Dead Heat Part 9

'No,' I said. 'Most of it is six years old, although that cooker,' I pointed to the one at the end, 'was added a couple of years ago to make life a little easier.'

'But it's all so s.h.i.+ny,' she said.

'It has to be to pa.s.s the health inspection. Most domestic kitchens wouldn't be allowed to cook food for a restaurant; there would be far too much dirt and grease. When did you last clean the floor under your fridge?' I pointed at the kitchen fridge we used exclusively for raw poultry.

She shrugged her shoulders. 'No idea.' Round two to Moreton.

'Well, the floor under that fridge was cleaned yesterday. And it will be cleaned again today. In fact, it is cleaned every day except Sundays.'

'Why not on Sundays?' she asked.

'My cleaner's night off,' I said. What I didn't tell her was that I was the cleaner, and I never worked on Sunday evenings. Carl ran the kitchen then, when I went home and rested after the busy Sunday lunch service.

She relaxed a little more and even rested her left hand on the worktop. 'So how come,' she said in an accusing tone, 'if everything is so clean, you managed to poison so many people and had this place shut down for decontamination?' Round three to Harding.

'The food wasn't cooked here, for a start,' I said. 'The event was at the racecourse and a temporary kitchen was set up there. But it was still as clean as this.'

'But it couldn't have been,' she said. I didn't respond. She pressed the point. 'So why did all the guests get food poisoning?'

I decided not to mention anything about the elusive kidney beans, so I said nothing at all and simply shrugged my shoulders.

'Don't you know?' she said in apparent amazement. 'You poisoned upwards of two hundred people and you don't know how?' She rolled her eyes. Round four to Harding, but we were still all square.

'I prepared that meal from basic ingredients,' I said, 'and everything was fresh, clean and thoroughly cooked. I made everything myself except the bread rolls and the wine.'

'Are you saying it was the bread that made people ill?'

'No, I'm not,' I said. 'What I am saying is that I don't understand how the people were made ill and I stake my reputation on the fact that I would do exactly the same if I was preparing that dinner again tonight.' First knock-down to Moreton.

She came up punching. 'But there's no doubt that people were ill. Fifteen were admitted to hospital and one person died. Don't you feel responsible for that?' It was a body-blow, but I countered.

'There is no doubt that people were ill. But your paper was wrong to report that someone died as a result of the dinner. They didn't. And what's more, only seven people were admitted to hospital not fifteen.'

'Fifteen, seven, it doesn't matter exactly how many. It doesn't change the fact that some people were made so ill they needed hospital treatment.'

'Only as a result of dehydration.' I knew as I said it that it was a mistake.

'Dehydration can kill very quickly,' she said pouncing. 'My great-uncle died from kidney failure brought on by dehydration.' Second knock-down, this one to Harding.

'I'm sorry,' I said, recovering. 'But, I a.s.sure you, no one died from being ill due to my dinner. Perhaps I could sue you for writing that.' Moreton lands a right hook.

'Then why did a source at the hospital say that someone had?'

'It seems that a man did die on Friday night from something that was originally thought to be food poisoning but turned out not to be. He hadn't been at the dinner. He died from something else.'

'Are you sure?' she said suspiciously.

'Absolutely,' I said. 'You should check with the hospital.'

'They wouldn't tell me,' she said, 'due to their d.a.m.n privacy policy.'

'Then you'd better ask your unofficial source,' I said. 'It was because of that same incorrect and damaging information that the Food Standards Agency shut down this kitchen, in spite of it not being where the dinner was even cooked. You can see for yourself how clean it is.'

'Mmm,' she mused. 'I have to admit that it doesn't seem very fair.' Another round to Moreton.

I pressed home my advantage. 'And I was ill too. Do you really think I would have eaten the food myself if I had any thought that it might contain toxins?'

'How about if you were ill before you cooked it? It may have been that it was you who contaminated everything and not the ingredients.'

