Dead Heat

1

I wondered if I was dying. I wasn’t afraid to die, but, such was the pain in my gut, I wished it would happen soon.

I’d had food poisoning before, but this time it was particularly unpleasant, with agonizing cramps and long bouts of retching. I had already spent most of Friday night kneeling on my bathroom floor with my head in the toilet, and, at one point, I became really concerned that the violence of the spasms in my abdomen might result in me losing my stomach lining altogether.

Twice I resolved to get myself to the telephone to summon help, only again to be doubled up by a fresh round of dry-heaving. Didn’t my bloody stupid muscles realize that my stomach was already empty, and had been so for ages? Why did this torture continue when there was nothing left in me to throw up?

Between the attacks, I sat sweating on the floor, leaning up against the bathtub, and tried to work out what had brought on this misery.

On Friday evening, I had been to a black-tie gala dinner in the Eclipse tent at Newmarket racetrack. I’d eaten a trio of cold smoked fish with a garlic mustard dill sauce for a starter, followed by a sliced black cherry stuffed chicken breast wrapped in pancetta with a wild chanterelle and truffle sauce, served with roasted red new potatoes and steamed snow peas, as the main course, and then a vanilla crème brûlée for dessert.

I knew intimately every ingredient of the meal.

I knew because rather than being a guest at the function, I had been the chef.

FINALLY, as my bathroom window changed from black to gray with the coming of the dawn, the tight knot in my stomach began to unwind and the cold clamminess of my skin slowly started to abate.

But the ordeal was not yet over, with what remained in my digestive tract now being forcefully ejected at the other end.

In due course, I crawled along the landing of my cottage to bed and lay there utterly exhausted; drained, dehydrated, but alive. The clock on my bedside table showed that it was ten past seven in the morning, and I was due to be at work at eight. Just what I needed.

I lay there, kidding myself that I would be all right in a little while, and another five minutes would not matter. I began to doze but was brought back to full consciousness by the ringing of my telephone, which sat on the table next to the clock. Seven-twenty.

Who, I thought, is ringing me at seven-twenty? Go away. Leave me to sleep.

The phone stopped. That’s better.

It rang again. Damn it. I rolled over and lifted the receiver.

“Yes,” I said with all the hurt expression in my voice from a night of agony.

“Max?” said a male voice. “Is that you?”

“One and the same,” I replied in my more usual tone.

“Have you been ill?” asked the voice. It was his emphasis on the word you that had me worried.

I sat up quickly. “Yes I have,” I said. “Have you?”

“Dreadful, isn’t it. Everyone I’ve spoken to has had the same.” Carl Walsh was technically my assistant. In fact, these days he was as often in charge of the kitchen as I was. The previous evening, as I had been working the tables and receiving all the plaudits, Carl had been busily plating up the meals and shouting at the staff in the kitchen tent. Now, it appeared, there may be no more plaudits, just blame.

“Who have you spoken to?” I asked.

“Julie, Richard, Ray and Jean,” he said. “They each called me to say that none of them are coming in today. And Jean said that Martin was so ill that they called an ambulance and he went to the hospital.”

I knew how he felt.

“How about the guests?” I asked. Carl had spoken only to my staff.

“I don’t know, but Jean said that when she went with Martin to the hospital the staff there knew all about the poisoning, as they called it, so he can’t have been the only one.”

Oh God! Poisoning two hundred and fifty of the great and the good of the racing world the night before the 2,000 Guineas was unlikely to be beneficial to my business.

Being a chef who poisons his clients was not a reputation to relish. The event at the racetrack was a special. My day job was my restaurant, the Hay Net, situated on the outskirts of Newmarket in Ashley Road: sixty or so lunches a day, from Sunday to Friday, and dinner for up to a hundred every night. At least, that’s what we’d served last week, prepoisoning.

“I wonder how many of the other staff are affected,” said Carl, bringing me back to the present. My restaurant had been closed for the evening, and all eleven of my regular employees had been working the dinner at the racetrack, together with twenty or so part-timers who had assisted in the kitchen and with waiting on tables. All the staff had eaten the same food as served at the function, while the guests were listening to the speeches.

“I’ve arranged five to do the job at the racetrack today,” I said. The thought of having to prepare lunch for forty of the sponsor’s guests sent fresh waves of nausea through my stomach and caused the reappearance of sweat on my brow.

