A Taste of Death

by H. V. Coombs

  The younger of the two said, ‘Yeah, I’ll go and get him. What’s it about, mate?’

  ‘I’m head chef at the Old Forge Café, near Byfield,’ I said. Like they’d have heard of it, but there is quite a strong camaraderie amongst chefs borne out of the incredibly long hours, stressful, back-breaking work and awful pay. We tend to help one another.

  ‘I’m chasing up a reference and this person used to work here.’

  The young kid returned in a couple of minutes with the head chef. In my experience there are two kinds of chef, if we exclude the technical side of things, and look at personality. The very nice or the utterly vile. The man standing in front of me, framed in the kitchen doorway, fell, I had no doubt whatsoever, into the latter category.

  He was a huge guy, in his mid-forties, with a very round head and hostile, staring eyes. His expression was sour and his chef’s whites – dirty blue and white checks, a jacket smeared with food – an absolute disgrace, both to him and the profession.

  ‘Who’s it about?’ he said. His voice was unfriendly.

  ‘A woman called Naomi West,’ I replied. I was kind of hoping he wouldn’t have heard of her, that she was before his time, it was, after all, five years since she had been there. Nothing good was going to come out of the mouth of a man like that.

  ‘Hang on a minute,’ he said. He turned and spoke to one of the kids. I couldn’t hear what he said, but I could see his arse cleavage as revealed by his saggy blue and white check trousers which had slipped down off his hips. It was not rear of the year. Twin pale, hairy, globes, strangely fully rounded, which somehow made them worse, a ghastly parody of femininity, bisected by his bum crack. It drew your eyes in, the way horrible sights do. It was revolting. Black hair sprouted from it. Truly horrific, then. The thought of him touching food was stomach-churning.

  ‘Come into my office.’

  He led me across the yard to an outhouse half of which was a bottle store for the bar, the other half a rudimentary office with a table, an ashtray, an old swivel chair, an antique computer with a huge, bulky monitor on top – none of your flatscreen stuff, a genuine great, big clunky monitor out of the ark and a dinged-up filing cabinet. The small room stank of cigarette smoke. A pornographic calendar was on the wall. It was the wrong month too. Or maybe he liked seeing a girl wearing a Santa hat and nothing else, not even a smile. Classy. The Dorchester it was not.

  He sat in the swivel chair. ‘Take a seat,’ he said. I sat in the plastic chair opposite him, he looked at me malevolently and lit a cigarette.

  ‘Naomi West, eh?’

  ‘That’s right,’ I said, ‘I’m considering her for a job and she told me she once worked here.’

  ‘Naomi West, bit of a slag’s name, isn’t it?’

  The good-humour was gone. For a moment I was stunned at his rudeness. I suppose it was what one might call ‘fighting talk’. Well, that was OK by me.

  Sod it, I thought. I’d had a horrible day, I was facing a murder charge for something I hadn’t done. I thought, well, I shall spread the joy.

  ‘That’s not a very nice thing to say about a lady.’ I looked him hard in the eye. He managed to mask his terror quite well.

  ‘Yeah, well what’re you going to do about it?’ I assumed he thought it was a rhetorical question.

  The chef leaned his massive bulk forward in a threatening way. He was one of those bullies whose sheer size makes them unstoppable. I guessed it had been years since anyone had stood up to him. He would have had a great time in the kitchens where the majority of his staff would be scrawny teenagers, over-awed by his title and position too.

  Well, I was no teenager. I had once been branded as ‘a menace to society’ by a judge. I thought I might as well live up to it.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I could do this …’

  I rested my palm on the old-fashioned computer on his table with the monitor sitting on top and pushed. They crashed to the floor. The screen fractured and huge cracks appeared in the plastic casing of the PC.

  ‘Oops,’ I said.

  He swore at me and jumped to his feet. But he was big and slow and ponderous and it was a bit too late. I had no intention of getting into a fight with him. I had other things that I needed to do that day which were a tad more pressing, such as finding a murderer.

