Burned At The Bake

by Ashley Cain

  “Fancy one?” he said, licking his lips and smiling at her, a smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes. “Or do you fancy something else?” He glanced to his right in to a bedroom where a large double bed was unmade.

  April was furious and made up her mind there and then to end this toxic relationship. “No thanks. I’ve just come here to sack you. I’ll give you a week’s payoff but I don’t want to see you again. You have caused enough trouble over the last couple of days and to add to that you have lied to me. You said that Rachel had burned you, that you were having to go to the hospital and there is nothing wrong with you. Other than you have an oversized ego”. April took a deep breath. There she had said it.

  Connor’s face had gone red underneath the tan. “You’re sacking me?” His features instantly went in to a snarl which transformed his face in to one of ugliness. There was nothing attractive now about him at all. He looked like a wolf about to attack; his teeth bared. “You’re joking right, what for?”

  Had he not heard what she had said? “For lying. I have just told you. You had me believe that Rachel had burned you when she had done no such thing. You dropped the mixture on yourself and it was raw, not cooked. I can’t trust you and I will not have anyone working for me who I cannot trust”.

  “That lying little bitch”, he laughed nastily. “And you believe her over me. She is nothing. She thinks she is better than she is”.

  “She isn’t the only one” April bit back. She had been nervous about telling Connor earlier but now she was furious with him and the words rushed out. “You think you are so good” she taunted, “but you can’t even help out in a kitchen without getting everything wrong. You may think you look like Mr Wonderful but there is nothing in here” she touched her head “or in here “she held her hand to her heart”.

  Connor changed tack. “You can’t sack me, you need me. Miguel is leaving so you need a cook. And I’m a cook, a better one than him whatever you think”.

  His words made April pause “How do you know he is leaving” she said suspiciously. Miguel had only just told her and she knew how much he hated Connor; he was hardly likely to confide in him before he had had chance to talk to her about it.

  Connor looked momentarily embarrassed. “I heard them talking” he said, walking over towards the window and fastening his shirt. “They were in their flat and the window was open”.

  “You heard them talking from the fourth floor?”, April said with a bark of laughter “I don’t think so”.

  “I was getting out of my car and I heard them talking. Miguel was telling Rachel that he had been offered a great job in a restaurant in town and that she should go as well. Rachel said she would but she didn’t know how to tell you so she would let Miguel go first and then she would leave a couple of weeks later”

  “I don’t believe you” April said, hoping against hope that Connor wasn’t breaking the habit of a lifetime and telling the truth for once. “I’m sure you heard them talking but I doubt very much that you have repeated exactly what was said. And even if it is, I would rather work 24 hours a day to keep my café open than give you Miguel’s job. You are useless”.

  She turned and made for the door but Connor bounded after her. Just as she had put her hand on the door handle to open it, Connor put his palm hard against the door, preventing her. She felt his breath hot on the back of her neck.

  “You seriously do not want to cross me April” he growled in her ear. “I can make life very difficult for you, believe me”

  “Is that a threat?” She kept her back to him, refused to face him so that he could not see how frightened she was. She would not show weakness in front of him. “Let me out”. She pulled on the door handle but it wouldn’t budge, Connor was much stronger than her.

  He stepped away without warning and she almost lost her balance as the door opened suddenly. She would have fallen if he hadn’t been so close and caught her fall.

  “It’s a promise” he replied pushing her gently away from him. “You won’t get away with sacking me. I think you need some time to think about it, come to your senses. I’ll see you tomorrow”.

  “You won’t Connor” April turned to face him, composing herself. “You are sacked. I’ll just have to take my chances, won’t I?” She didn’t wait for an answer and turned towards the lift. The door was slammed shut behind her but not before she had heard the words, “you will regret it” come from the apartment. She breathed heavily. Sacking him was the right thing to do, but why did it at this moment feel so wrong?

  Chapter 17

  The next day brought more misery for April as her worst fears were realised. It looked like Connor had made good on his promise and she had been right to be fearful of what he may do. She was the first at the café in the morning and as she walked in, she was greeted by a scene of absolute devastation. The back door to the café had been forced open sometime in the night and whoever had got in, and April thought it must have been more than one person given the mess, had trashed the café.

  All the freestanding tables and chairs that were arranged in the centre of the café had been upended and thrown on their sides. The cheerful yellow and white striped banquettes that lined the café walls and windows had all been slashed by someone who looked like they had been in an absolute frenzy of rage whilst doing it. The stuffing of the cushions floated around in the wind caused by the opening of the door like the foam left by the receding tide. The old photographs of fishermen from times past, including many of her grandfather, that were displayed on the walls had been carelessly thrown on the floor, their glass frames smashed in to smithereens, the photographs themselves ripped and torn.