I was due to provide a three-course meal in two of the large, glass-fronted private boxes in the grandstand. Delafield Industries, Inc., an American tractor-manufacturing multinational from Wisconsin, was the new sponsor of the first Classic race of the year, and they had offered me more money than I could refuse to provide their guests with fresh steamed English asparagus with melted butter, followed by traditional British steak-and-kidney pie, with a summer pudding for dessert. Thankfully, I had talked them out of the fish-and-chips, with mushy peas. MaryLou Fordham, the company marketing executive who had secured my services, was determined that the guests from “back home” in Wisconsin should experience the “real” England. She had been deaf to my suggestions that pâté de foie gras with brioche, followed by a salmon meunière, might be more appropriate.

“I’ll tell you right now,” MaryLou had declared, “we don’t want any of that French stuff. We want English food only.” I had sarcastically asked if she wanted me to serve warm beer rather than fine French wines, but she hadn’t understood my little joke. In the end, we had agreed on an Australian white and a Californian red. The whole meal had boredom written all over it, but they were paying, and paying very well. Delafield tractors and combine harvesters, it seemed, were all the rage in the American Midwest, and they were now trying hard to grab a share of the English market. Someone had told them that Suffolk was the prairie country of the UK, so here they were. That the “Delafield Harvester 2,000 Guineas” didn’t have quite the right ring to it didn’t seem to worry them one bit.

As things stood at the moment, they would be lucky to get anything to eat at all.

“I’ll call around and get back to you,” said Carl.

“OK,” I replied. He hung up.

I knew I should get up and get going. Forty individual steak-and-kidney pies wouldn’t make themselves.

I was still lying on my bed, dozing, when the phone rang again. It was five to eight.

“Hello,” I said sleepily.

“Is that Mr. Max Moreton?” said a female voice.

“Yes,” I replied.

“My name is Angela Milne,” said the voice formally. “I am the environmental health officer for Cambridgeshire.”

She suddenly had my full attention.

“We have reason to believe,” she went on, “that a mass poisoning has occurred at an event where you were the chef in charge of the kitchen. Is that correct?”

“Who are ‘we’?” I asked.

“Cambridgeshire County Council,” she said.

“Well,” I said, “I was the chef for a gala dinner last night. But I am unaware of any mass poisoning, and I would seriously question as to whether my kitchen would be responsible for one even if it existed.”

“Mr. Moreton,” she said, “I can assure you that a mass poisoning has occurred. Twenty-four persons were treated overnight at Addenbrooke’s hospital for acute food poisoning, and seven of those were admitted due to severe dehydration. They all attended the same function last evening.”

“Oh.”

“Oh indeed,” said Ms. Milne. “I require that the kitchen used to prepare the food for the event be closed immediately and that it be sealed for inspection. All kitchen equipment and all remaining foodstuffs to be made available for analysis, and all kitchen and waitstaff to be on hand to be interviewed as required.”

That might not be as easy as she thought.

“How are the seven in the hospital doing?” I asked.

“I have no idea,” she said. “But I would have been informed if there had been any fatalities.”

No news was good news.

“Now, Mr. Moreton”-she sounded like a headmistress addressing a miscreant pupil-“where exactly is the kitchen that produced the food for the event?”

“It no longer exists,” I said.

“What do you mean it no longer exists?” said Angela Milne.

“The dinner was held in the Eclipse tent at Newmarket racetrack,” I said. “The tent will be used as a bar during the race meeting today. The tent we used for the kitchen last night will be being used to store beer by now.”

“How about the equipment?”

“Everything was hired from a catering supply company from Ipswich. Tables, chairs, tablecloths, plates, cutlery, glasses, pots, pans, ovens, hot servers-the lot. My staff helped load it all back on the truck at the end of the event. I use them all the time for outside catering. They take everything back dirty and put it through their own steam cleaners.”

“Will it have been cleaned yet?” she asked.

“I’ve no idea,” I said, “but I wouldn’t be surprised. I have a fresh truck of equipment due to arrive at the racetrack today at eight o’clock.” I looked at the clock beside my bed-in precisely two minutes.

“I’m not sure I can permit you to prepare food again today,” she said rather sternly.

“Why not?” I said.

“Cross contamination.”

“The food for last night came from a different supplier than I am using today,” I said. “All the ingredients for last night’s menu came directly from a catering wholesaler and were prepared at the racetrack. Today’s ingredients were ordered through my restaurant, and it’s been in the cold-room there for the past two days.” The cold-room was a large walk-in refrigerator, kept at a constant three degrees centigrade.

“Did you get anything from the same wholesaler for the dinner?” she asked.

