by Janet Neel
Tony Gallagher had got involved in the detail and relaxed a bit, uncrossing his arms. Matt Sutherland was sitting absolutely still, but there was nothing relaxed about him.
‘Yeh. What we say is: one-third for food, one-third for labour, one-third for rent, rates, management, and profit.’
‘So if I’m paying a tenner for a steak?’ Davidson, genuinely interested, asked.
‘You’re not eating at the Caff!’ Tony Gallagher was pleased with his joke, and Bruce Davidson beamed at him.
‘Away. What’s a steak cost there, then?’
‘£15. But that’s with pepper sauce and frites.’
‘I’d do better in Glasgow. And if I wanted a wee drink?’
‘Three quid if you stick to the house wine.’
‘And that costs you what?’
‘£5 a bottle and we get six glasses.’ Gallagher was enjoying himself, expanding the technicalities of his trade.
‘So the plate costs are even lower if it’s booze?’
‘Nah, not always. On the better stuff, say that’s £12 on the menu, that probably costs us £6. Some things you can’t get that much of a mark-up. No one’ll buy them. So there’s some things on the menu where the plate costs are over a third, some where they’re less. But you keep to a third over the whole menu.’
‘Tell me where the costs are less than a third and I’ll remember not to order them when I go out,’ Davidson said.
‘I’ll tell you but you’ll still order them. All the punters do. Coffee. Tea. Soup. Pâté.’ Tony Gallagher was consulting an invisible menu. ‘Side salad – except in winter. Anything with eggs, soufflé, omelette, Eggs Benedict. They’re buggers to do, but the punters will pay good money for them.’
Davidson considered him with genuine interest. ‘So what do I order if I want to be sure the money’s in the food?’
‘Steak. Chops. Grilled fish. Our steaks, now, they cost £4.80 each today. Put on the frites and the sauce, which has wine and cream, and the salad, you’re up to near enough £6. Well, you can’t get £18 for that dish. We charge £15, so the plate cost is forty per cent. And sometimes it’s worse – if you have to keep a steak too long, or it gets cooked wrong, you just have to put it in the pâté, or the bolognaise, and you never get the costs back.’
Bruce Davidson gazed at him, shaking his head in admiration. ‘So that’s the sort of thing Mrs Marsh-Hayden was trying to think about?’
‘That’s right,’ Gallagher agreed.
‘What did she think you could do different?’
‘Oh, she didn’t say. Just hinted.’
‘At what?’ McLeish asked and saw Gallagher stiffen. Matt Sutherland looked up warningly.
‘Well. She was hinting someone was on the fiddle. Asking about the supplier, was he honest? Did we check deliveries? Christ, who doesn’t?’ Matthew Sutherland coughed, and Gallagher’s confident delivery faltered. ‘Stuff like that,’ he finished, lamely. ‘Stupid stuff.’
‘Did she often come to the kitchen?’ Davidson managed to sound honestly puzzled.
‘Nah. Only to swish round saying how lovely everything looked.’
‘So you resented her bothering, then?’ McLeish asked calmly.
‘Yeh, I did.’ He cast a sidelong, defiant look at his lawyer. ‘Pissed me off. But I forgot about it – can’t worry about rubbish like that when you’ve got two hundred covers to get out.’ He hesitated and addressed himself to Davidson. ‘I’d like to get back to set up if you’ve got all you want.’
‘Remind me, what time was it that Mrs Marsh-Hayden left you that day?’ John McLeish asked.
‘Five thirty. I’d just come on.’
‘Did you see her again at all, anywhere, after she walked out on the conversation?’
‘No. I went to get into whites.’
‘You went to the laundry room?’
‘Yeh. Then to the men’s changing. And she wasn’t in there, no. Then into the kitchen, where she wasn’t either.’
There was a lie in there, McLeish thought, the man had hesitated over the laundry room and speeded up confidently as he described his return to the kitchen. He considered Matthew Sutherland, who was studying his notebook as if an exam question depended on it.
‘How long did it take you to change?’
And there it was, the hesitation, the slight colour over the cheek-bones. ‘‘Bout … well, I dunno, fifteen minutes. I shaved as well. I hadn’t been working that day, so I’d got up late and not bothered.’
