A Bitter Feast(21)

PC Murray made a note, then asked, “Do you know where Mr. O’Reilly was staying?”

“Not a clue,” Viv said more firmly. “But it can’t have been far if he left his coat.”

“Did he know Mrs. Nell Greene?”

Viv frowned. “I can’t imagine that he did.”

“Did you see them leave the pub together?”

“No. I was in the kitchen. It was Friday-night service,” she added, as if it should have been obvious.

Murray made another note, then asked, “Do you have a London address for Mr. O’Reilly?”

“No idea. He used to rent a flat in Chelsea, but I don’t remember the street. As I said, it was a long time ago. Look, I have to—”

“Just a couple more things, Ms. Holland. Is there anyone who should be notified as Mr. O’Reilly’s next of kin?”

Viv paled again. “Oh, God, no. He didn’t have any family that I know of. That was part of Fergus’s myth—you know, the Irish orphan. They were all killed in Belfast in the eighties.”

A young man in jeans came from the direction of the glasshouse, carrying two pails brimming over with salad leaves. “Look, sorry to interrupt,” he said when he reached the terrace, “but what do you want me to do with these greens, Viv? They’re going to wilt.” He turned to Addie. “And what about the kids? I’ve given them some veg to sort but I can’t keep them occupied all day.” He had a shock of unruly brown hair and a neatly trimmed beard, and a heavier local accent than Gemma had heard so far. Joe the gardener, she assumed.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, standing. “I’ll just fetch Char—”

But PC Murray stood as well, and the silent McCabe followed suit. “Thank you all for your time,” Murray said, with a nod to Addie. “We’ll let you get on with things. Just one more question for Ms. Holland.” She’d put her notebook away, but Gemma guessed what was coming. “A formal identification of the body will be necessary. Can you come to the mortuary at headquarters? At your convenience, of course.”

May 2006

The first thing Viv did every morning when she arrived at O’Reilly’s was clean the vent hoods, which had been left in the sink to soak. Ibby had mocked her, saying, “Women’s work,” but she was used to that and she didn’t care. Any kitchen she worked in was going to be clean.

“You think any Michelin-starred restaurant has greasy vents?” she asked.

She’d been in enough London kitchens. At eighteen, she’d left her home in Evesham, having saved up the money she’d made working at the café next to her mum’s antiques shop, and set off for the city she knew mostly from television shows.

For her mum, the good life had meant her shop. For her dad, a former London banker, it was a smallholding, raising chickens and pigs and his own veg. Viv had helped him in the farmhouse kitchen for as long as she could remember, and the older she grew, the more she loved it. When her friends were listening to the Spice Girls, Viv was glued to MasterChef on the telly and daydreaming about what she could make for dinner.

For her sixteenth birthday, her parents took her to the Michelin-starred Le Champignon Sauvage in Cheltenham. The food had been sublime, beyond anything she had even imagined, as if every component tasted somehow more itself. She’d spent weeks afterwards trying to re-create the things she’d tasted, crying in frustration when she couldn’t duplicate what she’d eaten.

Now, she saw that meal as the moment her future crystallized. She knew then that she was going to cook.

In the five years she’d been in London, she’d worked her way up from restaurant to restaurant, dishwasher to line cook, in some of the best places in west London. A year ago, she’d set her sights on O’Reilly’s in Chelsea. It had the up-and-coming buzz, and Fergus O’Reilly was the chef everyone was talking about as the next Marco Pierre White or Gordon Ramsay. When a job came up on day prep, she’d jumped at it, even though she knew she was good enough to be on the line.

When she sat down for an interview across from O’Reilly in the tiny basement room that served as the restaurant’s office, she’d found herself unexpectedly tongue-tied. She’d seen him in photos, and in cookery and interview segments, but none of that had prepared her for his height, or for how stunningly good-looking the man was in person. With his curly dark blond hair and deep dimples, he was reputed to have women swooning over him, but none of that charm was wasted on her that morning.

“I don’t like women in my kitchen,” he’d said bluntly, with his Belfast accent. He must have seen her start to bridle because he added, “I don’t mean women can’t cook, so don’t go getting all flustered. But women cause problems in the crew and I won’t have any of that emotional shite on my patch, understood?”

“Yes, Chef,” Viv had managed to mumble. She was glad she’d worn a T-shirt and kitchen overalls and not a stitch of makeup.

“Good. My day prep cook quit because he said it was too hard. Can you fucking believe that?” He glared at her as if it were her fault. “You’d better tell me now if it’s going to be too much for you.”

“No, Chef. I can do it,” she’d said, looking him straight in the eye. She’d started the next day.

It was hard, she found out soon enough, ten hours a day of working her bum off. The job was as much about organization as physical labor, but she liked that, liked the routine and the sense of accomplishment, liked that everything that came off the line at dinner service depended on how good a job she’d done.