Death at the Sawney Bean (2/3)

I ran towards the scream, which came from the kitchen. I already had my phone in my hand, ready to call an ambulance. Working as a chef, you get to see some gnarly injuries—scalding, accidental amputations, heavy falls, knife fights…One thing you learn is that the sooner accidents they’re seen to, the better.

At the back of the kitchen there was a walk-in refrigerator. Next to the refrigerator door, I saw a kitchenhand leaning against the wall. She was very pale, holding a shaking hand up to her mouth and pointing wordlessly at the pantry.

I rushed to the door and pushed it open to see what was in there. The first thing that met my gaze was a large puddle—rather a lake—of blood on the floor. Without going in (I decided not to go walking through the area in case it would mess things up for the fuzz), I looked around for a body but couldn’t immediately see one.

Whatever had happened there, there was clearly no longer any need for an ambulance so I called the police.

I turned to the kitchenhand, who was now being comforted by one of her colleagues. I told them both to go and sit in the dining area; I’d stay by the door until the police arrived.

Looking through the door on the scene of carnage, I noticed there was a door at the back of the room, presumably leading out into a loading bay to facilitate the delivery of supplies. I noticed that there was a track of blood leading to the door, suggesting that someone had pulled a trolley out through that back exit. It seemed likely that the body had been removed that way. But why? The whole thing had a feeling of nightmarish unreality about it

It was only as I was standing there waiting for the police to arrive that it occurred to me that Andrea’s silence might have something to do with the mess in the pantry. The thought chilled me more than the refrigerated air. While I fervently hoped nothing bad had happened to her, I had an overpowering sense of dread.

Interrupting my reverie, a large and cheery woman with bright red hair and corkscrew curls threw open the kitchen door and came limping inexorably towards me. Imagining she was a member of the hotel staff, I hastily blocked the door.

“Sorry, ma’am, you can’t go in there,” I said. “There’s been an accident.”

“I can go in, my darling, and I will,” she said swiping me out of the way as if I were a gnat, “And that is no accident.” She clicked her tongue at the ghastly scene.

In her wake, like a chorus behind the prima ballerina, came a team of people equipped with cameras, fingerprint kits, hazmat suits and yellow tape.

“Right,” said the redhead nodding to me, “That’s you.”

I was officially dismissed.

Retreating into the dining room, I saw that the other chefs had gathered in a knot, worried expressions on their faces. I noticed at once that Andrea was not among them.

“Cos’è successo?” Nina Denaro appealed to me with a gesture of desperate inquiry. At the best of times this blonde Florentine was wound up so tight you could have twanged a tune on her like a Renaissance lute. Now, in the midst of a crisis, she looked like she might be able to launch herself into the stratosphere fuelled entirely by nervous energy.

“To tell you the truth, I don’t know. One thing I can tell you, though: That’s a homicide team.”

“Omicidio!” she whispered and collapsed on a chair, staring ahead of her, glassy eyed and slackjawed. “Then they have found me. It is over.”

“Come again?” I said.

“Shhhh,” Billie said, “bustling over to sit next to Nina and rub her back. “Poor thing, it’s bringing back memories, isn’t it sweetheart?” She mouthed to me ‘Mafia’ and shook her head sadly.

Nina shivered, then sprang to her feet.

“I must go for the cigarette. Amunninni,” she said to Billie, who nodded and followed.

The women left and it was just us four men. In the silence of the initial moments, I realized with some embarrassment that we didn’t know one another very well and there was the additional difficulty that we were all from different cultures. Artyom was a Russian from St. Petersburg, Antonio was French but originally from Guinea, Yoshio was from Yokohama.

“Well!” I said, and shrugged expressively.

Yoshio, who was supposed to be preparing lunch for the day, looked at us angrily.

“When is kitchen ready? Late.” He tapped his watch.

I realized that he hadn’t understood what had happened.

“There’s been a murder, man,” I said gently. “No lunch today. Cancelled.”

“Yes, yes. murder,” he looked contemptuous. “I need kitchen. Important. Fish is fresh now!” He brought his hand down with a crash on the table.

I exchanged a glance with the other two men. Artyom raised an eyebrow and gave a small sardonic smile. Antonio just looked bewildered. I’d met some of these old-school sushi chefs before and Yoshio was certainly a ‘type’—the samurai who lives only for his craft. Even so, I thought this was taking it a bit far. In fact, I started to get hot under the collar.

“Are you joking, chum? Someone’s been murdered. Even if the police weren’t here, nobody here is in the mood to look at raw salmon made in the place where a human being was knifed. Have some respect, will ya!”

