Chef Maurice and the Wrath of Grapes (Chef Maurice Culinary Mysteries Book 2) (14 page)

“We?” Chef Maurice looked indignant.

“You honestly didn’t know anything about this passageway?” said PC Lucy to Gilles, trying to keep the scepticism out of her voice.

“I assure you, madam, I hadn’t the slightest inkling. If I had, I would have insisted most strongly that Sir William brick it up for security reasons. It quite invalidates our insurance policy, I’m sure.”

PC Lucy glanced around the corridor at the row of closed guest room doors. Any of the visitors could have slipped out that evening and hurried down these steps . . .

“Well, clearly, someone else knew about its existence.”

“So it seems,” said Gilles. He looked a trifle ill.

“Which of last night’s guests would be most familiar with the layout of Bourne Hall?”

“Lady Margaret has been visiting the Hall for decades, of course. Mr Lafoute too,” said Gilles, with some reluctance. “Mr Resnick has stayed with us several times in the past few years, and Mrs Lafoute, though she has not been a frequent visitor thus far, did spend a fortnight at the Hall soon after her marriage to Mr Lafoute.”

“So, all of the guests, except for Monsieur Paloni, had been often enough a visitor to have the potential for knowledge of this staircase?” said Chef Maurice.

“Looks like it,” said PC Lucy, notepad out.

“Hallo, what’s this?” said Arthur, bending over Waffles, who was pawing at something just inside the archway. It was a white handkerchief, now grey with dust.

“It must be from the murderer!” Chef Maurice grabbed the handkerchief. “Perhaps we can trace the
parfum
or cologne—” He stuck the cloth to his nose, inhaled deeply, then exploded into a fit of sneezes.

“Wait!” PC Lucy grabbed the handkerchief before Chef Maurice could blow his nose on a key piece of evidence. Arthur, sighing, proffered his own blue-checked handkerchief to his friend.

She turned the handkerchief over in her hands. It was made of stiff cotton, of very good quality. In one corner, embroidered in light grey thread, was an initial.

A curly letter ‘A’.

The next morning, Arthur and Chef Maurice caught the 7.34 a.m. train from Beakley, changing at Oxford, to London Paddington. Arthur found himself a seat wedged in amongst the morning commuters, who drooped over their newspapers like rows of thirsty sunflowers. To his left, a young man in a navy blue suit was dozing with his head against the window; to his right, a middle-aged woman in purple tweed was ferociously consuming the day’s financial pages, throwing the occasional scathing look at the large picnic hamper on Arthur’s lap.

He tried to avoid her gaze and buried his nose in the recently released autobiography of Keith Savage, often dubbed ‘the angriest chef in Britain’. This was his second book to date, titled
Seared, Scarred and Savaged: Tales from the World’s Best, Greatest and Most Awesome Kitchen
.

(The editor who’d tentatively suggested to Savage that the book’s subtitle wasn’t entirely accurate, and possibly open to litigious challenge, was later found hiding on the ledge outside his office window, and had to be coaxed back down under the promise of never having to work with celebrity chefs again. He was also given carte blanche to commission a series of books on cupcakes.)

“
Excusez-moi
,
excusez-moi
, ooops,
pardon
,
madame
 . . . ”

Arthur watched Chef Maurice squeeze and elbow his way back down the carriage, accompanied by a series of yelps and discontented muttering.

“Any luck finding the sandwich trolley?”

“
Non
, but I did see Mademoiselle Lucy with one of her
collègues
. But do not worry, I make sure that they did not see me.”

Arthur looked up at his friend’s large pork-pie hat (which he liked to wear on days out), giant moustache and big heavy winter coat.

“We can but hope.”

“But to be sure we reach Madame Ariane before they do, perhaps we should command a taxi to her hotel?”

“Not a bad idea.”

PC Lucy had expressly forbidden them to engage in any amateur investigations of their own. Which, as Chef Maurice had pointed out, meant they’d simply have to get on with their investigating in a more covert manner.

