Chef Maurice and the Wrath of Grapes (Chef Maurice Culinary Mysteries Book 2) (12 page)

“Perhaps,” said Chef Maurice, thinking about the note they’d found in Sir William’s pocket. “And what is your impression of Monsieur Paloni and Monsieur Resnick?”

“Oh, I was in a right tizzy, I was, having a movie star up here at the Hall. He did put me out, though, when he turned up out of the blue for lunch like that, but golly if he ain’t a handsome fellow! He knows it too, though you can’t really blame him. And his teeth! Whiter than an angel’s laundry line, I’ll tell you.”

“He had come here before?”

“Oh no, never. You know, I rather fancy he invited himself up, the way the master put it. Told me last week we’d be having an extra guest to stay, and the way he said it made me think he was none too pleased.”

“Ah, so there was bad feeling between Sir William and Monsieur Paloni?”

“Oh, hardly like that. Sir William loves to host a big party, and he was soon all excited again, saying it’d be just like Paris or something, having a big dinner with the Americans against the French.”

“What about Resnick?” asked Arthur. “I hear he’s up here pretty often?”

“Oh yes, up here like clockwork, talking Sir William into buying all those fancy old bottles that nobody ever drinks. I told the master, you can’t take it with you. I mean, it’s good for a gentleman to have a hobby, keeps ’em out of mischief, but at the end of the day, wine’s made for drinking. You don’t see me collecting centuries’ worth of jam jars in the pantry, just to ogle at, do you?”

“Quite,” said Arthur.

Chef Maurice drained his teacup. “
Merci
,
madame
. You have given us much to think around. Now, we must continue on with our search.” He reached over to the bell cord to summon Gilles.

“Continue on to where?” said Arthur.

“The cellar, of course. We must return to the scene of the crime.”

“We must?” Arthur gave a little shudder.

“Can I get you gentlemen anything to eat before you go?” said Mrs Bates. “All this shock, plays havoc with the appetite, I tell you.”

Chef Maurice surveyed the table, which was groaning with the cumulative weight of all the cakes.

“If you would be so kind,
madame
, I would most enjoy a kipper sandwich.”

If Mrs Bates thought the request in any way odd, she was professional enough a cook not to show it. “Certainly, Mister Maurice, I’ll just go see if we have any out the back.”

“Clever,” whispered Arthur, as Mrs Bates disappeared into the pantry. “Get her mind off the cakes. Can’t think about dessert in a kitchen reeking of smoked fish.”

“Ah,
mon ami
, once again you do not see,” said Chef Maurice, helping himself to a still-warm mince pie.

“See what?” said Arthur indignantly.

“I am confident that soon we will solve the mystery of the locked cellar and the single brass key.”

“With the help of a kipper sandwich?”

“
Oui
.”

Under the table, Waffles perked up. Someone had just mentioned kippers.

Patrick put down the receiver and made a small cross on the piece of paper beside him.

“Three down, six to go,” he announced to the dining room, which was empty apart from Dorothy, doing a stocktake behind the bar, and Alf, who was laid out on a bench taking a post-caffeine snooze.

“Are you sure you want to be doing this, luv?” asked Dorothy, as Patrick consulted his list for the next number.

“It’s not a matter of want, it’s a matter of must,” replied Patrick grimly.

“Why don’t you just hack into their booking systems?” suggested Alf, opening one eye.

Patrick, in his pre-cheffing days, had dabbled in a short-lived career as a software engineer, which, in Alf’s eyes, meant that he commanded a range of godlike powers over all technological realms.

“First off, that’s illegal, and secondly, if these places are anything like us”—Patrick held up Le Cochon Rouge’s own bookings diary, its edges wavy from use and its pages liberally marked by Chef Maurice’s coffee cup stains—“then I doubt they’re hackable in the first place.”

He dialled the next number. After a few moments, the line picked up and a light symphony of background chatter filtered through.

“Trattoria Bennucci,” said the male voice at the other end of the line. “How may I help you?”

“Hi, I think my friend made us a booking for dinner on Sunday evening,” said Patrick, his heart thumping, “but I can’t remember what time she booked for. The table’s under her name, I think. Gavistone.”

There was the rustling of pages. Probably just for show, thought Patrick, to impress upon him how fully booked they were.

Trattoria Bennucci was one of the more pricey establishments in Cowton, with the type of clientele who were more concerned about the low-lit, faux-rustic decor, which served as an eminently suitable venue for prospective amorous encounters, than with the quality of food, which was cheap knock-off Italian, at best.

“Yeessss, Gavistone. Seven pee-em, for three people?”

“Three— Oh, yes, that’s right. Seven o’clock. Great, thanks.”

Patrick hung up, his heart heavy as an anvil.

“She booked a table for three,” he reported. “At Trattoria Bennucci.”

“There you go, then,” said Dorothy, with a told-you-so smile. “She’s just having dinner with friends, nothing to worry about.”

“No, this is worse.” A table for three meant that not only was Lucy having dinner with another man, she was bringing along a friend to meet her not-so-secret lover. He and Lucy had yet to proceed to the ‘meeting each other’s friends’ stage. Which meant that—horror of horrors—
he
was the other man.

“You’re catastrophising, luv,” said Dorothy, reading his expression. “Making mountains out of molehills. You’ve nothing to go on. Just talk to her straight, you might just be surprised . . . ”

But Patrick had stopped listening. He’d just had a thought. It was a bold, daring thought, with potential for things to go very wrong indeed.