  If the café itself looked like it had been visited by a couple of enraged madmen, the kitchen looked even worse. Food had been taken from the store room and emptied on to the floor; eggs, baked beans and tomatoes mingled with sponge cakes and broken biscuits. If that wasn’t bad enough all the big chest freezers had been turned off and the fish and meat inside had defrosted, wasting hundreds of pounds.

  April put her head in her hands, sank in to the only chair that hadn’t been thrown on to its side, and wept. She cried for her café that had been destroyed and the hard work that she had put in to it. She cried for the memory of her grandmother whose humble café had survived for over 50 years, whilst April hadn’t even managed to keep hers going for four. And she cried most of all for her grandad whose young face on a black and white photograph taken just after the war peered at her from underneath a slimy goo of egg yolks and orange juice.

  “Oh goodness, what has happened here?” Hope was beside her looking around in amazement. “What a mess”.

  “Oh Hope”, April looked up at the old woman who had been her grandmother’s friend. “I don’t know exactly what has happened but I can guess why”. She recounted her run in with Connor the day before and his dire warning as she walked away from him. “You don’t want to cross me”. She hadn’t taken his warning seriously, had just brushed it off as arrogant machismo from someone who was used to women falling at his feet and didn’t like a woman getting the better of him. Maybe she should have taken his threat seriously, taken some precautions. But in her wildest nightmare she could not have imagined this.

  “Connor?” Hope queried. “That useless idiot who you interviewed on Friday. Martha told me all about him on Saturday afternoon when I popped in for a coffee. Didn’t know the difference between salt and sugar. He didn’t look to me the sort to get his hands dirty or tire himself out doing something like this”.

  “He’s the only person I’ve crossed recently. Who else would have done something like this?”

  “Well, you did accuse Jerome and Sylvain of stealing from you. They may have got drunk and decided to teach you a lesson. They’re big drinkers you know”.

  “I didn’t exactly accuse them of stealing Hope, and anyway we have been alright since and I cannot imagine them doing something like this”. Hope had a funny recollection of events when it suited her
, and if April remembered rightly it had been Hope who had almost accused them of stealing.

  “Who knows what goes through people’s heads when they have had the demon drink?” Hope never drank and April was sure that her habit of winding down on an evening with a glass or two of wine meant in Hope’s eyes that she was a borderline alcoholic.

  “I’m sure that it wasn’t Jerome or Sylvain” April’s voice was firm. She did not want Hope going off and accusing them of breaking in to her café. It had caused enough trouble when she had brought up the subject of the missing cake. “Anyhow, what would have been the point? They will lose their jobs if I have to close”.

  “Now, now, it’s not going to come to that, you are not going to have to close, well not for more than a few days” Hope said gently patting April’s shoulder. “If we all muck in, we can get this shipshape in no time at all. My friend Lois Grant is a whizz with a sewing machine, and she will get these banquette cushions looking like new. And the insurance will cover the food. I remember your grandmother having to deal with a couple of drunks in 1983. They decided to have a fight with some French fishermen who had come over. A right brawl it was, left the place looking like a scene from the Battle of Waterloo. Within a few days we were open again. Mind you” she continued, reminiscing, “your grandma waded in with a right hook and knocked one of them out cold. The others soon scarpered”. She laughed. “Nobody messed with Ruby back in those days”.

  April laughed despite herself. Back in 1983 her grandmother must have been in her 40’s. She only remembered her as an old lady and couldn’t imagine her as a woman of Martha’s age.

  “Well,” she said standing up. “I don’t think it would have been Jerome or Sylvain. My money is on Connor, either him or he paid someone to do it. He has plenty of money judging by his clothes, his car and his apartment”.

  “Hmm” Hope mused, “so why did he want to work here as a kitchen assistant if he is as rich as appearances would suggest? I mean, I don’t need to work here as I have enough to live on, but I promised your grandmother I would help you out and I always will. But he’s young, he could do anything he wanted, why would he want to work in a place like this?”

  April ignored the obvious insult as she knew that it wasn’t meant in the way that it had been said. And if truth be told she had thought the same thing herself. “You know, that is something that I could never understand. And he worked at the Belvedere before he came here. I know it is a five-star hotel but the work would not have been easy or particularly well paid”.

  “I forgot you told me he worked at the Belvedere. They wouldn’t have kept him five minutes if he couldn’t do the job. Did you get a reference?”

  “Yes” April nodded. “A glowing one”.

  “There’s something fishy here, and it isn’t just coming from that freezer” Hope said, wrinkling her nose and nodding at the chest freezer that contained a ruined consignment of prawns and fish. “You call the police and report this crime, and I will call Renee, my friend who works as a housekeeper there, see what reference she gives this Connor. What was his surname?”

  “Monroe”.

  April pulled out her mobile phone and called the local police station to report the crime as Hope dialled the number for her friend who worked at the Belvedere. The police said that they would send someone around and she put the phone down and listened as Hope finished her call. She was surprised to see that Hope was using one of the latest smart phones.

