Murder Makes an Entree Read online

  ‘Any other suggestions?’ enquired Sir Thomas complacently.

  There was none.

  Auguste racked his brains wildly, but they failed to produce any suitable Dickensian memories. He sighed. ‘Soup,’ he wrote down. ‘Mutton broth.’

  ‘Dimpled over with fat,’ added Oliver Michaels, ‘to make it a true Dickensian dish.’

  Sir Thomas looked up. ‘I feel we can dispense with the fat dimpling, Mr Michaels.’

  Here Auguste was in horrified accord.

  ‘A barrel of oysters,’ Lord Beddington woke up suddenly. ‘Read that somewhere in old Dickens. Sensible fellow. Don’t do things by halves, eh?’

  ‘And oysters,’ amended Sir Thomas, aware of the need to placate his one stable supporter.

  ‘They are out of season, sir,’ murmured Auguste weakly. ‘But I will try.’

  ‘Kippered salmon,’ suggested Samuel sulkily, thus revealing a knowledge of Dickens that he would never otherwise confess to – save in an attempt to out-Dickens Sir Thomas.

  ‘No!’ thundered, Sir Thomas. ‘Lobster salad to follow. As in The Pickwick Papers.’

  Auguste relaxed. Here, at least, was something one could present to the palate of the Prince of Wales. But would lobsters be obtainable by then? He would ensure they were. He would talk to the fishermen.

  ‘Now. The entrée. I think we’re all agreed?’ Sir Thomas looked triumphantly round the table before announcing their verdict: ‘Mrs Crupp’s dish of kidneys.’

  Howls of laughter followed from all save Samuel. Auguste looked blank.

  ‘Mr Didier,’ explained Oliver, ‘the joke is that David Copperfield’s housekeeper sent for all her dishes from the pastrycook, so you—’

  ‘Non,’ stated Auguste simply. Here Horatio must stand firm to guard his bridge. ‘Everything for the Prince of Wales is cooked by me – not by a Broadstairs shopkeeper.’

  Perhaps it was something in his eye which told them their joke had fallen flat, but no more was said on the question of Mrs Crupp’s dish of kidneys, it being tacitly agreed that the dishes of kidneys would be à la Didier.

  ‘Now, the goose,’ said Sir Thomas casually.

  ‘This too is a joke,’ said Auguste confidently.

  ‘No, my dear fellow,’ he retorted testily. ‘A Christmas Carol. Either goose with sage and onion stuffing and onion sauce, or turkey.’

  ‘Oh, Sir Thomas, do you think you ought?’ enquired Gwendolen anxiously. ‘With your delicate stomach—’

  Sir Thomas glared. ‘I am not prepared, Mrs Figgis-Hewett, to abrogate my duty to Mr Dickens. It is to be goose, madam, goose.’

  Auguste gazed at him, wondering whether he were mad.

  ‘But this is a Christmas dish,’ Auguste said at last. ‘Not a dish for August Bank Holiday Saturday.’ His voice was almost calm.

  ‘Quails,’ suggested Pipkin. ‘Dolby tells us Dickens ate them in America.’

  ‘Veal cutlet and taters,’ said Angelina with relish.

  ‘Lovely, lovely beefsteak pudding made with flour and eggs,’ put in Gwendolen, who had never made one, and rarely eaten one.

  ‘Simoon of roast,’ said Oliver. ‘Master Humphrey’s Clock.’

  ‘Mais—’ Auguste tried, but broke off to gather his strength for the plan he had in mind. ‘May I suggest your goose if you wish, sir, but for those for whom this is just a little heavy, His Royal Highness for instance, how about raised pies? I am sure’ – clutching wildly at his recollections of Dickens – ‘he mentions pies.’

  ‘Indeed. Jolly meat pies. Pickwick,’ said Sir Thomas lugubriously. ‘But does His Royal Highness—’

  ‘Pies and pickles are beloved by His Royal Highness,’ said Auguste, without proof but certain he was correct in assuming His Royal Highness would find them preferable to goose on an August night. Already his fertile mind, having got the measure of the monstrous problem confronting him, was rearranging the menu so that it might not disgrace the Prince or himself, and yet appear to conform with Mr Dickens’s predilections.

  ‘Mr Dickens does not seem to have had a sweet tooth, unfortunately,’ Sir Thomas droned on. ‘Charlotte Russe – Lady Clutterbuck has a recipe. I think that would be allowable in default of anything better.’