  I was out of my chair before he could move and I ran out of the office – or would have done if I hadn’t run straight into the human equivalent of a brick wall. He was a bouncer, aptly named, and I bounced off him. He must have weighed about twenty stone. His badge on his jacket proclaimed him the head of security for the Bar and Grill. Before I knew what was happening he spun me around and had me in a professional grip that I couldn’t move out of. My arm twisted up behind my back, my wrist held by something approximating a vice.

  ‘You’re going nowhere, sonny,’ he said in a gravelly East End accent. He looked like he’d been auditioning for a part in a film about the Kray Twins. In his fifties, dressed in a doorman’s sombre two-piece suit and bow tie, a slab-like face and a powerful physique, but above all the kind of rock-solid self-confidence that comes from unlicensed boxing bouts and working the doors at troublesome establishments frequented by violent men and criminals.

  The head chef had now reached the door, his face furious. He reached out a hand to grab me.

  The Guv’nor, as he was doubtless known, fixed him with a basilisk stare. ‘Leave it, Ray!’ he barked, and the head chef backed away.

  ‘Sorry, Cliff.’ It was a heartfelt apology. Cliff was not the kind of man you wanted to upset. He was the kind of man that made you want to throw yourself on your knees and beg him not to hurt you too much.

  ‘C’mon you.’ One hand held my shoulder, the other my right arm just above the elbow. There are a mass of nerve endings down there. His thumb pressed warningly on some of them. I felt any attempt to run away would end in tears, mine not his.

  ‘Where are you taking him?’ asked Ray, nervously.

  ‘The beer cellar, it’s soundproof and we won’t be disturbed. Now, go back to yer pots and pans, Delia! Got that!’

  ‘Yes, Cliff,’ said the chastened Ray.

  ‘Now, you,’ he commanded me, ‘move’.

  Helpless, I was marched off to my fate.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  He marched me through the kitchen, everyone looking the other way. Don’t stare at the condemned man. Or possibly, ‘No officer, I didn’t see anything, I was staring at the mixer, an antique Robot Coupe,’ as two of them were, their eyes fixed on the giant machine as if it was the most fascinating thing in the world and I didn’t exist.

  Ray was nowhere to be seen. Probably puzzling over his smashed PC.

  We went silently down a corridor to a locked door which my captor opened with a large key, then he switched on a light and pointed to a flight of precipitous stairs.

  ‘Down you go!’

  I did so, carefully, the wooden treads behind me creaking under Cliff’s weight. There was the unmistakeable smell of damp, bleach and stale beer that you get in a beer cellar. We reached the bottom and we faced each other. He stood looking at me by the light of the naked bulb. Dozens of beer barrels surrounded us, the active ones connected to plastic tubing that ran upwards through the cellar roof to the bars above.

  It struck me that the man standing in front of me was perhaps the most dangerous I had ever met in my life and I’d met more than a few unsavoury characters in my time. Here I was, trapped underground with him in a soundproof cellar. He took one of his black leather gloves off, Cliff, it read on his knuckles, he started to unpeel the other, I knew what it was going to say, Hinds.

  The moment had come.

  We threw our arms around each other and banged each other on the back, overjoyed to see each other again.

  ‘Cliff, you old bastard!’

  ‘Ben Hunter as I live and breathe …’

  We grinned delightedly at each other. Three years previously at HMP Bretton Wood we had shared a cell toge
ther for six months. Cliff had been responsible for teaching me how best to do time in a Category B prison and, with one or two exceptions and only the odd incident, nobody had dared bother me when they knew he was my friend.

  We sat down on empty barrels. Cliff drank brandy from a hip flask while I told him what had brought me here.

  ‘But why all this heavy duty business,’ I asked, ‘why did that fat bastard chef get his knickers in such a twist. That was a bit uncalled for?’

  ‘Do you know who owns this gaff?’ asked Cliff, with obvious amusement.

  ‘Nope,’ I said.

  ‘Thought not. Caramel Rosa’s is owned by the Anderson brothers,’ he explained.

  ‘Oh, I see!’ now I understood. The brothers, based in Edmonton, were one of North London’s leading crime families. Any stranger, like me, snooping around, would be automatically suspect, to be warned off in no uncertain terms. If I hadn’t known Cliff, I don’t like to think about what might have happened.

  But I did know Cliff and he knew a lot about Caramel Rosa’s.

