by Monica Ali
‘Case?’ said Maddox. ‘What case?’
Parks smiled thinly. ‘Duty officer – that’s the sergeant there – didn’t like the look of it. Soon as someone calls it sus, you’re dealing with a crime scene, incident log’s up and running.’
‘Did he fall or was he pushed?’ said Maddox, simmering. ‘Do me a favour.’
‘Matter of fact,’ said Parks, ‘I agree with you. Looks like your chap fell. Tell you what’s caused the confusion. There’s cast-off on the floor and a spot on the wall as well.’
‘Meaning?’ said Gabe.
Parks yawned. ‘Apart from the blood pooled by the head there’s some splashes around the place – like you might get if someone had been hit on the back of the head, for instance.’
‘You’re not saying …’ began Maddox.
‘I’m not. The CSM’s taken a sample. Crime scene manager. We do like our acronyms.’
‘And the splashes?’ said Gabe.
‘Bit of a boozer, was he? Few empties down there. Probably what’s happened is he slipped over, cut his head, got up and staggered around a bit, and fell back down. I don’t blame the duty officer for calling it, but when I can get a BPA expert down there – should be someone on his way now …’ He checked his watch. ‘Blood pattern analysis. When I get my BPA guy down there, hundred to one that’s what he’ll say.’
‘So all this is a formality,’ said Maddox.
‘No sign of robbery or anything like that. His things don’t seem to have been disturbed. Of course we’ll be thorough. Once you set the ball rolling, you see, you’ve got to work it through to the end.’
‘Can we open again tomorrow?’ said Maddox.
The detective stuck his hands in his trouser pockets. He looked, Gabriel thought, somehow disappointing in his brown chinos and oatmeal sports jacket. ‘Don’t see why not,’ said Parks. ‘Should have the body out of there soon. The CSM’s got to bag the head and hands and then it can go for the post mortem. That area will stay cordoned off for the time being.’
‘The post mortem’s the end of it?’ said the general manager.
‘The coroner will give his initial findings – injuries consistent with a fall, that kind of thing, open an inquest and adjourn it awaiting the final police report.’
‘And the post-mortem results you get back when?’
‘Unless the BPA throws up any surprises it won’t go through on a rush job. We can get it done in forty-eight hours if there’s cause, otherwise it’s more like five or six days. Ah, looks like my blood man’s arrived. I take it you’ve called environmental health?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Mr Maddox grimly. ‘We’ve called in the council. We’ve called in Health and Safety. We’ve not called in the navy yet, but we’ve called everyone else.’
Gabe checked the time. Nearly ten thirty. He had been sitting in his office over half an hour without getting a single thing done. He tried to remember the last time he’d spoken to the Ukrainian. A conversation about the grease on the extractor hoods, but that was about a month ago. ‘Yes, Chef,’ Yuri would have said. ‘I’ll see to it, Chef.’ Something like that. There wasn’t much call for an executive chef to speak to a night porter unless he was giving trouble and Yuri, until yesterday, had been no trouble at all.
Oona knocked and entered the office, all in one bustling move. She squashed her backside into the orange plastic seat. ‘I been keepin’ up the spirits out there with a little bitta prayer.’ Her voice was invariably strangled, as though she was just about managing not to laugh or cry or shout. She leaned her elbows on the desk and rested her chin on her hands.
We’re not here for tea and bloody buns, thought Gabe. There was something about Oona that infuriated him. It wasn’t the fact that she was so often late for work, it wasn’t the inefficient manner in which she worked, it wasn’t that her idea of fine dining was stew and dumplings with a sprig of parsley on top, and it wasn’t even the fact that she couldn’t cook so much as a fish finger without managing to cock it up. He had worked with lazier cooks, stupider cooks, cooks who would serve up a bowl of sick if they thought they could get away with it. What offended him about Oona was simply this: her domesticity. When she blew into his office and sat down it was as if she had just got home with the shopping, looking forward to a cuppa and a chat. The way she talked, the way she walked, the way she pressed her bosom when she was thinking, all of it, at core, was irreducibly and inescapably domestic. In Gabe’s experience, women who worked in kitchens – and there were a few – worked the hardest, swore the loudest and told the dirtiest jokes. It wasn’t about being one of the boys, not necessarily – they could flirt like hell too – but it showed that they knew the rules. The professional kitchen was not the same as the domestic kitchen. The two were worlds apart. Only Oona – who by staying on the spot for the best or worst part of two decades had risen to the rank of executive sous-chef – seemed unaware of the distinction.
