the place.’

She threw him a
you should be so lucky
kind of smile designed to put on the brakes, but her hormones were going full gallop and won the day. ‘I don’t suppose I’d kick you out,’ she said as an afterthought. He liked that. She could tell by the way his fingers brushed against the side of her breast. And that smile. Christ, how could he smile with all this going on? That poor chef. Even at his most irritating she had never considered roasting Smudger in his own oven.

‘Come on.’ Steve sounded concerned.

She made a firm effort not to fall against him as he helped her to her feet. ‘I’ll be OK.’ He looked a bit put out when she waved him away, but her attention was firmly fixed on the sobbing girl.

The male members of the team investigating the murder scene were also paying attention to the delectable Sandy Brown. The girl’s skirt stretched like a black bandage across her willowy thighs. A white cotton gusset winked with each strangled sob and the crossing and re-crossing of her mile-long legs. She was wearing an off-the-shoulder white top too tight to be decent. No bra. Her nipples were like dark eyes peering through a fog. She was about twenty.

Sandy was sitting at one end of a wickerwork sofa. The wickerwork was bronze, the cushions beige and sprinkled with gold thread. Very tasteful. And very expensive, Honey guessed. She fingered the chair arm and the cushion before sitting down and asked if it was designer.

‘It’s Fiona Davenport,’ said Sandy, referring to the trendy sofa almost as though it were a star of stage, screen and television.

Honey made a face. ‘Wow. He must have been loaded.’

‘Brian liked nice things.’

It occurred to Honey to ask in more detail how Brian Brodie could have afforded the services of an interior designer whose efforts got featured in
Country Living
and
House Beautiful
magazines.

‘The restaurant must have been doing extremely well.’

The sobs had turned to a well-rehearsed simper. ‘The best in Bath. He did
ever
so well.’

But not well enough, thought Honey in response to the defensiveness in the girl’s voice. Her eyes flitted over the restaurant, mentally counting the number of
couverts
and coming out at around forty. Forty at around forty pounds per head? One hundred pounds per head? And how often was the restaurant full? Generally it was safe to base the turnover rate at around twenty-five per cent capacity. But the hospitality industry was notoriously optimistic.

Sandy blew her nose loudly. Honey winced. Just as she’d guessed, the large handkerchief turned out to be a table napkin. Not hygienic, but forgivable in the circumstances …

‘Was Brian ever married?’

‘He used to be.’

‘So how long had you two been together?’

‘Two weeks.’

‘I see.’

‘His wife left him two years ago,’ sniffed the girl, pre-empting Honey’s next question.

‘And you moved in with him?’

The girl pulled a face. ‘Not straight away. Not until his other girlfriend moved out.’

Honey sized her up. She instinctively knew that this was not the girlfriend Oliver Stafford had been having an affair with. This was eye candy. Not even that. More like a cuddly toy, something silent and cute to cuddle up to.

‘Would you know who’d want to kill him?’

The girl shook her head. ‘He was a lovely man.’

Doherty threw Honey a quick nod of understanding. There was nothing this girl could say to assist them in their enquiries. Honey nodded back. Steve turned to the gathered professionals.

‘Anyone available to take this girl home?’

A host of hot-blooded Scene of Crime Officers, plus two paramedics who’d been called out and had stopped for coffee, rushed forward like a human tsunami. The paramedics won.

‘You need a lie down, love.’

They steered her towards the waiting ambulance.

Honey and everyone there looked on. ‘I suppose that’s what they call care in the community,’ Honey remarked to Steve.

He grinned and passed her a glass of cold water poured from a blue glass bottle. He also ordered her to stay put while he oversaw the removal of the corpse and the reintroduction of his wayward officers to their duties.

Honey lay her head back, closed her eyes and gathered her thoughts. Two chefs dead. Both had taken part in the same competition. One of them had won so there was no case of jealousy to answer here. So why these two chefs? Perhaps there was going to be another competition and one chef was thinning out the opposition beforehand.
Please don’t let it be Smudger.

Her thinking was disrupted.

The uniformed police guarding the door were arguing with two big pieces of furniture that had sprouted heads, arms and possibly even legs. She couldn’t quite see from the laid-back angle, so she jerked herself upright in order to see more clearly.

The police were telling the walking wardrobes that they couldn’t come in. The wardrobes were talking right back, saying they had every right to come in and collect their property.

Closing her eyes, she resumed the reclining position. It was none of her business. She had no rights getting involved; and then one of them mentioned the magic words.

‘It’s our salamander and the payments are in arrears.’

He did ever so well.

Honey shot up from her seat in two seconds flat and charged over to the new arrivals. Clearly Sandy Brown knew nothing.

‘I’d like a word with you guys.’

The big guys turned their ugly mugs in her direction. So did the boys in blue.

‘Steve Doherty will OK it,’ she said to the latter.

The two walking wardrobes, arms bursting from the sleeves of their coal black T-shirts, ambled into the restaurant. They looked her up and down.

‘I’m working with the police,’ she said. ‘There’s been a murder.’

If their faces could have paled they would have. Instead their chins retracted into their bulging necks. ‘That’s nothing to do with us,’ one of them said.