Chef Maurice and the Bunny-Boiler Bake Off (Chef Maurice Cotswold Mysteries Book 3) (2 page)

Parking arrangements had been discussed and debated, the capacity of the temporary toilet facilities had been double-checked against visitor number projections, and a subtle yet significant last-minute alteration to the layout of the stands had been made such that the blown-glass and fine china stall was no longer next to the archery butts.

Finally, with the schedule for the cookery demonstration tent now honed to military precision, there was only one more problem left to tackle.

“Mr Manchot,” said Miss Caruthers, glaring over her glasses at Chef Maurice, “for the last time, I can assure you that every single risk and danger to our Bake Off judges has been thoroughly considered and mitigated as part of our Health and Safety assessment. It will therefore be perfectly safe and healthy for
all
of them to take part in the judging of the cake contest.”

“Ah, you may think this is so, but I have the evidence to prove that this is incorrect,” said Chef Maurice. He pulled out the stack of newspaper clippings that Alf had collected for him.

“One may think there is no danger, but when you look carefully,
voilà
, the truth appears. In Scotland, there were three judges made most ill at this year’s Annual Haggis Championship, and last year, there was found an explosive hidden in a giant scone at the Devon Clotted Cream Festival! And we must not forget the incident not far from here involving a most fatal quiche . . .”

He threw the pile of Fayre-related fatalities onto the table. “It is clear. Tomorrow, Madame Caruthers, the Bake Off judges face a grave danger!”

Miss Caruthers gave him a severe look—though whether this was due to the topic of conversation, or her having been upgraded to ‘madame’ due to her advanced age in the French chef’s eyes, one could not be certain.

“And I suppose, Mr Manchot, that your solution to this imminent peril is that you should be allowed back onto the judging panel?”

“
Exactement!
” Chef Maurice beamed, pleased that the Committee Chair was, for once, showing some good sense.

“Rather daring of you, don’t you think, in the face of all this evidence?”

“Ah, but
non
,
madame
. For the nose of a chef, it is most delicate, like that of a foxhound.” He tapped his own, large, example. “I will place myself as the first to taste each baking entry, and so will be ready to make an alert in the case of any danger. It is, you see, a matter of duty!”

The rest of the committee turned, as one, back to Miss Caruthers, who deployed a thin smile in Chef Maurice’s direction.

“Very gallant of you, Mr Manchot. But even so, I’m afraid I will have to ask the judges to take their chances. As we’ve discussed previously, there is simply no space on the judging table for another taster this year.”

“Then one must be replaced!”

There was an intake of breath around the table.

“Impossible,” said Miss Caruthers calmly. “I’m sure you’ll agree that, as Chair of this committee, as well as Head Judge of the Beakley Ladies’ Annual Cake Challenge, I am obligated to sit on the panel. And of course, there’s no question of replacing Mayor Gifford, who’s kindly agreed to come over from Cowton to open the Fayre—”

And who was, incidentally, the husband of Mrs Angie Gifford, the mousy-haired Secretary of the Beakley Ladies’ Institute. Angie was currently engaged in nibbling on a Rich Tea biscuit and watching the proceedings with a certain amount of alarm.

“—and I assume you can’t object to Chef Elizabeth’s inclusion, a lady whose, ahem, nose you cannot possibly disparage—”

Chef Maurice frowned. Chef Elizabeth was one of Britain’s top pastry chefs—though, in his opinion, pastry chefs as a bunch were generally far more concerned with the look of their creations than the aroma. Still, the woman was travelling down from her restaurant specially for the Fayre, and plus, he had other reasons for not wanting to unduly displease Chef Elizabeth.

“—nor can you possibly expect to ask that Miranda Matthews step down—”

“An insult to our profession,” muttered Chef Maurice, but even he knew it would be a futile task to try and bump a celebrity chef off the judging panel, especially as it was her face that had been put on all the Bake Off posters and plastered up and down the Cotswolds.