  ‘Raspberry jam tarts are mentioned in Martin Chuzzlewit,’ offered Oliver, earning a glare from Sir Thomas for his erudition.

  ‘And we can drink ginger beer,’ shrieked Gwendolen. ‘What fun it will be.’

  Fun was not the word that Auguste could associate with the Prince of Wales’s discovering that he was expected to drink ginger beer with his dinner. Fortunately, Sir Thomas here intervened with Auguste’s full approval. ‘The rules of the Society,’ he pointed out, ‘do not specify that the drink has to be as noted in the works by the Lion. We will of course have porter and stout available for those who wish it, perhaps even mint julep and hot elder wine, but for the banquet itself,’ just as Auguste’s alarm was once again rising, ‘I feel we may safely partake of French wine. Do you not agree, Mr Didier?’

  Mr Didier did.

  ‘Then we need not detain you, Mr Didier. We leave you to your plans. I recommend you to Mr Soyer’s recipes. You won’t go far wrong there.’

  Auguste left the room, trembling with emotion, with Sid’s words coming back to him. Now he had a shrewd suspicion how and why murder would be committed at Broadstairs. By him. Or perhaps, unless this menu were radically adapted, by the Prince of Wales with himself the victim.

  Chapter Three

  Auguste opened one eye, and closed it again as the full force of his dilemma returned to him. True, it was the first day of the Fish Fortnight. He firmly refused to consider it a holiday, with such an inauspicious start, firstly as he had no strong faith in the English seaside as a suitable venue for such an event, and secondly, because the last time he had set off for a holiday, murder had awaited him. Not that he could seriously envisage that happening in this case, but nevertheless the word holiday was rapidly regaining its unpleasant ring. Moreover, there was the matter of the Dickens banquet. Visions of roast goose floated before his eyes, and he groaned. Then his natural optimism reasserted itself as the sun shone invitingly through the window. Who, after all, would wish to remain in London in such tropical temperatures? The seaside might prove quite acceptable, even if it did bring with it such major disadvantages as a Soyer banquet to cook.

  He sprang out of bed with sudden resolution, prepared to greet Saturday, 29 July 1899. But the dilemma still remained: should he don suitable travelling clothes for departing from Victoria railway station, considering the inevitable coating of smuts from the engine smoke that these would acquire, thus arriving at his destination looking as out of place as a bouillabaisse in a Smithfield eating house, or should he brave the worst and don his new holiday apparel. He eyed the boater wistfully, but replaced it in its hatbox. However tempting, he could not depart from Curzon Street adorned in a brightly striped blazer and sporting a boater. This afternoon, he vowed, they would make a proud appearance, however. Perhaps even his new blue bathing costume would join them.

  ‘Kipper an’ corfee, Mr Didier,’ came Sid’s cheerful shout from below.

  ‘Je vous remercie, Sid,’ Auguste called, and in due course duly descended to face Sid’s usual offering of kipper (ritually rejected by Auguste and eaten with relish by Sid) and muffins. At first Sid had tried hard to entice Auguste into the delights of kidneys and kedgeree for breakfast, but had been forced to admit failure. Strong coffee and a brioche had been Auguste’s simple demand, reduced to a compromise of muffins after prolonged negotiation. In the days of William of Normandy, the Conqueror as he was known here, Auguste reflected, 9 a.m. was the hour of dinner not breakfast. He shuddered, glad that he lived under the rule of the good Queen Victoria.

  ‘My granny allus said, “Wittles inside, walk with pride. Without no peck, watch your step”,’ contributed Sid.

  Auguste’s opinion of Sid’s granny was not enhanced by this tribute to her poetic powers, but
in the interests of Anglo-French co-operation he submitted as usual to the muffins.

  ‘Tomorrow, Sid,’ he pontificated, adding a dollop of quince preserve, ‘we will rise early and greet the fishermen as they return with their catch. We will purchase your beloved kippers as herrings.’ Sid greeted the prospect without joy.

  Later in the day, Auguste planned happily, he would perhaps go to see dear Egbert and Edith at Ramsgate. A brisk walk over the sands . . . His spirits rose again, and most of his former forebodings about Broadstairs fled with the speed of Sid’s granny’s immortal dicta.

