Chef Maurice and a Spot of Truffle (Chef Maurice Mysteries Book 1) (2 page)

As for local game, one just had to take a look at the nearby feral pigeon population to immediately turn vegetarian for the duration of dinner.

Arthur paused under a handy street lamp to rummage in his pockets for a pen and notebook. Horace took the opportunity to sniff out the latest canine gossip, then lifted one arthritic leg to add his own comment.

They were now down past the end of the village, where the street lamp budget had petered out. A movement in the shadows back up the street, near the end cottages, caught Arthur’s attention.

Tugging on Horace’s lead—Horace harrumphing as they went—Arthur inched forwards to get a closer look. There had been something about the way the shadow had moved . . .

As they neared the building closest to them, the left half of which belonged to old Mrs Eldridge, Arthur saw a tall figure, slim and clothed in black, slip around the far side of the cottage, the half that was rented by that forager fellow, Ollie Meadows. There was the sound of a door creaking open and closed, but no scrape of a key and, odder still, no lights came on inside.

Arthur considered his options. There was a small possibility that Ollie had just come home—young people these days kept all kinds of hours—and possessed excellent night vision plus the frugal desire to reduce his electricity bills. On the other hand . . .

He glanced down at Horace who, given the short pause, had taken the opportunity to lie down in the middle of the road and had started to snore.

No, Horace would be of little use if it came to confronting an opportunistic burglar. Better to—

Another indistinct form, prowling in the shadows, was approaching the cottage from the direction of the village. Except this second figure was of significantly more robust proportions, and wore a white jacket and dark checked trousers. Moonlight glinted off steel-capped boots.

The figure turned its head this way and that, and for a moment Arthur caught sight of a very large, very familiar moustache.

What in the devil—

“Maurice!” hissed Arthur, but his friend was too far away. Soon, the chef had crabbed his way around to the back of the cottage and disappeared too.

Arthur broke into a run, or at least what his knees declared to be a run at this point in life. Horace, waking up with a grunt, pulled himself to his paws and lolloped along after his master.

They were halfway to the cottage when they heard an almighty crash and a muffled cry.

“Maurice!” shouted Arthur.

The door banged open and a dark figure sprinted away over the back fields.

“Maurice!” shouted Arthur again, urging his knees onwards. As he neared the cottage, he could hear an increasingly disgruntled stream of inventive French swear words. He slowed his pace; no one with that command and volume of language could be severely injured.

He eventually located his friend in the kitchen, pinned down by a large upturned oak table. The floor was covered in dried plants, mushrooms and a handful of shrivelled apples. Arthur bent down gingerly, making certain to straighten his back, and heaved on one corner of the table. Chef Maurice scrambled out, still swearing heatedly.

“He came from nowhere! I walk in here, and boom”—he slapped his hands—“the table tips and I am trapped!
Quel désastre!
”

“Whoever he was, he was in here before you,” said Arthur, and quickly related what he had witnessed. “My question is—and do understand I probably don’t want to hear the answer but feel it necessary to ask anyhow—why are
you
here?”

Chef Maurice stuck out his chest. “I have come to collect my mushroom delivery. I already have come today, but the police lady, she would not allow me to take them.”

“So you thought it’d be a good idea to break in and steal them?”

“Steal?” Chef Maurice looked momentarily shocked. “
Mon ami
, I do not steal. I will of course pay Monsieur Ollie. When he appears again, of course.”

“Appears?” This did not sound good.

“He has not been seen since the Saturday,” said Chef Maurice, and proceeded with what Arthur presumed to be a rather sensationalised retelling of his morning adventures. “I tell Mademoiselle Lucy, it is
criminel
for him to miss a delivery like this!”

Arthur watched as the chef stooped down and started scooping fallen mushrooms into a handy paper bag.

“You do realise you’re disturbing a potential crime scene?”

“Bah, I would not have the need to disturb if the intruder had not attacked me with the table. I will simply liberate these delicious
champignons
to make use of before they go bad.”

“But why would anyone—apart from a nut like you, Maurice—want to break in here?” Arthur thought about what his friend had said about the broken lock. “Twice, even, assuming Friday’s break-in was the same person?”

Chef Maurice nodded. “That seems correct. Yet it is most strange that nothing was taken.”

