by Janet Neel
‘Bonjour. I am afraid we do not open until eleven thirty.’
‘Westminster Health Inspectors.’ The big man showed his card, and the young French waiter nodded uncomprehendingly.
‘You wait here, please?’
‘Just take us to the kitchen, sunshine.’
‘Excuse me, please.’ He gave ground before the incoming trio, looking wildly around. ‘Ah, Chef, Chef, on vous demande.’
Tony Gallagher, in white overalls, hatless and unshaven, was making for the coffee machine. He stopped, reluctantly, as the visitors advanced in a phalanx, the big man in the lead.
‘Morning, Chef.’
‘Ah, Mr Aylwin. Good to see you.’ He looked longingly at the machine. ‘Can I give you coffee?’
‘Later. Kitchen still through here?’
‘Yeh. We haven’t moved it.’ He watched, surly, as his visitors surged through the small door, pointing like retrievers. His kitchen was only four years old and had incorporated the health inspectors’ every whim at the time. And he, personally, went through the chillers every day with the sous chefs to remove anything suspect his staff had tucked away, or forgotten about. He forced a cup of black coffee out of the espresso machine before catching up with the inspection team. He hesitated, but he picked up the kitchen phone and summoned Judith Delves, who appeared inside a minute, not looking much better than he felt.
‘Were you very late last night?’ he asked her, grudgingly, as they both watched inspectors peering hopefully into immaculate ovens, lifting the lids of scoured saucepans and kneeling to peer into corners of the floor. All experienced restaurateurs know that speech is a waste of time with health inspectors; you can tell them until you are blue in the face that the washer-up does the floor, every night, with enough disinfectant to sanitise a hospital, and they will still get down on their hands and knees to look along the edges of the tiles. It is, as all reluctantly admit, the only way for an inspection system to be effective.
‘We were rather.’ Judith was cheered by any civility from her disgruntled chef. ‘People started singing. We had a lot of Mozart and Puccini.’
‘Glad I’d gone.’
She remembered belatedly that Tony was tone deaf. And he had gone early, she recalled.
‘What about the rubbish?’ she asked, anxiously. ‘Have you looked this morning?’
Staff bullied to keeping up operating theatre standards of cleanliness would still leave inadequately tied bags of rubbish in the wire cage outside the back door, in the simple belief – to which all experience ran contrary – that the employees of the local authority would take them all away without leaving any behind, or dropping any live matter to rot just outside the kitchen. A sub-routine had therefore been installed at Café de la Paix involving Chef, or the presiding sous chef, checking the rubbish area every morning.
‘I was late – bloody traffic. Didn’t look. Jacques should have.’
‘Can you go round the outside?’
‘Better you do. They’ll notice if I’ve buggered off.’
This made sense. Judith faded cautiously backwards out of the inspectors’ sight lines, and moved swiftly out of the restaurant door. She hesitated, doubled back to commandeer a waiter and a couple of plastic bags and walked swiftly, just not running, out the front, round the corner and down the narrow steps to the side entrance. As they arrived the back door burst open and a hatless sous chef rushed out.
‘Pardon, Madame. J’étais en retard.’
She nodded, out of breath herself, and the three of them, working as one, picked up odd dirty pieces of paper, half a cabbage and, wincing, the remains of two chickens. They had just straightened up from their task when they all heard several sets of feet scuffling in the cement corridor inside. They arranged themselves hastily in attitudes of people who had just stepped into this dank basement alleyway for a breath of fresh air and a conference about the day’s menus. The large chief inspector was first out of the door and his habitual expression of doubt and suspicion deepened as he took in the tableau.
‘Miss Delves. Nice to see management getting their hands dirty.’
Judith, who had done an inadequate job of cleaning decaying chicken off her hands with the edge of a plastic bag, smiled as pleasantly as she was able and said that indeed her duties were many and various and the council rubbish collectors were, as he would know, not entirely reliable. The three inspectors peered at every corner and the big man wrinkled his nose.