He reached in his desk drawer for the staff rota, noticing yet again the way the Formica was beginning to split and the notches carved in the plywood base, put there it was said by the previous chef who was counting the days spent sober on the job (a total of nine), and when he turned back to Oona he sat very straight and correct as if that might dissuade her from melting all over his desk.
‘There’s a lot of different religions in here, Oona. You want to watch out you don’t offend someone.’
‘Hoo-ee,’ said Oona, showing her gold tooth. ‘The good Lord don’ mind ’bout the words. As long as he hear the prayer.’
‘It wasn’t him I was thinking about,’ said Gabe, wondering, not for the first time, if he should get rid of her or if it would be more trouble than it was worth.
‘Well, darlin’,’ said Oona, ‘that is the problem right there.’
Give me strength, thought Gabe. ‘Right,’ he said briskly, ‘difficult day today. Can you call the agency and get some cover for Yuri? For Benny too. He’s at home, getting over the … the shock.’ Benny, in fact, had not wanted to take a day off but Gabe had ordered it, knowing HR would otherwise look askance.
‘Poor, poor ting,’ said Oona. The words formed little explosions on her lips so it seemed they had been forced from her body by a series of blows to the chest. She rolled her eyes up to heaven.
‘Yes,’ said Gabe, though why Benny had been roaming the subterranean corridors – ‘the catacombs’ as they were known – way past the dry-goods and freezer rooms, way past where any stores were kept, had yet to be explained. It occurred to Gabriel that, but for Benny, Yuri might not have been found, not for a long time at least. Stupid, how stupid, he thought, without knowing quite what he meant.
‘My day off,’ said Oona. ‘Of course it all happen on my day off.’
Gabe considered this for a moment. If she had not been off, Oona seemed to be saying, everything would have been OK. Or perhaps she was simply regretting missing out on the drama. ‘We have to keep our minds on the job,’ he said.
‘Yes, Chef,’ said Oona. She smiled, crinkling her almond-shaped eyes. Her face was much younger than her fifty-five years, smooth-skinned and plump with a scattering of girlish freckles across the bridge of her nose. There was no trace of grey in her hair which she wore cropped high above her little ears. She kept diamanté hairclips fastened to her chef’s coat and, presumably, fixed them either side of her head after work. She was fat but somehow the fat added to her youthfulness, as though it was something she would outgrow. ‘Yuri,’ she said, ‘that poor ting, living down there like a little old rat. How long you tink he been down there, mmm?’
‘Oona,’ said Gabe, searching for a way to keep the conversation on the straight and narrow, ‘the police are looking into all that.’
Oona slipped off a shoe and reached down to massage her instep. Her feet, it seemed, belonged to her age. They were so broad they were practically square, and the black flats she wore to work strained at the seams. ‘They going to interview me this afternoon. Mr Maddox say so this mornin’.
Lord,’ she said, cramming her foot back into the shoe, ‘Lord only know what happen.’
‘It’s pretty clear, actually,’ said Gabe. Parks looked like a pen-pusher but he clearly knew his job. The ‘crime scene’ forensics had borne out his theory, and there’d be no rush with the post mortem. ‘Yuri was living in the basement. He had a mattress down there and everything, the other side of the rubbish chutes, in what used to be the old facilities office. He took a shower in the waiters’ locker room, he’d probably been drinking, he was going back to his room, he slipped, he banged his head, he died. Tragic, yes. Mysterious, no, not at all.’
‘Lord only know,’ repeated Oona.
Gabe picked up a pen, clicked the top to release the nib and clicked again to retract it. He wondered what it was that Gleeson could not come out and say about Yuri. He was sure Gleeson was involved in some way. Why else would he be getting himself worked up? Everything would become apparent in the fullness of time. Gabe pressed the end of the pen over and over. Click, click, click, click, click.
‘Never mind, darlin’,’ said Oona, patting his hand. ‘We all feelin’ it, you know.’
