by J. A. Lang
“I suspect, Madame Fey, if you committed a crime, it would be one of much better planning and execution. But, non, I do not think you are responsible for the murder of Monsieur Ollie.”
He gave her a wink.
“But you are not the only one at this table who was in acquaintance with Monsieur Ollie.” He looked around at his guests. “Mademoiselle Lucy, of course, dealt with Monsieur Ollie at times when he was caught in minor crimes. Madame Eldridge, too, knew Ollie well as his neighbour, and knew much of his dealings, how he comes and goes.”
Mrs Eldridge leaned over to PC Lucy. “Is that right? Is he accusing me of being the murderer?”
“Shhh, I’m sure he’s not.” PC Lucy looked up. “You’re not, are you, Maurice?”
“Un moment, mademoiselle. We then have Madame Laithwaites here—”
“I’ve never even set eyes on the man!” said Brenda, more bewildered than indignant.
“Ah, you may have not, Madame Brenda, but if I am right, your son sitting beside you knew Monsieur Ollie very well indeed.”
Peter Laithwaites, who’d been sitting in sullen silence, looked up suddenly.
“Wha—”
“Am I right in thinking, Monsieur Peter, that you and your friends, who delight in meeting in Cowton public houses such as The Office, were in the habit of purchasing highly illegal mushrooms from Monsieur Ollie?”
Arthur gasped. “I knew I recognised his voice from somewhere.”
Brenda was staring open-mouthed at her son.
“Peter James Laithwaites—”
“And perhaps you ended up owing Monsieur Ollie quite a large sum of money. Which he demanded from you.”
“And which I paid back!” said Peter, managing to unfreeze his tongue. “I had nothing against Ollie, I swear, the shooting has nothing to do with me. I was in Ibiza, you can check the flight records—”
“Which we have,” said Chef Maurice, with a nod at PC Lucy.
“—and so you’ll see, I wasn’t even in the country the day he was shot!”
“And how,” replied Chef Maurice triumphantly, “do you know the exact day that Monsieur Ollie was shot?”
Peter’s face was transformed into a look of horror.
“And then there is the map that you stole. Regarde, Arthur, Monsieur Peter fits the description of the intruder who you observed entering Monsieur Ollie’s cottage on the Monday night.”
Arthur looked Peter up and down. “Well, he does. But I still don’t see why—”
“Aha, there is the question. Why would Peter steal the map, on which we presume Monsieur Ollie marked the patch of truffles? How would this young man know about the truffles and the map, in order to steal it?
“So today, I took a walk around the fields behind Monsieur Ollie’s cottage. And I found this.”
He extracted from under the table a crumpled, slightly soggy mass of paper, now welded solid by recent rains. The faint traces of roads and land markings were barely recognisable on the scrap facing upwards.
“Mesdames et messieurs, what we have here is most likely the map that was stolen from Monsieur Ollie. But what was it doing in a field, in complete ruin? Even if the intruder had dropped it, why not go back and pick it? Could they be in such a hurry?
“Then I realised, my logic, it was all upside down. What if the intruder, the young Monsieur Peter here, was not seeking to steal the map, but to destroy it?
“What if, in fact, Monsieur Peter was not in search of the truffle ground, but instead was the one who had told Monsieur Ollie of the existence of the Farnley Wood truffles?”
He turned to the stunned young man.
“You say that you paid Monsieur Ollie back, but it was not in money, n’est-ce pas? It was, I think, in truffles. But Monsieur Ollie, he was a greedy man. He was not happy with a truffle or two. He wanted the source, which you would not tell him. But he knew the woods well, and he went in search of it. And, unfortunately for him, he found it.”
Peter turned to his mother.
“Mum—”
“No.” Brenda’s face was grey. “Let him finish his nonsense. He obviously has no proof, else why sit here spouting all this . . . this . . . ” Her voice faltered as she looked across the table at PC Lucy, who was staring at Peter.
“But Mum—”
“I won’t have anyone saying you ran out of here like a criminal! Tomorrow, we’ll . . . we’ll get you a lawyer . . . ”
“A wise decision, madame,” said Chef Maurice.
