DEAD HEAT.
by d.i.c.k FRANCIS.
and FELIX FRANCIS.
Our thanks to Dr Tim Brazil, equine veterinary surgeon Allen Handy, princ.i.p.al trumpeter Andrew Hewson, literary agent John Holmes, friend and resident of Delafield, Wisconsin Newmarket Racecourse Gordon Ramsay, restaurateur and to Debbie for the t.i.tle and everything
CHAPTER 1.
I wondered if I was dying. I wasn"t afraid to die but, such was the pain in my gut, I wished it would happen soon.
I"d had food poisoning before but this time it was particularly unpleasant with agonizing cramps and long bouts of retching. I had already spent most of Friday night kneeling on my bathroom floor with my head in the lavatory and, at one point, I became really concerned that the violence of the spasms in my abdomen might result in me losing my stomach lining altogether.
Twice I resolved to get myself to the telephone to summon help, only to be doubled-up again by a fresh round of dry heaving. Didn"t my stupid muscles realize that my stomach was already empty, and had been so for ages? Why did this torture continue when there was nothing left in me to throw up?
Between the attacks, I sat sweating on the floor, leaning up against the bath, and tried to work out what had brought on this misery.
On Friday evening I had been to a black tie gala dinner in the Eclipse marquee at Newmarket racecourse. I"d eaten a trio of cold smoked fish with a garlic mustard dill sauce for a starter, followed by a sliced black cherry stuffed chicken breast wrapped in pancetta with a wild chanterelle and truffle sauce, served with roasted new potatoes and steamed snow peas as the main course, then a vanilla creme brulee for dessert.
I knew intimately every ingredient of the meal.
I knew because, rather than being a guest at the function, I had been the chef.
Finally, as my bathroom window changed from black to grey with the coming of the dawn, the tight knot in my stomach began to unwind and the cold clamminess of my skin slowly started to abate.
But the ordeal was not yet over, with what remained in my digestive tract now being forcefully ejected at the other end.
In due course I crawled along the landing of my cottage to bed and lay there utterly exhausted; drained, dehydrated, but alive. The clock on my bedside table showed that it was ten past seven in the morning and I was due to be at work at eight. Just what I needed.
I lay there kidding myself that I would be all right in a little while and another five minutes would not matter. I began to doze but was brought back to full consciousness by the ringing of my telephone which sat on the table next to the clock. Seven twenty.
Who, I thought, is ringing me at seven twenty? Go away. Leave me to sleep.
The phone stopped. That"s better.
It rang again. d.a.m.n it. I rolled over and lifted the receiver.
"Yes," I said with all the hurt expression in my voice from a night of agony.
"Max?" said a male voice. "Is that you?"
"One and the same," I replied in my more usual tone.
"Have you been ill?" asked the voice. It was his emphasis on the word you you that had me worried. that had me worried.
I sat up quickly. "Yes, I have," I said. "Have you?"
"Dreadful, isn"t it? Everyone I"ve spoken to has had the same." Carl Walsh was technically my a.s.sistant. In fact, these days, he was as often in charge of the kitchen as I was. The previous evening, as I had been working the tables and receiving all the plaudits, Carl had been busily plating up the meals and shouting at the staff in the kitchen tent. Now, it appeared, there might be no more plaudits, just blame.
"Who have you spoken to?" I asked.
"Julie, Richard, Ray and Jean," he said. "They each called me to say that none of them are coming in today. And Jean said that Martin was so ill that they called an ambulance and he went to hospital."
I knew how he felt.
"How about the guests?" I asked. Carl had spoken only to my staff.
"I don"t know but Jean said that when she went with Martin to the hospital, the staff there knew all about the poisoning, as they called it, so he can"t have been the only one."
Oh G.o.d! Poisoning two hundred and fifty of the great and the good of the racing world the night before the 2000 Guineas was unlikely to be beneficial to my business.
Being a chef who poisons his clients was not a reputation to relish. The event at the racecourse was a special. My day job was my restaurant, the Hay Net, situated on the outskirts of Newmarket in Ashley Road: sixty or so lunches a day from Sunday to Friday, and dinner for up to a hundred every night. At least that"s what we"d served last week, pre-poisoning.
