Dead Heat

8

K idney beans!”

“Yes, kidney beans, probably red kidney beans. According to the tests done on those customers taken to the hospital, there was something called phytohemagglutinin in the dinner and that’s what made everyone ill. It’s also known as ‘kidney bean lectin.’”

It was late Saturday afternoon, and I was having a meeting with Carl and Gary in my office prior to us opening for dinner. We didn’t do lunches on Saturday. Too many of my clientele were away at the races.

“But there weren’t any kidney beans in that dinner,” said Carl.

“That’s what I thought,” I said. “But, apparently, there were samples taken from sixteen different individuals, and this stuff was in all of them.”

Gary and Carl looked at each other. “Beats me,” said Gary.

“Where in the dinner could they have been?” asked Carl.

“That,” I said, “is what I intend to find out. And then I’ll find out who put them there.”

“Surely you’re not saying that someone poisoned everyone on purpose?” said Carl.

“What else can I think?” I replied. “Consider the facts. Loads of those who ate the dinner were ill, including me. Tests on sixteen of them show this phyto stuff in them. The stuff made them ill, and it only comes from kidney beans. Doesn’t take a genius to conclude that there must have been kidney beans in the dinner. I know I didn’t put any in the dinner. So, QED, someone else must have, and it must have been done on purpose to make people ill.”

“But why?” said Gary.

“I don’t know.” I was exasperated. “But it had to be done by someone who had access to the kitchen.”

“Loads of people had access to the kitchen,” said Carl. “We didn’t exactly have a guard on duty. There were all the kitchen staff from the agency, and all the waiters too.”

“And there were others from the racetrack caterers there as well,” I said. “But, believe me, I intend to find out who it was.”

“But wouldn’t you see red kidney beans in anything?” said Gary.

“I thought that myself,” I said. “But you wouldn’t if they were chopped up very finely.”

“How many beans would you need to poison over two hundred people?” said Carl. “Surely there would be so many it would affect the taste?”

“I looked it up on the U.S. Food and Drug Administration Web site on the Internet,” I said. “It says there that four or five raw beans are enough to make people quite ill. It also says that if the beans are heated to not more than eighty degrees centigrade, they are five times as poisonous as the raw ones. That means just a single bean per person could be enough. And it also says that the attack rate is one hundred percent-that means everyone who ate the beans would be ill.”

“But where were they?” said Gary.

“I think they must have been put in the sauce,” I said. No one, I thought, would taste a single partially cooked kidney bean, especially if it was finely chopped up and mixed with the chanterelle mushrooms, the truffles and the shallots, not to mention the white wine, the brandy, the garlic and the cream.

“But you have to reduce the wine in that sauce,” said Carl. What he meant by “reduce” was that the sauce was boiled to remove some of the excess liquid by evaporation. “Surely that would render the beans harmless even if they were in there?”

“They had to have been added after the reduction,” I said. “That sauce had cream in it to add richness. It wasn’t boiled after the cream was added.” To prevent it curdling in the acidity of the wine.

I remembered back to the dinner. In order to produce enough, I had used four large aluminum cooking pots to produce the sauce, similar to domestic kitchen saucepans only bigger, with handles on each side. The ones that Stress-Free Catering had provided would each hold about six liters of liquid, if full. I had estimated that we would require fifty milliliters of sauce per person. So for two hundred and fifty servings, I had needed twelve and a half liters of sauce. I had made it in four separate batches, just in case a batch curdled. In the end, all four batches had been fine, and there had been plenty left over. I remembered it well, as I loved the sauce and had poured extra on my own dinner. Just my bad luck.

The four half-full pots had stood in the serving area, where we had made up the dinners on the plates with the sliced stuffed chicken breasts, the roasted new potatoes, the snow peas and the sauce, with a sprig of parsley on the potatoes to garnish. The pots hadn’t been directly heated on a range for some minutes, as I had judged that they were hot enough and would maintain their temperature throughout the serving if simply placed on top of the hot stainless steel servers. I had told one of the temporary kitchen staff to stir the sauce to prevent it from separating. He had been of little use for anything else, and I remembered him because it had taken me some time to explain what was required because he didn’t understand English very well. I had assumed at the time that he was Polish or Czech, or from some other eastern European country, as so many staff in the catering business seem to be these days.