‘Mm. You could do with washing this yard with disinfectant.’
‘We did. Yesterday.’ Tony Gallagher was standing at the back door.
‘I’d do it again, laddie, if I was you.’ The big man was writing a note, and Judith scowled warningly. One did not argue with the men of the Westminster Health Inspection team. Tony frowned back and she understood that something had rattled him.
‘Right. What about this freezer?’ The big man had spoken to his note-pad as he finished recording their shortcomings.
‘Which freezer?’ Judith asked, instantly alarmed. Freezers and their contents are a potential death trap but even the best-organised restaurants have to keep emergency supplies and ice-cream frozen, not chilled.
‘Not the store freezer,’ Tony said, promptly. ‘They’ve been through that. The old chest freezer.’
‘The one we’re throwing away.’
‘That one.’
‘But it’s empty,’ Judith said, puzzled, following them into the dank passage, mercilessly lit by harsh overhead strip lighting.
The chief inspector sighed. ‘It’s switched on, and locked, Miss Delves. And your lad here says he doesn’t have the key.’
The five of them crowded under the uncompromising lights and gazed at the chest freezer, eight foot long and four foot deep, the red light glaring from the panel on the right-hand side. Judith looked anxiously at Tony; if there was anything to hide he would surely know better than to try and stall the inspectors with a device as feeble as losing the key.
‘Did you have to use it for the party last night?’ she asked, hopefully.
‘No. No one’s used that freezer since we cleared it. Couple of weeks ago. We left it propped open with a couple of towels. You saw it.’
She had indeed, she recalled, but not that recently. ‘I thought Broughtons had taken it,’ she said, hearing herself sounding idiotic. ‘Sorry. The keys are hanging on the kitchen board, surely, Tony? So you – or whoever – could give them to Broughtons when they come.’
‘The keys aren’t there now.’
She looked at him; he was very angry but that was all she could see.
‘We’ll need it open,’ the big man stated, unequivocally.
‘Yes, of course you will.’ Judith pulled herself together. ‘I’ll look for the spares. I’m sorry, will you come up and have some coffee while I do that?’
The big man gave her a sharklike smile and motioned an underling to the fore. He produced a clanking chain from his pocket and fiddled about for a minute. The lid sprang open and the three inspectors bent hopefully over to peer in. The chief made an exasperated noise and stood back while his underlings pulled out a pile of black plastic. Judith moved forward, but could not find a space between the waiters, and Tony turned to snarl at the two sous chefs and the preparation hand who had crept to the kitchen door to watch.
‘There’s something in here.’
‘Miss Delves?’
Judith moved forward and found herself looking at one of the big heavy-duty plastic rubbish bags, tied at the top.
‘Oh dear.’
‘Looks as if someone dumped the rubbish in there.’ Mr Aylwin observed and reached out a hand to prod. Not this morning, though, that’s solid.’ He motioned to an underling who untied the bag.
‘Chief.’
‘What?’
‘Oh, Christ. Oh, Jesus Christ.’
The big man shouldered his way past Judith, putting her to one side, and looked into the depths of the freezer, and stopped, motionless. ‘Miss De
lves.’ He reached out a big hand and pulled her forward. ‘Do you see what I see?’
‘Selina! Oh, Selina!’
Tony Gallagher came up at his elbow. ‘Let’s get her out,’ he said, huskily.
The big man gazed into the freezer, and shook his head. He put out a restraining hand. ‘Where’s your phone?’
Wordlessly they took him into the kitchen and gave him the phone and watched while he dialled 999, giving his underlings, both white and looking sick, a look of magisterial disapproval. He finished the phone call and said into the air, without looking at either Judith or Tony, ‘You’ll need to close.’
Judith and Tony gaped at him, then looked at each other.
‘It’s a health risk,’ Tony said, idiotically, and started to cry and giggle at the same time, while Judith numbly sent messengers to the front desk and told the kitchen staff, clustered together anxiously, to get some coffee down Tony and go home.