  ‘Do you know anything about Naomi West?’ I asked.

  ‘I know a lot about Naomi West,’ he said.

  Cliff lit a cigarette and removed the cap he wore to hide his bald patch. He took a pull from his silver flask and started to talk.

  Naomi had been, as she had told me, a lap dancer and pole performer and she was very good at it. I listened in a state of increasing depression. I had known all this, she had told me herself, but it had almost seemed like make-believe. Now I was hearing the depressing reality, and it hurt. I was sixteen again, hearing from my best mate that my girlfriend had been seeing a boy from another school, and not just for help with her homework.

  ‘Great body,’ said Cliff (thanks, mate, I know), ‘very stretchy … but all those drugs, off her nut she was a lot of the time, and a really bad temper. She glassed another of the girls once. Dave Anderson had to pay her a lot of money not to go to the Old Bill – he paid for her surgery too, to get rid of the scars. On the whole, Naomi West was bad news.’ He shook his head. ‘Seriously bad news.’

  It wasn’t the Naomi I knew. Not the temper and the violence anyway. But heavy drug and alcohol intake can wreak havoc on character, and I knew about bad temper. Mine had cost me eighteen months in prison, wrecked my career and given me a criminal record. I could sympathise rather than condemn. ‘And she was getting on, getting old,’ added Cliff.

  ‘Aren’t we all,’ I said.

  ‘You’re not an erotic dancer,’ Cliff pointed out.

  ‘That ship has sailed, Cliff,’ I said sadly.

  ‘Too true, chum, too true.’ We were two maudlin old men, in an underground bunker.

  ‘Did you know a guy called Dave Whitfield?’ I asked.

  ‘The builder?’ Cliff looked surprised.

  I nodded.

  ‘Yeah, she really suckered him. He was doing work down here, refurbing the bar, and she got her hooks into him.’

  ‘Oh really.’ My voice was nonchalant. ‘I heard he made all the running.’

  Cliff shook his head. ‘No way, she hunted him down like a cat with a mouse. He was obsessed by her. He never stood a chance.’

  Oh Naomi, I thought sadly, why did you lie to me? This was getting worse and worse.

  Cliff continued inexorably. ‘What Naomi West wants, Naomi West gets. Next thing she’s pregnant, or so she said, and they go and get married. Then, she lost the baby. Now,’ he paused, ‘some of the girls here say it was terminated, some say she was never pregnant in the first place.’

  ‘Not a miscarriage?’

  ‘It could well have been,’ Cliff said, ‘but the rumours just go to show how popular she was.’ He went on, ‘I think she’s the kind of person who uses people, then throws them away.’

  ‘She says Whitfield rescued her from becoming a prostitute.’

  ‘He couldn’t have done that.’ Cliff lit another cigarette.

  ‘How come?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, it would have been a bit late in the day,’ he said, ‘seeing as she was one already, two hundred pounds an hour. She made a porno film too, so I’ve heard.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘Mate, she’s been telling you porkies. I knew a couple of blokes who went with her, amazing sex, apparently. You can see how she caught Whitfield. She’d have pulled out all the stops.’

  I tried to keep my face expressionless. Like a ball of wool, the lies just kept unravelling.

  ‘So, is this true, that she’s asked you for a job?’ Cliff asked. ‘Tell her the positions filled, mate.’

  ‘It’s not that simple,’ I said, ‘I’m kind of dating her.’

  ‘In that case, mate,’ Cliff patted me on my shoulder, ‘you need your bloody head seeing to.’

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  I drove back to Hampden Green, slowly. I had a lot to think about. That was putting it mildly. What I had just learned almost pushed the fact that I was a prime suspect in the death of Luke Montfort out of my mind. I now had two completely opposing views of Naomi West.

  On the one hand was the Naomi I knew, sweet, gentle, a loyal friend. On the other, a violent, vicious, manipulative schemer with the morals of Messalina.

  The two were poles apart. I couldn’t reconcile them, no one could. But one thing was incontrovertible, beyond doubt. Naomi had lied to me, that much was clear. Blindingly so.