“—and lastly, there’s Mr Wordington-Smythe—”

“Who will face any ill-mannered icing and perilous pastry with a brave countenance and an iron constitution,” said Arthur Wordington-Smythe, Chef Maurice’s best friend and esteemed food critic for the
England Observer
.

The latter was a role that had lately been taking somewhat of a toll on his usually trim waistline, causing his wife Meryl to institute a new dietary regime within the Wordington-Smythe household. Under such circumstances, Arthur was not about to give up a chance to spend an afternoon partaking in the unfettered consumption of home-baked desserts and pastries—all in the name of the civic good, of course.

“Nice try though, old chap,” said Arthur, as they filed out of the village hall into the cool, still air of a Beakley springtime evening.

“Humph. Madame Caruthers, she will regret to have ignored my warnings.”

“I still don’t see why you’re so desperate to get back onto the tasting panel. You complained all the way through last year’s competition, may I remind you.”

“That is not the point,
mon ami
. It is the principle! Madame Caruthers dares to suggest I do not have the tasting skills to be a judge.”

“I don’t think,” said Arthur carefully, “that it was your taste buds
per se
that were being called into question.”

“Then what?”

“Let’s just say that the committee didn’t agree on the acceptability of telling a five-year-old that her jam roly-poly ‘tastes and looks like a badger sat on it’.”

“But I only intended—”

“And then you went on to describe Mr Evans’ red velvet cake as ‘a tragedy with the flavour of crayons and the look of blood-soaked murder’.”

“It is not proper, for a cake to be so
red
.” Chef Maurice gave a little shudder. “So they do not enjoy my opinions? Perhaps that is true. But it is still”—he waved the newspaper clippings—“a grand mistake to leave me from the judging panel. You will see.”

Arthur rolled his eyes heavenwards as they continued their stroll up past the village green. “Maurice, I assure you, no one is going to die during the Great Beakley Bake Off.”

Le Cochon Rouge sat at the top of Beakley, occupying an old stone cottage which had started life as the village pub, and still bore the original thick oak beams, low stone-arched doorway (treacherous to the occasional over-inebriated diner) and uneven flagstones (ditto) worn smooth by centuries of hungry travellers and thirsty Beakley locals.

PC Lucy, currently off duty from her role as Beakley’s only resident police officer, sat in the dining room by the unlit fireplace, sipping on a glass of chilled white wine and mopping up the last of her
moules marinière
with a chunk of crusty bread. She surveyed the empty mussel shells piled high in the upturned dish lid and mused, not for the first time, on the advantages of having a fully trained chef as one’s boyfriend.

Patrick, the chef and boyfriend in question, sat opposite her, head bent over a stack of paperwork. “Sorry about this,” he’d said when she’d arrived after her shift. “It’s just that it’s the month end, and you know what chef is like . . .”

PC Lucy had nodded understandingly. Chef Maurice’s previous attempts to navigate the world of accountancy had produced roughly the same results as a bunch of monkeys let loose with a calculator and a ballpoint pen. Thankfully for all concerned, nowadays he was more than happy to leave the details to his trusty sous-chef, while enquiring periodically into the health of the annual cheese budget.

“Is Maurice doing his usual demo at the Fayre tomorrow?” she said, as Patrick set aside another stack of invoices.

“Nope, I’m doing it this year. I’ll be demonstrating how to fillet and pan-fry a lemon sole.”

“What, no flambéing?” Chef Maurice’s annual set piece was a guaranteed crowd-pleaser, especially amongst the younger pyromaniacs in the audience.

“The fire department made a specific request to the committee. Chef threw a fit, obviously. Now he’s dead set on trying to flambé the hog roast at lunchtime. I’ve been hiding all the Calvados, just in case.” Patrick threw a guilty glance towards the old travel trunk by the door. “Are you going to the Fayre tomorrow?”

“In my official capacity, yes.”

In fact, the majority of the Cowton and Beakley Constabulary had all apparently decided that this year’s Spring Fayre warranted an increased level of police presence, a decision no doubt unrelated to the unseasonably fine spring weather that Oxfordshire was currently experiencing.