"I wonder how many of the other staff are affected," said Carl, bringing me back to the present. My restaurant had been closed for the evening and all eleven of my regular employees had been working the dinner at the racecourse, together with twenty or so casuals who had a.s.sisted in the kitchen and with the waiting at table. All the staff had eaten the same food as served at the function, while the guests were listening to the speeches.
"I"ve arranged five to do the job at the racecourse today," I said. The thought of having to prepare lunch for forty of the sponsor"s guests sent fresh waves of nausea through my stomach and caused a reappearance of the sweat on my brow.
I was due to provide a three-course meal in two of the large gla.s.s-fronted private boxes in the grandstand. Delafield Industries Inc., an American tractor-manufacturing multinational from Wisconsin, were the new sponsors of the first cla.s.sic race of the year, and they had offered me more money than I could refuse to provide their guests with fresh steamed English asparagus with melted b.u.t.ter, followed by traditional British steak and kidney pie, with a summer pudding for dessert. Thankfully, I had talked them out of fish and chips with mushy peas. MaryLou Fordham, the company marketing executive who had secured my services, was determined that the guests from "back home" in Wisconsin should experience the "real" England. She had been deaf to my suggestions that pate de foie gras with brioche followed by a salmon meuniere might be more appropriate.
"I"ll tell you right now," MaryLou had declared. "We don"t want any of that French stuff. We want English food only." I had sarcastically asked if she wanted me to serve warm beer rather than fine French wines but she hadn"t understood my little joke. In the end, we had agreed on an Australian white and a Californian red. The whole meal had "boredom" written all over it but they were paying, and paying very well. Delafield tractors and combine harvesters, it seemed, were all the rage in the American Midwest and they were now trying hard to grab a share of the English market. Someone had told them that Suffolk was the prairie country of the UK, so here they were. That the "Delafield Harvester 2000 Guineas" didn"t have quite the right ring to it didn"t seem to worry them one bit.
As things stood at the moment they would be lucky to get anything to eat at all.
"I"ll call around and get back to you," said Carl.
"OK," I replied. He hung up.
I knew I should get up and get going. Forty individual steak and kidney pies wouldn"t make themselves.
I was still lying on my bed dozing when the phone rang again. It was five to eight.
"h.e.l.lo," I said sleepily.
"Is that Mr Max Moreton?" said a female voice.
"Yes," I replied.
"My name is Angela Milne," said the voice formally. "I am the environmental health officer for Cambridgeshire."
She suddenly had my full attention.
"We have reason to believe," she went on, "that a ma.s.s poisoning has occurred at an event where you were the chef in charge of the kitchen. Is that correct?"
"Who are "we"?" I asked.
"Cambridgeshire County Council," she said.
"Well," I said, "I was the chef for a gala dinner last night, but I am unaware of any ma.s.s poisoning and I would seriously question as to whether my kitchen would be responsible for one, even if it existed."
"Mr Moreton," she said, "I can a.s.sure you that a ma.s.s poisoning has occurred. Twenty-four persons were treated overnight in Addenbrooke"s hospital for acute food poisoning and seven of those were admitted due to severe dehydration. They all attended the same function last evening."
"Oh."
"Oh, indeed," said Ms Milne. "I require that the kitchen used to prepare the food for the event be closed immediately and that it be sealed for inspection. All kitchen equipment and all remaining foodstuffs to be made available for a.n.a.lysis, and all kitchen and waiting staff to be on hand to be interviewed as required."
That might not be as easy as she thought.
"How are the seven in hospital doing?" I asked.
"I have no idea," she said. "But I would have been informed if there had been any fatalities."
No news was good news.
"Now, Mr Moreton," she sounded like a headmistress addressing a miscreant pupil, "where exactly is the kitchen that produced the food for the event?"
"It no longer exists," I said.
"What do you mean, it no longer exists?" said Angela Milne.
"The dinner was held in the Eclipse marquee at Newmarket racecourse," I said. "The marquee will be used as a bar during the race meeting today. The tent we used for a kitchen last night will be a beer store by now."
