‘Was it you who collected the stuff from last night?’ I asked.
‘No chance,’ he replied. ‘I had to leave Ipswich at seven and had to load everything before that. I’ve been at work since five thirty.’ He said it in an accusing manner, which was fair enough I suppose. He wasn’t to know that I’d been up all night.
‘Will it still be on the truck from last night?’ I could see that today’s was a much smaller version for a much smaller function, and there was no kitchen equipment.
‘Doubt it,’ he said. ‘First thing that’s done after a late function is to unload and steam clean the lot, including the inside of the truck.’
‘Even on a Saturday?’
‘Absolutely,’ he said. ‘Saturdays are the busiest day of the week for us. Weddings and all.’
‘What happens to the waste food bins?’ I asked him. Perhaps, I thought, some pig farmer somewhere is getting the leftovers delivered for his charges.
‘We have an industrial-sized waste-disposal unit. You know, like those things in kitchen sinks only bigger. Liquidizes all the left-over food and flushes it away down the drain. Then the bins are steam cleaned like the rest. Why do you want to know?’ he asked. ‘Lost something?’
Only my stomach, I thought, and my pride.
‘Just wondered,’ I said. Ms Milne is not going to be happy. No kitchen to inspect and no left-over food to test. I wasn’t sure whether I should be pleased or disappointed. With none of the offending material to analyse it couldn’t be proved that my food was responsible for the poisoning, but, there again, it couldn’t be proved that it wasn’t.
‘Where do you want all this stuff?’ he asked, waving a hand at the row of wire cages.
‘Glass-fronted boxes one and two on the second floor of the Head-On grandstand,’ I said.
‘Right.’ He went in search of the lift.
As the name suggested, the Head-On Grandstand sat near the winning post and looked back down the track so that the horses raced almost directly towards it. The boxes here gave the best view of the racing and were the most sought after. The Delafield tractor makers had done well to secure a couple together for their big day.
I wandered past the magnificent Millennium Grandstand towards the racecourse manager’s office. The whole place was a hive of activity. Last-minute beer deliveries to the bars were in progress while other catering staff were scurrying back and forth with trays of smoked salmon and cold meats. The groundsmen were putting the finishing touches to the flowerbeds and mowing again the already short grass in the parade ring. An army of young men were setting up tables and chairs on the lawn in front of a seafood stall ready for the thousands of racegoers that would soon be arriving for their big day out. Everything looked perfect, and normal, it was only me that was different, at least that’s what I thought at the time.
I put my head through the open door of the manager’s office. ‘Is William around?’ I asked a large woman who was half standing, half sitting on the desk. William Preston was the racecourse manager and had been a guest at the function the previous evening.
‘He won’t be in till eleven at the earliest,’ she said.
That sounded ominous, I thought. The racecourse manager not being in until eleven o’clock on 2000 Guineas day.
‘He’s had a bad night apparently,’ she went on. ‘Something he ate didn’t agree with him. Bloody nuisance if you ask me. How am I meant to cope on my own? I don’t get paid enough to cope on my own.’
The telephone on the desk beside her ample bottom rang at that moment and saved me from further observations. I withdrew and went back to the delivery truck.
‘Right,’ said the man from Stress-Free, ‘all your stuff’s up in the boxes. Do you want to check before signing for it?’
I always checked deliveries. All too often, I had found that the inventory was somewhat larger than the actuality. But today I decided I’d risk it and scribbled on his offered form.
‘Right,’ he said again. ‘I’ll see you later. I’ll collect at six.’
‘Fine,’ I replied. Six o’clock seemed a long way off. Thank goodness I had already done most of the preparation for the steak and kidney pies. All that was needed was to put the filling into the individual ceramic oval pie dishes, slap a pastry cover over the top and shove them into a hot oven for about thirty-five minutes. The fresh vegetables had already been blanched and were sitting in my cold-room at the restaurant, and the asparagus was trimmed and ready to steam. The individual small summer puddings had all been made on Thursday afternoon and also sat waiting in the restaurant cold-room. They just needed to be turned out of their moulds and garnished with some whipped cream and half a strawberry. MaryLou wasn’t to know that the strawberries came from southwest France.
