by J. A. Lang
PC Lucy, currently off duty from her role as Beakley’s only resident police officer, sat in the dining room by the unlit fireplace, sipping on a glass of chilled white wine and mopping up the last of her moules marinière with a chunk of crusty bread. She surveyed the empty mussel shells piled high in the upturned dish lid and mused, not for the first time, on the advantages of having a fully trained chef as one’s boyfriend.
Patrick, the chef and boyfriend in question, sat opposite her, head bent over a stack of paperwork. “Sorry about this,” he’d said when she’d arrived after her shift. “It’s just that it’s the month end, and you know what chef is like . . .”
PC Lucy had nodded understandingly. Chef Maurice’s previous attempts to navigate the world of accountancy had produced roughly the same results as a bunch of monkeys let loose with a calculator and a ballpoint pen. Thankfully for all concerned, nowadays he was more than happy to leave the details to his trusty sous-chef, while enquiring periodically into the health of the annual cheese budget.
“Is Maurice doing his usual demo at the Fayre tomorrow?” she said, as Patrick set aside another stack of invoices.
“Nope, I’m doing it this year. I’ll be demonstrating how to fillet and pan-fry a lemon sole.”
“What, no flambéing?” Chef Maurice’s annual set piece was a guaranteed crowd-pleaser, especially amongst the younger pyromaniacs in the audience.
“The fire department made a specific request to the committee. Chef threw a fit, obviously. Now he’s dead set on trying to flambé the hog roast at lunchtime. I’ve been hiding all the Calvados, just in case.” Patrick threw a guilty glance towards the old travel trunk by the door. “Are you going to the Fayre tomorrow?”
“In my official capacity, yes.”
In fact, the majority of the Cowton and Beakley Constabulary had all apparently decided that this year’s Spring Fayre warranted an increased level of police presence, a decision no doubt unrelated to the unseasonably fine spring weather that Oxfordshire was currently experiencing.
“Are you entering the Bake Off?” asked Patrick, flicking through a thick ring binder of wine invoices.
“You’re joking, right? After the last fiasco?”
Last month, under Patrick’s patient instruction, PC Lucy had undertaken the creation of a triple-layered chocolate fudge cake for PC Sara’s birthday. Each layer had come out of the oven as flat and solid as a manhole cover, and the chocolate icing, once dried, had required the application of a small hacksaw when it came to the cake-cutting.
“It did look fantastic, though,” said Patrick. He threw a glance at the clock above the fireplace, and pulled another stack of invoices towards him.
“Are you expecting more tables?” said PC Lucy, looking around the dining room. There were a couple of locals hanging around the bar, tended to by Dorothy. Other than them, though, the evening service seemed to have wound down a long time ago.
Patrick looked up from a rare-breed beef invoice. “Sorry? Oh, no. We’re done for the night. I just wanted to get this all done before my mother arrives.”
He filed the invoice neatly under ‘Expenditure, Meat, Bovine’ and was about to start on the next when he noticed a certain quality in the silence emanating from the other side of the table. It was the type of silence that boyfriends and husbands sooner or later learnt to recognise.
“Your mother’s coming to visit? And you didn’t think to give me any warning?”
Patrick looked puzzled. “It’s not like she’s a hurricane. You’ll like her, I promise.”
“Still, it would have been nice to have known a little earlier. I’d have changed out of uniform, at least.” PC Lucy looked down ruefully at her slightly scuffed black boots—great for navigating the village’s cobbled streets, but perhaps less suitable for making a good first impression—and tried ineffectually to smooth down the slight frizz that often developed in her fine blond hair at the end of a long day.
“She knows I’m a police officer, right?”
“Well, um . . .”
It was an ‘um’ with harmonics. The same type of ‘um’ often employed by the male of the species when questioned about anniversary dates, whether the washing had been taken in before the recent downpour, and the exact thought process that could possibly lead one to return from the shops without the milk but carrying a jumbo-pack of iced buns that ‘happened to be on offer’.
“You have at least told her about me, haven’t you?”
“Um . . .”
“Patrick!”
“It’s not like I meant not to tell her. It’s just that, well, it never came up.”