‘So it would have been five forty-five, or so, when you arrived back in the kitchen?’
‘Maybe nearer six. I’m a slow shaver.’
And in that gap Tony Gallagher had done something he didn’t want to tell the police about.
‘Selina was around all evening, you know, after we had our little tiff. She was on duty. Didn’t come near me – or the kitchen, too busy flirting with the customers.’
‘What time did you – do you all go home?’
‘Me, I went at twelve – kitchen closes then. I didn’t see her. I don’t know when she went.’
They took him through the statement again but without improving their understanding. The gap remained but, as Gallagher pointed out, Selina Marsh-Hayden had been seen alive and well for several hours after the quarrel, so they let him go.
Hours later, McLeish extracted himself from a liaison meeting with Scottish colleagues which he had managed to transfer to London. A message had been particularly brought to him from Francesca, reminding him that she was due at a Community Association meeting at 6 p.m and their nanny was out from five thirty by special concession. He stared at it, momentarily boggled by the idea of trying to explain to the assembled hard Glaswegians the reason for his need to close the meeting by 5 p.m, then remembered that the only decent plane back to Glasgow left at 6 p.m. He breathed again and took the group rapidly through the rest of the agenda, wondering if there was any way of persuading Francesca not to involve herself in these activities.
Francesca walked into the large dusty church hall and stopped, looking doubtfully to see if she recognised any of the dozen people there assembled round a trestle table with a tea urn.
‘Ah, Mrs McLeish.’ The local representative of the Church of England, clad in baggy trousers, sweater and clerical collar, seized her hand in a firm muscular grasp. ‘Nice to see you. We welcome your expertise. We’ve also been fortunate enough to find a local solicitor to help us.’ He turned, beaming with professional enthusiasm, to greet a tall young man who emerged from the passage at the side of the hall.
‘Ah. We’ve met.’ Matt Sutherland gathered her into his arms.
‘Why are you here, Matt?’ she asked, extricating herself.
‘Because of the nursery. We need it for the Refuge kids.’
‘Of course.’
The community centre putatively housed in four vandalised ground-floor flats in one of the grimmest council blocks in that part of West London was only a hundred yards from the Refuge for which Graebners were the official solicitors. Not a very difficult connection to make, but one she had not even thought of.
‘You could send your William if we can get the funding.’
‘Indeed.’ She took a deep breath. ‘And the next one.’
‘What next one?’
‘The one I’m going to have in about eight months.’ She had, she saw, severely disconcerted him and there were interested observers around them. ‘We thought we’d better get on with it,’ she said, generally, to the group. ‘My son is nearly two and I’m not getting any younger.’
The vicar tied himself up in a complex sentence in which he seemed to be suggesting that she hardly looked old enough to be a mother at all. Francesca gracefully acknowledged this muddled tribute, avoiding Matthew’s eye. The vicar turned away to greet another newcomer and she sneaked a look at Matthew, who was struggling to conceal laughter. She grinned back, suddenly comfortable with him.
‘How’s things, Matt?’
‘Your husband an
d his merry men are harassing my client.’ Matt had no small talk, she should have remembered, she thought crossly.
‘A woman got strangled and John sees finding murderers as more important than not hurting people’s feelings.’
‘Yeh, but my man didn’t do it.’
‘Then I am sure he has nothing to fear.’ Dear God, what was it about Matthew? She was sounding like the Chairman of the Magistrates Association.
‘You sound like your ma,’ he said, gloomily, confirming her fears. ‘The Caff’s falling apart. Tony’s lost two sous chefs and a commis in the last week. They don’t like being hassled and they can get jobs anywhere, tomorrow.’
‘Customers still rolling in?’
‘Yeh, but they aren’t getting a meal in front of them fast enough. So that won’t last.’
‘John’s very quick,’ she said, defensively. ‘And when he’s got his man it’ll get back to normal.’ She looked up at him, six inches taller than her, looking annoyingly young and righteous. ‘Unless it was your client and then they’ll have to get another head chef. He’s good though. I agree.’
‘Tony could go somewhere else tomorrow. As your friend Judith Delves does not seem to know.’