‘Shall we get on?’ said Gabriel. ‘There’s a lot to get through.’
‘Yes, yes, yes. I know.’ She wiggled her bottom to try and get comfortable, a difficult task in the circumstances, of being wedged between desk and door. ‘But, Yuri, love him. What he tinkin’? It ain’t no hotel down there.’
That was it. If something smelt bad you followed the trail and the trail led back to Gleeson. Gleeson was pulling every scam in the book and a few on top besides.
‘You arks me,’ said Oona, ‘they gonna sue the arse off this place.’
‘Who? Who is going to sue? Anyway, he wasn’t supposed to be down there.’ For a moment he had been sure that Gleeson was renting the space to Yuri, charging extra for the mattress perhaps, but now the idea seemed ludicrous. Those empty bottles of Rémy Martin. You don’t buy premium brandy on a night porter’s salary, not at full price anyway. It wasn’t Gabe’s business, though. There was going to be an inquest. Let them find out what they needed to know. Let Mr Maddox find out the rest.
‘M’mm,’ said Oona, with some apparent satisfaction. ‘Get their arses sued.’
‘That’s as may be,’ said Gabriel. ‘What we’ve got to worry about is getting this staff rota up to date.’
‘Got Nikolai covering for Benny,’ said Oona, ‘he know his stuff all right.’
Nikolai, one of the commis chefs, was on a lower grade than Benny but Oona was right, he was more than capable.
‘Rang the agency ’bout an hour ago,’ Oona continued. ‘Two porters on they way.’
‘Two? Who else is missing?’
‘The girl. What’s the name? You know, washing the pots and all.’ She rubbed her breast while she thought. ‘Oh, she so skinny that girl she pass under doors, she so thin she hard to see. You want to sit her down with someting nice and hot and say, for Lord’s sake, child, you eat now. Eat!’
‘She call in sick?’ Gabe checked the time. This coffee morning had to come to an end.
‘Got it now – Lena,’ said Oona, laughing. ‘Hoo. She leaner than me, all right.’
‘She call in sick?’ Gabe repeated. He vaguely recalled this skinny Lena.
‘No,’ said Oona, ‘but nobody saw her yesterday, so I hear, and she not in today for her shift. Probably she took a scare, with all the tings that happen, you know.’
‘Have you called her house, then?’ Gabe asked.
Oona looked at him and pursed her lips, clearly deciding if he was mad or simply joking. Giving him the benefit of the doubt, she began to laugh her deep and throaty laugh. ‘Go on,’ she said, ‘go on.’
It seemed to Gabe that Oona did not laugh the same way other people did. Other people laughed politely or rudely, sarcastically or knowingly, helplessly, hopelessly, with sadness or with joy, depending on the situation at hand. But Oona had only one laugh, as if in reply to some never-ending cosmic joke. He said, ‘She doesn’t have a phone. Of course not.’ It was pointless prising phone numbers from porters anyway. If you managed to get through, it would be to someone who spoke no English. Or to someone who, in broken English, vehemently denied that the person in question had ever entered the UK, let alone set foot in their house. ‘Is she agency or permanent?’
Oona thought for a moment. Gabriel looked over the kitchen floor and saw Victor emptying a plastic bag of frozen chips into a deep-fat fryer. Frozen chips were banned; all frozen vegetables were banned since Gabriel took charge, five months ago. But there was Victor, the smartarse, carrying on as if he were a law unto himself.
‘She come through the agency,’ Oona was saying, ‘yes, that’s right, mmm.’ The sentence finished but she continued, mmming and yesing, soft little soothing sounds uttered beneath her breath as if she had divined his mounting rage and would blanket it with her mumbles.
‘She shows up, tell her to get lost again. I’m not having it.’
‘I goin’ to give her a warnin’,’ said Oona. ‘Got to have two or three warnin’s.’
‘No,’ said Gabe. ‘She’s only agency.’ He shrugged to show he was taking no pleasure in this. ‘I’m sorry, Oona, but she’s fired.’
