by Janet Neel
She waited for Jeremy, who had done his best to cast aside all restraint and was wearing a beautiful figured leather jacket, looted from Tristram’s wardrobe. It was amazing how much occupation affected genetics, she reflected; Tristram and Jeremy were fraternal twins and very like each other, yet everything about Jeremy said conservative solicitor, or banker, despite the jacket. Conversely, no matter how sober his suit, no one would ever take the expressive Tristram for other than an artist. She slid in, behind Jeremy, to a place at the long table at the back, banking on the assumption that the waiting staff would have needed to have seen a customer more than twice to be confident of recognising them. She had now met most of the Tosca cast, so conversation at the table flowed easily, as did the food and wine. But she was aware that their table was receiving favourable treatment; it was impossible not to observe that two of the tables nearest to them were becoming distinctly restive, and that waiters were giving them a wide berth. She watched out of the corner of an eye, thinking smugly that they had been wise, at Gladstone College, to change over to self-service, but finally laden trays and smiling, gracefully apologetic waiters arrived there, followed by another man bearing what were clearly complimentary bottles. Sensible, she thought, good customer relations, and returned hastily to her plate to avoid the man’s questioning look. Not a waiter, but a floor manager, and she feared he had recognised her, though hopefully not as wife to Detective Chief Superintendent McLeish.
Tristram, four places away from her, on the other side of the table, suddenly coughed, touching his throat, and she looked over at him, alarmed. He reached for a glass of water, downed it, coughed again, drew in a breath and started to cough seriously. Someone slapped him on the back which made it worse, and Francesca was on her feet and round his side of the table, in a flash. She looked round for more water and blinked; the lighting appeared to have gone dim and there was a mist in the restaurant. Other diners had started to cough and fan themselves.
‘Tris. Out, now,’ she said, urgently; one glance at Jeremy and he was with her, picking up Tris’s jacket and urging him out. She drew breath and started to cough herself; the smog in the restaurant was thickening and patrons were gesticulating and waiters rushing ineffectually around. She looked up at the ceiling and saw that black smoke was rolling from every crack in the pine planking. Jeremy seized her arm and she grabbed a napkin, poured water over it and gave it to Tristram who took it wordlessly and clapped it over his mouth. Jeremy would not even expect the same treatment, but Tristram’s throat must at all costs be protected. She glanced up at the ceiling, coughing herself, to see that the thick black smoke was no longer billowing out, but oozing, reluctantly. A small door, marked ‘Private’, opened beside them and Matthew Sutherland’s client, the chef, emerged, his arm round a white-faced shocked man, who was stripped down to a greying vest above battered jeans with both forearms wrapped in tea towels.
‘Got the air-conditioning off,’ he shouted to the floor manager, across the backs of retreating patrons.
Francesca almost opened her mouth to point out that air was what was needed before she realised that it was the ventilation system which had been blowing smoke to every corner of the restaurant through the ceiling. Behind the slatted pine panels must be tubes and pipes carrying air and music, and if things went wrong, black smoke.
‘Ze sprinklers?’ The floor manager had arrived at Chef’s side.
‘No, for God’s sake, Jean-Pierre. It’s the grease filter over the grill. Fire’s inside the pipes – I’ve called the fire brigade out, but it’s dying down.’
She found herself on the pavement with a firm brotherly arm around her. Jeremy, six years her junior, scolding in an entirely middle-aged way about pregnant women who exposed themselves to risk. She managed not to snap at him, recognising that she was a surrogate for her sister-in-law in far-away Hong Kong, but occupied herself wrapping Tristram, pale and anxious, into a jacket and finding the cough sweets she always carried. The floor manager, Jean-Pierre, was outside attempting to reassure and placate customers, milling around on the pavement. It was a fire in the kitchen, he was explaining, not serious, no bills would of course be charged, and any patron here who had paid should submit the bill for reimbursement in the morning. Indeed, any patron whose evening had been disrupted would be received for a complimentary meal on any evening of his choice during the next week. It was nicely done, a neat piece of disaster recovery. But disaster it most certainly was for a restaurant. And another potential crisis was threatening here too, she realised grimly, setting herself to the task of getting Tristram, still coughing, to the expensive stand-by medical adviser to the English National Opera. And achieving some kind of explanation to her husband as to how she had been an eyewitness of an unexplained turn in the case he was professionally charged with investigating.