I reckoned there had been about a ten-minute window when the beans could have been added to the sauce between being moved from the kitchen and the service. At that time, I mostly had been around the corner in the kitchen or out in the dining area. Either way, I had been out of sight of the pots during that vital time. Due to the positioning between the kitchen and the dining room, almost any of the staff that night could have had the chance to add something to the pots. But it had to have been someone who knew the place, and surely my stirrer or someone else would have seen them. It still made little sense to me.

“So what do you suggest we do?” said Gary.

“Nothing we can do,” I said, “except carry on as before. We have sixty-five booked for dinner, and, so far, no one has called today to cancel.”

The telephone on my desk rang. Why didn’t I keep my stupid mouth shut, I thought, as I lifted the receiver.

“Hello,” I said. “Hay Net restaurant.”

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

“Certainly is,” I said.

“Good. This is Emma Kealy. I understand you saw George at Elizabeth’s funeral yesterday.”

“Yes,” I said, “I did. I’m so sorry about Elizabeth.”

“Yes,” she said. “Thank you. A dreadful thing, especially for poor Neil.” She paused for a moment. “But life has to go on for the rest of us.”

“How can I help?” I asked her.

“Well, George tells me that he canceled our booking for tonight.”

“Yes, he did. He said to leave it for a while.”

“Stupid old fool,” she said. “We still have people staying tonight, and there’s no food in the house. What does he think I’m going to do? Go to the Raj of India?” The Raj of India was a seedy take-out curry place on Palace Street. It would never have crossed my mind that Emma Kealy would have even known about it, let alone thought of going there. “Can you fit four of us in for tonight at eight-thirty?” she said imploringly. “I will perfectly understand if we can’t have our usual table.”

“Of course we can fit you in,” I said. “Look forward to seeing you.”

“Great. See you later, then.” I could hear the relief in her voice. I wondered how much of a row had gone on between her and George.

I put the phone down and looked at Gary and Carl. “Four more bookings for tonight,” I said, smiling. Thank goodness for the Kealys.

The other two went into the kitchen to start preparing for dinner while I sat at my desk to complete some paperwork. I shuffled the stack of already-tidy papers, checking that there were no outstanding bills that had to be paid immediately. I came across the delivery note from Leigh Foods, the supplier I had used for the gala dinner. I looked through the ingredients again, as if I could have missed the kidney beans before. They weren’t there. Of course they weren’t there. I would swear on my father’s grave that I had not put any damn kidney beans in that dinner.

I called Suzanne Miller on her cell.

“Hi, Suzanne,” I said, “Max Moreton here. Sorry to disturb you on a Saturday afternoon. Do you have a minute?”

“Fire away,” she said. “I’m in my office anyway. We’ve had a wedding here today, so I’m still working.”

“I didn’t know you had weddings at the racetrack,” I said.

“Oh yes,” she said. “Most Saturdays during the summer, when there’s no racing, of course. We use the Hong Kong Suite for the ceremony and then, often, the Champions Gallery restaurant for the reception. It works quite well.”

“You live and learn,” I said.

“How can I help you?” she asked.

“I wonder if I could have a copy of the guest list from last Friday night?”

“Sure,” she said, “no problem. I have it on my computer. I’ll e-mail it to you now.”

“Thanks,” I said. “There is another thing. Do you have a list of the names of all the temporary staff that you found through the agency?”

“Not their names,” she said. “The agency just gave me the number that would be there, not their names.”

“But, you remember, some of them failed to turn up, and we had to draft in a few of your own staff at the last minute,” I said. “Do you, by chance, have the names of those that didn’t come, and also the names of your staff that we drafted in?”

“I’ll e-mail the agency’s phone number and you can ask them directly,” she said. “Why do you need to know the names of my staff?”

How much should I tell her? She had been quick to hang me out to dry when the letter from Caroline Aston had first appeared on her desk. Would she now simply think I was looking for a scapegoat?

“I have reason to believe that something may have been put into the dinner that shouldn’t have been there,” I said, “and I am trying to determine the names of everyone who was there and had access to the food so I can find out who was responsible.”

