by Dick Francis
“Where do you want all this stuff?” he asked, waving a hand at the row of wire cages.
“Glass-fronted boxes 1 and 2 on the second floor of the Head On Grandstand,” I said.
“Right.” He went in search of the elevator.
As the name suggested, the Head On Grandstand sat near the finish line and looked back down the track, so that the horses raced almost directly towards it. The boxes had the best view of the racing and were the most sought after. The Delafield tractor makers had done well to secure a couple of boxes side by side for their big day.
I wandered past the magnificent Millennium Grandstand towards the racetrack 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 flower beds and again mowing the already-short grass in the parade ring. An army of young men was setting up tables and chairs on the lawn in front of a seafood stall, ready for the thousands of racegoers who would soon be arriving for their 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 next to and half sitting on the desk. William Preston was the racetrack manager and had been a guest at the function the previous evening.
“He won’t be in ’til eleven, at the earliest,” she said.
That sounded ominous, I thought. The racetrack manager not being in until eleven o’clock on 2,000 Guineas day.
“He’s had a bad night, apparently,” she went on. “Something he ate didn’t agreed 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 my 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 cold-room. They just needed to be turned out of their molds 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 truck carrying bricks 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 study 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 meager 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 now had passed since the fateful day when a policeman 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 study chemistry. But my life was changed forever, not only 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 traveling in the Far East for the next six months. So I went to work as a pots-and-pans washer-upper, beer-crate carrier and general dogsbody at a country pub/restaurant/hotel overlooking the river Thames in Oxfordshire that belonged to a widowed distant cousin of my mother’s. The normal designation for such an employee is kitchen porter, but this is such a derogatory term in catering circles that my mother’s cousin referred to me as the temporary assistant undermanager, 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, since 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 and I started an apprenticeship under the watchful eye of Marguerite, the fiery, foulmouthed 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 caught up on their sleep, I would experiment with flavors, spending most of my earnings on ingredients at Witney farmers’ market.
In the late spring, I wrote to Surrey University, politely asking if my enrollment 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 halls. When, in late October of 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 in 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 thirt
ies who had made a fortune in the cell 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 attendees of 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 when they were away in Barbados in January. “Much easier to cancel than to book,” she’d said. But she rarely canceled, 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. “Public Health has turned up.”
“She said she’d meet me at the racetrack,” 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.”
2
S ealing the kitchen literally was 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 in 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 died?” I asked him.
“No idea,” he said, clipping another padlock in 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 offense-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, in the end, you will 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 running 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 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 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 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 racetrack last night and had suffered like the rest of us. And many others had heard about it.”
“Does anyone know who it is who died?” I asked.
“No idea,” said Carl. “I didn’t exactly ask our customers.”
“We’d also better tell the staff not to come in 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 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 van we used for outside catering that 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 marvelous,” 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 van to the racetrack while I took my car, a beat-up VW Golf that had been my pride and joy. I had bought it brand-new when I was twenty, using the prize money from a televised cooking competition I had won. After eleven years, and with well over a hundred thousand miles on the odometer, it was beginning to show its age. But it remained a special car for me, and I was loath to change it. And it could still outaccelerate most others off the traffic lights.
I parked in the staff parking lot, on the grass beyond the weighing room, and I 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, on
e 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.
The tweed suit beat the scarlet-and-black ensemble by a short head.
“Mr. Moreton?” she asked in her headmistressly manner as I approached.
“Ms. Milne, I presume?” I replied.
“Indeed,” she said.
“And I am MaryLou Fordham,” stated the scarlet-and-black loudly in an American accent.
I had suspected as much.
“Aren’t you cold?” I asked her. Chiffon blouses and early-May mornings in Newmarket didn’t quite seem to go together. Even on still days, a cutting wind seemed to blow across the Heath, and Guineas Saturday was no exception.
“No,” she replied. “If you want to know what cold is, come to Wisconsin in the winter.” She spoke with every word receiving its share of emphasis, with little harmonic quality to the tone. Each word was clipped and clearly separate; there was no Southern drawl here, no running of the words together.
“And what do you want to see Mr. Moreton about when he should be working for me?” she said rather haughtily, turning towards Angela Milne.
I could tell from her body language that Angela Milne did not take very kindly to being addressed in that manner. I wouldn’t have either.
“It is a private matter,” said Angela. Good old Ms. Milne, I thought. My friend.
“Well, be quick,” said MaryLou bossily. She turned to me. “I have been up to the suites, and there seems to be no work going on. The tables aren’t laid, and there’s no staff to be found.”
“It’s OK,” I said. “It’s only half past nine. The guests don’t arrive for more than two hours. Everything will be ready.” I hoped I was right. “You go back upstairs, and I will be there shortly.”