“OK,” I said, nodding. He turned to leave. “George?” I called. He turned back. “Is your decision anything to do with the event at the racetrack last Friday evening?”
“No,” he said unconvincingly. “I don’t know. Both Emma and I were dreadfully ill, up all night. Look, I said we’ll give you a call, OK?” He didn’t wait for an answer but strode off purposefully. I decided that persistence at this time would not be to my advantage in the future.
NEXT, AT TWO-THIRTY, it was Louisa’s funeral at the West Chapel at Cambridge Crematorium.
I had been to visit the Whitworths on Wednesday afternoon and I had almost been able to touch the sorrow and anguish present in their house. I had been much mistaken in thinking that Louisa’s parents might have blamed her death on her job at the restaurant. In fact, they couldn’t have been more effusive about how it had done so much to give her confidence in her own self, as well as the financial independence that she had cherished.
“Not that we didn’t help her out, of course,” her father had said, choking back the tears. Beryl, Louisa’s mother, had clung so tightly to my hand, as if doing so might have brought her daughter back to life. So grief- stricken was she that she had been unable to speak a single word to me throughout my half-hour visit. What cruelty, I thought, had been visited on these dear, simple people whose great pleasure in life was to have had a beautiful, clever and fun-loving daughter, only to have had her snatched away from them forever in such a brutal manner.
I had left their house more disturbed than I had expected and had sat in my car for quite some time before I was able to drive myself back to the restaurant. And her funeral became the biggest ordeal of the day.
I pride myself on being a fairly emotionally stable character, not easily moved either to tears or to anger. However, I suffered dearly in that chapel with both tears and anger very close to the surface. I clenched my teeth together so hard to control myself that my jaw ached for hours afterwards.
As one would imagine, at least two-thirds of those present were young people in their teens, school friends of Louisa. I guessed that for many of them, this was the first funeral they had ever attended. If the grief displayed was a measure of the love and affection that existed for the deceased, then Louisa had been large in the hearts of so many. If grief is the price we pay for love, then overwhelming grief is the price for adoration, and Louisa had been adored by her friends. Before the service finished, several of them needed to be helped outside to sit in the fresh air to recover from near hysteria. By the time I returned to my car in the crematorium parking lot, I was totally exhausted.
And, still, the day had more sorrow to come.
Brian and June Walters had been one of my first-ever customers when I had opened the restaurant. Brian had once been a fellow steeplechase jockey of my father’s, and for years they had been close friends, as well as fierce competitors. I think they had come to have dinner at the Hay Net that first time only to support me, as the son of his dead friend, but they had quickly become regular customers, which said a lot for how much they had enjoyed the food, both then and since.
Almost thirty years before, Brian had retired from the dangers of race riding and had joined Tattersalls, the company that owned and ran the world-famous Newmarket horse sales. He had worked hard and had risen steadily up the ladder to be Sales Manager. While he hadn’t been the overall decision-making boss, he had been the person whose job it was to make sure that everything ran smoothly on a day-to-day basis, and run smoothly it had. He had recently retired from this lofty position and had been settling down to what he had hoped would be a long and happy retirement, choosing to continue living in the town where his standing was quite high. High enough for him to have been included in the Delafield Industries guest list of local dignitaries at the 2,000 Guineas; high enough for him to have been standing with his wife right next to where the bomb had exploded on Saturday. His long and happy retirement had lasted precisely six weeks and one day.
Brian and June had produced four grown-up children between them, but none were actually theirs together, both having been previously married and divorced. As June had often told me over an after-dinner port in my dining room, they were not very close to any of their children since both the divorces had been acrimonious and the children had tended to side with the other partner in each case. Consequently, their joint funeral, late in the afternoon at All Saints’, was more unemotional and functional than those I had attended earlier. Many of the same people, including George Kealy, gathered in the Anglican church for the Walterses that had earlier been across the High Street in the Catholic church for Elizabeth Jennings. Was it ungracious of me, I thought, to wonder how many had passed the intervening hours in the bar of the Rutland Arms Hotel, which sat halfway between the two places of worship?
After the service, I decided not to join the cortege of other mourners for the trip to the cemetery for the interment. Instead, I drove the fifteen or so miles from the church in Newmarket to the railway station in Cambridge. Yea, it seemed to me, that I had walked all day through the valley of the shadow of death by the time I wearily boarded the six-fifty train to London. I applied a gin and tonic to comfort me, as I lay down beside the still waters in the green pastures of a first-class seat. I had had my fill of ashes to ashes, dust to dust, and the Twenty-third Psalm for one day.
I sat back, sipped my drink and reflected back on the events of the last week. It seemed much longer than that since I had been preparing the gala dinner in a tent at the racetrack the previous Friday evening.
How seven days can change one’s life. Then I had been a confident businessman; diligent, respected, profitable and sleeping like a baby. And I had been happy with my lot. Now, in a mere week, I had become a self- doubting shambles; inactive, accused of being a mass poisoner and a liar, on my way to probable bankruptcy and the victim of regular nightmares about a legless woman. Yet here I was contemplating giving up this easy life for even more stress and anxiety in London. Perhaps I really was going mad.
The train pulled into King’s Cross station just before a quarter to eight. I should have been looking forward to my evening with Mark. But I wasn’t.
“RISE ABOVE IT,” Mark said over dinner. “Have faith in yourself, and bugger what people think.”
“But you have to attract the customers,” I said. “Surely it matters what they think?”
“Gordon Ramsay just swears at everyone, and they love him for it.”
“Trust me, they wouldn’t in Newmarket,” I said. “For all the earthiness of racing and its reputation for bad language, those within it value being given their due respect. Trainers may swear at their stable lads, but they wouldn’t dream of swearing at their owners. The horses would disappear quicker than you could say abracadabra.”
“But I’m not talking about Newmarket,” said Mark, getting us around to the real reason for our dinner. “It’s time you came to London to run a place like this. Time you made your name.”
We were in the restaurant of the OXO Tower, on the eighth floor overlooking the City of London skyline. It was one of my favorite venues, and, indeed, if I was to run a restaurant in the metropolis then this would be the sort of establishment I would create, a combination of sophistication and fun. It helps, of course, to have an interesting and unusual venue, and this was it. According to the brief history printed on the menus, the restaurant sat atop what had been a 1920s warehouse built by the Liebig Extract of Meat Company, who made OXO beef stock cubes. When the company was refused planning permission to put up the name OXO in lights on the front of the building to shine across the Thames, an architect incorporated the word in the window shapes on all four sides of a tower built above the warehouse. The meat extract company has long gone from the site, which now contains design shops, residential accommodation, as well as four different cafes and restaurants, but the tower remains, with its OXO windows. Hence, the name.
“Well?” said Mark. “Lost your tongue?”
“I was thinking,” I said. “It’s quite a change.”
“You do want to make your name, don’t you?” he said earnestly.
“Yes, absolutely,” I replied. “But I’m more worried at the moment of making it in the tabloids as a mass poisoner.”
“In a week it will be forgotten about. All anyone will remember will be your name, and that’s an advantage.”
I hoped he was right. “What about the girl that’s suing me?” I asked.
“Don’t worry about her,” he said. “Settle out of court and it won’t be reported. Give her a hundred quid for her trouble and move on. Stupid idea anyway, suing over a bit of food poisoning. What does she hope to get? Not much loss of earnings through the night anyway, not unless she was on the game!” He laughed at his own joke,