Arthur wandered into the cottage’s other ground-floor room, a study-cum-living-room littered with books on plants and herbs, as well as partially labelled dried specimens and scraps of paper with scrawled notes and drawings.

He found Horace attempting to take a nap in a battered dog basket four times too small for him.

Nothing looked particularly valuable, although it was hard to tell amongst all this—

“Aha!
Regarde
,
mon ami!
” shouted a voice from the kitchen.

Arthur hurried back through to find Chef Maurice with his head wedged into the bottom of the fridge.

“There was a certain smell when I was here before,” he said, voice muffled by the fridge’s contents, “and this nose, it never lies!” In his hand, he waved what looked like a small lumpy potato.

“Um. Very good.” Arthur wondered how one was meant to test for concussion, and, more importantly, how to avoid explaining to the doctor exactly how one’s friend had come to be hit on the head by someone else’s kitchen table.

“Now, Maurice,” he said carefully, “put down that potato and let’s—”

“Potato?” Chef Maurice backed out of the fridge and gave the lump an appreciative sniff. “This is no potato!
Regarde
.”

Arthur opened his mouth to suggest rapid medical treatment, but stopped. A familiar, alluring, pungently earthy yet not unpleasant scent filled the air.

“Wait a minute, is that . . . a . . . ”

Chef Maurice gently scratched the surface of the lump and the wafting aroma got stronger. “You are correct,
mon ami
. If I am not mistaken, this is a very good, and very expensive, white Alba truffle. And look!”

He pulled a rough sack out of the fridge and held it open. Inside was a heap of fat, pristine white truffles. Altogether, they must have been worth tens of thousands of pounds.

Arthur had a bad feeling about this. But feelings could be dealt with later, once they got out of here.

First, he had to get Chef Maurice to let go of the sack of truffles.

* * *

Back in the moonlit kitchens of Le Cochon Rouge, Chef Maurice brushed the last specks of soil off his newly acquired prize, with all the love and care of an archaeologist in a hitherto undiscovered royal tomb.

It was only a single truffle, Arthur having forcibly restrained him from ‘liberating’ more than one sample, but it was a beauty, nonetheless. He lined a small wooden crate with straw, tucked the truffle in and surrounded it with eggs to keep it company.

Balancing on an upturned bucket, he placed the box reverentially onto the highest shelf in the walk-in fridge, then went to bed.

Perhaps if he’d known just how much trouble these truffles were going to cause in the very near future, he might not have drifted off so easily.

But as things were, sleep engulfed him like autumn fog the minute his head hit the pillow.

That night, he dreamed of truffles.

* * *

Hamilton was dreaming too. But his was not a good dream.

In the silence of his cell, his sleep-propelled legs kicked uselessly against the straw and shredded paper that littered the concrete floor.

It was a nightmare about bacon.

Again.

The next morning, Patrick and Alf, Le Cochon Rouge’s gangly commis chef, arrived at work to find Chef Maurice bustling round the kitchens, humming to himself.

“Everything all right, chef?” said Patrick. His boss was not, by any definition, a morning person. In fact, there were probably sloths deep in the Amazon jungle that could be considered more morning people than Chef Maurice. That said, sloths weren’t generally known for indulging in a large glass of cognac most evenings, which presumably helped their morning routine.

“Everything is very right.
Voilà
,
regarde ça!
” He held up a straw-lined box, filled with eggs and a lumpy beige object. “Which of you can tell me what this is?”

“Er. A potato?” said Alf, scratching his ear.

Patrick leaned in closer. It looked a lot like a dusty potato, true, but there was something about the smell . . .

“That’s not . . . an Alba truffle, is it?” Patrick had only seen one once, during a short stint at one of Paris’s top restaurants, and even then it hadn’t been as big as this one. They cost more than . . . well, more than he and Alf were getting paid, that was for certain.

“
Très bien.
” Chef Maurice picked up the truffle and waved it under his nose like a glass of single malt whisky. “And so, this morning, we will enjoy
une belle omelette aux truffes
! That is, after I can find the truffle grater . . . ”

As Chef Maurice conducted a whirlwind search around the kitchen, banging open cupboards and drawers and cursing loudly to the God of Lost Kitchen Implements, Alf sidled up to Patrick.

