by M C Jacques
Wispy cloud cover had palmed a general dimming down of the natural light and the passageway’s luminosity had been still further diminished. McKay’s mind was busily engaged with diverse prospects, too, as he blearily strode the final ten metres or so up to the hardwood, but shoddily maintained, front door of the Pan Asiatic. Even the handle struggled in its task; only by a minute margin did it successfully manage to eject the catch from the roughly-gauged out socket in the shuddery doorframe. Eventually, the door gratingly and begrudgingly opened, skimming the straw-like bristles of a dark brown door mat. An insecurely mounted bell tinkled faintly as the door was forcibly closed. This preliminary test having been passed, McKay found himself in the restaurant itself. There was no cloakroom or inner foyer which he had anticipated, clearly prematurely.
The inside was something else. McKay had always wondered exactly what the original kasba would have been like, in each and every respect: clamour, décor, ambience, service, cuisine, cellar and entertainment, among others. In his cerebral wanderings, the Pan Asiatic rang what could only have been an imaginary bell in that tone. Upon entering, McKay clocked a stairwell descending almost immediately to his left and a sign announced that the spiral staircase led to ‘Additional Seating and Washrooms’. Quite the Desert Tardis, he logged admiringly.
The restaurant floor comprised sandy, Sahara-inspired tiles punctuated around the walls by angular, grey-stone oases which were the residences for an assortment of evergreen plants from arid climes – a leafy yucca in this one, a bold cactus in that one. To the left, there was an impressive, rectangular bar jutting out across the tiles about two metres or so, halfway along the room. The speckled marble surface on the counter locked in accurately to the similarly hued grey-stone elsewhere.
The bar harnessed an impressive array of spirits, although McKay could not recall having witnessed any indication of the licensee’s name above the front door, as is usually the case with licensed premises. At least, that was what he understood. (All at once, he realised that he could not recall having seen the name of the Café-bar-Riyadh’s licensee in evidence, either.)
Mirrors were in evidence again, though, both at the rear of the bar and as outer panelling on the three facing sides of the bar itself; each mirror had been polished with pride and rigour and was scrupulously spotless.
A second room, accessed by what looked like double shuttered doors, propped open, was just as wide but shallower than the first. The rear room remained largely in shadow, although a mellow glow sprawled over part of the continuously tiled floor; the percussive clink and clatter of kitchen utensils augmented the faint Arabian dance music emitted from what used to be known as a ghetto-blaster atop the bar counter.
It was some time before anybody emerged. McKay supposed that the door shedding light at the rear of the second – and bedecked – room to be the kitchen entrance. After a few minutes the illusion lay in tatters; a tallish blonde, rather Teutonic-looking girl, perhaps in her early to mid-twenties, looped across the floor towards him. Whilst she was by no means brusque with her first customer of the evening – she even radiated a shooting starburst of a smile at McKay, he later thought – there were no superficial niceties and even before she had asked McKay where he’d like to sit, as if she were playing a part in some ritualistic or formal ceremony, he realised that she was, in fact, German, and he felt reasonably certain that, if the truth be told, she would be found to have hailed from Bavaria, probably but not certainly from Munich.
Most of the wines were French, although there was also one Gavi and one Trebbiano del’Abruzzo listed among the vino blanco on the rear of the broadsheet menu. In the end, McKay opted for a bottle of the Macon Villages because it was slightly lighter, gentler and lower in acidity than many wines, because he could, thus, drink more of it and, finally, on a day of serious thoughts and in a place which may yet be shown to harbour dark deeds, because he enjoyed its frivolity.
The ‘full bodied and fruity’ house white, exalted and highly commended by the menu author was, nevertheless, the same strength as the one McKay had settled on, whilst only a few pennies less. To his mind, based upon a number of disappointing purchases over the years, the word ‘fruity’ does, in fact, far too often for comfort, simply mean acidic.
McKay regarded the skeleton of the restaurant. What secrets, if any, did it cosset, and which of these, if any, would he be able to lure out of it?
20
Eating, drinking and chatting…
The menu card, obviously from the same typographical pool as the marred version on display in the window, varied only slightly from that version: the rigatoni was now penne in the Pasta Mediterraneo and the Tripoli fishcakes now featured fresh salmon rather than fresh trout, along with fresh potatoes and coriander all wrapped in a ‘delicate breadcrumb coating’ and fried ‘only in the lightest olive oil, uniquely sourced from the Karaoglonoglu district of Northern Cyprus’. McKay thought: ‘Karaoglonoglu. That must be quite near to Zeytinlik in the north of Cyprus, and doesn’t zeytinlik mean ‘olive grove’ in Turkish? His mind was made up and the Tripoli fishcakes were ordered.
Following the tinkling of the doorbell, along with a decent measure of scuffling and suppressed mutterings, an elderly don-looking male and his elegant wife of a similar, possibly septuagenarian age, were shown to their table, previously marked as reserved. They sat almost diametrically opposite McKay and, almost at once, undertook an earnest debate about the whys and the wherefores of the menu and the wines. The ritual of ordering was similarly energetic with fits of head nodding, shaking and tilting, as well as the chopping and waving of hands to illustrate this request or that requirement, in a performance that was not unlike those seen late in the night on television programmes, specially augmented for the hard of hearing. By this time another waitress, whose shift seemed to commence at seven p.m., badged ‘Charlene’, had entered the fray. Slight and wispy, she was something of a ‘scuttlerette’ (McKay’s dad would have said) betwixt the tables and followed the animated signage of the couple rather like the shadow-boxing of a fighter in training.