9
‘Good morning, Miss Delves – I shouldn’t say that, should I? It can’t really be a very good morning for you. Sorry we couldn’t get here for eight, but eight thirty’s not bad, not with this traffic, thought it was going to be a lot worse.’
Judith managed to raise a smile; Mac Troughton, relentlessly chirpy, rubbing his hands and gazing appraisingly at the blackened ceiling of the Café, was general foreman of the heating and ventilation firm which had installed the system, and his availability the key determinant of whether the Café could reopen in the foreseeable future. It was a devastating scene: long strips of the pine ceiling in the restaurant were blackened and cracked and all the paintwork was covered in greasy black. The kitchen was a wreck. They had not been able to use the washing-up machines last night and a couple of wash-ups were wearily stacking blackened, greasy plates into them. Saucepans of food stood where they had been abandoned, and Tony Gallagher, in the middle of it, was engaged in disposing of everything that was left. Anything not already securely in a deep freeze would need to be thrown out. The char grill, with eight wizened blackened steaks sticking to the iron bars, was the centre of the destruction. Above it the huge fan hood hung, crooked and twisted by the heat of the fire.
‘Grease filter caught, then,’ Mac Troughton said, smiling brightly at Tony Gallagher, who gave him a look that ought to have caused him to shrivel like the steaks, but which bounced off that armour-plated personality.
‘That’s where it started, Mac,’ Judith acknowledged. ‘One of the steaks caught for a minute, the grill chef turned it over to put the flame out and thought nothing of it until drops of flaming grease started to fall on him. Then he ran. No, he’s not here, some of it went through his jacket and he had to go to casualty. We don’t expect him in.’
‘Took you a bit of time to get the emergency switch off, then.’
‘Bloody right.’ Tony Gallagher passed a tray of pastries speckled with soot to an underling for disposal. ‘It’s way down the end of the corridor.’
‘As required in the regulations. And stated in all the notices. And illuminated as, I hope, you found.’
A snort from Tony Gallagher, but Mac Troughton was not giving an inch.
‘Doesn’t take long to spread, of course, that’s what you get with an efficient ventilation system, sorry about that, I’m sure.’ He was studying the damage, moving to consider different angles.
One put up with Mac, she reminded herself, because he was the best, and they had had cause to be grateful to him many times for his system.
‘Yerss. I can have a crew here tomorrow, and I’ll pick up the parts myself. Give you time to clean up.’ He drew two fingers along a blackened, greasy counter and wiped them on one of the wash-ups’s towels, leaving two parallel black smudges. Judith followed him meekly into the restaurant, while he opined it wasn’t worth pulling the pipe through, all that bit of panel would need replacing anyway, so if a builder could be secured just to pull it off, his skilled men could go straight there after the kitchen. And no, he wouldn’t like to offer any view, not just now, not until a chippie cleared things for him, like, as to how long it would take, or how much it
would cost, but he’d put a holding order on for two hundred metres of trunking if she could let him have a cheque now for £1000. She sat down to write it, on the spot, as he watched her.
‘I expect you was due to have the filter cleaned.’
‘Overdue. Well overdue,’ she said, bitterly, concentrating on making the figures and the writing on the cheque match.
‘You might not want to say that to everyone. If you take my meaning.’
She looked up at him, but he was gazing at the ceiling, and she understood the full extent of the problem. They were heavily insured for everything including loss of profit if the restaurant was closed for more than a few days. But the insurance company could reasonably object to paying out if a necessary precaution against fire had been omitted. She looked gratefully at his overalled chest and pressed the cheque into his hand, and he talked his way out of the front of the restaurant just ahead of a Jaguar which deposited Michael Owens at the door.