“But I don’t understand,” said Arthur. “How would Peter here—clearly not the most outdoorsy of fellows, I’m afraid—know anything about finding truffles in the first place? Truffles that not even someone like Ollie knew were there?”
“Aha!” Chef Maurice eyes lit up. “This is another thing I discover this morning. The reason that Monsieur Peter Laithwaites knows that the truffles were in Farnley Woods is because it was the Laithwaites who planted them there in the first place.”
* * *
“Wait a moment, old chap,” said Arthur after a moment’s silence, “you just don’t go around planting truffles. Believe me, I’ve tried.”
(That was a few years ago, and Meryl had been less than impressed to find her favourite rose bush half dug up, and her inebriated husband attempting to plant the remains of a truffle soufflé in its spot.)
Chef Maurice turned to Miss Fey.
“This is, of course, your area of knowledge, madame.”
“You’d need trees, young ones, with roots inoculated with the correct truffle spore,” said Miss Fey promptly. “It’s been done with the lesser varieties, even with the black Périgord, but I’ve never seen a successful case of the white Alba.”
“But I’ve heard it takes decades for the truffles to fruit!” said Arthur. “How would Peter—”
“Ah, but I suspect it was not Monsieur Peter, but his grand-père, Monsieur Archibald Laithwaites, who was a great gardener and lover of plants, who planted the truffle trees. Most likely from a variety of oak already growing in Farnley Woods.”
“Rubbish,” muttered Peter.
“Ah, you think so? Then you must see this.”
Chef Maurice reached under the table and pulled up a sheaf of large photocopies. “These are from the library. They show the same area in different years, the same type of maps that Madame Brenda was kind enough to show us. The librarian informed me that Monsieur Ollie too had been looking at these maps. And he took a copy of the map from 1957. Why that year?”
Chef Maurice shuffled the sheets. “If we regard the Laithwaites Manor estate today, we see there are no areas of trees big enough to be a truffle planting. But Madame Brenda told us her father was forced to sell areas of land to pay his debts. And this was in 1961.”
Chef Maurice laid the two maps, the old and current, side-by-side. Mrs Eldridge struggled to her feet to get a better look.
“Regarde, the areas of land that made part of the Laithwaites estate in 1957. And today, they are not there. This one, in particular”—he jabbed a finger at the map—“was a large area of tree land.”
“Why,” said Brenda icily, “would my father sell off an area of land that he knew was producing truffles?”
“But they would not have shown by then. We go back ten years”—Chef Maurice brought out a map of 1948—“there were no woods marked there. By the time your father had necessity to sell the land, perhaps he was thinking his experiment had failed. Only after many years, he discovered his success. And passed this knowledge to his family, of course.”
“This is all complete nonsense!” said Brenda. “I don’t know when exactly this Ollie was shot, but Peter is telling the truth. He only arrived back on the Monday, records will show this.”
“Yes, they will, madame,” said Chef Maurice softly. “In fact, Mademoiselle Lucy has already checked them, and Monsieur Peter arrived back, as you say, on the Monday afternoon. So he could not have been in Farnley Woods the Saturday before, when Monsieur Ollie went missing.”
“Well, there you are, then!”
“But, Madame Brenda, when we come to visit you on the Thursday, the day Hamilton is taken from your kitchen, you tell us your son is arriving back that evening. The Thursday evening. Why do you lie?
“And so the truth, it comes out. Monsieur Peter, yes, was not in the country on Saturday, but you, Madame Brenda, you were.
“We talked about the truffles, but how would the son know of the truffles, and the mother would not? It is not believable. You are the one who has looked after the truffle patch from the time your father told you of it. You were in the woods on Saturday, when you found Monsieur Ollie picking truffles on the ground you considered your own, considered part of your estate. You were there, and you shot him, and dragged his body away from the patch. When Monsieur Peter arrives back on Monday, you send him out to make sure there is nothing in Monsieur Ollie’s cottage that could link your family to the crime.”