  “Well, it all checks out” Hope said putting the phone in her bag and looking around for somewhere to place it that wasn’t covered in cake mix or raw food. Renee says that Connor worked in the kitchen for the last two years and he was brilliant. Made a fantastic strawberry roulade for her birthday. He left suddenly a couple of weeks ago”.

  “That fits then” said April, “although from what I saw over the last two days I wouldn’t have trusted him to hull a punnet of strawberries, never mind whip them up in to a strawberry roulade. The more I think about it the more it just doesn’t make sense. It was as though he was deliberately trying to sabotage the place, but I can’t for the life of me figure out why”.

  “If he was trying to sabotage it deliberately, he would have surely been more subtle than this” Hope said looking around at the scene of devastation surrounding them. “You know the only odd thing that my friend Renee said was that she had heard that the reason Connor had left so suddenly was because he had to care for his elderly parents. If he had to care for his elderly parents why turn up here looking for work?”

  “Maybe it was just an excuse, he thought that they may let him go quicker if he made up a lie like that. I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw him even before this, so I am sure that he wouldn’t have thought twice about lying if it was going to get him what he wanted. What I don’t understand though is why he came here, why did he want to work here, why me?”

  She was distracted in her thoughts by a noise behind her, and turned to see Miguel and Rachel standing in the doorway, shock written all over their faces.

  “What the hell has happened here?” said Miguel

  “I sacked Connor yesterday, I think this may be his revenge” April said wearily. “He said I would regret crossing him and he was right” She could feel the tears stinging hot behind her eyes.

  Miguel clenched his fists. “Right, I’m going to see him right now”.

  He turned but was blocked by a figure in a blue uniform.

  “Now hold on a minute, you are going nowhere” said the policeman, who introduced himself as Sergeant Tozier. He was a youngish man with light brown hair and pale grey eyes that stared at the group keenly. April remembered his name as the same police officer who had phoned to tell her about James’s motorcycle accident. He must be the community police officer for St Agnes. “Now if I heard you correctly you have evidence of who has done this” he said taking out his notebook.

  “Not evidence exactly” April said, “although it’s a coincidence. I sacked someone yesterday, a guy called Connor Monroe. He lives up the hill at the Rockspur. He had only worked for me for a couple of days but I believed he was deliberately sabotaging the food. Salt in the cake mix, mustard in the mayonnaise, that sort of thing”.

  “How did he take it?”

  “He wasn’t happy. Made vague threats that I would regret crossing him. I didn’t take it seriously but then I walked in here this morning to find this mess”.

  She was close to tears and Rachel put her arm around her shoulders.

  “Sounds suspicious, although it is a bit of a leap from putting salt in a cake to this” He looked around the café. “We mustn’t jump to conclusions. I will certainly need to speak to him. How did the person or persons get in?”

  “Through the back door here”. April showed the splintered wood where the door had been forced open from the frame.

  “No security lights or alarms?”

  “No, there is no crime here, I didn’t think I would need it”. It was true, Jersey was a relatively safe place to live and work with very little crime. She didn’t really need to lock her front door when she went out and if she drove in to town, she always left the car unlocked.

  Sergeant Tozier sighed. “I’ll need to speak to the neighbours. Who lives there?” he said pointing at the cabin perched up the hill behind the café.

  “I do, and I didn’t hear anything in the night”.

  “Pity” Sergeant Tozier said, “you have a great view of the café from up there. We will get the fingerprints guy out here to look at this door. I’ll then go and see this Connor Monroe character and then let you know. But I don’t want you accusing or speaking to him yourselves, do you understand?” He looked at the group. “We don’t know for sure that it is him. There was a similar incident in town a couple of weeks ago where a bar got broken in to and a lot of mess was made. They got away with a few thousand pounds. It could be the same thieves, any money taken here?”

  “There was nothing to take, I clear out the till a
t the end of the day and put it in the safe at home. And there is never a huge amount of cash anyway, not at this time of year. Most people pay by card”.

  Sergeant Tozier put his notebook away. “Well providing you stay away from the back door until after the fingerprints man has been, there is no reason why you can’t start clearing up. I’ll fill out a report and let you have it for the insurance. I presume you have insurance?”

  April nodded sadly. She had insurance for damage and theft but it wouldn’t cover the love and hard work that had gone in to transforming her grandmother’s home in to the Bluewater Café.

  Chapter 18

  Luckily April only had to close the cafe for two days as everyone pulled out all the stops to get the café cleaned up and looking almost as good as it had before the break in. Hope’s friend took the cushions away and managed to stitch the material back together, it wouldn’t last a long time but it would suffice as a temporary measure until the new material she had sourced off the internet arrived and new cushions could be made. Martha and Hope helped her clear up the mess and she ordered in more supplies so that Miguel and Rachel could cook and bake to replace what had been lost. Her savings were almost depleted, but the insurance company had assured her that she was covered for the damage as well as the lost food, so she expected a payment any day.