"How about the equipment?"
"Everything was hired from a catering supplies company from Ipswich. Tables, chairs, tablecloths, plates, cutlery, gla.s.ses, pots, pans, ovens, hot serveries, the lot. My staff helped load it all back on their truck at the end of the event. I use them all the time for outside catering. They take everything back dirty and put it through their own steam cleaners."
"Will it have been cleaned yet?" she asked.
"I"ve no idea," I said. "But I wouldn"t be surprised. I have a fresh truck of equipment due to arrive at the racecourse today at eight o"clock." I looked at the clock beside my bed in precisely two minutes.
"I"m not sure I can permit you to prepare food again today," she said rather sternly.
"Why not?" I said.
"Cross contamination."
"The food for last night came from a different supplier from the one I am using today," I said. "All the ingredients of last night"s menu came direct from a catering wholesaler and were prepared at the racecourse. Today"s were ordered through my restaurant and have been in the cold-room there for the past two days." The cold-room was a large walk-in refrigerator, kept at a constant three degrees centigrade.
"Did you get anything from the same wholesaler as for the dinner?" she asked.
"No. The dry provisions would have come from the cash-and-carry near Huntingdon, the meat from my butcher in Bury St Edmunds, and the fresh fruit and vegetables from the wholesale greengrocer in Cambridge that I use regularly."
"Who provided the food for the dinner last night?" she asked.
"Something like Leigh Foods, I think. I"ve got their details in my office. I don"t usually use them but, then, I don"t often do a function for so many people."
"How about the equipment company?"
"Stress-Free Catering Ltd," I said, and gave her their telephone number. I knew it by heart.
The digits of my digital clock changed to 8:00 and I thought of the Stress-Free Catering truck arriving down the road with no one to meet it.
"Look, I"m sorry," I said, "but I have to go now and start work. If that"s all right by you?"
"I suppose so," she said. "I will come down to the racecourse to see you in about an hour or so."
"The racecourse is in Suffolk. Is that still your territory?" Actually there were two racecourses at Newmarket: one is in Cambridgeshire and the other in Suffolk, with the county boundary running along the Devil"s d.y.k.e between them. The dinner, and the lunch, were in Suffolk at the Rowley Mile course.
"The sick people are in Cambridge, that"s what matters to me." I thought I detected the faint signs of irritation but maybe I was mistaken. "The whole area of food hygiene, and who has responsibility, is a nightmare. The county councils, the district councils and the Food Standards Agency all having their own enforcement procedures, it"s a mess." I had obviously touched a nerve. "Oh, yes," she went on, "what exactly did people have to eat last night?"
"Smoked fish, stuffed chicken breast and creme brulee," I said.
"Perhaps it was the chicken," she said.
"I do know how to cook chicken, you know. Anyway, the symptoms were too quick for salmonella poisoning."
"What happened to the left-over food?" she asked.
"I"ve no idea," I said. "I don"t think there was much left over. My staff are like a pack of wolves when it comes to leftovers and they eat whatever remains in the kitchen. Food left on people"s plates goes into a bin which would normally be disposed of by Stress-Free."
"Did everyone eat the same?" she asked.
"Everyone except the vegetarians."
"What did they have?"
"Tomato and goat"s cheese salad instead of the fish starter, then a broccoli, cheese and pasta bake. There was one vegan who had pre-ordered grilled mushrooms to start, roasted vegetables for main course and a fresh fruit salad for dessert."
"How many vegetarians?"
"I"ve no idea," I said. "All I know is that we had enough of the pasta bake."
"That seems a bit cavalier."
"We did two hundred and fifty covers. I ordered two hundred and sixty chicken b.r.e.a.s.t.s, just in case some of them were a bit small or damaged."
"What do you mean by damaged?"
"Bruised or torn. I didn"t know the supplier very well so I decided to order a few more than I normally would. In the end they were all fine and we cooked the lot. Then there was enough vegetarian for at least twenty, plus the vegan. That should be about thirty to thirty-five extra meals over and above the guests. That feeds my staff. If there are only a few vegetarians among the guests, then my staff have to eat more of that. Look, I really must go now, I"m late already."