“No. The dry provisions would have come from the cash-and-carry near Huntingdon, the meat from my butcher in Bury St. Edmonds and the fresh fruit and vegetables from the wholesale greengrocer in Cambridge that I use regularly.”

“Who provided the food for the dinner last night?” she asked.

“Something like Leigh Foods, I think. I’ve got the details at my office. I don’t usually use them, but, then, I don’t often do a function for so many people.”

“How about the equipment company?”

“Stress-Free Catering Ltd,” I said, and gave her their telephone number. I knew it by heart.

The digits of my digital clock changed to 8:00, and I thought of the Stress-Free Catering truck arriving down the road with no one to meet it.

“Look, I’m sorry,” I said, “but I have to go now and start work. If that’s all right by you?”

“I suppose so,” she said. “I will come down to the racetrack to see you in about an hour or so.”

“The track is in Suffolk. Is that still your territory?” Actually, there were two racetracks at Newmarket; one is in Cambridgeshire and the other in Suffolk, with the county line running along the Devil’s Dyke between them. The dinner, and the lunch, were in Suffolk, at the Rowley Mile course.

“The sick people are in Cambridge, that’s what matters to me.” I thought I detected the faint signs of irritation, but maybe I was mistaken. “The whole area of food hygiene and who has responsibility is a nightmare. The county councils, the district councils and the Food Standards Agency all have their own enforcement procedures. It’s a mess.” I had obviously touched a nerve. “Oh yes,” she went on, “what exactly did people have to eat last night?”

“Smoked fish, stuffed chicken breast and crème brûlée,” I said.

“Perhaps it was the chicken,” she said.

“I do know how to cook chicken, you know. Anyway, the symptoms were too quick for salmonella poisoning.”

“What happened to the leftover food?” she asked.

“I’ve no idea,” I said. “I don’t think there was much left over. My staff are like a pack of wolves when it comes to leftovers and they eat whatever remains in the kitchen. Food left on people’s plates goes into a bin that would normally be disposed of by Stress-Free.”

“Did everyone eat the same?” she asked.

“Everyone except the vegetarians.”

“What did they have?”

“Tomato and goat’s cheese salad instead of the fish starter, then a broccoli, cheese and pasta bake. There was one vegan who had preordered grilled mushrooms to start, roasted vegetables for main course and a fresh fruit salad for dessert.”

“How many vegetarians?”

“I’ve no idea,” I said. “All I know is that we had enough of the pasta bake.”

“That seems a bit cavalier.”

“We did two hundred and fifty covers. I ordered two hundred and sixty chicken breasts, just in case some of them were a bit small or damaged.”

“What do you mean by damaged?”

“Bruised or torn. I didn’t know the supplier very well, so I decided to order a few more than I normally would. In the end they were all fine and we cooked the lot. Then there was enough vegetarian for at least twenty, plus the vegan. That should be about thirty to thirty-five extra meals over and above the guests. That feeds my staff. If there are only a few vegetarians among the guests, then my staff have to eat more of that. Look, I really must go now, I’m late already.”

“OK, Mr. Moreton,” she said. “Just one more thing.”

“Yes?”

“Were you ill in the night?”

“As a matter of fact, I was.” Horribly.

BY THE TIME I finally arrived at the racetrack, the man from Stress-Free Catering was well advanced with the unloading of the truck.

“Beginning to think I’d got the wrong day,” he said sarcastically by way of welcome. He rolled a large wire cage full of crockery out onto the hydraulic tailgate and lowered it to the ground with a clatter. Perhaps he could use the tailgate to lower me onto a bed. I worked out that I had been awake for more than twenty-six hours, and remembered that the KGB had used sleep deprivation as their primary form of torture.

“Was it you that collected the stuff from last night?” I asked.

“No chance,” he replied. “I had to leave Ipswich at seven and had to load everything before that. I’ve been at work since five-thirty.” He said it in an accusing manner, which was fair enough, I suppose. He wasn’t to know that I’d been up all night.

“Will it still be on the truck from last night?” I could see that today’s was a much-smaller version, for a much-smaller function, and there was no kitchen equipment.

“Doubt it,” he said. “First thing that’s done after a late function is to unload and steam-clean the lot, including the inside of the truck.”

“Even on a Saturday?”

“Absolutely,” he said. “Saturdays are the busiest day of the week for us. Weddings and all.”

“What happens to the food waste bins?” I asked him. Perhaps, I thought, some pig farmer somewhere is getting the leftovers delivered for his charges.

