Coombs Death in Nonna's Kitchen

The second in the cozy restaurant mystery series readers are loving!
1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-915798-75-6
Verlag: No Exit Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, Band 2, 352 Seiten

Reihe: An Old Forge Café Mysteries

Autoren/Hrsg.

Coombs, Alex

Leseproben

Chapter Four

Speak of the devil and he will come. The very next day, on Saturday lunchtime, I met both Matteo and his wife, the beautiful Graziana.

Jess had announced their presence. Normally, Jess does her job running my restaurant with a mixture of good-natured efficiency and ironic detachment. For her, it’s a well-paid holiday job, a distraction from studying IT, which is where her future lies. She rarely gets excited – why should she? Working in the hospitality business is not her dream. Unlike most people in kitchens who aren’t passionate about food, she’s not crazy, unqualified or desperate. But today was different.

She had come running into the kitchen an hour earlier.

‘It’s Matteo McCleish, and his wife, in our restaurant!’

I had never seen her so excited. She was wide-eyed; her hair, unruly at the best of times, stood up like she’d been electrocuted. Francis stared at her, a parody of amazement.

‘Gordon Bennett!’ he said. That, for Francis, constitutes great excitement. It was a measure too, of Matteo McCleish’s fame, that Francis knew who he was. His knowledge of people is usually confined to cricketers and rugby players.

‘Can everyone just calm down,’ I said, calmly. In reality I was feeling anything but relaxed. I seemed to have forgotten my earlier reservations about the McCleishes. You hypocrite, Charlie, I told myself sternly. But it was no good. I was as bad as my staff. My heart was thundering with adrenaline. It’s Matteo McCleish, and HIS WIFE, in MY restaurant! Feigning nonchalance, ‘They’re just customers.’

But of course they weren’t just customers, they were culinary royalty, and when I got their orders I cooked their food as if it was going out to the King.

Matteo had lamb fillet with an anchovy and caper dressing garnished with a mint sauce and rösti potatoes, and Graziana, a chicken Caesar salad. I scrutinised every single ingredient on their plates as if I were performing brain surgery.

Jess kept us updated every time she came into the kitchen.

‘They’ve started, they look happy!’

Then:

‘They are loving the sourdough bread.’

‘He just said, “Compliments to the chef”. Oh, God, this is so exciting!’

A bit later: ‘They’re halfway through, they still look happy and there are three paparazzi outside on the green! And they’ve parked illegally!’

She was a true child of Hampden Green. If the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse turned up, someone would point to the sign, ‘Oi, you, that means you – War, Famine, Pestilence and you, Death! No Riding On The Common (£100 fine)’.

When the plates came back we all stared at them like doctors looking at a life or death X-ray.

‘Blimey, clean plates!’ said Francis.

I shrugged. Feigned nonchalance again. They liked it!

‘Don’t sound so surprised, Francis.’ My voice was dismissive. Inside, I was shouting to myself, ‘He ate everything!’

They had dessert.

Cue another update from my waitress: ‘Matteo’s having the strawberry bavarois and Graziana’s having the lemon and lime posset with almond shortbread.’ She added, ‘God she’s even more beautiful in real life than on Instagram.’

Then, more clean plates, compliments to the chef and the following bombshell: ‘He wants to meet you!’ Jess looked at me adoringly. Normally she treats me as if I were slightly half-witted, like a dotty aunt who needs to be humoured. Now I was transmuted from lead to gold by the alchemical hand of Matteo McCleish, sprinkled with his TV stardust.

The gods had come down from Olympus. Or at least out of . Matteo was here in high resolution and 3D. And so it was that towards the end of service, I found myself shaking the McCleish hand, wondering what to call him. It was a problem that I would never have thought I would ever have. Matteo sounded too presumptuous, Mr McCleish far too formal.

He was the first really famous person I had ever met. I’ve cooked for a fair few, but they’ve never come in the kitchen, why would they? It was a strange sensation. I couldn’t help but scrutinise him as intensely as I had his food when I’d sent it out from the kitchen half an hour earlier. It was hard work not staring at him too obviously.

In the flesh he was smaller than I had expected – shorter than me – and surprisingly slender. TV gives little indication of size unless people are helpfully standing next to something that has a recognisable benchmark height, a post-box for example, or a Labrador. Matteo was also more handsome in real life than he was on the screen – he certainly didn’t disappoint there. He was ridiculously good-looking in an Italian way.