“I thought truffles were made of chocolate,” said the commis chef, out of the corner of his mouth. “How come chef wants to make a chocolate omelette?”

“It’s not a chocolate truffle, Alf. It’s a
truffle
truffle.”

Alf looked up at him blankly. Patrick sought another approach.

“It’s a type of mushroom. It grows underground.”

“So . . . like a potato, then?”

“No! Not like a potato. They grow on the roots of trees, it’s a sort of symbiotic relationship. They work together,” he added, seeing Alf’s forehead wrinkle. “The tree and the truffle.”

“Aaah, gotcha. So how come chef’s all excited about a mushroom?”

There was the sound of tumbling boxes from deep inside the storeroom.

“Well, for one thing, they’re really expensive,” said Patrick. “A truffle like that, from Alba—that’s in the north in Italy—can fetch up to a couple of thousand pounds per kilo, you know. They call it the King of Truffles.”

“Bah!” shouted an indistinct voice from the storeroom. “The white truffles of Alba, they cannot compare to the black truffle of Périgord.
La truffe noire
, she is the Queen of Truffles! The texture, the aromas . . . ”

“Black truffles cost less, though,” said Patrick to Alf. He raised his voice. “So you’re saying a queen is better than a king, chef?”

“
Absolument!
” Chef Maurice was a feminist, it seemed, at least when it came to truffles. “Aha! Now we can begin.” He emerged triumphantly, waving a small metal slicer.

“So, these truffles,” said Alf, as if trying out a new idea. “These expensive truffles. They just grow in the ground, yeah, like, in the woods?”

“If only,” said Patrick. “We don’t get this type around here in England. We only get the cheaper types, like summer truffles, and even then they’re nearly impossible to find.”

“Bah,” said Chef Maurice, “the English truffle. It is like the English wine. It cannot compare! Now, observe.”

He slid the truffle across the grater. Thin, almost translucent slivers fell to the plate, beigy-brown marbled by a network of thin white veins. An intense aroma of forest floor mixed with garlic drifted through the kitchen.

“So are we thinking of doing a truffle menu, chef?” said Patrick, picking up a slice and holding it up to the light.

“Eh?” Chef Maurice looked up from his slicing. “
Non
,
non
, this truffle is . . . a sample. From a supplier.”

“Ollie’s started dealing in truffles?” Patrick was surprised. Ollie was perennially strapped for cash, as he was wont to tell anyone he met. Brokering truffles was far beyond his usual cash flow capabilities.

“
Non
,
non
, a new supplier,” said Chef Maurice hastily. “But enough questions. Now we eat!”

He threw a large knob of butter into a pan, cracked half a dozen eggs into a bowl, and a minute later the three chefs stood around the table in silent anticipation, forks in hand, admiring a perfectly made wobbly omelette topped with slivers of the finest white truffle.

They dove in.

“But if we
did
have these truffles around these parts,” said Alf a while later, not being one to let a good idea go, “you mean anyone could just go around and pick them up?”

“It’s not that easy,” said Patrick. “You can’t see them from above ground. You need a special truffle dog, one that’s trained to sniff them out from under the earth. In fact, I heard in France they still use pigs to hunt truffles.”

“Pah, you do not want a pig,” said Chef Maurice, mouth full of truffled omelette. “They are big trouble. Always, it is better to have a dog.”

“How come, chef?” asked Alf.

Chef Maurice held up a finger. “With a dog, you can train the dog to give you the truffle after he has found it. With a pig, the pig also wants to eat the truffle. And you do not want to fight a pig for a truffle. I know truffle hunters who have lost more than one finger to a pig who is mad for truffles.”

Patrick tried to clear his mind of the mental image of Chef Maurice wrestling a pig for a truffle.

Chef Maurice held the truffle to his nose again, a thoughtful look on his face. Their impromptu breakfast had barely made a dent in it.

“So you’re definitely sure we don’t have these truffles here in Beakley?” said Alf, running a finger around the plate, then licking it.

Patrick expected some form of emphatic denial from his boss, perhaps along with some slur on the incapacity of England’s green and pleasant lands to produce a worthwhile crop of truffles. Instead, Chef Maurice murmured, “It does not appear to be so . . . ”