“We have an industrial-sized waste-disposal unit. You know, like those things in kitchen sinks, only bigger. Liquidizes all the leftover food and flushes it away down the drain. Then the bins are steam-cleaned like the rest. Why do you want to know?” he asked. “Lost something?”

Only my stomach, I thought. And my pride.

“Just wondered,” I said. Ms. Milne is not going to be happy. No kitchen to inspect and no leftover food to test. I wasn’t sure whether I should be pleased or disappointed. With none of the offending material to analyze, it couldn’t be proved that my food was responsible for the poisoning. But, then again, it couldn’t be proved that it wasn’t.

“Where do you want all this stuff?” he asked, waving a hand at the row of wire cages.

“Glass-fronted boxes 1 and 2 on the second floor of the Head On Grandstand,” I said.

“Right.” He went in search of the elevator.

As the name suggested, the Head On Grandstand sat near the finish line and looked back down the track, so that the horses raced almost directly towards it. The boxes had the best view of the racing and were the most sought after. The Delafield tractor makers had done well to secure a couple of boxes side by side for their big day.

I wandered past the magnificent Millennium Grandstand towards the racetrack manager’s office. The whole place was a hive of activity. Last-minute beer deliveries to the bars were in progress, while other catering staff were scurrying back and forth with trays of smoked salmon and cold meats. The groundsmen were putting the finishing touches to the flower beds and again mowing the already-short grass in the parade ring. An army of young men was setting up tables and chairs on the lawn in front of a seafood stall, ready for the thousands of racegoers who would soon be arriving for their day out. Everything looked perfect, and normal. It was only me that was different. At least, that’s what I thought at the time.

I put my head through the open door of the manager’s office. “Is William around?” I asked a large woman who was half standing next to and half sitting on the desk. William Preston was the racetrack manager and had been a guest at the function the previous evening.

“He won’t be in ’til eleven, at the earliest,” she said.

That sounded ominous, I thought. The racetrack manager not being in until eleven o’clock on 2,000 Guineas day.

“He’s had a bad night, apparently,” she went on. “Something he ate didn’t agreed with him. Bloody nuisance, if you ask me. How am I meant to cope on my own? I don’t get paid enough to cope on my own.”

The telephone on the desk beside her ample bottom rang at that moment and saved me from further observations. I withdrew and went back to the delivery truck.

“Right,” said the man from Stress-Free, “all your stuff’s up in the boxes. Do you want to check before signing for it?”

I always checked deliveries. All too often, I had found that the inventory was somewhat larger than the actuality. But today I decided I’d risk it and scribbled on his offered form.

“Right,” he said again. “I’ll see you later. I’ll collect at six.”

“Fine,” I replied. Six o’clock seemed a long way off. Thank goodness I had already done most of the preparation for the steak-and-kidney pies. All that was needed was to put the filling into the individual ceramic oval pie dishes, slap a pastry cover over the top and shove them into a hot oven for about thirty-five minutes. The fresh vegetables had already been blanched and were sitting in my cold-room at my restaurant, and the asparagus was trimmed and ready to steam. The individual small summer puddings had all been made on Thursday afternoon and also sat waiting in the cold-room. They just needed to be turned out of their molds and garnished with some whipped cream and half a strawberry. MaryLou wasn’t to know that the strawberries came from southwest France.

As a rule, I didn’t do “outside catering,” but Guineas weekend was different. For the past six years, it had been my major marketing opportunity of the year.

The clientele of my restaurant were predominantly people involved in the racing business. It was a world I knew well and thought I understood. My father had been a moderately successful steeplechase jockey, and then a much more successful racehorse trainer, until he was killed in a collision with a truck carrying bricks on his way to Liverpool for the Grand National when I was eighteen. I would have been with him if my mother hadn’t insisted that I stay at home and study for my A level exams. My elder half brother, Toby, ten years my senior, had literally taken over the reins of the training business, and was still making a living from it, albeit a meager one.

I had spent my childhood riding ponies and surrounded by horses, but I was never struck with Toby’s love of all things equine. As far as I was concerned, both ends of a horse were dangerous and the middle was uncomfortable. One end kicks and the other end bites. And I had never been able to understand why riding had to be done at such an early hour on cold, wet mornings, when most sane people would be fast asleep in a nice warm bed.

More than thirteen years now had passed since the fateful day when a policeman appeared at the front door of our house to inform my mother that what was left of my father’s Jaguar, with him still inside it, had been identified as belonging to a Mr. George Moreton, late of the parish of East Hendred.