When it arrived, the Macon was welcomed by McKay. The first girl, newly badged as Anita, explained that the slight delay with the wine had occurred because of ‘a corking issue with the first bottle’. She poured it upright and carefully, her left arm tucked away out of McKay’s sight from his left-hand corner seat, just before the bar. This time the girl was less officious and almost candid. “Where are you from, please?” He attempted to précis the circuitous scheme of his nativity with at least moderate success. “There are many air bases in Leicestershire and Rutland?” Anita enquired, with surprising interest.
“Er, three or four. I think. Probably more, actually,” answered McKay, being as honest as he was uncertain. Just then, the bell tinkled again and the girl nodded and smiled tightly as she strode her way towards the entrance, the static of her tights emitting a soft, swishing and rhythmic sound, perfectly synchronised with her long strides. Two youths, kitted in dark-green polyester football tops, jeans and trainers, an off-the-peg uniform of its day, jogged across and sat near to the recently arrived elderly couple. Anita indicated that she would like to sit them further away from the couple – who seemed to know her, and vice versa – and led them to a table opposite McKay, that is, about a quarter of the way into the first room to the right. Had they have been able to see out of the window clearly, they could have discussed the interesting types of cars parked outside, McKay thought to himself.
The delicately breaded fishcakes were still sizzling with promise when the stocky, sweaty chef waddled across the floor, with commensurate haste and deftness, and placed the dish, along with a lavish side salad, before his guest. He introduced himself as Abdul and assured McKay that his choice of main course had been nothing short of inspirational. McKay estimated that his accent would place his genesis as having been in the western part of the Maghreb, possibly Moroccan, possibly Algerian. The chef soon s
cuttled away, promising to return later.
McKay was, at once, thoroughly seduced by the aroma of the dish, and for the next fifteen minutes or so, the entire world could have imploded and he would have known little or nothing of it. Succulent mouthful followed slow, lengthy sip and all was well, for the moment anyway, in that highly unorthodox and precarious world of Mark McKay.
For their part, across the way, the two youths, perhaps Asian, perhaps Arab, continued to look McKay up and down, completely undetected by anyone in the place. They were remarkably quiet when they exchanged observations and, had McKay had even half his wits about him, he would have considered them not to have been merely on the quiet side, but dangerously conspiratorial. And that was before the plump girl in the grey and maroon hooped rugby shirt even sat down and began to contribute her own hushed comments to the pair’s furtive rumblings, punctuated only by frequent glances across in McKay’s direction.
“That was excellent, and I don’t often say that word, Anita! Especially in restaurants. Worked here long?”
She seemed to find her guest’s presumptuous use of her Christian name a trifle amusing. “Good. I will tell Abdul that. No, I’ve not worked here for long. Maybe eight months, yes. I started, erm, later in the autumn of last year.” She dashed off as a sustained spell of tinkling heralded the arrival of a party of eight markedly strapping women of various ages and stages. Jackets hung, they brushed past Anita’s outstretched arm, indicating to them the direction of their descent to the place of ‘Additional Seating’.
During the later course of the evening, McKay managed to get off a couple of emails – the first, a lengthy one, to John Foote and then another, and altogether briefer one, to DI Burrows – after he’d devoured the fishcakes and was sipping his wine first and then coffee later.
It was shortly after nine-thirty p.m. that McKay decided it was time to leave. He’d neglected to check the train times, but he’d take a taxi from the station if there weren’t any trains to Tuxford village, he thought – there was always, irrespective of time, season or weather, a rumbling shackle of cabs outside, on the main forecourt.
21
On the way to the station…
Rather than play ‘dodge the drunk’ along the bustling pavements of Mill Road, McKay turned left down the now humbly illuminated passage and then right along St Michael’s Road in the direction of the station. He often wondered what it would have been like to have been a student at Cambridge University. He already knew about Oxford and St Andrews.
His father had all but insisted that he study at Cambridge, although, when came the time, the faculties to be able to study Palestinian Aramaic, Syriac, and Qur’anic Hebrew had themselves dictated which of the great universities he should study at. Moreover, he had, already and perhaps just a little prematurely, indulged in a degree of correspondence with Professor Geza Vermes, then the Professor of Hebrew at Oxford, and had even visited the noble Professor in his office at the Oriental Institute there.
McKay strolled along. Sometime after this evening, months after, in fact, McKay explained to a friend that he wasn’t certain what he remembered first about the event which was about to happen.