As a rule I didn’t do ‘outside catering’ but Guineas weekend was different. For the past six years it had been my major marketing opportunity of the year.
The clientele of my restaurant were predominantly people involved in the racing business. It was a world I knew well and thought I understood. My father had been a moderately successful steeplechase jockey, and then a much more successful racehorse trainer until he was killed in a collision with a brick lorry on his way to Liverpool for the Grand National when I was eighteen. I would have been with him if my mother hadn’t insisted that I stay at home and revise for my A level exams. My elder half-brother, Toby, ten years my senior, had literally taken over the reins of the training business and was still making a living from it, albeit a meagre one.
I had spent my childhood riding ponies and surrounded by horses but I was never struck with Toby’s love of all things equine. As far as I was concerned both ends of a horse were dangerous and the middle was uncomfortable. One end kicks and the other end bites. And I had never been able to understand why riding had to be done at such an early hour on cold wet mornings when most sane people would be fast asleep in a nice warm bed.
More than thirteen years had now passed since the fateful day when a policeman had appeared at the front door of our house to inform my mother that what was left of my father’s Jaguar, with him still inside it, had been identified as belonging to a Mr George Moreton, late of the parish of East Hendred.
I had worked hard for my A levels to please my mother, and was accepted at Surrey University to read chemistry. But my life was changed for ever, not by the death of my father, but by what should have been my gap year and turned out to be my gap life.
I never went to Surrey or to any other university. The plan had been that I would work for six months to earn enough to go travelling in the Far East for the next six months. So I went as a pot-and-pan washer-upper, beer-crate carrier and general dogsbody to a country pub/restaurant/hotel overlooking the river Thames in Oxfordshire, which belonged to a widowed distant cousin of my mother’s. The normal term for such an employee is ‘kitchen porter’, but this is such a derogatory term in catering circles that my mother’s distant cousin referred to me as the ‘temporary assistant under-manager’, which was more of a mouthful and less accurate. The word ‘manager’ implies a level of responsibility. The only responsibility I was given was to rouse the chambermaid each morning to serve the early morning teas to the guests in the seven double bedrooms. At first, I did this by banging on her bedroom door for five minutes until she reluctantly opened it. But after a couple of weeks the task became much easier as I simply had to push her out of the single bed that we had started sharing.
However, working in a restaurant kitchen, even at the kitchen sink, sparked in me a passion for food and its presentation. Soon I had left the washing up to others while I started an apprenticeship under the watchful eye of Marguerite, the fiery, foul-mouthed head cook. She didn’t like the term ‘chef’. She had declared that she cooked and was therefore a cook.
When my six-month stint was up, I just stayed. By then I had been installed as Marguerite’s assistant and was making everything from the starters to the desserts. In the afternoons, while the other staff c
aught up on their sleep, I would experiment with flavours, spending most of my earnings on ingredients at Witney farmers’ market.
In the late spring I wrote to Surrey University politely asking if my entry could be deferred for yet another year. Fine, they said, but I think I already knew I wasn’t going back to life in laboratories and lecture theatres. When, in late October the following year, Marguerite swore once too often at my mother’s distant cousin and was fired, my course in life was set. Just four days short of my twenty-first birthday I took over the kitchen with relish and set about the task of becoming the youngest chef ever to win a Michelin star.
For the next four years the establishment thrived, my confidence growing at the same spectacular rate as the restaurant’s reputation. However, I was becoming acutely aware that my mother’s cousin’s bank balance was expanding rather more rapidly than my own. When I broached the subject, she accused me of being disloyal, and that was the beginning of the end. Shortly after she sold out to a national small hotel chain without telling me, and I suddenly found I had a new boss who wanted to make changes to my kitchen. My mother’s cousin had also failed to tell the buyers that she had no contract with me, so I packed my bags and left.