There was a long pause at the other end of the line.

“Are you saying that you think my staff are to blame for making people ill?” Suzanne said rather frostily.

“No,” I replied hastily. “I’m not saying that, and I don’t think it. Your staff were all last-minute replacements, so it is impossible for them to be the ones.” I thought it most unlikely that anyone could buy and prepare a large number of kidney beans on such short notice. “I would just like their names so that I can eliminate them from my inquiry.” I was beginning to sound like a policeman.

“I will look it up,” she said. “But I will have to ask them first if they are happy for you to have their names.”

“That’s fine by me,” I said.

“Do you really think that the food was poisoned on purpose?”

“Suzanne,” I said, “I know it sounds crazy, but I have absolutely no other explanation. Hospital tests have shown beyond doubt that there was stuff in that dinner that I didn’t put in there, so what am I to think?”

“What stuff?” she asked.

“I’d rather not say,” I said. I don’t know why I thought it might be useful to keep some of the facts secret. Perhaps I had hopes of catching out the culprit by him saying “kidney beans” when I hadn’t mentioned it. I was sure that I had once read a detective novel when that sort of thing had happened and the policeman had instantly solved the case.

“All sounds very cloak-and-dagger to me,” she said. “And a bit far-fetched as well, if you ask me. Why would anyone want to poison so many people anyway?”

“I don’t know why,” I said. “Why do so many people have the urge to break things? Perhaps it was just done for kicks. There’s no logic to many things.”

“Are the police looking for whoever did it?” she asked.

“Not that I’m aware of,” I said. “I think the police are preoccupied looking for last Saturday’s bomber.”

“You’re probably right,” she said. “They’re certainly still here at the racetrack, and we nearly had to cancel today’s wedding because of them, but, thankfully, we don’t use the Head On Grandstand. That’s now going to be closed for months. But surely you should inform the police if you have suspicions about the dinner?”

“Maybe I will,” I said, although privately I thought they would believe the same as Angela Milne, that I had simply served undercooked kidney beans and was not prepared to admit it.

“What else do you intend to do?” she asked.

“Probably nothing,” I said. “A bit of food poisoning that didn’t do any permanent harm to anyone is not really important compared to the bombing.” And, I thought, it might be better for my reputation, and for the restaurant, if I were to let the incident slowly fade from people’s memory rather than keep stirring it up.

“Let me know if I can be of any help,” said Suzanne.

“Thanks, I will,” I said. “And don’t forget the guest list and the agency information.”

“On their way to you right now.” I could hear her tapping away on a keyboard. “Gone,” she said. “Should be with you any moment.”

“Brilliant. Thanks.” We hung up, and I turned to my computer.

YOU’VE GOT MAIL, it told me, and, sure enough, with a couple of clicks, the guest list from the gala dinner appeared before my eyes. How did we function before e-mail?

I scanned through the list of names, but I didn’t actually know what I was looking for, or why, so I printed it out and left it lying on my pile of stuff to be dealt with. I logged on to the Internet instead.

I made a search for RPO and soon I was delving into the details of concerts and operas of the Royal Philharmonic. Sure enough, the concert program at the Royal Festival Hall was widely advertised, and, if I wished, I could purchase a ticket with just a couple of clicks of my computer mouse. I noticed that tonight, and for most of the next week, the orchestra was performing the works of Sibelius and Elgar at Carnegie Hall in New York City. Lucky Caroline Aston, I thought. I had been to New York in the springtime the previous year and had loved every moment.

I looked at Ms. Aston’s telephone number on the notepad where I had written it on Wednesday morning when Bernard Sims had called. If she was in New York, she wouldn’t be at home now. Three times I punched her number into my phone without actually pushing the button for the final digit. I wondered if there might be a voice message, so I could hear what she sounded like. The fourth time, I completed the number and let it ring twice before I lost my nerve and hung up. Maybe she didn’t live alone and someone would be there to answer after all.

I played with the phone for a while longer and then called the number again. Someone answered after a single ring.

“Hello,” said a female voice.

Oops, I thought, no recorded voice message. A real live speaking person.

