by Dick Francis
“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 chili 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 assistants plating the meals, and all the waitstaff 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 racetrack 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 since 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 racetrack event the previous Friday and they 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 assured me, they were not, and they had ordered a steak each to prove the point.
Thursday proved to be slightly more encouraging with the arrival on my desk of the Cambridge Evening News, courtesy of Richard, who went into town to get it. As he said, he had plenty of time on his hands since we had just three tables in the restaurant for lunch, just eight covers in all.
The article in the paper centered 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 also had 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 all that gleaming stainless steel had been included next to the article, and I suppose I should be happy even if it was on page seven rather than on the front page 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 Saturday 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 on Exeter Road, near the town center, 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, standing room only.
I squeezed in to 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 neighbor may not have been so keen to move up to accommodate me.
Bravely, Neil Jennings delivered the eulogy for his wife, and he reduced most of us to tears. He himself 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 passing 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 passed on the High Street. One of them was George Kealy, the top Newmarket trainer whose wife kept a table on retainer at my restaurant each Saturday night.
“Hello, 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 and held his hand as he finished saying his good-byes at the door. I remembered that Emma was Neil’s sister. I watched them both walk slowly over and climb into the back of a black limousine that then pulled away from the curb behind the hearse 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 Saturday 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 racetrack 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 her own self, 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 had a beautiful, clever and fun-loving daughter, only to have had her snatched away from them forever 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 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 parking lot, I was totally exhausted.
And, still, the day had more sorrow to come.
Brian and June Walters had been one of my first-ever customers when I had opened the restaurant. Brian had once been a fellow steeplechase jockey of my father’s, and for years they had been close friends, as well as fierce competitors. I think they had come to have dinner at the Hay Net that first time only to support me, as the son of his dead friend, but they 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 decision-making 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 2,000 Guineas; high enough for him to have been standing with his wife right next to where the bomb had exploded on Saturday. His long and happy retirement had lasted precisely six weeks and one day.
Brian and June had produced four grown-up children between them, but none were 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 since 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, gathered in the Anglican church for the Walterses that had earlier been across the High Street in the Catholic church for Elizabeth Jennings. Was it ungracious of me, I thought, to wonder how many had passed the intervening hours in the bar of the Rutland Arms Hotel, which sat halfway between the two places of worship?
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-class 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 back 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 racetrack the previous 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 mass poisoner and a liar, on my way to probable bankruptcy and 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 bugger 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 around 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 favorite 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 beef stock cubes. When the company was refused planning permission to put up the name OXO in lights on the front of the building to shine 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 contains design shops, residential accommodation, as well as four different cafés and restaurants, but the tower remains, 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 mass 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 sat in the round-backed, blue leather chairs of the restaurant at the OXO, and I was enjoying allowing someone else to do the cooking for a change. I chose the foie gras galantine, with a fig chutney and brioche, to start, and then the 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 c
hoice of fish, Mark was a red wine man, so we sat and took pleasure from an outstanding bottle of 1990 Château Latour.
“Now, then,” he said once the first courses were served, “where shall we have this restaurant and what style do you fancy?”
Why did those questions ring alarm bells in my head? Mark had stuck absolutely to his deal over the Hay Net. He had provided the finance but given me a free hand in everything else: venue, style, menus, wines, staff-the lot. I had asked him at the time to give me an indication of an overall budget for the setting up and for the first year of operation. “More than half a million, less than a million,” is all he said. “And what security?” I had asked him. “The deeds to the property and a gentlemen’s agreement that you will work at the venture for a minimum of ten years unless we both agree otherwise.” In the end, I had used nearly all his million, but his fifty percent of the profits for the past five years had paid back far more than half of it, and he still held the deeds. Over ten years, at the prepoisoning turnover rate, the Hay Net would provide for a very healthy return on his investment. I, of course, was delighted and proud that my little Newmarket establishment had proved to be such a success, both financially and in terms of “standing” in the town. However, what had been more important to me than anything was my independence. It may have been Mark’s money that I had used to set it up, and he ultimately owned the building in which it was housed, but it was my restaurant and I had made all the decisions, every one.
Did I detect in Mark’s questions his intent to have a more hands-on role in any new London venture? Or was I jumping to conclusions? Did he not mean where shall you have the restaurant? Not where shall we? I decided it was not the time to press the point.