‘How’s it going?’
A phone call had summoned both of them from a sound sleep at 1 a.m. and he had driven her back to London, and helped her calm the staff, sort out their injuries and secure the building. He had finally insisted on taking her to her own flat at five o’clock. He had gone on to his flat and was immaculately dressed in expensive casuals in contrast to her boiler suit and trainers.
‘It actually looks even worse this morning, doesn’t it? Christ, what a mess. I think I might give Brian Rubin a ring.’
‘Why? So he can come and gloat?’
‘Darling.’ He pulled her a little away from the procession of curious passers-by. ‘There really is now a case for cutting our losses. Give Rubin the problem, let him claim the insurance and have all the hassle, rather than us – you – do it all and then hand it over. No?’
She looked at him, appalled, and he looked back at her, his face drooping. ‘You really hadn’t accepted we were going to sell.’
‘No, I haven’t.’ They both heard the change of tense, and she winced as the hand holding her arm clenched. ‘Please don’t ring Brian Rubin.’ It was not a request and he looked back at her. ‘We’ll talk at lunch, OK?’
John McLeish was in his office reading, again, the forensic report on the Café de la Paix lift. The stain on the carpet was indeed blood and had belonged to the dead girl. So, at some point she had been in the lift, dead presumably, and blood from her nosebleed, since there was no open wound on the corpse, had dripped on to the carpet. The lift was rich in fingerprints belonging to Judith Delves, Michael Owens, Tony Gallagher, Richard Marsh- Hayden, Brian Rubin, and indeed the dead girl herself. There were other unidentified prints and it would now be necessary to match them up with staff and see what, if anything, was left over. Depressingly, there were also the characteristic bubble marks left by rubber gloves, so it was most likely the murderer had not taken them off until he – or she – had got rid of the body. He looked up to find Bruce Davidson, also in a suit, watching him from the door.
‘I came in,’ he said redundantly, ‘I thought you’d need some help what with the fire at Café de la Paix?’
‘I had an eyewitness present. As I did not know, Fran was there, eating with her brothers and the cast of Tosca.’
‘Ah.’
‘Yes. She hadn’t, of course, any idea whether it was accidental or not, so no useful purpose was served.’
A chastened Francesca was cooking lunch for her mother and John. He had been extremely angry when she had rung him, guiltily, from Tristram’s flat at midnight, to confess where she had been and to report the fire, but she had been so penitent that he had managed to forgive her.
‘The fire brigade lads say probably accident not arson. They’ve seen one of these before. There was a lot of grease inside the hood and the pipes above the charcoal grill, so when a flame went up from a steak it caught. Like a chimney going on fire. And then, of course, the fans took the fire right through the ventilation which runs above the ceiling. They got them switched off pretty quick. Bloody complicated way of setting a fire. I mean, you’d have to have six months of grease to start with, stuffed inside the cooker hood.’
‘Doesn’t sound likely, does it?’
At Café de la Paix, Judith had reached the same conclusion. She put her head through the kitchen hatch.
‘Chef. A word, please. Out here.’
He came slowly and reluctantly, but underneath the masculine foot-dragging she could see he was deeply uneasy. She had placed herself at a hastily cleaned table at the back of the Café, well out of range of the clean-up squad who had reported for duty that morning, imagining they were going to spend the day in clean uniforms, waiting on tidy, clean people. They were nonetheless working with a will; they got time and a half on Sundays anyway, and Judith had promised everyone double time and a £10 bonus over. Nothing could be more important than to get the thick black greasy stain off tables, chairs, cruets, vases and floors as quickly as possible. She considered her chef, who was slumped, looking at his hands.
‘I know something has gone wrong for you, Tony. What is it?’
He looked up at her briefly, then hunched his shoulders and looked down, the big hands moving restlessly.
‘Is it money?’
His hands twitched and his head turned away; it was like dealing with someone of about seven years old. She tried again. ‘The police – Mr McLeish, the Chief Superintendent – he saw you being followed. So they know something’s wrong. You might as well tell me.’