'No, I've thought of that,' I said. 'I wasn't ill beforehand and my symptoms were exactly the same as everyone else's. I was poisoned in the same way by the same thing. I just don't know what.' I poured myself another cup of coffee and held out the jug to her. She shook her head. 'So will you write a piece for your paper that exonerates my restaurant?' I asked.

'Maybe,' she said. 'It depends. Will you give me any interesting new angles on the racecourse bomb blast?'

'Maybe,' I echoed. 'If you promise to print it all.'

'I can't promise anything without it going through the editor,' she smiled, 'but, as he's my husband, I ought to be able to swing it.'

d.a.m.n, I thought, another possible romantic opportunity had just slid past me. I quite liked the feisty Ms Harding. What a shame she was a Mrs.

Carl and Gary needed to get into the kitchen to start preparing for lunch so Ms Harding and I went back to the bar for the rest of the interview, but not until I had insisted on having my photograph taken in the kitchen with as much gleaming stainless steel in the background as I could manage.

I gave her the new angles on the bombing that she had hoped for without fully recounting the graphic details of the blood and the gore. I told her a little about Mary Lou and how horrible it was to have discovered afterwards that she had died. I tried to describe the frustration of not knowing how to cope with the situation without actually admitting to having been a sobbing, shaking wreck.

Finally, she looked at her watch, closed her notebook, and said she had to dash as she had things to finish before the newspaper went to press.

'This will not make it into today's,' she said. 'Look for it tomorrow.'

'Fine,' I said. We shook hands, this time without even the slightest hesitation on her part. 'Have you ever been here to eat?' I asked her.

'No, never.'

'Then come as my guest. Bring your husband. Any time you like.'

'Thank you,' she said, smiling. 'I'd love to.'

Moreton wins by a knockout.

CHAPTER 7.

Angela Milne called first thing on Thursday morning and I could tell at once that she was more than slightly irritated at having received my message. She told me in no uncertain terms that the testing at the hospital was not wrong or mistaken, and that I should look at myself carefully in the mirror and ask 'Who is fooling who here?'

'You served kidney beans that hadn't been properly cooked,' she said. 'Why don't you just admit it?'

Was I going mad? I knew there were no kidney beans in that dinner. Or did I? What I was absolutely sure of was that I hadn't put any kidney beans in it myself, cooked or otherwise. Could I be so sure that no one else had? But surely, I thought, I would have seen them; red kidney beans are pretty obvious as anyone who has eaten chilli con carne can testify. Perhaps they had been chopped up and added by someone. But why? And by whom?

There had been plenty of us in the kitchen tent that night, not just my usual team. There had been at least five or six temporary a.s.sistants plating up the meals, and all the waiting staff had had access as well. Most of these had been from a catering agency but some were friends of my crew, and one or two had been late recruits from the racecourse caterers when others had dropped out. Did someone purposely poison the dinner due to some catering war? Was it jealousy? Surely not. It just didn't make sense, but I was increasingly steadfast in the knowledge that, as I hadn't put the beans in that dinner, someone else must have.

It might be difficult, however, to convince anyone else that I was right. They, like Angela Milne, would simply believe that I had made a basic culinary mistake and was not prepared to admit it.

Wednesday evening had been depressing with the dining room far less than a quarter full, although one couple who did come had also been at the racecourse event the previous Friday and had both been ill afterwards.

'Just one of those things,' the wife had said. 'I'm sure it wasn't your fault.' I wished all my customers were like them. I had asked them what they had eaten but they couldn't remember. I had asked them if they were vegetarians. No, they'd a.s.sured me, they were not, and they had ordered a steak each to prove the point.

Thursday was slightly more encouraging, with the arrival on my desk of the Cambridge Evening News Cambridge Evening News, courtesy of Richard, who went into town to get it. As he said, he had plenty of time on his hands as we had just three tables in the restaurant for lunch, just eight covers in all.