While I decided what to do next, I went home and cooked dinner parties for my mother who seemed somewhat surprised that I could, in spite of reading about my Michelin success in the newspapers. ‘But darling,’ she’d said, ‘I never believe what I read in the papers.’
It had been at one of the dinner parties that I was introduced to Mark Winsome. Mark was an entrepreneur in his thirties who had made a fortune in the mobile phone business. I had joined the guests for coffee and he was explaining that his problem was finding good opportunities to invest his money. I had jokingly said that he could invest in me if he liked by setting me up in my own restaurant. He didn’t laugh or even smile. ‘OK,’ he’d said. ‘I’ll finance everything and you have total control. We split the proceeds fifty-fifty.’
I had sat there with my mouth open. Only much later did I find out that he had badgered my mother for ages to organize the meeting between us so that he could make that offer and I had fallen into the trap.
And so, six years ago now, with Mark’s money, I had set up the Hay Net, a racing themed restaurant on the outskirts of Newmarket. It hadn’t especially been my plan to go to Newmarket, but it was where I found the first appropriate property and the closeness to racing’s headquarters was simply a bonus.
At first business had been slow but, with the special dinners and lunches around the race meetings spreading the word, the restaurant was soon pretty full every night with a need to book more than a week in advance for midweek, and at least a month ahead for a Saturday night. The wife of one major trainer in the town even started paying me a retainer to have a table for six booked every Saturday of the year, except for when they were away in Barbados in January. ‘Much easier to cancel than to book,’ she’d said, but she rarely cancelled and often needed the table expanded to eight or ten.
My phone rang in my pocket.
‘Hello,’ I said.
‘Max, you had better come down to the restaurant.’ It was Carl. ‘The Public Health have turned up.’
‘She said she’d meet me at the racecourse,’ I said.
‘These two are men,’ he replied.
‘Tell them to come down here,’ I said.
‘I don’t think they will,’ he said. ‘Apparently someone has died and these two are sealing the kitchen.’
CHAPTER 2
Sealing the kitchen was literally what they were doing. By the time I arrived there was tape over every window and two men were fitting large hasps and padlocks to all the doors.
‘You can’t do that,’ I said.
‘Just watch,’ one of them replied, while clipping a large brass padlock into place. ‘I’ve instructions to ensure that no one enters these premises until they have been examined and decontaminated.’
‘Decontaminated?’ I said. ‘From what?’
‘No idea,’ he said. ‘Just doing what I’m told.’
‘When will this examination take place?’ I asked him with a sinking feeling.
‘Monday or Tuesday maybe,’ he said. ‘Or Wednesday, depends on how busy they are.’
‘But this is a business,’ I said. ‘How can I run a restaurant with the kitchen closed? I’ve got reservations for this evening.’
‘Sorry, mate.’ He didn’t sound very sorry. ‘Your business is now closed. You shouldn’t have killed someone.’
‘Who is the person who has died?’ I asked him.
‘No idea,’ he said, clipping another padlock into place. ‘Right, that’s finished. Sign here, will you?’ He held out a clipboard with some papers on it.
‘What does it say?’ I asked.
‘It says that you agree to the closing of your kitchen, that you won’t attempt to gain entry, which, by the way, would be a criminal offence, that you agree to pay for my services and for the equipment used and that you will be responsible if anyone else gains entry or tries to do so without due authority from the county council or the Food Standards Agency.’
‘And what if I refuse to sign?’ I asked.
‘Then I have to get an enforcement order and have a policeman on site at all times and you will, in the end, have to pay for that too. Either way, your kitchen remains closed. If you sign, then the inspection might be tomorrow or on Monday; if you don’t, it won’t.’
‘That’s blackmail.’