The kitchen, along with the rest of the Imperial Hotel, was a product of the Victorian age. But while the lobby and function rooms, the bedrooms and bathrooms, the stairways and corridors and vestibules had been transmuted into twenty-first-century spaces within a nineteenth-century shell, the kitchen – despite numerous refurbishments and refittings – retained its workhouse demeanour, the indelible stamp of generations of toil. It was a large, low-ceilinged room; roughly square with two dog-legs attached, the first containing the vegetable prep area, the other housing the industrial-size dishwashers, one each for plates, glasses and pans. Beyond the washers and sinks was a short corridor that led to the unloading bay, where trucks pulled up from the early hours of the morning until late in the afternoon and to which Ernie (a lifer even by Oona’s standards) scuttled back and forth from the tiny prefab hut where he sighed over his poetry and the computer that scared him half to death. Going back into the hotel but out on a wing from the main kitchen, just before you reached the offices filled with toothy young marketing assistants, was the pastry kitchen. In contrast to the big kitchen the air in here was permanently cool, in theory because of the nature of the work, but whenever Gabe walked in or even past he could not help but feel it was because of Chef Albert, whose icy breath could chill the warmest of hearts.
From where Gabe was standing now, with his back to the pass and his hands on the edge of the hot shelf that ran two-thirds the length of the room, he could not see these far reaches of his domain. He could see the larder, sauce, and fish and meat sections. He could see the tiny work station where one of the commis dished up endless burgers and fries for room service, turning back and forth between stainless steel worktop and the fry baskets and grill, circling round and back, round and back, like a dog settling down for a nap. And he could see the way that decades of half-hearted refits, of misaligned edges and a mishmash of equipment, gave the place a desperate kind of look, as if it were only just managing to hold itself together.
Even the floor, he thought, gives up. The tiles, he judged, had been laid in the last few years, heavy duty red-brown stone. But they failed to make it up to the edges and into the corners where archaeological trails of slate, terracotta and lino could be found. When the kitchen was busy, when knives wheeled and pans slammed, when the burners hissed and flared, when the white plates marched, when the chefs shouted orders and insults and jokes, swerving and bending, performing the modern dance of cuisine, this place was transformed.
But today the lunch service was dead. One of the porters, a Filipino in a dark green boiler suit, pushed a mop over the tiles with such detachment that it was the mop that seemed animate, dragging the porter along. On the grease-spattered back wall, painted an institutional sage, a health and safety poster an
d a ripped-out pin-up fluttered in the stale draught of the electric fan. In twos and threes, beneath the life-sapping fluorescent lights, the chefs gossiped and planned cigarette breaks. What a place, thought Gabe, looking away, at the grilled and bolted back door and the barred and lightless window. What a place: part prison, part lunatic asylum, part community hall.
The printer that stood on the pass and connected with the restaurant till began to whirr. Gabriel grabbed the docket. ‘Battle stations,’ he called. ‘One consommé royale, two whitebait, one red mullet, one cacciatore, one osso buco. Let’s go.’
‘Chef,’ said Suleiman, approaching with a Tupperware box, ‘I have been playing around with the consommé garnish. A chiffonade of sorrel and chervil.’ He displayed the contents of the box and then kissed his thumb and forefinger. ‘Really, really tasty. You think it’s OK?’
Suleiman was from India. He had spent less than three years in England but already his English was better than Oona’s. He was the only person in the kitchen who showed any interest in food. A consommé royale did not have those herb garnishes. That would turn it into a consommé julienne. But Gabe did not want to discourage him. ‘It’s OK,’ he said. ‘Good work, Suleiman.’
Suleiman smiled. Though he brought to his smile the same thorough-going attitude with which he executed all tasks, stretching his lips wide and over his teeth, nodding his head and wrinkling his eyes, it did little to dent the seriousness of his face. Even in his white chef’s hat and coat and apron, even with his short – slightly bow – legs in blue check trousers and with a skillet in his hand, Suleiman did not look like a chef. He looked like a loss adjuster wearing a disguise.
Gabriel decided to do a walk round and moved past Suleiman, dispensing a quick pat on the back.
In the larder section Victor was idling, kicking his heels against the under-the-worktop fridge. He was one of those young men who mistook their nervous energy and frustration for charisma, which made him impossible to like. The way he stood, jutting his chin and tilting his pelvis, he thought he was back in some alleyway in Moldova, waiting for a hustle to begin.