The article in the paper centred mostly around my answers to Ms Harding's questions concerning the bombing, which I suppose was fair. It did mention, lower down, that, further to the article in Monday's edition, the Hay Net restaurant was now open for business having been inspected by the local food inspectors and found clear of any contamination. Ms Harding had also written that she herself had visited the kitchen of the Hay Net and had been impressed by the standard of hygiene. Good girl. The picture of me with the gleaming stainless steel bad been included next to the article and I suppose I should De happy even if it was on page seven rather than on the front oage as I would have liked.

I thought it would be too soon for the paper to have had any real effect, but Thursday night showed a little improvement with the numbers up into the mid-thirties. This was far below our usual Thursday-night complement, and still not enough to cover our costs but, nevertheless, the place felt better with a slightly livelier atmosphere in the dining room. Perhaps things were looking up. We were going to be closed all day on Friday for Louisa's funeral, so maybe Sat.u.r.day evening would tell.

Friday was a busy day for funerals in and around Newmarket, at least for people I knew.

Elizabeth Jennings was first up at Our Lady and St Etheldreda Catholic Church in Exeter Road, near the town centre, a modern building constructed in the 1970s but in a traditional style with rows of Norman arches and columns set either side of the nave, and a rose window high above the west door. It was a big church, designed for a town where many of the residents, or their parents, came from Ireland, that most Catholic of countries. Needless to say, for the funeral of the wife of one of the country's most successful and popular trainers, the building was packed, with standing room only.

I squeezed into the end of an already crowded pew. If we had realized that the service would last for well over an hour with a full Eucharist, I might have found somewhere more comfortable and my neighbour might not have been so keen to move up to accommodate me.

Bravely, Neil Jennings delivered the eulogy for his wife and reduced most of us to tears. He managed to hold everything together and get through it with a firm voice but he looked much older and more vulnerable than his sixty years warranted. He and Elizabeth had never had any children and I wondered if that was because they were unable to. Consequently, they had always conferred on their horses the love that others might have showered on their offspring. Now with the untimely and violent pa.s.sing of his partner, I worried that Neil might go into decline, both personally and in his business.

He stood at the door to the church for at least half an hour and shook the hand of everyone who had been at the service. It is one of those occasions when words are not really enough to transmit one's sorrow, one person for another. Inadequately, I smiled the tight-lipped smile with sad eyes that tries to say, 'I am so very sorry about your loss' and also 'I know that it must be dreadful for you at the moment' without the words actually coming out and sounding so awfully cheesy. He smiled back with the same tight lips but with a furrowed brow and raised eyebrows that said, 'Thank you for coming,' and also, 'You can have no idea how lonely I am feeling at home.' I suppose I should be thankful that he hadn't lowered his brow over his eyes and used them to say, 'It is all your fault that I am not with her right now.'

I stood and chatted with some of the other mourners, most of whom I knew well enough to be on nodding terms with if we pa.s.sed in the High Street. One of them was George Kealy, the top Newmarket trainer whose wife kept a table on retainer at my restaurant each Sat.u.r.day night.

'h.e.l.lo, George,' I said to him. 'This is a rum do, isn't it?'

'Dreadful.' We stood together in silence.

Emma Kealy, George's wife, stood alongside Neil Jennings ind held his hand as he finished saying his goodbyes at the church door. I remembered that Emma was Neil's sister. I vvatched them both walk slowly over and climb into the back of a black limousine that then pulled away from the kerb behind the hea.r.s.e for Elizabeth's last journey to the cemetery.

George, beside me, shook his head and pursed his lips. I wondered why he hadn't gone with Emma and Neil to the cemetery but it was no secret in the town that there was no love lost between the two great rival trainers, even if they were brothers-in-law. George suddenly turned back to me. 'Sorry about Sat.u.r.day night,' he said. 'After all that happened, Emma and I didn't make it to your place for dinner.'

'We didn't open anyway,' I said. I decided not to add anything about the padlocks.

'No,' he said. 'I thought you might not.' He paused. 'Better cancel us for tomorrow as well. In fact, better leave it for a while. Emma will give you a call. OK?'

