Chef Maurice and the Bunny-Boiler Bake Off (Chef Maurice Cotswold Mysteries Book 3) (6 page)

“Possibly. It might have been enough to knock her out. Though it hasn’t rained the whole of this week,” said PC Lucy, running a hand over the dry wood. “And she’s wearing trainers. Pretty hard to fall over in those.” She pointed at Miranda’s incongruously sporty footwear, then frowned.

Hadn’t she seen Miranda teetering around on stage in some neon-coloured stiletto heels? Trainers, even purple ones with orange laces, didn’t seem like they’d be Miranda’s first choice for footwear, not even for a stroll in the woods.

She stood back up and stared around the clearing. The woods were dense in these parts, but even so, the perpetrator, whoever he or she was, would have been foolish to stick to the path by the creek—much better to cut through the woods straight up to the main road, where there were plenty of little lay-bys and turn-offs used by visitors who stopped to admire the Cotswold scenery. Easy to leave a car there, and sneak down here through the woods . . .

But she was getting ahead of herself. For now, the important thing was to have a good look around, before rain or trampling feet obscured any helpful hints of what had happened.

“So you reckon it might not have been an accident?” asked PC Alistair, now inspecting the construction of the little jetty.

PC Lucy, using a long branch to push away the foliage surrounding the path, stopped as something metallic caught her eye.

“Unfortunately,” she said, “that scenario is looking less and less likely. Have a look at this.”

PC Alistair scrambled up and hurried over. At their feet, half-hidden by the twisted brown leaves, was a short length of thick cast-iron pipe, the type used for old-fashioned plumbing. It was about the length of PC Lucy’s forearm, and across one end was a shimmer of dark blood.

“So it was murder,” breathed PC Alistair, who rather revelled in the stating of the obvious.

PC Lucy nodded. Someone out there, it seemed, had decided it was time for Miranda Matthews to hang up her apron.

For good.

The cookery demonstration tent had been turned into an impromptu tea room for the distressed and detained. Arthur stood at the hobs, keeping an eye on two simmering pans of water, while Chef Maurice had managed to requisition a box of loose Darjeeling from the Gourmet Tea Leaf stand, as well as a stack of white mugs, as yet undefaced, from the Paint-Your-Mug stall.

Arthur had suspicions that his friend’s sudden tea-providing tendencies had less to do with altruism, and more to do with achieving a suitable eavesdropping proximity to the key crime scene witnesses, who were currently sat on folding chairs in a little semicircle around PC Lucy.

“So tell me what happened when you first went looking for Miranda,” she was saying, notebook held at the ready.

Tricia hiccupped into a tissue. “First, we had a quick look around the stalls and in all the tents. We thought she’d just forgotten the time. We also tried her dressing room—”

“She had a dressing room? Where was this?”

“It’s just a little tent, round the back of here,” said Angie. “She wanted somewhere to get ready, keep a change of outfit, that kind of thing.”

“Okay. And then?”

“Well, she wasn’t there, so then we thought she might have gone for a walk. It’s ever so pretty around here this time of year,” said Tricia. “We went down to the bit of the creek at the end of the field, where all the kiddies were playing, but she wasn’t there.”

“So then we just followed the path,” said Angie, “down to where we . . . well, you know . . .” She broke off with a shiver.

“What made you think Miranda would have followed the path into private land? It’s not exactly the most obvious place to go walking,” said PC Lucy.

Mayor Gifford, sitting beside his wife with one furry paw across her shoulder, looked up sharply, clearly unhappy at the tone of conversation.

Angie looked startled. “Oh! I didn’t even think about that. You see”—she looked over at Miss Caruthers—“that bit of the woods belongs to the school. In fact, the creek runs all the way through our land. The girls go walking up and down there all the time in the summer—”

She stopped with a look of horror on her face.

“Not to worry, Mrs Gifford,” said PC Lucy. “My colleagues will have roped off the area already. I’ll make sure someone telephones the school to let them know, of course. But I still don’t see—”

“Miranda Matthews was a pupil at Lady Eleanor, some twenty years ago now,” explained Miss Caruthers. “The same year as Angela, if I recall correctly.”

Angie nodded.

“So you’re saying she would have known this area well? Including the path along the creek?”

“It wouldn’t surprise me if she remembered,” said Miss Caruthers. “It’s a lovely stretch of woodland, even if our groundskeeper doesn’t tend to the path quite as much as he did in earlier years.”

There was a pause in proceedings as Arthur and Chef Maurice approached with trays to distribute steaming mugs of tea—and to get within better earshot of the questioning.

PC Lucy waved away the proffered mug. “So when was the last time you all saw Miranda? Alive, I mean.”

“The last time I saw her was at the end of her cookery demonstration,” said Miss Caruthers.

“Me too,” said Tricia.

PC Lucy consulted a flyer. “And that finished at twelve thirty, correct?”

The Spring Fayre Committee ladies all nodded.

“I last saw her in her dressing tent, right afterwards,” said Angie. “I popped my head in to see if she wanted anything to eat, but she said she wasn’t hungry.”

“Can you recall what type of shoes Miranda was wearing when you saw her?”

Angie looked puzzled. “I don’t remember. The same ones she was wearing earlier, I would have thought. Pink high heels.”

“And did Miranda mention anything about going for a walk? Or meeting someone during lunchtime?”

“She didn’t say anything to me.” Angie paused. “I mean, now that I think about it, she was a bit, well, distracted. And she was a bit short, like maybe she wanted to be left alone. But she gets like that sometimes, especially after a big event. It’s never anything personal,” she added generously.