But it was also a thought that might just win him PC Lucy’s respect and undying love.

That was worth a shot, surely. But first, he’d need to go shopping.

They left Waffles mewing at the top of the stairs in a kipper-induced trance, and carefully shut the cellar door.

Gilles led the way down, the slight wrinkle of his nose indicating that he did not at all approve of letting Arthur and Chef Maurice poke their way around Bourne Hall, but had yet to find a suitably decorous manner in which to eject them from the building.

The nose wrinkling might also have been due to the large hot-smoked kipper sandwich that Chef Maurice was currently munching his way through, wrapped neatly in a white linen napkin by Mrs Bates.

“I still don’t see what you need that sandwich for,” whispered Arthur, as they bent down to examine the flagstones where Sir William had fallen. “You already had salmon for lunch.”

The forensics team had removed all the shattered glass, but a few tiny fragments still glinted in the grooves between the stone slabs.

“Patience,
mon ami
.”

“And you don’t even like kippers.”

“I learn to appreciate the taste.”

“Hah. You gave half of it away to the cat.”

Chef Maurice bent down to inspect a bottle on a lower shelf. “She was looking at me. What was I to do?”

Arthur decided to abandon this line of enquiry and conduct his own search of the crime scene.

He’d been down into the cellars before on previous visits, but had never quite taken in the full extent of Sir William’s collection.

It wasn’t a particularly large room, at least by wine-collecting standards, but every vertical surface had been put to use with a criss-cross grid of wooden shelves holding a vast array of bottles, all neatly stacked on their sides. There were fat heavy bottles of single-vineyard Chardonnays, rows of slim-necked German Rieslings, dark wax-encrusted bottles of vintage Port, and even the odd balthazar—the equivalent of sixteen normal bottles of wine in one gigantic glass behemoth, sufficient to serve a hundred guests, if you could find a waiter strong enough to lift it.

In one corner, a towering stack of wooden wine crates, each containing a dozen bottles and branded with various winery names, stood ready to take up their rightful place on the shelves.

Chef Maurice was now wandering up and down the rows, pulling out bottles at random and admiring their labels. Gilles followed him at a discreet distance, wiping the bottles down in fear of kipper contamination.

“Monsieur Gilles, tell me, what is the meaning of these dots of yellow?”

Arthur leaned in closer to the rack. Sure enough, here and there he could spot little round yellow stickers pressed to the bases of a seemingly arbitrary selection of bottles.

“I do not know, sir. Possibly Sir William was marking out wines to serve at future events.”

Arthur pulled out the nearest yellow-stickered bottle. “An ’82 Pétrus. Well, you can’t deny that Sir William was a fantastically generous host.”

He walked over to the display cabinet, which, in addition to the magnum collection, housed a dozen or so bottles from the much-fêted Burgundian vineyard, la Romanée Conti, along with various bottlings from a cult Californian wine producer with black circular labels apparently only legible under ultraviolet light.

There were quite a few yellow stickers on the magnums too, but, more importantly, there was now an extra empty podium in addition to the two blank places he’d noticed there yesterday.

“What happened to this one?” asked Arthur, pointing to the missing third exhibit. A little white card announced it as a magnum of ’34 Chateau Ausone.

“Sir William had arranged for that particular bottle to be valued today, and I saw no reason to deviate from his wishes,” said Gilles. “I would have taken it to London myself, as per usual, but due to obvious circumstances, I chose to remain here with our guests. A representative from the firm collected the bottle this morning.”

“That’s rather speedy,” said Arthur.

“Not at all. There is an auction of fine and rare wines taking place at Sotheby’s next week. Sir William had wished to have an estimation before considering whether to place the bottle up for sale. Of course, this will no longer go ahead, but the inheritor of Sir William’s estate will no doubt still be interested in the valuation.”

“The contents of the will of Sir William, is it yet known?” asked Chef Maurice, who was on his hands and knees, peering under a rack of half-bottles.

“I believe the execution of the will is being undertaken by Sir William’s solicitors, the firm Cranshaw, Cranshaw & Handle in Cowton,” said Gilles. “No doubt they will soon be in contact with those whom it concerns.”

“Did Sir William ever mention to you who he was bequeathing the estate to?” asked Arthur.

“Sir William was a very private man in those respects, sir.”

“He has much family still?” asked Chef Maurice, his voice echoing as he stuck his head into an empty wine barrel which had been serving as decoration and, given the cat hairs, a playhouse for Waffles.

“I believe there is only his nephew, Lady Margaret’s son, and of course Lady Margaret, though both are related by marriage only. The young Mr Burton-Trent being her son from her first marriage, you see.”

There was something in the way Gilles spoke . . .

“But you don’t think he’ll inherit, do you?” said Arthur.

Gilles paused. “I don’t believe Sir William had seen Mr Timothy Burton-Trent for many years, ever since the gentleman emigrated to the Americas as a young man of twenty.”

“Bit of a wild one, eh?” said Arthur.

“One expects his character will have matured over the years,” was Gilles’s diplomatic reply.

“And Lady Margaret? She is his sister-in-law, after all.”

“We shall know in due course, I am sure.”

Arthur wandered over to Chef Maurice, who was now standing arms folded, contemplating the dusty silver candleholder screwed high into one wall.

“Found what you were looking for?”

Chef Maurice shook his head. Still frowning, he reached up and tugged at the candleholder, which came away from the wall in his hand.

There was a flurry of fine dust and an unimpressed cough behind them from Gilles, but no further result.