He glared at me, stood up slowly and thrust his face close to mine, so our noses almost touched. He poked me on the chest with a stubby finger.

“You know nothing! You cook shit. I taste the food you make and I then--” he made the motion of putting fingers down his throat and mimed vomiting for a minute or so.

I saw red. No one insults my cooking. No one. I sprang to my feet and went to strike the guy with a left hook. To my surprise, something was holding my arm back.

“Please, please,” a voice whispered in my ear. “Do not fight, I beg of you.”

I relaxed my arm. Yoshio stalked off, his head held high, a low growl in his throat.

I turned to see Antonio—he had held me back—crying. The tears were streaming down his face.

“This fighting…it is not good. Better to be peaceful.”

I bowed my head.

“You’re right, man. I’m sorry. I lost my head there.”

“Come, sit here. I will tell you the story of my life.”

Surprised, I took a seat and waited for him to start. Artyom looked on, intrigued despite his air of preternatural calm.

“You know, I come from Guinea. But when I was a boy, a teenager, I wanted to be in a war, a real war. My best friend at school was Ethiopian so when we were sixteen, we both decided to travel there, to be a soldiers.”

“Sixteen!” I said. “That’s very young.”

“We were very foolish,” Antonio shook his head. “We went to the Ethiopian Highlands, not even as part of the main army—we thought of ourselves as guerillas. We lived rough up there—in caves. A lot of the time we did not have basic necessities: medicine, foodstuffs. Many people died.” He fell silent.

Artyom nodded grimly.

“I was in Chechnya. Compulsory military service. This is how I lost my finger.” He showed his left hand, the ring finger was gone. “And this eye? It is false.” He pointed to his left eye. I realized that that explained some of the oddity of his expressions at times.

“Yes. War…it is a terrible time,” Antonio said. “Many of us died of the cold. My friend…he froze to death one night. His body did not even decay for a long time…it was terrible.”

I patted him on the shoulder.

“I can’t imagine, man,” I was strangely grateful to him for taking my mind off what was going on in the kitchen. “So, what happened?”

“I thought I would not survive. We were out of supplies. The Eritreans were everywhere. I knew I could not forage very far. So…I did the unthinkable.” He lowered his head.

“What?” I said, genuinely mystified.

He looked up at me with bloodshot eyes, pleading.

“I didn’t have any food! I was desperate. I was young and I did not want to die. You see?”

“So you…”

“Yes! I ate my friend,” he whispered. “I was used to hunting. I knew how to prepare the meat. In that situation, in war…it is not the same.”

Stunned, I sat in silence.

Artyom coughed and looked out the window.

“Antonio,” I said, looking at him straight in the eyes. “What are you saying? Did you have anything to do with this business here?”

“What?” his eyes widened. “No! But…”

“But what?”

“Speaking of that time. Last night, I…”

“Yes?” I pressed him. “Did you see something in the kitchen there? Speak up, lad! It might be important.”

“I…” he twisted his hands, looked over my shoulder as if he’d seen a ghost, then shook his head.

“Come on, don’t mess about Antonio. This is a matter of life and death!”

“What’s a matter of life and death?” said Nina, who’d come up behind me along with Billie.

“Nothing, nothing,” said Antonio. “I have to go. I will be in my room if I am needed.”

The two women sat down at the table with me and Artyom.

“What’s with him?” Billie asked.

“Nerves,” I said. “He’s had a shock. We all have. All right, love?” I asked Nina, who still looked pale and drawn.

“I am not all right,” she shook her head.

“It’s terrible, isn’t it?” Billie shuddered. “To think something like that can happen here.”

“Anywhere there are people,” said Artyom, looking at her evenly. “It can happen.”

“What now?” Billie asked. “I suppose we have to stay here?”

As if on cue, the tank-like detective with red corkscrew curls appeared and limped over to our group.

“Morning all. My name’s Detective Inch, call me Ailish. I’d like to have a word with each of you to get your statements. Won’t take long—about 20 minutes each. Just in the room next door,” she waved at a conference room next to the dining area.

“You first,” she pointed at me.

I stood up and headed into the room indicated.

The interview, as promised, was brief. I told Annie that I’d attended the cocktail party the previous evening and then gone to my room around eleven. My room was on the other side of the hotel, away from the kitchen and I’d not seen or heard anything strange.

“There is one thing I’m worried about though,” I said. “One of the guests—my friend Andrea Caballero—is missing. She didn’t come down for breakfast and didn’t answer when I knocked at her door.”

“Was there anything strange about her behavior beforehand?”

“Yes, actually,” I said. I explained how Andrea had stowed one of the appetizers in her handbag and had seemed angry or upset.