I had worked hard for my A levels to please my mother and was accepted at Surrey University to study chemistry. But my life was changed forever, not only by the death of my father but by what should have been my gap year and turned out to be my gap life.

I never went to Surrey or to any other university. The plan had been that I would work for six months to earn enough to go traveling in the Far East for the next six months. So I went to work as a pots-and-pans washer-upper, beer-crate carrier and general dogsbody at a country pub/restaurant/hotel overlooking the river Thames in Oxfordshire that belonged to a widowed distant cousin of my mother’s. The normal designation for such an employee is kitchen porter, but this is such a derogatory term in catering circles that my mother’s cousin referred to me as the temporary assistant undermanager, which was more of a mouthful and less accurate. The word manager implies a level of responsibility. The only responsibility I was given was to rouse the chambermaid each morning to serve the early-morning teas to the guests in the seven double bedrooms. At first, I did this by banging on her bedroom door for five minutes until she reluctantly opened it. But after a couple of weeks the task became much easier, since I simply had to push her out of the single bed that we had started sharing.

However, working in a restaurant kitchen, even at the kitchen sink, sparked in me a passion for food and its presentation. Soon, I had left the washing up to others and I started an apprenticeship under the watchful eye of Marguerite, the fiery, foulmouthed head cook. She didn’t like the term chef. She had declared that she cooked and was therefore a cook.

When my six-month stint was up, I just stayed. By then, I had been installed as Marguerite’s assistant, and was making everything from the starters to the desserts. In the afternoons, while the other staff caught up on their sleep, I would experiment with flavors, spending most of my earnings on ingredients at Witney farmers’ market.

In the late spring, I wrote to Surrey University, politely asking if my enrollment could be deferred for yet another year. Fine, they said, but I think I already knew I wasn’t going back to life in laboratories and lecture halls. When, in late October of the following year, Marguerite swore once too often at my mother’s distant cousin and was fired, my course in life was set. Just four days short of my twenty-first birthday, I took over the kitchen, with relish, and set about the task of becoming the youngest chef ever to win a Michelin star.

For the next four years, the establishment thrived, my confidence growing at the same spectacular rate as the restaurant’s reputation. However, I was becoming acutely aware that my mother’s cousin’s bank balance was expanding rather more rapidly than my own. When I broached the subject, she accused me of being disloyal, and that was the beginning of the end. Shortly after, she sold out to a national small-hotel chain without telling me and I suddenly found I had a new boss who wanted to make changes in my kitchen. My mother’s cousin had also failed to tell the buyers that she had no contract with me, so I packed my bags and left.

While I decided what to do next, I went home and cooked dinner parties for my mother, who seemed somewhat surprised that I could, in spite of reading about my Michelin success in the newspapers. “But, darling,” she’d said, “I never believe what I read in the papers.”

It had been at one of the dinner parties that I was introduced to Mark Winsome. Mark was an entrepreneur in his thirties who had made a fortune in the cell phone business. I had joined the guests for coffee, and he was explaining that his problem was finding good opportunities to invest his money. I had jokingly said that he could invest in me, if he liked, by setting me up in my own restaurant. He didn’t laugh or even smile. “OK,” he’d said. “I’ll finance everything, and you have total control. We split the proceeds fifty-fifty.”

I had sat there with my mouth open. Only much later did I find out that he had badgered my mother for ages to organize the meeting between us so that he could make that offer, and I had fallen into the trap.

And so six years ago now, with Mark’s money, I had set up the Hay Net, a racing-themed restaurant on the outskirts of Newmarket. It hadn’t especially been my plan to go to Newmarket, but it was where I found the first appropriate property, and the closeness to racing’s headquarters was simply a bonus.

At first, business had been slow, but, with the attendees of the special dinners and lunches around the race meetings spreading the word, the restaurant was soon pretty full every night, with a need to book more than a week in advance for midweek and at least a month ahead for a Saturday night. The wife of one major trainer in the town even started paying me a retainer to have a table for six booked every Saturday of the year, except when they were away in Barbados in January. “Much easier to cancel than to book,” she’d said. But she rarely canceled, and often needed the table expanded to eight or ten.

My phone rang in my pocket.

“Hello,” I said.

“Max, you had better come down to the restaurant.” It was Carl. “Public Health has turned up.”

“She said she’d meet me at the racetrack,” I said.

“These two are men,” he replied.

“Tell them to come down here,” I said.

“I don’t think they will,” he said. “Apparently, someone has died, and these two are sealing the kitchen.”