“Absolutely preposterous!” cried Brenda. She leapt up, dragging Peter to his feet beside her, and marched towards the door. “I will not listen any more to your . . . your inflammatory stories and half-baked ideas. You have no shred of proof, not a single—”
She reached for the door, but it flew back inwards before she could touch it.
A huge figure loomed in the doorway. It grinned at her.
Chapter 21
It was Luciano, carrying a large sack.
He strode past Brenda without a glance and upended the sack onto the table. A dozen large white truffles rolled out.
“Just where you said they’d be, Signor Maurice,” he said cheerfully. “Tufo and I, we had a very good time. And these truffles, they are something special, I can tell you tha—”
It was at this point that Brenda lost it. She grabbed up a poker from near the fire and ran towards Luciano.
“Thieving scoundrel! Those truffles belong to the Laithwaites family! I’ll kill you, just like I killed that scum of a nephew of yours. Thieves, the lot of you!”
“I think,” murmured Arthur to Chef Maurice, as they watched Luciano duck and shield himself with a meaty arm and PC Lucy jump up to grab Brenda from behind, “that we might just be able to count that as a confession.”
* * *
It was some time later. Brenda Laithwaites had been taken down to the Cowton police station, still screaming obscenities, with Peter following miserably. PC Lucy, who’d had a tape recorder running the whole time, told Arthur she’d have to see how things went but it seemed as good an admission of guilt as they’d probably ever get.
Luciano had taken his place at the far end of the table, and Alf and Patrick had finished their kitchen duties and had taken the seats of their recently departed guests. Dorothy had rushed off down into the village with a sudden batch of ‘errands to run’.
“So when did you figure out it was Brenda all along?” asked Arthur, tucking into a long-neglected plate of beef ribs.
“Ah, mon ami, I tell you, it was from the very beginning when we met in the woods. The way she talked as if she owned the land—”
“Codswallop. I don’t believe you.”
Chef Maurice deflated a little. “Perhaps not. But from the moment of Hamilton’s disappearance, I had suspicions about this lady. She told us of a masked gunman bursting into her kitchen—so much drama, so much theatre. It did not seem real. And it wasn’t!”
“She made the whole thing up?” said Patrick.
“I think not, but I think she arranged it all. Peter had returned earlier in the week. He would burst in and take Hamilton, while she destroyed a very handsome teapot and screamed most loudly. Remember, she was most insistent that the intruder was very big, very bulky—the complete opposite of her son.”
“But I still don’t see how—” began Arthur.
“Aha.” Chef Maurice leant back in his chair, resting his hands comfortably on his stomach. “I just begin. It was not, I make the confession, until yesterday that my thoughts turned completely to the Laithwaites. But Madame Hart, she told us something about Monsieur Ollie stealing ‘family heirlooms’. And I remember how Madame Brenda talked, as if the woods still belonged to her family.
“So then I make my enquiries. Madame Brenda tells us she is not a fan of shooting. Yet Monsieur Brooks, the pheasant broker, tells me Madame Brenda brings to him several dozen pheasants each October. She is, says Monsieur Brooks, a most excellent shot. And then I ask Monsieur Luciano here to ask questions into the sale of mysterious English truffles in this country, as he has many contacts in the sale of truffles.”
Luciano grunted, mouth full of beef rib, and saluted Chef Maurice.
“It was inconceivable that Madame Brenda was not selling the truffles for profit. And yet, she could not be selling locally, as we would know already. And so it was. After many phone calls, Luciano finds a dealer of truffles near York who claims a supply of unusual white truffles, from ‘an English lady from the south’. He refused to give a name, but said that the lady would travel up every week in truffle season, with a grey poodle. Et voilà!”
Arthur set down his fork, plate empty. A thought had just occurred to him. “So that note we found at Ollie’s cottage—not the one from Luciano—but the other one, about staying away from their property. All this time we assumed it was, ahem, an irate husband but—”
“Oui, it was Madame Brenda. Today, I go and ask her to write a recipe for walnut-and-coffee-bean cake—a most excellent cake, though perhaps I would add a little coffee liqueur . . . ” He drifted off for a moment, contemplating this.