He flung himself round in his chair, in an agony of physical frustration, she realised. He would have liked to hit someone, or be lifted from the scene by helicopter, but he was cornered. She reminded herself there were at least fifteen people within easy call and waited until, gripping the table, he managed to tell her about his gambling debts.
‘Five thousand,’ she said, involuntarily, and understood immediately from the quick look she got that this was not the whole story. She sat, dismayed, working out how to say what had to be said. ‘I finished the last three months’ accounts before I went away for the weekend,’ she said, finally, and saw his shoulders slump.
‘I had to get cash.’
‘From the till?’
‘Nah.’ He was obviously surprised and managed to look her, briefly, in the eye. ‘Sold some food at the back.’
‘That’s what happened to the plate costs? They’re up to thirty-eight per cent, thirty-nine last month. The difference between profit and loss.’ A long miserable silence fell.
‘We was selling the place, see, and it wouldn’t matter. I mean, Rubin wasn’t going to reduce the price, he was that mad to buy us.’
She glanced at him, and he went quiet again and looked longingly at the kitchen door. ‘This is what Selina was talking about.’
‘Yeh.’
Judith sat up. ‘She accused you of it?’
‘Yeh. But she didn’t really know how to find … a … well, anything wrong, so I wasn’t much bothered.’
‘You waited to do all this until I was out of the way, over the river?’ she said, bitterly.
‘It wasn’t like that.’ He was scarlet and sullen, but he was still sitting in his chair. ‘They was after me – are after me. I didn’t want a beating, OK?’
‘You could have said, you silly cuckoo.’ They stared at each other, Judith as startled as he by the emergence of the childhood epithet. ‘We might not have wanted our chef incapacitated either.’
He looked back at her, very carefully, the blue eyes narrowed. ‘Doesn’t matter now, though, does it?’
‘More than before,’ Judith, who had been working and thinking with only a short break since 2 a.m., assured him. ‘We have to get open again, quickly. How do I replace you in a hurry, you … you …’
‘Stupid bog-trotter?’ His jaw was gritted.
‘Silly idiot was what I was struggling for.’
‘What are you going to do?’ He managed to look her briefly in the eye.
‘It’s what are we going to do.’
She stared back. ‘First thing we have to get the wolves beaten back from your sledge. We throw them something, like say £3000.’
‘It’ll take a bit more than that, and I’ll tell you true, I’ve not got it.’
‘Not even from three months’ selling our supplies?’ She watched him go scarlet. ‘Pity. I’ll lend whatever you need to you personally, but I’ll take your shares as security. And you pay back my estimate of what you’ve taken from here out of future wages, or out of your shares if we do have to sell.’
He was watching her lips, pale now, like an anxious child. ‘And I get it in cash?’
‘Yes. But I want a proper agreement. Your lawyer can do it, but I want it done. And you do your damnedest to make sure we make the profit we should.’ She put out her hand, and after a second’s hesitation he shook it hard, unsmiling.
‘I’ll do that now, ring the lawyer.’
‘Tony. Do we have to change our butcher?’
‘We do, yeh, but no need to pay his bill on time, and I know another.’ He caught her eye. ‘Maybe you’d like to choose the next one.’
‘I would. And someone else to supply olive oil?’
‘Mm Yeh.’ He hesitated, and struggled with himself. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, managing to look her in the collar-bone, and fled to the kitchen and the telephone.
Matthew Sutherland, summoned for the second time in two days to Café de la Paix, got out at Trafalgar Square and walked crossly up past the Coliseum. He stopped to look and found himself face to face with Tristram Wilson, looking maliciously amused. ‘Sorry if you were meeting Frannie. She’s at home in disgrace. I lured her out to the Café de la Paix last night and all would have been well, but there was a fire.’
‘You were all there, were you?’
‘Absolutely. Lots and lots of black smoke pouring from the ceiling. Very bad for the throat.’ Tristram Wilson touched his neck, cautiously.
‘Not very good for trade either.’