  Victoria railway station bustled with an excitement only rivalled at Christmastime. Those who could afford hotels, lodgings or boarding houses by the seaside mingled with mere day excursionists in a mass departure in search of less polluted air, a need heightened this year by the exceptionally hot weather. Frustrated husbands, unable to leave their offices for two weeks, or wishing to appear as if this were the case, waved their families off. Buckets and wooden spades were clutched by tiny hands as symbols of veteran travel, sailor suits were sported by every male under twelve, and ladies of high fashion bound for the respectable haunts of Broadstairs or the Cliftonville Hotel at Margate pursued their porters bound for first-class carriages. Their less affluent sisters swarmed cheerfully towards second-and third-class carriages, clutching ancient grips and eyeing their battered trunks possessively, while the excursionists scurried for their own cheap fast train.

  Auguste and Sid followed their porter to their reserved first-class carriage. The Auguste Didier School of Cuisine did not do matters by halves. Like in a recipe in which ingredients suddenly assume a different identity when mixed together according to instructions, he was interested to see what would happen when this odd mixture of pupils was together for a whole fortnight. Holidays were strange occasions. Those you thought you knew well turned out sometimes to be quite unlike that at all. Others you had previously set little store by could turn out to be shining jewels of companions. And what, after all, did he really know about these six people?

  As Auguste climbed up into the teak carriage, he tripped over Sid’s feet, his spirits tumbling with him as he saw his six pupils squeezed together in the one carriage. Alas, who could believe these six geese might in a few hours’ time become happy swans? No one could have guessed this quiet group was bound for the seaside. True, Broadstairs was apparently decorous, even dull by Ramsgate and Margate standards, yet surely not this sombre.

  Auguste seated himself next to Alice Fenwick, who was sandwiching Alfred Wittisham between herself and James Pegg. Alfred was sporting his Old Etonian waistcoat, but beyond that showed no signs of holiday festiveness. James, too, with brown boots and heavy suit, was subdued. By the corridor window Auguste was opposite Emily Dawson, clad in an unbecoming dark brown cotton dress, unrelieved by touches of colour. What would she wear at the seaside? he wondered. Black bombazine? Algernon Peckham sat next to her ostentatiously reading Carlyle. Various other levels of reading matter adorned the other laps, including, he noted, the inevitable Harmsworth in Alice’s lap. Auguste’s spirits fell further. Despite a lack of excitement, there was a definite tension. But why? He told himself that he was imagining things, but the impression would not go away.

  ‘My book says,’ remarked Emily brightly, ‘that there was a murderer from Ramsgate thirty years ago, killed five people. Ramsgate’s near Broadstairs, isn’t it?’

  ‘Quite near,’ replied Auguste repressively. He had no wish to encourage talk of murder.

  ‘Is that vy ve go there?’ rumbled Heinrich Freimüller with interest.

  ‘Non,’ said Auguste. ‘Certainly not.’

  ‘It said in one of my Harmsworth Magazines,’ announced Alice, ‘that if you walk along the Strand from Charing Cross to Temple Bar and back any day at any busy hour, you’ll pass a man who has either done a murder or who will do a murder before he dies. It says that somehow you will sense it. Is that true, Mr Didier?’ She found it necessary to clutch Alfred’s arm for protection against such horrors.

  ‘This I do not know, Miss Fenwick,’ answered Auguste grimly. ‘I work during the busy hours. I do not have time to wander along the Strand gazing at my fellow man when I have to teach pupils as difficult as yourselves.’

  ‘We’re not as bad as that, are we?’ drawled Algernon. ‘I thought my veal curry rather excellent yesterday.’ Too late he realised he had betrayed an interest in meat cookery.

  ‘You used curry paste,’ Alice retorted disapprovingly. ‘You can’t make a real curry like that. You have to use the proper spices – red pepper and cardamoms, and garam—’

  ‘Nor,’ said Auguste breaking in, ‘do you use a Soyer recipe for curry. Miss Fenwick is correct, Mr Peckham. For curry you use perhaps Colonel Kenney-Herbert’s Culinary Jottings for Madras—’

  ‘My grandmama had a cholera recipe that used cardamoms,’ volunteered Emily.

  ‘I did not know your family came from India, Fraülein Dawson,’ said Heinrich. These were about the first words he had addressed directly to her since the unfortunate affair of the Nesselrode pudding, at which she had taken great offence.

  ‘No, she lived in Dover. They had a cholera outbreak near there.’

  ‘That is near vere ve are going?’ enquired Heinrich anxiously.

  ‘Non,’ said Auguste resignedly. ‘Not vere ve are going.’ Really, for a so-called holiday, there was a remarkable harping on illness and death in the conversation.

  ‘Nasty thing cholera. I was in the army you know, over there,’ announced Alfred.