He had been walking alone and his amble through the streets of Cambridge had actually reminded him of his time at Oxford: his lecturers and colleagues. That part was certain. But whether or not he noticed the girl’s perfume (which might just have been musk, as it reminded him of a girl called Janine whom he had known in his teens when fragrances were, to him at least, still a notable and relatively new phenomenon), or the freshly ironed crispness of her rugby shirt as she hooked her right arm around his left arm, he could by no means be certain. What he was certain about, he expounded to his friend, was that by the time he turned the corner opposite what is now a new residential development, built on the site of Mantel’s Station Garage, a girl, young woman, had attached herself to him and was trying to find out which hotel he was staying at, clearly offering her overnight services to him. At least that was how it appeared at that point.
When he showed disinterest – he had made sure that there could be no ambiguity about the matter – she did not want to release him easily, even though he could recall offering her money to do so. It was then, sensing that there was a deeper quarry to her mission than a costly hour or so’s romp in a hotel room, that he had started to become a mite anxious.
The girl spoke with an inflection unfamiliar to McKay, although he was eighty per cent certain that it was from Eastern Europe – were he pushed, he would likely have plumbed for Romania – and when he eventually saw her face clearly, momentarily angled towards a streetlight, he knew at once that it was the same girl who had been sitting opposite him in the Pan Asiatic. At this stage in the proceedings, there in the shadowy quietness of the street, however, the girl seemed to be by herself.
She was not to be so for long. As soon as McKay had forcibly unclasped the girl’s persistent right arm from his, two other bodies emerged quickly from the shrubby cover of a front garden path and stationed themselves before him and he knew at once that violent trouble was not far away.
“Your wallet, mate!” crowed the first, larger one of the two males. Madly, at the time, or so it seemed later when he was recounting the saga, he had noticed that both of his male assailants had dark, greasy hair. A yellow margarine tub even streaked across his mind with some blue script or imagery thereupon.
“It’s in the restaurant, but I have quite a bit of cash on me.”
For some time thereafter, seconds or minutes, it had become a free for all. McKay remembers dodging one punch in particular, the substance of which he managed to evade successfully, although a ring on the attacker’s right hand caught and ripped a searing gash across his nose, from left to right which – later on that night – was to be stitched together very skilfully in the Addenbrooke’s casualty clinic by a young Austrian surgeon.
The painful tear to the nose, along with the sensation of blood flowing down the back of his dry thorax, quickened McKay considerably and reignited his old boxing instincts, so much so that his best punch by far in the exchange caught the larger of the pair plumb on the nose as he was exposed from throwing his own previous haymaker. McKay’s fist cracked into and flattened the nostrils standing in its way with a dreadful, dull thud, rendering the recipient hapless, at least for the short-term. The girl’s nails left an impression on his left cheek and the other male struck home with at least two sharp, winding body blows. But that is all that McKay could recall, or indeed had to, because the cavalry had arrived.
Out of the struggle came clamour: yells, entreaties, threats, instructions. “Hey! You get off him! You leave him alone. You don’t go there again! Not to my place! No, never!” When McKay was next able to gather his thoughts, the two pimps had scampered and had taken their young hussy along with them in their wake.
“Your wallet, sir; it must have fallen out of your pocket when you got up. Chantelle found it when she was tidying your table. Please check it!” McKay angled himself so that he could see the identity of his newfound ally; it was the chef who at first wore a smile, but this writhed into a scowl as he beheld the bloody mess before him. With urgency, the portly saint proffered a white cotton handkerchief to McKay. As he received it thankfully, McKay noticed that the chef’s aide was the waiter from Café-bar-Riyadh who had positioned himself a pace or so to the side and, observing McKay assiduously, bore an expression of utter incredulity.
“Sir, you must get that done quickly; it bleeds too badly, I fear,” continued the chef. He at once reached for his mobile and spoke a few sentences in rapid colloquial but clear Arabic. “A car will be here very quickly, sir. We both saw those people leave almost immediately after you and Anita, the German girl, had said that they were watching you eat your meal with a very close eye. That is why we brought your wallet out to you tonight, at once, to see also that you were okay. For usually, we would have telephoned, sir
, tomorrow. Here, take it, please, and put it safely.”
McKay mustered up something resembling a grin. “Well, I did tell them that I’d left it in the restaurant, but they didn’t seem to believe me! Anyway, thanks. Many thanks. I wish that I had been watching those guys more closely. Thank Anita for her alertness, please. Actually, I’ll make sure that I thank her myself, too, as I took rather a shine to your restaurant back there!” His hands were pressing the soft cotton hard against the wound to his nose and he was aware that it had absorbed almost as much as it was going to. McKay was forced to chuckle as his transport to hospital pulled up to a squeaky halt fast by the kerb. It was at this point that the waiter surrendered his silence!
“Ha! I see that you like the car, Mr McKay. Don’t worry, Anita is a safe driver, even though she is not exactly Michael Schumacher!”
“Good. Pleased to hear it. Yes, I noticed the car earlier, parked near the restaurant!”
22
The morning after
McKay knew something of the layout of the great hospital. Even before visiting his dying father there, he was aware of many of its achievements and of its reputation for clinical excellence. His first wife had even touted drugs to the practitioners and consultants there, on behalf of a Swiss-American medical corporation. In return, they had entertained her, too. But quite to what extent the various forms entertainment had reached, he’d never cared enough to find out, should the truth be known.