“What do you mean, it never—”
She stopped as the restaurant’s front door swung open, and a tall woman in her early sixties entered, wheeling a small black suitcase. She had the same dark curly hair as Patrick, though hers was now streaked with grey and cut in a bob, and the same serious brows and sharp brown eyes.
“Hi, darling.” She embraced her son with the brief perfunctoriness common to many an English family reunion. Her eyes, though, showed genuine warmth as she ran her gaze over her son’s face.
“Hi, Mum. Was the train down okay?”
“The usual. We were delayed at Reading for three-quarters of an hour for no apparent reason, and you can’t get a good cup of coffee on the train for love nor money. So,” she said, catching sight of PC Lucy, “are you going to introduce me?”
“Oh. Er, Mum, this is Lucy. Lucy, this is my mum. Beth.”
“Ah, so you must be the girlfriend that Patrick keeps completely failing to mention.”
PC Lucy stood up, unsure if protocol dictated an awkward but well-intentioned hug or a firm handshake. “How did you—”
“It’s a special sixth sense you develop as a mother of an unmarried man in his thirties,” said Mrs Merland. “Also, Patrick told me he’d been for a walk the other day to one of those National Trust sites. In my experience, a man under fifty does not go for walks in landscape gardens of his own accord.”
PC Lucy saw Patrick shoot her a tentative ‘see, it’s all okay’ smile, and she raised him back a ‘we’ll see about that’ eyebrow.
“So, Mrs Merland—”
“Please, call me Beth.”
“Of course. Are you going to be around for the Beakley Spring Fayre tomorrow?”
“I most certainly am,” said Mrs Merland, unwinding the lavender scarf from around her neck. “I’ve heard such lovely things about it. I’ve not been to a proper country fair in years. Will you be entering the Bake Off?”
Out of the corner of her eye, PC Lucy saw Patrick’s look of sudden alarm. As Mrs Merland bent down to fetch a tissue from her handbag, he gave Lucy a vigorous head shake.
The cheek! He didn’t think her cakes were good enough for his mother? All right, so Sergeant Burns had mentioned something about a broken crown and a trip to the dentist after her last baking attempt, but she was surely improving. And no one could deny her cakes looked pretty good.
“Oh, definitely,” replied PC Lucy, with a bright smile. “I love baking. It’s so relaxing and so satisfying to create something, you know what I mean?”
“Well, I’ll be looking forward to trying a bit of your cake tomorrow, then,” said Mrs Merland.
“Actually, I think only the judges get to try the cakes, I’m afraid,” said PC Lucy, attempting a look of deep regret.
In truth, she was now feeling a sudden stab of guilt at the idea of subjecting tomorrow’s judges to such a jaw-aching ordeal. But, on the plus side, without Chef Maurice on the tasting panel, hopefully the judges would find something positive enough to say to avoid completely embarrassing her in front of Mrs Merland.
There was the sound of raised voices outside and the front door burst open once more, this time to allow the entry of Chef Maurice and Arthur, apparently bickering about the amount of stewed prunes in a steamed pudding necessary to produce a poisonous, or at least highly laxative, effect.
“Mais non, one wou
ld need at the least— Ah! It is la bonne Maman Merland!” cried Chef Maurice, rushing over to deal a properly Gallic slew of kisses to Mrs Merland’s cheeks. “And you have been introduced to Mademoiselle Lucy, the most excellent police lady in Oxfordshire?”
“And a keen baker, I hear.” Mrs Merland smiled at PC Lucy, while Patrick descended into a sudden fit of coughs.
“Ah?” Chef Maurice’s expression, even from behind that giant moustache of his, betrayed that he too had heard about the hacksaw incident.
“I was just saying, Maurice,” said Mrs Merland, “I’ll have to do my best to be impartial, then, tomorrow on the judging table.”
“You’re . . . one of the Bake Off judges?” PC Lucy felt her voice leap a few octaves. She didn’t dare look at Patrick.
“But of course!” said Chef Maurice, waving them to sit down, while he ambled off behind the bar to fetch his decanter of best cognac. “Madame Elizabeth is one of the finest pastry chefs in all of England! Come, let us celebrate our guest.”