The lid of the picnic hamper swung up, and a little pink snout poked out.

The woman on Arthur’s right gave a shriek. “What
is
that?”

“He is a micro-pig,
madame
,” said Chef Maurice, extracting a handful of sow nuts from his pocket and offering them to the snout, which snuffled them up greedily. “His name is Hamilton.”

“I . . . I refuse to sit here next to someone carrying
livestock
!” The woman struggled to her feet and pushed her way down the aisle.

Chef Maurice sat down in the newly vacated seat and made himself comfortable. Hamilton had now fully pushed back the hamper lid, and was staring around the train carriage with great interest.

“Are you sure we should have brought Hamilton with us?” said Arthur, handing the picnic hamper over to Chef Maurice and jiggling his leaden legs. Hamilton might be a micro-pig, but he had definitely put on weight since Chef Maurice had adopted him a few months ago.

“They say it is important for animals to have a variety of stimulation,” said Chef Maurice firmly.

Hamilton, for his part, having ascertained that none of the dozy humans around him were going to give him any more sow nuts, ducked back inside the hamper to carry on with his morning nap.

In her suite at The Belvedere, Piccadilly, Ariane Lafoute greeted them with perfumed kisses and led them over to the low seats by the windows. She did not seem overly concerned by the presence of her tiny third guest, and even poured some Evian into a bowl for Hamilton to lap up.

It was a crisp December day outside, and from their vantage point, they could look down and watch the tiny muffled-up passers-by hurry along Lower Regent Street.

“A coffee?” said Ariane, waving her hand at the silver coffee pot. She was wearing a tight black turtleneck, a discreet string of pearls, and well-cut grey tailored trousers.

“With three sugars,
merci
. You have recovered,
madame
, from the terrible events of the last Saturday?”

Ariane gave a little shrug, as if to suggest that the murder of one’s host happened all the time back where she came from. “Bertie is most upset, of course. He and Sir William were very close. But for me, I cannot say I knew him well.”

This was a stark change from the trembling young woman they had last encountered a few days before. Ariane appeared to have regained full control of her icy poise, and the tilt of her head discouraged further enquiries into her well-being.

The coffee table was strewn with papers, including the architectural plans they had seen in the Lafoutes’ room at Bourne Hall.

“May I?” said Arthur, indicating the building drawings. Ariane nodded vaguely, then resumed staring out of the window, chin rested on delicate wrist.

Chef Maurice wiggled a detailed sketch of a wine label out of the pile. The label read:
La Fleur de Lafoute
.

“Ah, you plan,
madame
, to make a second wine?”

Ariane gave him a curt nod. “It is time. All the best chateaux make not just one, but two or even three wines. My
grand-mère
, she has insisted for a long time that all our grapes go into the one wine, Chateau Lafoute. But with modern techniques, our winemaking can now be done with much greater precision. Especially”—she shifted the papers to show a detailed cross-section of the new proposed winery building—“if we can install these smaller fermentation tanks, to allow each parcel of land to ferment and mature separately, we will be allowed more control in the final blending. And by separating our production into two wines, we can achieve even greater quality for our first wine.”

A change had come over Ariane. There was a sparkle in her eyes and a fiery warmth in her voice that Arthur had not heard before.

Chef Maurice had noticed it too. “I see you are most passionate about your wines,
madame
.”

“If I am not, who will be?” replied Ariane, with some vehemence. “My
grand-mère
, she is ninety-two. Soon it will come a time that I must lead the chateau.”

“And your husband?”

She waved a hand. “Before we were married, he saw it all as a game, a ‘hobby’,” she said, deploying the word with distaste. “But now I have made him come to see, it is not play, it is work. Hard work! It is not simply a job. To make good wine, it must consume your life.”

Arthur flipped over another sheet. It was a colour sketch of rows and rows of gleaming fermentation tanks and a new maturation room with oak barrels, piled three high, stretching as far as the artist’s eye could see.