He looked very stylish and had an even bronze tan. I’m normally quite happy with the way I look, but he was so high wattage that standing next to him, I felt very plain. I also felt my hair was letting me down. It doesn’t normally. It’s red-brown, shoulder length, plaited today to make sure none of it went in the food, but it looked dowdy next to Matteo’s luxuriant locks that reached to his shoulders. He was like a Seventies rock star but one dressed by Henry Holland.

He put an arm around me in a friendly way as Jess took our picture together on her phone.

It was unusual for Jess to rave about anyone; normally she treated people and events with a healthy scepticism.

The McCleishes had been a big hit with all concerned. Damn, I thought, Matteo even smelt good. I had just finished a busy service in the forty-degree heat of the kitchen and I suspected that I exuded an aroma of sweat, strain, and food.

I gawped silently at him, bereft of the power of speech.

‘I enjoyed my lamb,’ he said, encouragingly. He had quite a strong accent, that heady mix of Scottish and Italian. I should have known this from the few times I had seen him on TV, but it had never occurred to me he would actually talk like that. ‘And the bavarois was excellent.’

Thank God I hadn’t known it was destined for him when I had originally made it, I thought. There is something very unnerving about cooking for a celebrity chef or a food critic. You feel every little thing is going to be inspected to the nth degree. Graeme Strickland would have laughed at my nervousness, but I wasn’t an insanely overconfident megalomaniac like he was (or coked out of my brains) nor was I as good a chef. Strickland was touched with the hand of genius.

But, I thought smugly to myself, Matteo McCleish wasn’t in his restaurant right now, was he? He was here.

I smiled confidently, or tried to anyway. My lips certainly twitched.

Matteo gave my kitchen a cursory glance. I was very proud of it, but a kitchen is a kitchen. What was I going to say?

‘Could we, erm, have a quiet word somewhere?’ Matteo said, nodding his head to the side.

That was a harder question to answer than it sounded.

The downstairs of the Old Forge Café was taken up by the kitchen, dry store (a glorified cupboard) and the restaurant. My office was a space under the stairs. Upstairs was my accommodation. To say it was spartan was to oversell it. There was virtually nothing up there at all.

Virtually, though, was better than nothing at all.

I had bought a bed, a huge step up from sleeping on a mattress on the floor, and the sizeable living room did have a TV balanced on a beer crate, and a secondary beer crate (or IT suite as I liked to call it) where my laptop sat. Matteo might think I was merely eccentric. He might think that I viewed the accumulation of material objects, like furniture, with scorn. Or he might realise the truth – that I was embarrassingly poor and that all my money had gone into kitchen equipment.

I wasn’t going to have him know that.

So, upstairs was out of the question. No one likes revealing how boracic they are. Anyway, it was a bit too intimate, I didn’t want Matteo getting any ideas. For all I knew he had some kink thing going on about female chefs.

‘Let’s go outside and I’ll show you my walk-in fridge,’ I suggested. ‘It’s new!’ I added proudly, instantly regretting it. Matteo wouldn’t have boasted about his fridge; the company would have given him one for free and then paid him a fortune to endorse it.

Matteo brightened. ‘Good idea!’ he said. We walked out of the kitchen into the little yard, which, luckily, I keep immaculate. I’ve even started growing herbs in large terracotta pots, which seems to be working well. In the afternoon sun it looked rather beautiful. Matteo nodded his approval and then we disappeared into the walk-in. I pulled the door to behind us and said with a polite gesture, ‘Take a seat. . .’

Matteo looked around the fridge, about the length of a shipping container with racking inside. He sat down on a sack of Yukon Gold potatoes and looked up at me. I leaned against the fridge door, smiling politely. I wondered what this was all about. You don’t go and have a conversation in an industrial fridge to make idle chit-chat. It’s chilly, but it has the advantage of privacy and nobody can eavesdrop.

Matteo looked up at me and brushed his long hair back from his face. There was a smattering of designer stubble on his upper lip and chin.

‘I was talking to Danny Ward, the head chef at the Cloisters – remember him?’

I nodded. Danny – a tubby, lecherous Scot with a look of infinite cunning, pebble-thick glasses, balding red hair and a whiny Fife accent – was the proud possessor of a Michelin star (Strickland would be extremely jealous) and I’d...