'OK,' I said, nodding. He turned to leave. 'George?' I called. He turned back. 'Is your decision anything to do with the event at the racecourse last Friday evening?'

'No,' he said unconvincingly. 'I don't know. Both Emma and I were dreadfully ill, up all night. Look, I said we'll give you a call, OK?' He didn't wait for an answer but strode off purposefully. I decided that persistence at this time would not be to my advantage in the future.

Next, at two thirty, it was Louisa's funeral at the West Chapel at Cambridge Crematorium.

I had been to visit the Whitworths on Wednesday afternoon and I had almost been able to touch the sorrow and anguish present in their house. I had been much mistaken in thinking that Louisa's parents might have blamed her death on her job at the restaurant. In fact, they couldn't have been more effusive about how it had done so much to give her confidence in herself, as well as the financial independence that she had cherished.

'Not that we didn't help her out, of course,' her father had said, choking back the tears. Beryl, Louisa's mother, had clung so tightly to my hand, as if doing so might have brought her daughter back to life. So grief-stricken was she that she had been unable to speak a single word to me throughout my half-hour visit. What cruelty, I thought, had been visited on these dear, simple people whose great pleasure in life was to have a beautiful, clever and fun-loving daughter, only to have her s.n.a.t.c.hed away from them for ever in such a brutal manner.

I had left their house more disturbed than I had expected and had sat in my car for quite some time before I was able to drive myself back to the restaurant. And her funeral became the biggest ordeal of the day.

I pride myself on being a fairly emotionally stable character, not easily moved either to tears or to anger. However, I suffered dearly in that chapel with both tears and anger very close to the surface. I clenched my teeth together so hard to control myself that my jaw ached for hours afterwards.

As one would imagine, at least two thirds of those present were young people in their teens, school friends of Louisa. I guessed that, for many of them, this was the first funeral they had ever attended. If the grief displayed was a measure of the love and affection that existed for the deceased, then Louisa had been large in the hearts of so many. If grief is the price we pay for love, then overwhelming grief is the price paid for adoration, and Louisa had been adored by her friends. Before the service finished, several of them needed to be helped outside to sit in the fresh air to recover from near hysteria. By the time I returned to my car in the crematorium car park, I was totally exhausted.

And still the day had more sorrow to come.

Brian and June Walters had been two of my first customers when I had opened the restaurant. Brian had once been a fellow steeplechase jockey of my father's, and for years they hid been close friends, as well as fierce compet.i.tors. I think Brian had only come to have dinner at the Hay Net that first time to support me, as the son of his dead friend, but he and h s wife had quickly become regular customers, which said a lot for how much they had enjoyed the food, both then and since.

Almost thirty years before, Brian had retired from the dangers of race riding and had joined Tattersalls, the company that owned and ran the world-famous Newmarket horse sales. He had worked hard and had risen steadily up the ladder to be Sales Manager. While he hadn't been the overall decisionmaking boss, he had been the person whose job it was to make sure that everything ran smoothly on a day-to-day basis, and run smoothly it had. He had recently retired from this lofty position and had been settling down to what he had hoped would be a long and happy retirement, choosing to continue living in the town where his standing was quite high. High enough for him to have been included in the Delafield Industries guest list of local dignitaries at the 2000 Guineas; high enough for him to have been standing with his wife right next to where the bomb had exploded on Sat.u.r.day. His long and happy retirement had lasted precisely six weeks and one day.

Brian and June had produced four, now grown-up, children between them but none was actually theirs together, both having been previously married and divorced. As June had often told me over an after-dinner port in my dining room, they were not very close to any of their children as both the divorces had been acrimonious and the children had tended to side with the other partner in each case. Consequently, their joint funeral, late in the afternoon at All Saints', was more unemotional and functional than those I had attended earlier. Many of the same people, including George Kealy, who had earlier been across the High Street in the Catholic church for Elizabeth Jennings, gathered in the Anglican church for the Walterses. Was it ungracious of me, I thought, to wonder how many had pa.s.sed the intervening hours in the bar of the Rutland Arms Hotel, which sat halfway between the two places of wors.h.i.+p?