“Very attractive. I hope the investor meetings are going well?” said Arthur, remembering what Bertie had said about the couple’s purpose for being in London.

Ariane’s lip curled. “These business people, they have no vision. They want to see a return in two years, five years. But a great wine may not show its beauty for decades. The replanting of vines can take ten, twenty years to be truly ready. They are too impatient. They have no understanding.”

“And Sir William?” asked Chef Maurice. “Did he offer his support?”

Ariane looked up sharply. “For a long time, I have asked my husband to speak with him. Sir William has been an admirer of the chateau for years. I was sure that he would have . . . ” Her voice trailed off. “But my husband, he would act strange, very proud in this matter. He refused to even approach him with the subject.”

Arthur thought about the note they’d found in Sir William’s pocket. Perhaps it was at this point that Ariane had decided to explore other modes of persuasion.

“But it does not matter now,” finished Ariane with another wave of her hand.

“You have more meetings?” said Chef Maurice.

Ariane paused, then nodded, slightly uncertain. “There are a few . . . that I have hopes for.”

There was the distant
ping
of the lift in the hallway, and familiar voices could be heard approaching the suite’s double doors.

“—seen a hotel like this, miss. Look, they even have sweets left out on the little tables, that’s fancy—”

“Alistair, this is a police investigation, not Disneyland.”

“Yes, miss. But do you think we might have time to see
Les Misérables
afterwards—”

“Shhh! Now if you could
try
acting like a police officer, and not like a kid on a school trip . . . ”

There was an official-sounding rat-a-tat-tat on the door.

Ariane raised a perfectly shaped eyebrow at Arthur. “Your police, they are like the hunting dogs. They sniff and sniff,” she said, uncrossing her legs and drifting over to the door.

“Mrs Lafoute? I’m PC Gavistone, we spoke yesterday afternoon on the phone? I hope I’m not disturbing you—” PC Lucy stopped as she noticed Arthur and Chef Maurice sitting there with coffee cups in their hands.

“No, not at all, please join us,” said Ariane.

PC Lucy took a seat at the end of the sofa, while PC Alistair sat down on the footrest, gazing around the suite with wide-eyed amazement. Hamilton, knowing a soft touch when he saw one, head-butted the freckled young man on the ankle and gave a pointed look at the pile of apples in the carved fruit bowl.

“I won’t keep you long, Mrs Lafoute, seeing as you have guests,” said PC Lucy, glaring at Chef Maurice and Arthur.

“By all means, please,” said Ariane. “Your work is important, and the sooner you have discovered who could have committed such a grave crime . . . ”

There was a wet crunch-crunch-crunch sound from under the table. PC Alistair looked up guiltily, an apple core in his hand.

“This may sound odd,” said PC Lucy, with another glare at Chef Maurice, “but what do you know about a concealed passageway between the wine cellar and the upper floor of Bourne Hall?”

“Passageway?” Ariane looked confused. “I had not heard of such a thing.”

“The entrance was hidden behind the bookcase, the one on the landing between Sir William’s bedroom and the guest rooms.”

“The English, they are so strange,” said Ariane, with a little sigh. “To have a cellar and install such security, then to have a secret entrance hidden behind some books? It is madness.”

“So you didn’t know anything about it?”

“Not at all. But why do you a—” Ariane stopped. The implication of a secret way down to the cellars, the scene of the horrific crime, had clearly just sunk in. She looked, thought Arthur, suddenly scared.

“You think that is how . . . ” she started.

PC Lucy pulled a clear plastic bag out of her jacket. It was the white handkerchief from yesterday. “Do you recognise this?” she said, placing the bag on the table. “It was found in the entrance to the passageway.”

Ariane stared at it, mesmerised, her hand stretched out to pick it up. For a moment, an odd expression—confusion? anger?—flitted across her face, then she nodded slowly.

“I cannot be sure, but this appears to belong to my husband,” she said.

“But why then is there the ‘A’?” said Chef Maurice, before PC Lucy could jump in.