“Is this Caroline Aston?” I asked, confident in the knowledge that she was, in fact, three thousand miles away.

“Yes,” she replied. “Can I help you?”

“Er,” I said, sounding like an idiot, “would you like to buy some double glazing?”

“No thank you,” she said. “Good-bye!” She hung up.

Stupid, I thought, as I sat there with my heart thumping in my chest. Really stupid. I put the phone down and it rang immediately.

“Hello,” I said.

“Would you like to buy some double glazing?”

“Excuse me?” I said.

“See. Why do you think I would want to buy double glazing from someone I don’t know who rings me up out of the blue? You don’t like it and neither do I.”

I didn’t know what to say. “I’m sorry.” It sounded ridiculous even to me.

“Who are you anyway?” she said. “You’re not very good at selling.”

“How did you get my number?” I asked.

“Caller ID,” she said. “I didn’t think you people would have a number that was visible. More important, how did you get my number?”

I could hardly tell her the truth, but whatever else I said now was going to get me into deeper trouble. I decided to retreat gracefully.

“Look, I’m sorry, but I have to go now. Good-bye.” I hung up quickly. My hands were sweating. Really, really stupid!

I went out into the kitchen and found Carl trying to explain rather sarcastically to one of the kitchen porters that it was indeed necessary for him to get all the old food off the frying pans when washing up.

In spite of the name, kitchen porters rarely carry things. They mostly spend their lives up to their elbows in hot water washing up the pots and pans. We had two of them at the Hay Net. At least, that was the plan. But all too often a kitchen porter would be there one minute and gone the next. No explanation, no good-bye, just gone, never to return. The current incumbents of the posts included a man in his fifties whose father had come to England from Poland in 1940 to fight with the RAF against the Nazis. He had unpronounceable Polish names, with lots of ps and zs, but he spoke with a broad Essex accent, and was always “tinking.” “I tink I’ll go hame na,” he’d say. Or, “I tink I’ll ’ave a cap o’ tea.” He’d been with us for nearly a year, much longer than the norm, but he mostly kept himself to himself and communicated rarely with the other staff.

The other porter was called Jacek (pronounced Ya-check), and he was now in his fourth week and seemingly not very good at scrubbing the frying pans. He was more typical of those now sent to us by the local job center, in his mid to late twenties, and from one of the newer member countries of the European Union. He knew very little English, but he did manage to ask for my help sending money every week to his wife and baby daughter, who were still in the homeland. He seemed quite happy with life, always smiling and singing to himself, and he had been a positive influence on kitchen morale over the previous week. Now he stood in front of Carl and bowed his head, as if asking for forgiveness. Jacek nodded a lot, and I wondered how much of Carl’s tirade he was actually understanding. I was certain that he was not appreciating the sarcasm. I felt quite sorry for him, so far from home, in a strange environment and separated from his family.

I caught Carl’s attention. That’s enough, I mouthed to him. Jacek was hardworking, and I didn’t really want to lose him at the moment, not least because the current pair appeared to get on quite well together and neither of them was a heavy drinker, generally the bane of all kitchen porters.

Carl stopped almost in midsentence and dismissed the miscreant with a brief wave of his hand. Jacek passed me on the way back to his duties at the scullery sinks, and I smiled at him. He winked at me and smiled back. There was more to this kitchen porter, I thought, than meets the eye.

SATURDAY NIGHT HAD the feel of the Hay Net back in business. Sure, we were only serving at about two-thirds capacity, but the bar and the dining room were humming with excitement, and the horrors of the previous week were forgotten, albeit temporarily.

George and Emma Kealy and their two guests arrived promptly at eight-thirty, sat at their usual table and seemed to enjoy themselves, though quietly. Nothing was mentioned about my discussion with George at the funeral, but, as they were leaving, Emma turned to me and said, “See you next week, then, as usual.”

“For six?” I asked.

“Book for six,” she said. “I’ll let you know on Friday.”

“Fine,” I said, smiling at her.

“Have you found out yet what made everyone ill last week?” she asked. George looked horrified that his wife had been so tactless as to mention it.

“Not quite,” I said. “It appears that the dinner may have been contaminated.”

“What with?” asked Emma.

