said Strickland mournfully. He looked quite depressed, as anyone would, with an unsackable member of staff. I changed the subject.
‘Do you know about the Earl’s opera thing?’
Strickland nodded. ‘Yeah, and I know who’s doing the catering for it too.’
The way that he said it made me sure that he had won the contract for it. He would be well placed to do it. He had the expertise. He’d been at the top of the tree for twenty years, from a spotty faced kid to thirty-six-year-old head chef. He also had phenomenal energy – it wouldn’t have surprised me to learn that he was going to do it single-handedly.
Probably in his break.
‘Who’s that then?’ I asked.
His smile broadened, ‘Have a guess …’
I felt a stab of envy. Undeserved, but I had to acknowledge it was there. ‘I really don’t know …’
He sat back in his chair. ‘Justin McCleish!’
So, Justin McCleish, famous TV chef, was going to be running the show. Not Graeme Strickland. Well, that was surprising, to say the least. Everyone knows Justin.
McCleish had worked his way up from being a chef who cropped up on Saturday Kitchen and MasterChef: The Professionals, to having his own TV series on BBC2. The most obvious thing about him, other than his ability to cook, was his extreme good looks. He had a seductive, half-Italian, half-British pronunciation, and a model wife. The former made women swoon, the latter attracted a male audience. Some people even learned a bit about cooking.
Strickland nodded his head.
‘Yeah, thought that would surprise you. He’s going to be running a pop-up restaurant for the Earl’s opera in some marquee, hundred-quid five-course tasting menu, hundred and fifty with matched wines and two-hundred-quid ‘deluxe’ truffle and champagne option. What do you make of that then?’
Hampden Street could do with some excitement. Since January when there had been a murder nearby, things had been remarkably quiet. The most talked about thing was currently a village debate about parking near the village hall.
Half the village wanted restrictions, half the village didn’t. Temperatures were running high.
That had ruffled more feathers than the murder and subsequent arrest of a local for the killing. Parking was always a hot topic here. Murder seemed a bit meh for the village, a bit, who cares … Parking though …
The arrival of a bona fide famous person, a chef in the same league as Gordon Ramsay or Tom Kerridge or Rick Stein, would be the topic of conversation in the village for the next month.
Strickland had some more information. ‘Not only is he running the pop-up, McCleish is even moving here.’
‘So, Justin McCleish is moving to the village. Exciting times!’ I said.
‘Yep, into the Old Vicarage,’ Strickland replied, raising his eyebrows.
The Old Vicarage was massive and had belonged to a shady businessman who was facing a ruinous divorce and had needed to sell up quickly.
Strickland pulled a face and drank some of his lager. ‘What do you think of him?’
This was an easy one to answer. His name cropped up a lot in conversation. Coincidentally, I had recently mentally listed the main reasons I disliked Justin McCleish – several times.
The case for the prosecution:
His looks – the long, dark hair, the designer stubble, the faux ethnic jewellery, the hippy/surfer dude vibe. He was in his late thirties. This was a look he was too old for, in my opinion.
His causes – Jamie Oliver has his school dinners/sugar tax; Hugh has his sustainable fish thing; Gordon Ramsay, swearing and bad temper; Marco Pierre White, inscrutably weird behaviour. The low-hanging fruit have gone. Justin had his ‘feed the poor’ crusade, meals-on-a-budget ideas.
And last but not least, Aurora McCleish, his skimpily dressed Italian wife, heavily and sexily tattooed and annoyingly beautiful, who floated in and out of shot on his TV programmes.
‘What do you think of him?’ repeated Strickland, insistently.
I paused for thought. I had to confess, I didn’t like him.
I thought I was jealous, but no, that was the wrong word. I was envious. I wanted the freedom from financial worry that Justin had. I bet he didn’t wake up in the morning concerned about his unpaid bills. If I was honest, that was probably why I didn’t like him; he was successful and I resented it. I wished that I could float through life like he did.
I tried to rise above this. A big part of the new post-prison Ben Hunter was tranquillity and that meant not slagging other people off, hard as it might be.
‘I don’t know,’ I said judiciously. ‘I’m sure he’s very nice.’
I didn’t realise I was about to learn a lot more about Justin McCleish than either of us expected.
Speak of the devil and he will come. The very next day, much to my surprise, I met both Justin and his wife.
Jess had announced their presence. Normally, Jess does her job running my restaurant with a mixture of good-natured efficiency and ironic detachment. For her, it’s a well-paid holiday job, a distraction from studying IT, which is where her future lies. She rarely gets excited – why should she? Working in the hospitality business is not her dream. But today was different.
She had come running in to the kitchen an hour earlier.
‘It’s Justin McCleish, and his wife, in our restaurant!!!’
I had never seen her so excited. She was wide-eyed; her hair stood up like she’d been electrocuted. Francis stared at her like a parody of amazement.
‘Gordon Bennett!’ he said. That, for Francis, constitutes great excitement. It was a measure too, of Justin McCleish’s fame, that Francis knew who he was. His knowledge of people is usually confined to cricketers and rugby players.
‘Can everyone just calm down,’ I said, my heart thundering with adrenaline. It’s Justin McCleish, and HIS WIFE, in MY restaurant! ‘They’re just customers.’
But of course they weren’t just customers, and when I got their orders I cooked their food as if it was going out to the Queen.
Justin had lamb fillet with an anchovy and caper dressing garnished with a mint sauce and rosti potatoes, and Aurora, a chicken Caesar salad. I scrutinised every single ingredient on their plates as if I were performing brain surgery.
Jess kept us updated every time she came in to the kitchen.
‘They’ve started, they look happy! They like the sourdough bread. Oh, God, this is so exciting!’
A bit later: ‘They’re halfway through, they still look happy and there are three paparazzi outside on the green! And they’ve parked illegally!’
She was a true child of Hampden Green. If the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse turned up, someone would point to the sign, ‘No Riding On The Common (£100 fine)’.
When the plates came back we all stared at them like doctors looking at a life or death X-ray.
‘Blimey, clean plates!’ said Francis.
I shrugged. They liked it!
‘Don’t sound so surprised, Francis.’ My voice was dismissive.