“What about you, Mr Gifford?” asked PC Lucy. “When did you last see Miranda Matthews?”

“Eh? Can’t say I paid her much attention, cooking’s not really my thing, you know. Saw her signing some autographs earlier in the morning. Long before lunchtime, though. Can’t help you there, I’m afraid.”

“Arthur? Maurice?” said PC Lucy, looking over at her two spectators, who had settled themselves into folding chairs not far away.

Arthur shook his head. “I stayed for her demo, but didn’t see her after that.”

“I left before, when Mademoiselle Miranda started her cake covered in the Smarties.
C’est un sacrilège
, to claim that such a cake is a—”

“Yes, yes, thank you both for your input,” said PC Lucy quickly. She looked down at her notes. “So Miranda was last seen by Mrs Gifford, who spoke to her in her tent after the demo. We’ll put out a call for information, see if anyone saw her leaving her tent, or passed her walking down to the creek.”

“You’ll be keeping my wife’s name out of this, I assume?” said Mayor Gifford, with a cross look at Angie.

“We will. But I have to warn you, I’d be surprised if the local press don’t try contacting Mrs Gifford and Mrs Walters in the meantime. They were all in the Bake Off tent when . . . the incident was reported. Of course, there’s no obligation on your part to speak to them,” she added, looking towards Angie and Tricia.

“I should bloody well think not!” snapped Mayor Gifford, while Angie nodded meekly.

Questioning over, Miss Caruthers left to drive Tricia home, while the mayor led PC Lucy over to a corner of the tent for an angry discourse on the abuse of police power and the so-called freedoms of the press, which PC Lucy listened to with an expression of blank official politeness.

Angie collected up the finished tea mugs and brought them over to the sink area.

“You can put them down there,” said Arthur, pointing one pink-rubber-gloved elbow at the counter nearby. “Apparently”—he shot a look at Chef Maurice—“I’m the designated pot wash for the day.”

“As the English say, if the glove fits . . .” Chef Maurice sipped happily at his own mug, held in one XL-sized fist.

Angie twisted the end of her chiffon scarf around her fingers and threw a nervous look back at her husband, who was still busy berating the stone-faced PC Lucy.

“I was wondering, Mr Maurice . . .”

“
Oui
,
madame
?”

“Well, I remember hearing about—”

She got no further, though, as the sound of her own name was bellowed across the room. “I— Never mind, I better go. Rory’s calling for me. Thank you for the tea.”

She hurried off.

“I wonder what that was all about,” said Arthur.

“Do not worry,
mon ami
. I am sure that we will discover more as we make an inspection of the matter.”

“The matter? What matter?”

Chef Maurice threw his hands in the air. “There has been the murder of a chef, and you ask me what matter? This is a most serious happening!”

“So Miranda Matthews is now a chef?”

“Bah, the public, they do not make a difference between myself”—he thumped his chest—“and the type of Miranda Matthews. To them, she is a chef. So we must ask if other chefs, too, are in danger from this murderer.”

Arthur gave this statement its due consideration. As an entirely spurious reason for Chef Maurice to indulge in his penchant for dabbling in crime investigation, he could, Arthur supposed, have done a lot worse.

“You might be on to something there, old chap,” said Arthur, as they wandered out through the now-deserted Fayre-ground stalls. “For all we know, there might be some serial killer on the loose with a predilection for bumping off famous chefs.”

“Ah, so you agree that this case is one requiring of our attention?”

Arthur wasn’t too sure about this part, but he conceded that it couldn’t hurt to make a few enquiries of their own. Thankfully, he pointed out, if the serial-killer-famous-chef theory was correct, it meant that Chef Maurice would be well clear of any danger.

They headed back up the lane into the village with Chef Maurice striding on ahead, nose in the air, wearing an expression of injuriously injured pride.

That evening, the staff of Le Cochon Rouge sat down at the big kitchen table to tuck into plates of grilled sardines on toasted seeded bread, to fortify themselves for the busy dinner service ahead. Many of the Spring Fayre visitors had decided to soothe their frayed nerves with a slap-up dinner before the drive home, and the restaurant was fully booked. The kitchen crew were joined at the table by Mrs Merland, who had offered to pitch in with a special dessert for the evening menu.

“Have they found the murderer yet?” asked Alf, pouring some balsamic vinaigrette over his sardines.

“This one’ll have ’em stumped for a while, I’ll bet,” said Dorothy, nodding in satisfaction at the prospect of weeks of speculation and idle gossip with her regular customers. “Big crowd, no witnesses, all ’em woods just to disappear into. You know it was all on the telly this afternoon? We made the national news, we did.”

Patrick nodded, though he didn’t quite share their head waitress’s level of enthusiasm. He wondered how the next few weeks’ table bookings were going to fare, though he had to admit that the news report had painted the village of Beakley in quite a flattering light. If you ignored the part about brutal murder, of course.

“Makes you think twice about wandering about late at night,” continued Dorothy.

“But it happened right in the middle of the day,” Patrick pointed out.

“All the more reason to know how to defend yourself,” replied Dorothy. She had recently signed up to a series of self-defence classes run by Mrs Petticoat, the vicar’s wife. However, it seemed that Mrs Petticoat was a subscriber to the belief that the best defence was a good offence, and news of Dorothy’s one-inch punch had spread fast through the village. Tips had more than doubled over the last month alone.

Chef Maurice, who generally found that the application of a heavy steel-capped toe was usually enough to ward off any would-be attacker, shook his head. “It is possible that the attack on Mademoiselle Miranda may not have been a random chance.”