“Your mother is an award-winning pastry chef?!” hissed PC Lucy to Patrick, as Chef Maurice poured them each a generous measure of amber liquor.
“I did try to warn you—”
“Not good enough!” PC Lucy rubbed her temples. Tomorrow was going to be an unmitigated disaster. She supposed it would be too much to hope, really, that something would happen to get the Bake Off cancelled.
But, still, you never knew . . .
Chapter 3
The next morning brought another day of fine English weather. The mild sun and light breeze dried the last of the dewdrops clinging to the grass, and lines of colourful bunting took to the skies as the Beakley Spring Fayre Committee rushed about the field, putting the finishing touches on the decorations.
Due to the Fayre’s growing repute—last year they’d even had a busload of visitors from South Korea, which had been viewed as something of an international coup, even if the driver had later confessed he’d taken the wrong turning for Stonehenge—the location for this year’s event had been moved from its usual spot on the village green to a large field on the southern edge of Beakley proper. Used occasionally by the local cricket club, it was surrounded by old woodland on both sides, and hemmed in by the main road to the north and by Warren’s Creek, a popular paddling stream and punting ground, to the south.
Arthur, who had been tasked with checking that all the stands were properly located on their designated spots, wandered amiably about the wooden stalls and long trestle tables that had sprouted up in the last few hours.
Between the hook-a-duck stand and a purveyor of alarmingly pink candyfloss, he came across Alf standing behind a rickety-looking table. The young commis chef was fiddling with a big old-fashioned weighing scale, on which sat a soup tureen containing a small pig wearing a straw hat.
Above the table was the hand-painted sign: Guess The Weight Of The Micro Pig!
Hamilton, the pig in question, was staring around at the stalls nearby. This was his first year attending the Beakley Spring Fayre, and he appeared satisfied to find himself sitting in such a prime spot.
Arthur leaned over to sneak a glance at the needle on the scales. Even after deducting the weight of the average porcelain soup tureen, he was still more than a little surprised.
“My, he’s grown quite a bit since the winter, hasn’t he? Wonder what Maurice has been feeding him.”
Back in the autumn, when Hamilton had first turned up, he could have easily fit into a ladies’ shoebox; now, you’d have to at least order a pair of size 12 wellington boots to get him in.
“’Fraid I can’t let you enter now,” said Alf, stowing the weighing scale away under the table.
“Not a problem, I’m saving my pennies for the coconut shy. Knocked all four of them down last year in one turn—so much for all those people who say they glue the coconuts on. Did you know I used to bowl for my college cricket team?”
Limbering up his right shoulder in preparation for his signature top-spinner delivery, Arthur strolled off towards the Bake Off tent. Keen amateur bakers had already begun dropping off their icing-covered creations, and one table along the side of the tent was now colonised by a range of ambitious endeavours. There was a hedgehog cake covered in shards of white and milk chocolate, a four-tiered square genoise covered in bright yellow royal icing—reminiscent, in Arthur’s mind, of a giant Lego pyramid—several versions of the usual carrot cakes and Victoria sponges, and even a few attempts at the classic pink-and-yellow-squared, marzipan-wrapped Battenberg.
At the end of the table, PC Lucy was unboxing a large round cake covered in shiny dark chocolate ganache and decorated with white chocolate curls.
“Need a hand with that?” asked Arthur. “Ganache is always a fuss to transport, isn’t it? Always ends up touching the side of the box and getting smudged.”
“Not this one,” said PC Lucy morosely, sliding the cake onto a glass stand with surprising ease. “Watch this.” Before Arthur could stop her, she’d drawn her truncheon and dealt the offending cake a sharp rap to the surface. There was a dull thunk.
“I’m thinking of writing to the company that makes those bulletproof vests, to see if they want my recipe.”
“Ah, I see.” Arthur sought around for a suitably gentlemanly comment. “Well, I’m sure it will taste wonderful. And I don’t believe that ‘cuttability’ is one of the judging criteria, if that helps.”
