Chef Maurice and the Bunny-Boiler Bake Off (Chef Maurice Cotswold Mysteries Book 3) (18 page)

“No problem. Though I still don’t quite see what any of this has to do with Miranda Matthews, I’m afraid.”

“This tail piece was found in the woods near Warren’s Creek, not far from where the body of Miranda Matthews was discovered last Saturday.”

Karole’s eyes widened and her lips parted in a silent ‘O’.

PC Lucy watched her for a few moments, but no further comment seemed forthcoming. So, with a polite nod, she collected her notebook and the tail and let herself out.

As the door swung shut, she took one final look at the young woman, still sat at the big table, her thin fingers gripped tightly in her lap, staring at the wall opposite. She appeared to be thinking. Hard.

Arthur and Chef Maurice had settled themselves down on a park bench, stretched out their legs and were now enjoying a spot of mild April sunshine. The bench itself was located directly under the window to Mayor Gifford’s meeting room—a not entirely serendipitous occurrence, as they had taken a stroll around the Town Hall gardens in search of this very eventuality.

Are they still in there?
Arthur scribbled in his notebook and held it up to his friend.

Chef Maurice shrugged, then pulled out a wood-handled metal spatula from his jacket. He gave it a few buffs on his sleeve, then raised the implement above his head. Arthur caught a glimpse of a shiny auburn head in the mirrored surface, but no sign of PC Lucy.

Back to the police station?
wrote Arthur.

Chef Maurice gave this a moment’s contemplation, then nodded. However, they were both stopped, mid-buttock-rise, by the sound of a door slamming above them and a male voice raised in anger.

“What the hell were you doing, having the police in here like that? Did you think about what it’s going to look like to the press?”

“They’re the police, Rory, not the paparazzi. For goodness’ sake, you can’t just fob them off with a ‘no comment’.” Karole’s voice was equally sharp.

“And now they’re asking me to come down to the station, some nonsense about a rabbit’s tail.”

“The police found the tail from your costume, down in the woods where Miranda Matthews was found.”

There was a short silence. And then:

“And what does that have to do with anything? Some kid probably pinched it off me when I wasn’t looking. I know they had some kind of game going, running up and tugging on the damn thing all day long. There was something bloody magnetic about the thing. I had little old ladies coming up to me and giving it a tug, and I swear I even caught Paul having a go at one point. I told Angie it was a ridiculous costume. Anyway, one of those kids probably pulled it off and threw it into the woods. Probably thought it’d be funny.”

“So that’s what happened?” She spoke quietly, but her tone was accusatory.

“Careful, Karole,” growled the mayor.

There was the sound of a chair scraping back. “Careful? Me? When I’ve been telling you to be nothing
but
careful—”

“All right, all right, enough! I’ve got to go down to the police station to speak to that policewoman, God help me. I’ll talk to you when I get back. Fine mess you’ve landed me in.”

“Me? What on earth do you mean by—” But the door slammed again.

Arthur gestured urgently to Chef Maurice. Together, crouching low to avoid being noticed, they hobbled off to report this latest exchange to PC Lucy.

From across the Town Hall gardens, their departure was watched by a young mother walking with her little girl.

“See over there, dear,” said the mother. “If you don’t sit up straight, you’ll end up all bent over like those gentlemen there. And we don’t want that now, do we?”

“Looks like Karole was telling the truth,” said PC Lucy, sitting back in her swivel chair.

“Play it again,” demanded Chef Maurice, leaning in closer to the screen. He and Arthur had spent the last twenty minutes waiting impatiently outside the police station, while PC Lucy dealt with a red-faced and extremely unhelpful Mayor Gifford, who’d finally stormed off with dire threats to phone up the Chief Inspector at his Corfu holiday villa and get him to ‘put his damn staff on a leash’.

PC Lucy hit ‘play’ and the video jumped to life once more. It showed a wobbly close-up of a little boy wearing a red cape, with a petulant expression on his frosting-covered mouth.

“Come on, Billy, smile over here, show Mummy what you’re eating,” cajoled a sugary voice from off-camera.

But little Billy seemed more interested in the antics of the giant furry rabbit in the distance. “Look, Mummy! She’s stealing his bunny tail! Can I have a bunny tail too?”

“Don’t be silly, darling, she’s helping him pin it back on. Like pinning the tail on the donkey. See, he’s all fixed now. And Superman doesn’t have a bunny tail, now, does he?”

In the background, as Billy contemplated his bunny-tail-less future, Mayor Gifford twisted around to inspect Angie’s work, nodded briefly at her, then walked off, tail bobbing, while Angie pulled herself to her feet and dusted the grass off her long skirt.

PC Lucy paused the video.

“But it makes no sense,” said Arthur, voicing the thought they all shared. “What on earth would Mayor Gifford have to gain by murdering Miranda Matthews?”

“You did tell me his wife has inherited some money from Miranda,” said PC Lucy.

“Only for the use of the cookery school. She can’t touch the money herself. And Rory Gifford’s not exactly known to be hard up. The whole scenario is ridiculous.”

PC Lucy thought about Angie Gifford’s rather worn tweed skirt in the video. No, the mayor did not seem like a man who would spend a lot on his wife, let alone set about to murder her best friend in the aim of small monetary gain.