“Are you entering the Bake Off?” asked Patrick, flicking through a thick ring binder of wine invoices.

“You’re joking, right? After the last fiasco?”

Last month, under Patrick’s patient instruction, PC Lucy had undertaken the creation of a triple-layered chocolate fudge cake for PC Sara’s birthday. Each layer had come out of the oven as flat and solid as a manhole cover, and the chocolate icing, once dried, had required the application of a small hacksaw when it came to the cake-cutting.

“It did look fantastic, though,” said Patrick. He threw a glance at the clock above the fireplace, and pulled another stack of invoices towards him.

“Are you expecting more tables?” said PC Lucy, looking around the dining room. There were a couple of locals hanging around the bar, tended to by Dorothy. Other than them, though, the evening service seemed to have wound down a long time ago.

Patrick looked up from a rare-breed beef invoice. “Sorry? Oh, no. We’re done for the night. I just wanted to get this all done before my mother arrives.”

He filed the invoice neatly under ‘Expenditure, Meat, Bovine’ and was about to start on the next when he noticed a certain quality in the silence emanating from the other side of the table. It was the type of silence that boyfriends and husbands sooner or later learnt to recognise.

“Your mother’s coming to visit? And you didn’t think to give me any warning?”

Patrick looked puzzled. “It’s not like she’s a hurricane. You’ll like her, I promise.”

“Still, it would have been nice to have known a little earlier. I’d have changed out of uniform, at least.” PC Lucy looked down ruefully at her slightly scuffed black boots—great for navigating the village’s cobbled streets, but perhaps less suitable for making a good first impression—and tried ineffectually to smooth down the slight frizz that often developed in her fine blond hair at the end of a long day.

“She knows I’m a police officer, right?”

“Well, um . . .”

It was an ‘um’ with harmonics. The same type of ‘um’ often employed by the male of the species when questioned about anniversary dates, whether the washing had been taken in before the recent downpour, and the exact thought process that could possibly lead one to return from the shops without the milk but carrying a jumbo-pack of iced buns that ‘happened to be on offer’.

“You
have
at least told her about me, haven’t you?”

“Um . . .”

“Patrick!”

“It’s not like I meant
not
to tell her. It’s just that, well, it never came up.”

“What do you mean, it never—”

She stopped as the restaurant’s front door swung open, and a tall woman in her early sixties entered, wheeling a small black suitcase. She had the same dark curly hair as Patrick, though hers was now streaked with grey and cut in a bob, and the same serious brows and sharp brown eyes.

“Hi, darling.” She embraced her son with the brief perfunctoriness common to many an English family reunion. Her eyes, though, showed genuine warmth as she ran her gaze over her son’s face.

“Hi, Mum. Was the train down okay?”

“The usual. We were delayed at Reading for three-quarters of an hour for no apparent reason, and you can’t get a good cup of coffee on the train for love nor money. So,” she said, catching sight of PC Lucy, “are you going to introduce me?”

“Oh. Er, Mum, this is Lucy. Lucy, this is my mum. Beth.”

“Ah, so you must be the girlfriend that Patrick keeps completely failing to mention.”

PC Lucy stood up, unsure if protocol dictated an awkward but well-intentioned hug or a firm handshake. “How did you—”

“It’s a special sixth sense you develop as a mother of an unmarried man in his thirties,” said Mrs Merland. “Also, Patrick told me he’d been for a walk the other day to one of those National Trust sites. In my experience, a man under fifty does not go for walks in landscape gardens of his own accord.”

PC Lucy saw Patrick shoot her a tentative ‘see, it’s all okay’ smile, and she raised him back a ‘we’ll see about that’ eyebrow.

“So, Mrs Merland—”

“Please, call me Beth.”

“Of course. Are you going to be around for the Beakley Spring Fayre tomorrow?”

“I most certainly am,” said Mrs Merland, unwinding the lavender scarf from around her neck. “I’ve heard such lovely things about it. I’ve not been to a proper country fair in years. Will you be entering the Bake Off?”