“I tried elbowing it off the kitchen table earlier, when Patrick wasn’t looking,” said PC Lucy, a haunted look in her eyes. “It bounced.”
Arthur decided to leave the police officer to her cake-based woes and made his way over to the cookery demonstration tent next door.
Rows of white garden chairs had been laid out across the grassy floor and, up at the front, a small kitchen stage had been constructed, complete with two hobs, a portable oven, and a sink at the back.
A stick-thin woman in her early forties, with an orangeade tan, pink stilettos and caramel hair piled high in an elaborate beehive, was stalking back and forth on the stage, issuing commands to a pair of harried-looking young women who were putting the equipment through its paces.
“Eugh, gas,” said the stiletto-ed woman, waving a red-taloned hand at the hobs. “I hate cooking on gas.”
“Most likely because it causes her hairspray to set on fire,” said a voice from Arthur’s right.
It came from Chef Bonvivant, the pencil-moustached, effortlessly urbane owner of L’Epicure, a fine dining establishment not far from Beakley. He was standing at the back of the tent, arms neatly folded as he watched Miranda Matthews’ prima-donna performance. Beside him, Chef Maurice, also dressed in chef’s whites—though his buttons bore significantly more strain around the stomach area than those of Chef Bonvivant—nodded his assent.
“Oui. And regard her fingers! She must serve her guests a dinner full of nail lacquer, if she cooks with hands like that.” Chef Maurice let out a loud cluck of disapproval.
Arthur was surprised. Usually the pair of Frenchmen got along like two cats in a very small sack, but today they seemed to have set aside their differences to partake in the mutual condemnation of Miranda Matthews.
“You have seen her show on the television?”
“I have watched one episode,” said Chef Bonvivant, in the tones of one owning up to a minor predilection of a somewhat risqué nature. “She made oatmeal biscuits from a box of cereal, and burnt them. My nephew, he is four and he cooks better than this woman.”
Up on the stage, Miranda Matthews was dealing with an issue of culinary logistics.
“And where are we meant to put the flipping microwave?”
Arthur saw both chefs wince at the mention of the m-word.
“How did it happen that she was invited here in the first place?” said Chef Bonvivant, as they watched Miranda’s assistants weave back and forth carrying the giant microwave between them, as Miranda debated the merits of various positions.
“It must be that Ma
dame Caruthers wished to punish me further,” said Chef Maurice. “First, she takes away my judging seat, and now this!” He waved two outstretched palms towards the stage.
“I heard that Miranda’s pretty chummy with one of the Spring Fayre Committee,” said Arthur. “And she apparently lives in Cowton, which makes her practically a local.”
Cowton, a good-sized market town in the foot of the Cotswolds boasting a chic high street and a two-screen cinema, was a twenty-minute drive from Beakley and the nearest thing the village had to a seething metropolis.
“Which of the Committee?” asked Chef Maurice. “Surely it cannot be Madame Caruthers.”
“No, not her.” In fact, it was rather hard to imagine Miss Caruthers as being ‘chummy’ with anyone. Not that she was an unpleasant woman by any definition, but years of headmistressing at the nearby girls’ school had left her with a stern countenance and ramrod deportment that deterred anyone from getting too familiar in her presence. “I heard she’s an old friend of Angie Gifford,” continued Arthur. “They went to school together or something like that.”
Chef Maurice nodded, no doubt filing that information away to exact revenge—or at least smaller portions at the restaurant—on poor Angie Gifford for her part in Miranda’s presence today.
There was now a small commotion developing up on stage, as a short, rotund man with wavy black hair attempted to grapple with the monster microwave, which had found a home slap bang in the centre of the main counter.
“Che cavolo?! What is this thing filled with? Rocks? It cannot stay here! Where will there be space for my pasta-rolling demonstration? It starts in only ten minutes!”
It was Signor Gallo, proprietor of The Spaghetti Tree, one of Cowton’s longest-standing restaurants. This apparent longevity was something that irked Arthur to no end; he could only assume that Signor Gallo’s fiery temperament and flamboyant showmanship somehow counteracted the near criminal underseasoning of his pasta and the sogginess of his pizza dishes in the eyes of local diners.