I waved him to a table in the restaurant. I did not want to switch machines that had been cleaned on again. He would have to do without the offer of hospitality. No coffee or cake for you, Mr Policeman.
‘How can I help you?’
He sat opposite me, giving me a sardonic once over. It was such a classic policeman’s look, polite scepticism with a hint of amused contempt.
‘How long have you been here?’ he asked.
‘On this earth?’ I said innocently.
He rolled his eyes. ‘In this village.’
‘Since the first of January,’ I said. He knew that anyway.
He nodded. ‘And during this time we have had two crimes: a break-in and a fire bomb.’ There was something accusatory about his tone, as if it were my fault.
‘A bomb?’
‘Mm-hm, Mr Whitfield’s obelisk was set alight with an incendiary device which was detonated with a timer made from a mobile phone. Are you good with electronics, Ben?’
‘No,’ I said, shrugging. ‘It’s unfortunate, the crimewave, but it’s nothing to do with me.’
Slattery looked at me sceptically.
‘Pure coincidence,’ I said firmly.
He nodded thoughtfully and then said, ‘Of course, you’ve been in trouble with the law before.’
There was the obvious implication that he had run me through the system because I was a suspicious blot on the landscape; the veiled threat of ‘I’m on to you, Sonny Jim’ and the implicit threat that he would make sure knowledge of my chequered past would return to haunt me.
Was a conviction for GBH considered all that terrible these days? It had certainly finished my teaching career. I had been running a university English language programme, but in catering nobody had batted an eyelid.
Would the good citizens of Hampden Green care about my two-year jail sentence? It would have been different if I’d poisoned someone, that was obvious. That would be a hard one to contend with as a purveyor of food.
Or if I’d been sent down because I was a sex pervert. Bestiality, for example. Who knows what horrors might lurk in the food? But a spot of good old-fashioned violence? I was about to say, surely GBH never hurt anyone, but that’s obviously not the case.
Slattery was still waiting for a comment on his revelation. Go ahead, I thought, any publicity is good publicity. I’m a chef, not a vicar.
I thought about saying something profound, something philosophical. But Slattery wasn’t interested in abstract conceptions of justice. He was a man who was looking at a new neighbour and really not caring for what he saw.
I said, ‘The past is the past. I can assure you, DI Slattery, that I haven’t come here to disrupt your lovely, friendly village.’
He gave me the message he had come to deliver.
‘If you step a millimetre out of line …’ He leaned forward and indicated the distance with thumb and forefinger in case I was unsure of distance. His fingers were a couple of centimetres in front of my face. He stood up and jabbed a finger at me. ‘You, smart-ass, have been officially warned.’
He let himself out, closing the door in a restrained, passive-aggressive way that suggested he would like to have slammed it.
I had been very calm with Slattery, but inside that was far from the case.
I was suddenly furious. For the last eight days I had been averaging six hours’ sleep a night. I was very tired, and there was no end in sight to the insane hours I had been working. I was under stress: would my business succeed or go under? I wasn’t eating well, chefs never do, snatching bits and pieces here and there. Arsey customers like Whitfield, and now this … I snapped.
A kitchen is a good place for letting off steam. I picked up my rolling pin, about half a metre long, a cylinder of heavy plastic and, with a shout, whipped it down on one of the stainless-steel work-surfaces.
CRAAAAASH !
The noise was deafening. I kind of wished that it was Slattery that had stopped its downward progress.
What was I thinking! I breathed deeply. Dan Tian breathing as recommended by Qi Gong. Anger had put me inside for two years, I was supposed to be transcending all of that.
I looked down at the metal top of the table. There was a massive dent in it now. Oh well, at least it hadn’t been someone’s head.
Gradually I felt calm restore itself. I picked up the rolling pin. Time to use it for its intended purpose as a tool not a weapon.
I put a pack of digestive biscuits into a steel bowl and started banging them gently with the end of the rolling pin to reduce them to crumbs. That was better. We all need a goal. We all need to transcend our circumstances. We all need a star to follow.
Nelson Mandela had a vision of the ending of apartheid.
Paul Bocuse wanted the renaissance of French cookery.
Martin Luther King had a dream.
I had some mascarpone cheese and a lemon.
Bring it on!
Redemption through desserts!
Time to make a cheesecake.
While the cheesecake base – half a packet of digestive biscuits smashed to crumbs and mixed with melted butter – set, I crossed the road and walked around the village green. I say, walked. I squelched. The rain was still falling, whipped by the wind it seemed to be coming at me sideways. It was ferociously cold, particularly after the warmth of the kitchen.
I looked at my watch, half four. For the time being I was only opening at lunchtimes. Gradually I would phase in evening meals. Slow but steady growth was what I wanted.
I kept my head down as I walked. The green was a rectangular piece of common ground that houses and a few businesses fronted on to. On my side of the road there was my place, the Old Forge Café, a car repair business that also did MOTs, and a few houses. More or less diagonally opposite from me was the Three Bells pub, the village hall which doubled as a fitness centre and arts studio, and several more houses. On the opposite side of the green was Whitfield’s house and of course, DI Slattery’s. It was an attractive village, compact and down to earth, not full of second homes and retired business people.
The green, being at the top of the hill and surrounded by buildings, made the sky overhead seem vast. At times it reminded me of a bald head, fringed by hair. There was a playground for children on the far side, but there was no one around today, it was too cold to play. There was a pond near there too, sometimes it had ducks. Not today. The only person I saw was a man, head down, buried in the hood of his anorak, leaving the house next to Whitfield’s with its charred obelisk in the front garden.
I thought, the village committee will be up in arms about that. It was like a sinister beacon of civil unrest, not suitable for a South Bucks village.
I walked up to the Three Bells and went inside. It was, quite frankly, disappointing, a bit of a dump. People have an image, rooted in reality, of what a nice countryside pub is, from the low-beamed ceiling, to the inglenook fireplace and cosy, homely charm. The Three Bells certainly fell short of the kitsch ideal. It fell far short of it.
The pub was a long, rectangular room with the door at one end, the bar at the other and a pool table in the middle. The pub was defiantly not chocolate-boxy. It was never going to feature on Location, Location, Location. It