After the service I decided not to join the cortege of other mourners for the trip to the cemetery for the interment. Instead, I drove the fifteen or so miles from the church in Newmarket to the railway station in Cambridge. Yea, it seemed to me that I had walked all day through the valley of the shadow of death by the time I wearily boarded the six fifty train to London. I applied a gin and tonic to comfort me as I lay down beside the still waters in the green pastures of a first-cla.s.s seat. I had had my fill of ashes to ashes, dust to dust, and the twenty-third psalm for one day.

I sat back, sipped my drink, and reflected on the events of the last week. It seemed much longer than that since I had been preparing the gala dinner in a tent at the racecourse the p revious Friday evening.

How seven days can change one's life! Then I had been a confident businessman; diligent, respected, profitable and sleeping like a baby. And I had been happy with my lot. Now, in a mere week, I had become a self-doubting shambles: inactive, accused of being a ma.s.s poisoner and a liar, on my way to probable bankruptcy and being the victim of regular nightmares about a legless woman. Yet here I was, contemplating giving up this easy life for even more stress and anxiety in London. Perhaps I really was going mad.

The train pulled into King's Cross station just before a quarter to eight. I should have been looking forward to my evening with Mark. But I wasn't.

'Rise above it,' Mark said over dinner. 'Have faith in yourself and b.u.g.g.e.r what people think.'

'But you have to attract the customers,' I said. 'Surely it matters what they think?'

'Gordon Ramsay just swears at everyone and they love him for it.'

'Trust me, they wouldn't in Newmarket,' I said. 'For all the earthiness of racing and its reputation for bad language, those within it value being given their due respect. Trainers may swear at their stable lads but they wouldn't dream of swearing at their owners. The horses would disappear quicker than you could say abracadabra.'

'But I'm not talking about Newmarket,' said Mark, getting us round to the real reason for our dinner. 'It's time you came to London to run a place like this. Time you made your name.'

We were in the restaurant of the OXO Tower, on the eighth floor overlooking the City of London skyline. It was one of my favourite venues and, indeed, if I was to run a restaurant in the metropolis, then this would be the sort of establishment I would create, a combination of sophistication and fun. It helps, of course, to have an interesting and unusual venue, and this was it. According to the brief history printed on the menus, the restaurant sat atop what had been a 1920s warehouse built by the Liebig Extract of Meat Company, who made OXO stock cubes. When the company was refused planning permission to put up the name OXO in lights on the front of the building to s.h.i.+ne across the Thames, an architect incorporated the word in the window shapes on all four sides of a tower built above the warehouse. The meat extract company has long gone from the site which now contained design shops and residential accommodation, as well as four different cafes and restaurants, but the tower remained, with its OXO windows. Hence the name.

'Well?' said Mark. 'Lost your tongue?'

'I was thinking,' I said. 'It's quite a change.'

'You do want to make your name, don't you?' he said earnestly.

'Yes, absolutely,' I replied. 'But I'm more worried at the moment of making it in the tabloids as a ma.s.s poisoner.'

'In a week it will be forgotten about. All anyone will remember will be your name and that's an advantage.'

I hoped he was right. 'What about the girl that's suing me?' I asked.

'Don't worry about her,' he said. 'Settle out of court and it won't be reported. Give her a hundred quid for her trouble and move on. Stupid idea anyway, suing over a bit of food poisoning. What does she hope to get? Not much loss of earnings through the night anyway, not unless she was on the game!' He laughed at his own joke and I relaxed a little.

We were sitting in the round-backed blue leather chairs of the restaurant at the OXO, and I was enjoying allowing some-one else to do the cooking for a change. I chose the foie gras ballantine with a fig chutney and brioche to start, and then tie rack of lamb with sweetbreads for my main course, while Mark went for the lobster to start and the organic Shetland cod for his main. In spite of his choice of fish, Mark was a red wine man so we sat and took pleasure from an outstanding bottle of 1990 Chateau Latour.