“I thought she might have been jealous, professionally speaking,” I explained. “Because everyone was raving about the food. No one could figure out what it was made of. Andrea told me that she was going to get it analyzed. But it was out of character…Andrea’s not the jealous type as a rule.”

“Odd,” Ailish said thoughtfully.

“Yes,” I agreed. “Though, chefs are odd people.”

“Tell me, Gordon,” she said. “Did Andrea have a car?”

“Yes, she did,” I said. “I remember she said she’d hired a car in the city as she wanted to see some sights while she was here.”

“Very good. And you yourself, did you drive here for the weekend?”

“I did.” I gave her a description of my car and I said I thought Andrea’s rental was a red ev.

“One more thing. Tell me, did each of you use your own kitchen equipment? Or did you make do with the hotel’s things?”

“A mix. Most of us prefer to use our own knives, for instance. And there are certain things that a regular kitchen won’t have. Yoshio, the Japanese fella, for example—he’d need his own bamboo mats and such like.”

“As I thought,” she nodded. “

“Tell me; do you own a set of knives that look like this?” She showed me an image on her phone.

“In my dreams!” I said. “Those are Hayami knives. They cost a ton.”

“Do you know anyone here who uses them?”

“Well…I suppose you might ask Yoshio. But to be honest I have no idea.”

“Thank you Gordon, that’s you,” she said imperiously, standing up. “Please ask the next person through.”

I told Artyom it was his turn and then wandered to see the receptionist, who was back at her desk, leaving the kitchenhand in the lobby with a cup of sweet tea. I asked her if Andrea had checked out but he said not as far as he knew.

There didn’t seem much else to do, practically speaking. I rang my elderly mother to let her know what was happening. Knowing her, she’d see it on the news and assume the worst. She was a beggar for keeping up to date with all the doom and gloom in the world. I thought it would be better she had it from the horse’s mouth.

“Morning mam!” I said brightly.

“Not morning anymore, is it,” she said crisply. “I wondered when you were going to call me. Keeping secrets, as usual.”

“What do you mean?”

“The police all down at your hotel as they are, and not a word from you. My own son!”

Unbelievable. The grapevine had already caught wind of the commotion.

“For god’s sakes, they arrived half an hour ago! How do you know about it, anyway?”

“Don’t use that language, lad. You know Susan lives up the hill and saw the police heading down in a mad rush. She has a good pair of binoculars, for her birding, and saw the Hazmat suits. She watches enough police procedurals to know it wasn’t shoplifting. Besides, I have a police scanner app on my phone. So who was it that died?”

“Well, we don’t know.”

“What do you mean you don’t know?”

“There’s no body.”

There was a moment of silence as my mother processed this.

“They check in the skips? The laundry hampers?”

“I’m sure they’ll search all over, mam, they’re professionals after all.” Already I was getting to the teeth-gritting, eye-rolling stage that these conversations tended to induce.

“Right you are. Well! I don’t know what the world’s coming to, love, I really don’t. They’ve got that poor woman whose husband of thirty years hit her with a hammer, and then the fire downtown the other week, and the car that went up in smoke down the road. Not to mention those wee children disappearing…”

“How’s that now?”

“Didye not hear about that? Nine months it’s been going on now—wee bairns disappearing from a primary school in London. Strange taste, the serial killer has: they’re all right little fatties. I’ve heard that serial killers do have these predilections. ‘Signatures’ they call them, I was listening to forensics expert on the radio last night.”

“Christ ye have grisly tastes. What’s wrong with the classical music channel?”

I could practically see her pursing her lips.

“Well, evil is all around us dear and don’t blaspheme. It’s no good burying your head in the sand. If you’d been educated as I am you might have seen something useful in time, before there was a terrible murder.”

“No doubt. Right, well, I’d better get back to see if there’s anything—hold up. What was that about the burnt up car?”

“Oh a car down near the school. Some hooligan parked it there and set fire to it.”

“When?”

“Last night, love. It’s still smoking, I drove by for a look earlier. Looks like it was one of those new electric models.”

As soon as I said goodbye to my mother I headed back to the dining room. Artyom was just coming out with his usual cynical expression. I decided to pop in and tell Ailish about the car.

“Yes, we know about that,” she said.

“Would you mind telling me,” I said, “If there was anyone…” I couldn’t bring myself to say it.

She shook her head.

“No, no body if that’s what you’re asking. It was all burnt to a cinder, of course, but even so we would have been able to tell if there was anyone in there.”

“And it was Andrea’s car, yes?” I asked.

Ailish nodded.

“I’m afraid so.”

I walked out of the room in a daze. Finally, I knew for certain that I’d never see Andrea again.