  ‘In Dover?’ asked James with interest, earning himself a rare black look from his hero.

  ‘No. India. The Guards. Only for a year or two. Had to resign for ill health.’

  ‘Were you wounded?’ breathed Alice tremulously.

  ‘No,’ said Alfred cheerfully. ‘Caught chickenpox from the Colonel’s youngest. They thought it was cholera, and packed me off home. Mama insisted I leave.’ His face grew suddenly long.

  ‘Poor Alfred. Chickenpox.’ Alice was distressed.

  ‘I haven’t got it now,’ Alfred announced encouragingly, and patted her hand.

  James cleared his throat at this compromising movement, determined to steer the conversation away from Alfred’s frailties. ‘You like these Sherlock Holmes stories then,’ he said out of the blue, glancing at the Strand Magazine on Auguste’s knee.

  ‘Like you, isn’t he?’ Algernon commented.

  ‘Non. I am not in the least like Mr Holmes!’ Auguste replied, outraged. ‘Why, Mr Holmes has never to my recollection cooked anything, or shown the least interest in true cuisine. He merely suffers the invaluable Mrs Hudson to struggle in with trays of nourishment from time to time. What kind of life is that? No, he is no true detective if he does not appreciate food.’

  With a chug and billows of greyish-white smoke, the train began to move out of Victoria railway station on its journey to the sea. The die is cast, thought Auguste, as it gathered speed, the rhythm pounding inexorably in his ears. The sound had a comforting reassurance after a while, so why then did he suddenly wish with all his heart that he were safe in his kitchen in Curzon Street?

  ‘So do you agree you can tell a murderer by his face?’ Algernon continued remorselessly and maliciously, aware of Auguste’s reluctance to talk on the subject.

  ‘Everyone can tell afterwards. It is less easy to do so beforehand,’ Auguste assured him. ‘How can one take a group of people, like yourselves for instance, and say you are a murderer or might be a murderer? There is no proof, and can never be any. And without proof one cannot know. Just as without cooking and tasting you cannot know that the recipe works.’

  Emily gave a little scream. ‘Like us, Mr Didier? You think we are murderers?’

  ‘Non, non,’ he said hastily. ‘A group like you. Or like the Literary Lionisers. Any group of ordinary people in their daily lives.’ Could one say of any group, he wondered, that they were ordinary? What, after all, did he know of the d
esires and passions, the hopes and fears of these people after they left Curzon Street at night? True, it was hard to imagine their having any at all, looking at them now. A dull enough assembly. Yet put these same people in front of food and something happened to them. Each in their own way turned into an artist. Not to be compared with himself of course, but talented, definitely talented. And if food could bring about such a change, perhaps other factors could also. Perhaps the Literary Lionisers committee too would be revealed as individuals with hopes and fears.

  ‘There are an awful lot of undiscovered murders,’ Alice was saying with some relish. ‘That’s what my Harmsworth Magazine says.’ Auguste had long ago tired of the Harmsworth Magazine, but Alice was not to be stopped. ‘There was that Mrs Francis butchered in her rooms at Peckham. And that murder in Great Coram Street—’

  ‘They found the murderer. He was a German,’ Algernon remarked incautiously.

  ‘Nein, he was found innocent,’ glared Heinrich, always touchy on the subject of German honour.

  ‘And the Euston Square murders,’ Algernon continued doggedly.

  ‘London isn’t safe, and that’s a fact,’ James put in. ‘But most murderers are found out, aren’t they, Mr Didier?’

  ‘How can we know? Most murderers of known murders perhaps. But of those murders not known to be murders, the push over the clifftop, or under the train, the poison dealt stealthily that kills little by little. How can we know how many there are?’

  ‘Mrs Maybrick was found out.’

  ‘But was she guilty?’ demanded Emily, taking an unusually large part in the conversation today. ‘I think it was a shame. He was an arsenic eater, you know. And she only bought the arsenic for her complexion. My grandmama used it with treacle.’

  ‘Pardon?’ said Auguste, startled.

  ‘Oh, not on her bread, Mr Auguste,’ said Emily, her face unaccountably flushing bright red. ‘To kill flies.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Auguste, relieved.

  ‘Sheep,’ put in James. ‘You use it for sheep. Dangerous stuff.’ He relapsed into silence again, perhaps at the sight of Alice’s hand stealing once more into Alfred’s for comfort. He frowned. Something had to be done. ‘Messy business, poison,’ he said quietly, glancing at his huge capable hands.