“I’m not quite sure yet,” I said. I wondered if it was simply embarrassment that was preventing me from mentioning anything about undercooked kidney beans. “I’m still trying to work out how something was put into the food.”

“You are surely not saying it was done on purpose,” she said.

“That is my inescapable conclusion,” I said.

“Sounds a bit fanciful to me,” said George.

“Maybe to you,” I said, “but what else can I think? Just suppose, George, you had a horse that ran like the wind on the gallops and then was more like a cart horse when you sent it out to run in a race, and it subsequently tested positive for dope. If you absolutely knew you hadn’t personally given it any substance to slow it down, then you would conclude that someone else must have done so. The same here. I absolutely know I didn’t put anything in that dinner to make people ill, but tests have shown that there was a food-poisoning agent present. So someone else must have put it there. And that, I believe, only could have been done on purpose. And, I can assure you, I intend to find out who was responsible.”

I thought that I probably shouldn’t be telling them quite so much, but they were supporting me when others were deserting, so maybe I owed them.

“Well, it did us a big favor anyway,” said Emma.

“How so?” I asked.

“We were invited to that lunch where the bomb went off,” she said. “We didn’t go only because we had both had such a bad night. How lucky was that! Although, I must admit, on the Saturday morning I was bloody angry with you.” She poked me in the chest with her finger. “I had been so looking forward to that day at the Guineas. Anyway, it turned out to be a blessing in the end.” She smiled at me. “So I forgive you.”

I smiled back and put a hand on her arm. “That’s all right, then,” I said. I always responded positively when flirted with by female customers who were old enough to be my mother. It was good for business.

“Come on, Emma,” said George impatiently, “we must go. Peter and Tanya are waiting.” He waved his hand towards their guests, who were standing patiently by the front door.

“All right, George,” she replied, irritated. “I’m coming.” She stretched up her five-foot-three frame to my six feet for a kiss, and, leaning forward, I duly obliged. “Night-night,” she said. “It’s been a lovely evening.”

“Thank you for coming,” I said, meaning it.

“And you can poison us anytime you like if it saves our lives.” She smiled.

“Thanks,” I said, trying to think of an appropriate response.

George was hopping from one foot to the other. “Come on, my darling,” he said with exasperation. Emma complied with a sigh. I watched through the window as the four of them got into and drove away in a new, top-of-the-line Mercedes.

That made three people that I now knew of who should have been in the bombed box but weren’t because they had been made ill by the dinner. Poor old Neil Jennings had wished he had been there with Elizabeth, but the Kealys certainly didn’t. They were perversely grateful for having been poisoned. Perhaps this particular dark cloud had a silver lining after all.

THE FEWER NUMBER in the restaurant had tended to make the service somewhat quicker than usual, and the last few diners departed just before eleven. On some Saturday nights, we could be still pouring ports and brandies after midnight, and, once or twice, it had been after one in the morning before I had cajoled the stragglers out through the front door and into the night.

I sat at my desk in the office and silently hoped that the worst was over. If I could nip the lawsuit in the bud, and plead ignorance and forgiveness over the poison kidney beans, then maybe normality would return to the Hay Net, at least for a few months, until I was ready to announce a move to the big city. How wrong I could be.

I looked at my watch. Eleven-fifteen. Time to go home, I thought. A nice early night for a change.

The telephone rang at my elbow.

“Hello,” I said into the receiver. “Hay Net restaurant.”

There was just silence at the other end.

“Hello,” I said again. “The Hay Net restaurant. Can I help you?”

“Why did you tell me you were selling double glazing?”

“Er.” I sat there, not knowing quite what to say.

“Well?” she said. “I’m waiting.”

“I don’t know why,” I mumbled.

“Are you a bloody idiot or something?”

Yes, I probably was. “No,” I said. “Can I please explain?”

“I’m waiting,” she said again.

“Not here, not now, not on the telephone,” I said. “Perhaps we could meet?”

“How did you get my number?” she demanded.

“Directory inquiries,” I said.

“I’m ex-directory.”

“Oh. I don’t remember,” I said. “Maybe it was through the orchestra.”

“They only have my cell number.”

I was getting into deeper water, and quickly.