‘No,’ the chief inspector said, uncompromisingly. ‘You’ll all have to stay till the police get here.’
Everyone looked at him as if he had addressed them in a foreign language, but slowly they understood, and kitchen staff started to organise coffee and to press food on their weeping chef. Judith, crying herself and shaking from shock, looked round for the chief inspector. He had vanished from the kitchen, leaving his pallid assistants eating coffee and cake. Blowing her nose, she followed him to the passage to find him looking down on the livid, bloodstained face under the bright blonde hair.
She made an incoherent noise which attracted his attention. ‘I’m going to close the lid,’ he said, not looking at her.
‘Are you … are you quite sure she’s dead?’
‘Oh yes.’ He closed the lid gently, not banging it, and stood silently, and she realised he was the only person there who had thought to say a prayer for the soul of her departed friend.
4
It was a hot day in the City, the sun glinting on the cross on the top of St Paul’s, but Richard Marsh-Hayden and Michael Owens, sitting in the hushed, thickly carpeted office on the top floor of the Marshall Deneuve building, were wearing jackets in the air-conditioning. The uniformed manservant who brought in a tray with coffee and biscuits paused to make a fractional adjustment to a blind to cut out the sun, turning the room into a self-contained space capsule.
Michael Owens, as the host, poured the coffee. He felt heavy and tired, but Richard, who had never carried excess weight, seemed to have lost half a stone since he had last seen him. He also seemed not to have bathed, or shaved, and the blond hair hung ragged and greasy into his eyes.
‘I still can’t believe it.’ Richard had tasted his coffee and pushed it away and was speaking through a mouthful of expensive biscuit. ‘And I spent the morning trying to do all the things you’re meant to. I got a death certificate, of course, in the end. Our lawyer – Wiggins – managed to bang into their heads that we had a business to run here.’
‘Or at least one to sell.’
‘Yes. The shares are left to me, with everything else. But the bugger is I can’t do anything with them till Wiggins gets probate. Could take months apparently.’ He reconsidered his coffee and reached for the sugar bowl.
‘I’m so terribly sorry. About Selina.’
‘Yes. That. Thanks for your note, got it this morning. I miss her, I bloody miss her. It didn’t mean anything, you know, when we had these fights. And the worst thing is that the last thing we did was fight. I was so pissed off with her changing her mind about the sale. And now she’s gone and she never even said goodbye.’ He gazed into his coffee, his face creasing up as he snuffled painfully. ‘Christ. Sorry.’
‘What’s to be sorry for? She’s your wife.’
‘Was my wife.’ Richard fished a dirty handkerchief out of his pocket and studied it, looking unsuccessfully for a clean patch. Michael, reflecting that Richard’s personal habits had always left something to be desired, produced a laundered one of his own. ‘Thanks.’ He blew his nose and wiped his eyes, making a thorough job of it. He stuffed it into his pocket and gazed drearily at the discreet blinds. ‘I know she was a bitch. But I loved her.’
They sat in silence, the epitaph echoing in the room, until Richard sighed and sniffed. ‘And she’s left me right in it. The shares are mine, but so’s the overdraft and the Harvey Nicks bill and the Access and the Visa, you name it. Only I haven’t got anything to pay with and I can’t sell her fucking shares, Wiggins says.’ He took another cup of coffee. ‘I know it’s bad to think like that, with her only dead on Friday.’ He paused and stared at the tray. ‘Well, longer than that, but I only knew then. Oh, fuck it.’
‘Rich, why don’t you let me get my driver to take you home?’
‘Because it’s fucking worse there. The bank can’t ring me up here and I don’t have to open bills.’ He hesitated. ‘Mike, I know you’ve always said that you here don’t lend on property but at the price my stuff is right now, you couldn’t lose.’
