Dead Heat - Страница 2

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“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.