“Look,” I said, “if we can meet I will be able to explain everything. Perhaps I can give you dinner?”

“I’m not coming to Newmarket,” she said. “I’m not giving you another bloody chance to poison me.”

“You choose the venue and I’ll pay for the dinner. Anywhere you like.”

There was a short pause as she thought.

“Gordon Ramsay,” she said.

“At Claridge’s?” I asked.

“No, of course not,” she said. “The Restaurant Gordon Ramsay, in Royal Hospital Road. I’m free every night this week until Friday.”

The Restaurant Gordon Ramsay, quite apart from being one of the most expensive restaurants in the world, was notoriously difficult to get into. Bookings were taken from nine A.M., two calendar months in advance, and were often completely filled each day by ten-thirty. I would have to try to pull strings of a fellow-professional sort if I was to have any chance of getting a table in the coming week.

“I’ll call you,” I said.

“Right, you do that.” Was it me or did her tone imply that I wouldn’t be able to fix it?

“Why, aren’t you in New York?” I asked somewhat foolishly.

“Your bloody dinner took care of that,” she said angrily. “I couldn’t make it to the airport last Saturday and was replaced.”

“Oh,” I said.

“Oh indeed. I’d been looking forward to the New York trip for months, and you bloody ruined it.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Is that an admission of guilt?”

I could imagine Bernard Sims going crazy with me. “No, of course not,” I said.

“My agent says I should take you to the bloody cleaners,” she said. “He says that I should get ten thousand at least.”

I thought back to Mark’s advice and reckoned that it might need more than a hundred quid to buy her off. “I think that your agent is exaggerating,” I said.

“You think so?” she said. “I’ve not just lost out on my pay for the tour, you know. There’s no guarantee that I will be invited back into the orchestra when they get home. The directors can be very fickle. I’ve only just been promoted to principal viola, and now this bloody happens.” She clearly liked to say “bloody” a lot.

“Tell me,” I asked, trying to change the subject, “what’s the difference between a violin and a viola?”

“What?” she screamed over the phone. “Didn’t you hear me? I said that you might have cost me my bloody career.”

“I’m sure that’s not really true,” I said. “You should calm down. It’s not good for your blood pressure.”

There was a pause. “You’re very annoying,” she said.

“So my brother always used to say,” I said.

“He was absolutely right.” She paused. “Well?”

“Well what?” I asked.

“What are you going to do about it?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“Nothing! In that case, I’ll see you in court.”

“OK,” I said. “But do tell me, what is the difference?”

“Difference?”

“Between a violin and a viola?” I said.

“It’s not a viola,” she said, pronouncing it like I had done with the i as “eye.” “It’s a viola.” She said it with the i short, as in “tin” or “sin.”

“So what is the difference?”

“A viola burns longer than a violin.”

“What?” I said.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said, and laughed. “It’s an old joke among musicians. We viola players tend to be the butt of all the worst orchestra jokes. We get used to it, and we don’t really care. I think everyone else is jealous.”

“So what is the difference between them?”

“They’re different instruments.”

“I know that,” I said. “But they look the same.”

“No they don’t,” she said. “A viola is much bigger than a violin. That’s like saying a guitar looks like a cello.”

“No it’s not. That’s silly,” I retorted. “A cello is played upright and a guitar is played horizontally, for a start.”

“Ha!” she said smugly. “Jimi Hendrix played his guitar upright most of the time.”

“Don’t be pedantic,” I said, laughing. “You know what I mean. Violins and violas are both played with a bow, under the chin.”

“Or with the fingers,” she said. “Pizzicato. And it’s not so much under the chin as on the shoulder.”

“Does that mean you have your chin in the air?”

“It might,” she said. I could tell from the tone of her voice that she was smiling. I decided that it might be a good time to get out of this call before she started asking again how I knew her home telephone number and her occupation.

“I’ll call you about dinner,” I said. “It will be probably be Tuesday.” It tended to be one of our least busy nights at the Hay Net, and often the night I would be away, either cooking elsewhere or at some other event.

“You really think you can get a table?” she said.

“Of course I can,” I replied. “No problem.”

I hoped I was right. It might just save me ten grand.