Now that was probably true, Michael mentally agreed, but bankers are only fairly interested in the security for a loan, lending primarily on their assessment of the borrower. And in that context no worse bet than Richard Marsh-Hayden could be imagined. It wasn’t that he was grossly extravagant, or at least not in the usual ways. He neither gambled on horses nor went in for ocean racing, but he was chronically unwilling to deprive himself of any of the things he was used to – skiing holidays at the best hotels in the most fashionable resorts and during the most expensive periods of the year, or meals in London’s most expensive places. He had only a moderate London house in a good part of Fulham, but it had been reorganised and refurbished regardless of cost a year ago, when he was already having difficulty finding the interest on the huge mortgages that encumbered his small portfolio of secondary commercial property. Michael had thought censoriously more than once – well, about once every month – that, rather than put himself under such financial strain, he personally would have forgone the skiing holiday, and abandoned the hand-made kitchen and exquisitely redone plaster ceilings in the high living-room. Not that he had to make that choice, but after all he had grafted in a way that Richard never had. As a young graduate in a merchant bank he had worked fourteen hours a day for years doing all the overnight drafting and negotiations with clients, typists and printers to get the work done that fall to junior staff in a merchant bank. With no thanks, and shit poured in buckets from on high if, in a moment of exhaustion after three hours’ sleep, you let a nasty through.
The prospect of taking Richard’s affairs to the credit committee particularly at this moment stiffened his resistance and he got his mouth open to formulate a gracious but definitive sentence of refusal on the bank’s behalf. But he saw that Richard had not been hopeful; he was sitting, shoulders slumped, watching a flicker of sunshine that had somehow penetrated the bank’s defences, his expression utterly bleak.
‘I could lend you a bit personally,’ he heard himself say. ‘Against your shares in the Caff,’ he added, anchoring himself feebly in the slippery slope. He and Richard owned thirty-two and a half per cent each of the shares, making a powerful sixty-five per cent block between them. Richard’s chin lifted as he looked out of the window, and Michael watched the man he had known for thirty years, since their first day at prep school, struggle with a set of conflicting emotions.
‘They’re hocked already.’
‘You’re not allowed to,’ Michael said, shocked. ‘None of us are. It’s in the Articles.’
‘Aren’t bankers wonderful? It’s in the Ten Commandments, you can’t do it, see.’ He slid his eyes sideways. ‘I owed my builders. And Wade – you know, the plumbers. And they don’t piss around, they’d put in a writ and I was about at the end of the road with the counter-claim for unfinished work, cheque’s in the post, sorry, girl-can’t-have-posted-it-I’ll-give-her-a-rocket routine. You know.’
It occurred to Michael, as it had before in dealings with Richard, that possibly the dividing differ
ence between one man and the next lay not in class or colour, nor upbringing, nor dealings with women, but in their attitude to money. He would personally find being chased for a debt intolerable. Richard, even if he didn’t exactly enjoy it, regarded it as routine, like being in the Army where you were always having to shave or eat meals when you weren’t particularly hungry.
‘Who did you hock them to?’ he asked, wondering which of Richard’s friends or acquaintances had decided to take this particular risk. He guessed at the answer just before Richard, gazing studiously out of the window, gave it.
‘Brian. Brian Rubin.’
‘With an option to buy?’
‘Yeh.’ Richard had seen his expression. ‘But only if you all agreed, of course. He knew you could refuse to register a transfer to him.’ He picked up a biscuit and crammed it into his mouth. ‘After all, it is in the Articles.’
It was indeed; the Articles of Association had been carefully drawn up to avoid a situation in which the original members of the company, all of whom were friends or, like Tony Gallagher, were vital to its future, might sell shares to people less involved. It had occurred to Michael at the time that either, or both, of the improvident Marsh-Haydens might seek to charge their shares in return for a loan, but he had assumed that no one would lend on the basis of a charge which he could not enforce. But of course this calculation did not apply in the case of someone who wanted to buy the business. A potential purchaser, even if he were not able to get his name on the shareholders’ register, could use a charge on the shares to force the legal owner to vote them in favour of a sale.
‘How much? I mean how much did he lend you?’
‘Nothing like the full value.’