“Bof, it is clear. Monsieur Gifford must be arrested and put to the questioning.”

“I’m afraid that’s out of the question. We don’t have nearly enough to go on.” PC Lucy dreaded to think what Chief Inspector Grant would have to say, coming back from his holidays to find the Mayor of Cowton down in the cells because of the lightest of circumstantial evidence. “Plus, there’s no
motive
here.”

“Hmm, you are correct. A motive is required.” Chef Maurice stopped as he noticed the large-lens camera sitting on PC Sara’s desk. “Aha! The camera of Mademoiselle Miranda. What happened of the pictures inside it?”

“Miranda must have used a new memory card, or wiped it recently. There were only two photos, taken on the Saturday morning of the Fayre down by Warren’s Creek. Both,” she added, before Chef Maurice could get excited, “of a family of river otters.”

Chef Maurice paused. “Otter? That is a type of bird, perhaps?”

A quick trawl of the Internet produced several photographs of the water-loving mammal in question.

“Ah,
une loutre
! Of the river. But for me, I am in preference of the
loutre
of the sea. They have, I am told, a great appreciation of seafood. Come, I show you.”

Another quick online foray produced a wildlife video of a group of sea otters, enjoying their dinner of fresh crab and other maritime bounty. They were awfully cute, PC Lucy had to admit.

“But, to return to the investigation,” said Chef Maurice, after the fifth consecutive video, “it seems now that our task is to discover the motive of Monsieur le mayor. And for that,
mademoiselle
, you may leave it to us.”

With this gallant pronouncement, Chef Maurice got up and strutted out of the office. Arthur gave PC Lucy a helpless little shrug, then followed his friend outside.

PC Lucy turned back to her desk. In circumstances such as these, she found it was best not to pry too deeply into Chef Maurice’s plans. But she set her phone to ringer, just in case the pair should get themselves arrested for stalking Mayor Gifford all around Cowton.

She stared unseeingly at the screen. What had Miranda really been doing down at Warren’s Creek that day? The pictures from her camera suggested a spot of wildlife photography, but it was no otter, no matter how camera-shy, who had clubbed her over the head with a length of iron piping.

As for Mayor Gifford, what had he been up to, sneaking around in the woods that very same morning? The idea that his being there had nothing to do with Miranda could be dismissed as far too much of a coincidence. But if he wasn’t involved in the murder, why hadn’t he owned up to being down there in the first place?

She clicked on a video of a young sea otter ferociously bashing a clam against a wall of rock, without much result.

It was, she thought, a rather good metaphor for how she was beginning to feel about the whole Miranda Matthews case.

It had not been difficult to wrangle a dinner invitation out of Angie for that evening, which came as a pleasant surprise to both Arthur and Chef Maurice.

Food critics and professional chefs both suffer from a below-average number of dinner invitations from friends and acquaintances, due to fear of criticism, dissatisfaction, and, in the case of Chef Maurice in particular, having their larders severely depleted and their drinks cupboards emptied of the good brandy.

Perhaps Angie would have thought twice about her invitation had she known that the pair’s plans included breaking into her husband’s home study and subjecting it to a thorough search for ‘murderous clues’. However, as such, she gave them the time of half past seven and begged them not to bring anything along; it would just be a simple dinner, rustled up from whatever she had in the fridge and pantry.

Thus, at seven thirty on the dot—Arthur being a stickler for punctuality—they deposited themselves on the bristly doormat outside the Giffords’ residence, a detached mock-Tudor house situated in one of Cowton’s more affluent areas. The rest of the street was dominated by newly built, honey-stoned Cotswold cottages, and spring flowers bloomed on the grass verges by the roadside.

“You’re right on time. Do come inside,” said Angie, as she swung open the door. “Oh, you really shouldn’t have,” she added, graciously accepting the bottle of Bordeaux from Chef Maurice’s outstretched hands, as well as the glossy box of chocolates that Arthur had liberated from Meryl’s not-so-secret stash.

She led them through to the back of the house, which had been converted into a kitchen-cum-dining-area—an abomination, thought Arthur, that was all the rage nowadays in modern homes. He had also observed, these last few years, that kitchen design had become something of a lesson in landform geography, with islands, peninsulas and (in one particular high-end case) whole archipelagos sprouting up from the rustic Italian tile floors.

“I’m afraid Rory won’t be joining us,” said Angie, peering into the oven at a large casserole dish. “He has to attend a dinner for the Cowton Small Business Association.”

“Ah, that is a shame,” said Chef Maurice, who, with Arthur, had spent the afternoon flipping through the local event listings to ascertain that Mayor Gifford would, indeed, be otherwise occupied this evening.

As they settled down around the table with aperitifs in hand, Mayor Gifford popped his blond head into the kitchen and bestowed a megawatt smile on his two visitors, on the off-chance they might be members of his voting public. He was accompanied by a dour-faced Paul Whittaker, who was carrying a briefcase and wearing the look of a man condemned to an evening of jovial company, when he would much rather be at home enjoying a rereading of the
Iliad
in the original Ancient Greek.