  Initially, I had been upset, heartbroken, by the Montfort revelation. This was far more serious. Arguably, if she was cheating on anyone, she could have been said to have been cheating on him. I was like the hired help who was sleeping with his boss. Also, he was there before me. I was the usurper. I think I was more upset because it was Montfort than anything else. I was so snobby.

  But this was in a different league. She had said that it was Whitfield who had rescued her from a life of exploitation. It now looked as if it was the other way around. And when you catch someone out in one very big lie, inevitably you wonder about the smaller ones.

  And the violence, the glassing of the girl. It could have been the coke and the booze … but equally it could be down to innate viciousness.

  Seducing Dave Anderson, a modern-day answer to the Krays? That was kind of hard to explain away charitably.

  And the prostitution? Was I old-fashioned being upset by this?

  I didn’t know what to think any more.

  ‘Take the next right,’ the BMW SatNav informed me. The onboard screen showed me my direction and destination on a map and, just to make sure, with German thoroughness, the instrument panel showed me too in rudimentary form which way right was. If only I could get it to tell me what to do. A SatNav for the soul. Anna Bruce had dropped heavy hints about Naomi’s reliability but that wasn’t quite the same.

  I drove in to Hampden Green and past my restaurant. I noticed a police car parked in its small car park, almost certainly waiting for me to show up. I hadn’t switched my phone on once since I had left the place earlier that morning. I guessed there would be umpteen messages telling me to get in touch with Slattery, or worse, ‘give yourself up’. I felt that I’d rather plead ignorance.

  The Earl’s BMW would go unnoticed around here. I was quietly impressed by the way he quite casually flouted the law. I suppose that’s one of the things about being rich, but then I thought, no, that’s not necessarily the case. The Earl (‘bloody good bloke’) had that odd advantage of simply not caring about things.

  I bet he wouldn’t be fazed by being sent back to prison.

  I wished I could say the same.

  I parked in front of Naomi’s house.

  ‘You have reached your destination,’ the car said. Well, that was true, in more ways than one.

  Please, Naomi, I prayed, have a perfect explanation for everything, or at the very least a plausible one. I want to believe … Help thou my Unbelief…

  Her Audi was there so she’d be at home. I walked up to the door and rang the bell. I saw her coming through the opaque stained-glass of the door.

  S
he opened it, her face fell when she saw it was me.

  ‘Ben,’ she said, uncertainly, ‘do come in.’

  She was wearing black leggings and a figure-hugging Lycra top that emphasised rather than concealed her body. She looked great. She smiled at me and led me in to the lounge.

  ‘I’m just having some tea,’ she said, ‘can I get you some?’

  I nodded. ‘Please do.’ Normally by this time – it was now nearly four – I would probably have had about ten cups of the stuff. I was in tea withdrawal symptom mode.

  She disappeared into the kitchen and came back with two cups and a ceramic teapot. She poured the tea and handed me a cup.

  Naomi handed one to me and sat cross-legged on the opposite end of the sofa to me.

  ‘The police were round here looking for you,’ she said, ‘Luke Montfort is dead. It’s all over the village.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. I wasn’t sure whether to add, ‘I know’ or not. I certainly didn’t want to say that I had seen his body.

  I looked sadly at Naomi whose face was so sweet looking. Had she really glassed another woman? Had an affair with a North London gangster? Had she really taken Whitfield for a ride? How could she have done it with Luke Montfort? I felt really reluctant to question her about her behaviour, where to begin? I felt embarrassed. Rather oddly, I thought it might hurt her. I’ll be honest, I didn’t know what I was thinking, sadly all too common in my case.

  I drank some of my tea. I pulled a face, PG Tips it was not. I hate herbal tea, I thought.

  ‘Rooibos,’ said Naomi, seeing my expression, ‘it’s South African, it’ll relax you.’

  I doubted that. Since I had seen her the night before I had experienced a somewhat stressful day: the body in the car; my knife in the body; disposing of a murder weapon; the Earl; Anna Bruce; the strip club; Ray. Most stressful of all, her past life. It was all a bit much. I was way past relaxation. I doubted a fistful of temazepam would have relaxed me.

  She, of course, knew nothing of all of this. The most stressful thing she had probably done today was arrange an appointment to meet a client or done pigeon pose.