‘Not my friend,’ she said, on the back foot, but rallied. ‘And I bet your Tony couldn’t get another job that easily. Any prospective employer would wonder, fair or unfair, what was going to crop up in their deep freeze.’
Nor had Matt much sense of humour where a client was concerned, she remembered, as he gave her the kind of look with which John Knox might have favoured Mary Stuart.
‘We’d better not talk about it.’
‘That’s right, Matt, let’s just get a community centre going here. I have eight months, roughly.’
He smiled, reluctantly. ‘Shouldn’t be a problem, Wonderwoman.’
Tony Gallagher looked round the small group in the kitchen and exploded. ‘How the fuck are we going to do 250 covers tonight?’
His staff looked back at him, lost for a response. Indeed, with no sous chef, two commis, and only one chef de rang and one wash-up, there was no rational answer, unless all 250 people booked in on Friday were going to be content with a very plain steak and one of the puddings the chefs had made up on the day shift. Tony looked round him and picked up a knife, and his staff shrank behind the limited cover available.
He looked beyond them to the passage. ‘Jean-Pierre, François. Attendez.’ The two figures that had been trying to slink past unobserved stopped reluctantly and turned to face him as he advanced carrying the knife. ‘You’ll have to stay. Both of you. Sorry, but you’ll get double rate.’
Both men protested, in a mixture of French and English, that this would be their third consecutive shift, that double rate meant nothing given the iniquitous English custom of deducting tax at source, and that they were moreover both on the very busy day shift tomorrow, when another 250 people hoped to eat lunch. Would Chef prefer that these went unfed? Chef leapt at this unwisely conceded opening, pointing out that tomorrow was another day, and one on which he would personally use all his influence to ensure that replacements worked the shift. But now, at 6 p.m. this day, he needed another two commis and two more sous chefs, so they would have to stay; clean jackets awaited them together with whatever they would like for staff supper.
The two conscripts reluctantly returned to change, and the rest of the kitchen staff resumed preparations for the evening rush, watching out of the corner of their eyes Chef, face mottled with temper, assembling his utensils and stocks for the onslaught.
7
In New Scotland Yard, John McLeish, who had been in since six thirty, was beginning to feel that he had a grip on the case. He understood who was who, and several of his preliminary ideas had been blown out of the water by a reading of the various statements assembled for him. Bruce Davidson was sitting at the other side of the big table which occupied about half the space in a very decent-sized office.
‘These letters,’ McLeish said, indicating a ring-binder with each page sheathed in plastic. ‘I see Marsh-Hayden took the line that all three men were old flames, dating back to before they married.’
‘In his place I’d have hoped they’d been written before Selina had even set eyes on me.’
‘Somewhere here it says they’d known each other since they were children. Anyway, what did Mr Marsh-Hayden think?’
‘He was taken aback, it says here.’ Davidson had found the relevant part of the statement and was reading it carefully. ‘He knew all three of them, apparently.’ He hesitated. ‘The letters are rather the same. No, I mean they’re different, but …’
‘But the subject matter is much the same,’ McLeish suggested. ‘What they hoped to do, or had done and hoped to do again with Selina Marsh-Hayden, as opportunity offered.’ Bruce Davidson was the resident expert on matters sexual and his opinion would be useful. ‘Did you read them all? Anything, well, out of the ordinary, which might have turned rough?’
Davidson reached over and turned up a page on one of the letters. ‘This bloke’s a little near the line.’
McLeish read four paragraphs, thoughtfully. ‘Mm.’
‘He didn’t last long, though. The third letter from him is a long moan about how could she give him up. See here.’
‘ “How could you destroy this precious thing that was growing between us,” ’ McLeish read. ‘What can he have meant?’
‘The poor bugger had to take it somewhere else, any road,’ Davidson said.
‘We ought to check him out.’
‘He’s married and living in South Africa. They’re all well over five years old, the letters, I mean.’
‘So we’re assuming she gave up having men – or at least men who wrote to her – once she was married?’ McLeish asked.
Davidson grunted.
‘You don’t think so?’
‘Old habits, John. No. It would surprise me if she’d given them up.’
‘We need to see the husband,’ McLeish said. ‘And quickly. No alibi, broke, and she was standing between him and a pot of cash, and she may have been playing him up as well.’
