Читать книгу A Taste of Death: The gripping new murder mystery that will keep you guessing - H.V. Coombs - Страница 12

While the cheesecake base – half a packet of digestive biscuits smashed to crumbs and mixed with melted butter – set, I crossed the road and walked around the village green. I say, walked. I squelched. The rain was still falling, whipped by the wind it seemed to be coming at me sideways. It was ferociously cold, particularly after the warmth of the kitchen.

I looked at my watch, half four. For the time being I was only opening at lunchtimes. Gradually I would phase in evening meals. Slow but steady growth was what I wanted.

I kept my head down as I walked. The green was a rectangular piece of common ground that houses and a few businesses fronted on to. On my side of the road there was my place, the Old Forge Café, a car repair business that also did MOTs, and a few houses. More or less diagonally opposite from me was the Three Bells pub, the village hall which doubled as a fitness centre and arts studio, and several more houses. On the opposite side of the green was Whitfield’s house and of course, DI Slattery’s. It was an attractive village, compact and down to earth, not full of second homes and retired business people.

The green, being at the top of the hill and surrounded by buildings, made the sky overhead seem vast. At times it reminded me of a bald head, fringed by hair. There was a playground for children on the far side, but there was no one around today, it was too cold to play. There was a pond near there too, sometimes it had ducks. Not today. The only person I saw was a man, head down, buried in the hood of his anorak, leaving the house next to Whitfield’s with its charred obelisk in the front garden.

I thought, the village committee will be up in arms about that. It was like a sinister beacon of civil unrest, not suitable for a South Bucks village.

I walked up to the Three Bells and went inside. It was, quite frankly, disappointing, a bit of a dump. People have an image, rooted in reality, of what a nice countryside pub is, from the low-beamed ceiling, to the inglenook fireplace and cosy, homely charm. The Three Bells certainly fell short of the kitsch ideal. It fell far short of it.

The pub was a long, rectangular room with the door at one end, the bar at the other and a pool table in the middle. The pub was defiantly not chocolate-boxy. It was never going to feature on Location, Location, Location. It had as much atmosphere as a motorway service station. At this time of day it was quite busy, early doors. Four thirty was knocking-off time for the builders, and there 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.