“Maurice!”
“Eh? Oh, yes, so I brought this to Mademoiselle Lucy, and we compared to that note. They are written by the same hand.”
“Cor!” said Alf, who’d been listening with eyes wide as saucepans. “And then you got Mr Manozzy here”—Alf looked over at their last guest, who, napkin tucked into shirt, was demolishing an extra-large truffle-covered omelette with great concentration, while Tufo sat at his feet, licking a beef bone—“to go up to the woods and find those truffles, so that Mrs Laithwaites would get all mad and riled up and attack him with a poker. Genius!”
Chef Maurice nodded. “But of course,” he said modestly.
“So it wasn’t just to make sure you got a batch of truffles out of there before the police crawled all over the site?” said Arthur, raising an eyebrow.
“Mon ami, I am hurt!”
“But well-provisioned, I’m sure.”
“What a lot of fuss over a pile of mushrooms,” said Mrs Eldridge, who was also sampling a freshly made truffle omelette. “They ain’t bad, I’ll give you that, but they don’t taste of much, do they? Not a patch on a good old chestnut mushroom.”
They stared at her.
“What?” she said defensively. “They ain’t.”
Chapter 22
It was now November. The trees had shaken off their leaves, and the weather was coasting inexorably into the blustery winter blues.
Hamilton had settled happily into his field behind Le Cochon Rouge, snug in his little cocoon of hay as the wind huffed and puffed outside. The cows, feeling starved of excitement, were currently loitering down the other end of their field, right by the main road, in case anyone felt like cownapping them.
Miss Fey, thanks to the joint publicity from Arthur’s article and her soon-to-be-groundbreaking research into white Alba truffle cultivation, had expanded her mushroom business to the point where she was now able to take on a lab-assistant-cum-apprentice-forager, a nervous young woman who lived in constant fear that her employer would poison her if she broke a single pipette.
Luciano had gone off to Italy with Tufo to make the most of the Alba truffle season. He promised to return next autumn to train Hamilton into a champion truffle pig.
In the kitchens of Le Cochon Rouge, November was a welcome respite before the frantic Christmas season. Alf’s new foraging skills had brought in a glut of hawthorn berries and, today, head chef, sous-chef and commis were all covered head to toe
in sticky red jam as they bottled up enough jars to accompany the cheeseboard through the winter.
There was a knock on the back door and PC Lucy stuck her head round.
“I tried to phone, but no one picked up, so I thought I’d just walk over.” She looked them up and down. “Is this a bad time?”
“But of course not,” said Chef Maurice. “It is a delight to see you, mademoiselle. It has been too long.”
“Yes, sorry about that. The Meadows case has been keeping everyone pretty busy, but it’s now wrapping up.”
“Madame Brenda, she has been found guilty?”
“The trial’s not till next month, but she’s already confessed to everything. She tried to keep Peter out of it, so I think he’ll get off with minor charges.”
“Hmph, pig stealer,” muttered Chef Maurice. “And what will happen to the Manor?”
“I hear she’s had to sell it. To pay the legal fees.”
“Ah, a shame. I sometimes wonder if the grand-père Laithwaites had perhaps planted more truffle trees within—”
“Don’t you even think of trespassing on that land.”
“But of course not. Please, come in. A coffee, perhaps, or a chocolat chaud?”
PC Lucy hesitated by the door. “Actually, I was hoping to have a word with Patrick . . . ”
Chef Maurice prodded Patrick forwards with a jammy spoon. “Voilà, he is all yours.”
“Um.” Patrick’s face was red as a hawthorn berry. “Shall we go outside?”
They went out into the backyard, while Chef Maurice and Alf shuffled themselves over to a window to watch the proceedings. To their disappointment, Patrick led PC Lucy around the corner of the building, out of their line of sight.
They appeared some minutes later. There was a smear of red jam on PC Lucy’s cheek, and Patrick wore a big dreamy grin.
“Do you think that counts as assaulting a police officer?” asked Alf.