Davidson said smugly that he had arranged that this should be the next interview. And just over an hour later they were contemplating Richard Marsh-Hayden in his own living-room. The room was orderly, if not particularly clean, surfaces cleared, cushions plumped up, coffee promptly offered. The man himself looked drawn and tired and ill, but he had himself in hand as well as his surroundings. As he had let them in, he had picked the post off the doorstep and disposed instantly of the leaflets, flyers and free newspapers into a bin kept near the door, placing the rest on a beautifully shaped, curved table seriously in need of a polish beneath a mirror surmounted by a faded gold eagle. A soldier’s tidiness, McLeish thought, and was unsurprised to find, as they talked over coffee, that Richard Marsh-Hayden had served three years in the Welsh Guards.
‘I have the statement you made to my colleagues at Bow Street.’ McLeish decided it was time to lead into the business of the day.
‘Yes. Forgotten what I said, but it was true.’
‘Can we go through it again so I get the detail right. You last saw your wife at about 11.30 p.m. on Thursday, just over two weeks ago?’
‘Yes. We’d all had a meeting, rather a cross one, in the office. Then I went to see a mate. Then I came back about six thirty for a drink. Selina was on duty and I’d said I’d eat with some of the lads at White’s. We finished, oh about ten, and there wasn’t much doing, so I came over to the Caff about eleven thirty, and Selina and I had coffee. And a row.’ His face crumpled suddenly and both policemen waited stolidly while he recovered himself. ‘I mean, not a real screamer, but I was pissed off. So I went off to a club I know and had a few and played a bit. Then I thought I’d better get my head straight and I went to the baths in Porchester Street and had a kip there in the steam. Got home about ten in the morning and she wasn’t there.’
‘Were you surprised?’
&n
bsp; Richard Marsh-Hayden looked at him quickly, the sharp jaw looking even narrower. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Were you expecting her to be there?’ McLeish asked, evenly, noting the sore spot.
‘Yes, I was. So I was even more pissed off. Then I made myself a coffee and remembered she had muttered something about going off early. She was going to see friends, then her mother in Bideford for a few days. So I just thought she’d gone and I thought, bitch not to leave me a note and that I wouldn’t ring her up, I’d wait till she rang me.’
‘What about her car?’ This was a point which had puzzled both of them but the detective inspector who had initially taken a statement had not appeared to find it remarkable that all through this time Selina’s car had been on the forecourt outside the house.
‘She said she wasn’t going to bother with it. Her mother’s got a spare one there – grotty old Citroën.’ Richard Marsh-Hayden was not looking at either of the them. ‘Sorry, I need a pee.’ He watched, tense, as Davidson glanced at his watch and, leaning forward to record the time the interview was suspended, switched off the tape. ‘That’s so you can’t patch extra bits in, yes?’
‘That’s the principle,’ McLeish confirmed.
‘Won’t take long. You want the phone? Paper?’
They indicated they were content to sit; Davidson gave his superior a quick sidelong approving glance which McLeish acknowledged. The story was extremely thin and left Richard Marsh-Hayden without an alibi for the night on which his wife had disappeared from all her known haunts.
Marsh-Hayden appeared looking better, the ragged blond hair combed off his face.
‘So. Yeh. Look, we – Selina and I – we yelled at each other a lot, it isn’t … it doesn’t … well, I only ever hit her once when she’d really got up my nose.’ He studied their professionally stony faces. ‘We fought, we didn’t bottle it up.’
‘What did you fight about?’. McLeish asked.
‘Money mostly. Not having it. Selina had no idea – I mean, she bought this fucking dress to go to one of her mate’s parties. I mean, she’s got cupboards full. Seven hundred-odd quid, and we couldn’t pay the fucking milkman. That’s the time I hit her. And that’s why I was so pissed off with her before … when … week before last, because we can’t keep going here’ – a gesture took in the living-room with its careful joinery and expensive lighting – ‘and she was banging on about putting more money into the Caff. When we had an offer of four hundred thou for our shares. She could have had all the frocks she wanted.’ He stopped, hands clasped between his knees, looking beyond them out of the window on to the small, perfectly arranged, paved garden.