‘Yup,’ he said. ‘Usually works.’ He smiled and offered me the clipboard again.
‘Bastard,’ I said. ‘Enjoy your work, do you?’
‘Makes a change from the usual.’
‘What is the usual?’ I asked.
‘Debt collecting,’ he said.
He was a big man, both tall and broad. He wore black trousers, a white shirt with a thin black tie, and white training shoes. His accomplice was dressed in the same manner – uniform for the job. It crossed my mind that all that was missing was a baseball bat to back up his threats. I could tell that I wasn’t going to be able to appeal to his better nature. He clearly didn’t have one.
I signed the paper.
During this exchange, the second man had been placing sticky-backed plastic signs on the windows and doors. They were white, approximately eighteen inches square, with ‘CLOSED FOR DECONTAMINATION’ and ‘KEEP OUT’ printed in large red lettering.
‘Are those really necessary?’ I asked.
He didn’t answer. I knew. He was just doing his job, just doing what he’d been told.
I don’t know whether it was out of spite that they stuck one on the restaurant’s sign at the gate on their way out. There would be little doubt to passing traffic that the Hay Net was empty and limp, unable to feed a Shetland pony let alone the hundred or so people who we had booked for dinner.
Carl appeared from the dining-room end of the building.
‘It’s the same inside,’ he said. ‘The kitchen doors have been padlocked.’
‘What do you suggest?’ I asked.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’ve just phoned most of those booked in for tonight and told them we won’t be serving.’
‘Well done,’ I said, impressed.
‘Some said they weren’t coming anyway. Some said they had been at the racecourse last night and had suffered like the rest of us, and many others had heard about it.’
‘Does anyone know who it is who’s died?’ I asked.
‘No idea,’ said Carl. ‘I didn’t exactly ask our customers.’
‘We’d also better tell the staff not to come tonight,’ I said.
‘Done that too,’ he said. ‘At least I’ve left messages for most. And I’ve stuck a notice on the kitchen door telling everyone to take the weekend off and report for work on Monday morning.’
‘Did you tell them why?’ I asked.
‘Nope,’ he said. ‘Thought it best not to just yet. Until we know for sure what the damage
is.’ He wiped his forehead with his palm. ‘God, I feel awful. All sweaty and yet cold.’
‘Me too,’ I said. ‘But I suppose we can now take the afternoon off. The tractor makers from Wisconsin are going to have to get their grub elsewhere.’
‘Why so?’ said Carl.
‘Because their pie filling is in the cold-room behind the padlocked doors, silly.’
‘No, it’s not,’ he said. ‘I’d already loaded the van before those men arrived.’ He waved a hand at the Ford Transit we used for outside catering which was parked up near the back door to the kitchen. ‘The summer puddings are in there too.’ He smiled. ‘The only thing I haven’t got is the asparagus and the new potatoes, but we can get some more of those from Cambridge.’
‘You are bloody marvellous,’ I said.
‘So we’re going to do it then?’
‘Dead right we are. We need a successful service now more than ever.’ Silly thing to say, really, but, of course, I had no idea, then, of what was to follow.
Carl drove the Transit van to the racecourse while I took my car, a beaten-up VW Golf that had been my pride and joy when, aged twenty, I had bought it brand new, using the prize money from a televized cooking competition I had won. After eleven years and with well over a hundred thousand miles on the clock, it was beginning to show its age, but it remained a special car for me and I was loathed to change it. And it could still out accelerate most others off the traffic lights.
I parked in the staff car park on the grass beyond the weighing room and walked back to the far end of the grandstand where Carl was already unloading the van. I was met there by two middle-aged women, one in a green tweed suit, woolly hat and sensible brown boots, the other in a scarlet frill-fronted chiffon blouse, black skirt and pointed black patent high-heeled shoes, with a mass of curly dark hair falling in tendrils around her ears. I looked at them both and thought about appropriate dress.