I raised an imaginary glass towards his great achievement and made a silent toast: Sir Christopher, you managed it. And I can too.
8
K idney beans!”
“Yes, kidney beans, probably red kidney beans. According to the tests done on those customers taken to the hospital, there was something called phytohemagglutinin in the dinner and that’s what made everyone ill. It’s also known as ‘kidney bean lectin.’”
It was late Saturday afternoon, and I was having a meeting with Carl and Gary in my office prior to us opening for dinner. We didn’t do lunches on Saturday. Too many of my clientele were away at the races.
“But there weren’t any kidney beans in that dinner,” said Carl.
“That’s what I thought,” I said. “But, apparently, there were samples taken from sixteen different individuals, and this stuff was in all of them.”
Gary and Carl looked at each other. “Beats me,” said Gary.
“Where in the dinner could they have been?” asked Carl.
“That,” I said, “is what I intend to find out. And then I’ll find out who put them there.”
“Surely you’re not saying that someone poisoned everyone on purpose?” said Carl.
“What else can I think?” I replied. “Consider the facts. Loads of those who ate the dinner were ill, including me. Tests on sixteen of them show this phyto stuff in them. The stuff made them ill, and it only comes from kidney beans. Doesn’t take a genius to conclude that there must have been kidney beans in the dinner. I know I didn’t put any in the dinner. So, QED, someone else must have, and it must have been done on purpose to make people ill.”
“But why?” said Gary.
“I don’t know.” I was exasperated. “But it had to be done by someone who had access to the kitchen.”
“Loads of people had access to the kitchen,” said Carl. “We didn’t exactly have a guard on duty. There were all the kitchen staff from the agency, and all the waiters too.”
“And there were others from the racetrack caterers there as well,” I said. “But, believe me, I intend to find out who it was.”
“But wouldn’t you see red kidney beans in anything?” said Gary.
“I thought that myself,” I said. “But you wouldn’t if they were chopped up very finely.”
“How many beans would you need to poison over two hundred people?” said Carl. “Surely there would be so many it would affect the taste?”
“I looked it up on the U.S. Food and Drug Administration Web site on the Internet,” I said. “It says there that four or five raw beans are enough to make people quite ill. It also says that if the beans are heated to not more than eighty degrees centigrade, they are five times as poisonous as the raw ones. That means just a single bean per person could be enough. And it also says that the attack rate is one hundred percent-that means everyone who ate the beans would be ill.”
“But where were they?” said Gary.
“I think they must have been put in the sauce,” I said. No one, I thought, would taste a single partially cooked kidney bean, especially if it was finely chopped up and mixed with the chanterelle mushrooms, the truffles and the shallots, not to mention the white wine, the brandy, the garlic and the cream.
“But you have to reduce the wine in that sauce,” said Carl. What he meant by “reduce” was that the sauce was boiled to remove some of the excess liquid by evaporation. “Surely that would render the beans harmless even if they were in there?”
“They had to have been added after the reduction,” I said. “That sauce had cream in it to add richness. It wasn’t boiled after the cream was added.” To prevent it curdling in the acidity of the wine.
I remembered back to the dinner. In order to produce enough, I had used four large aluminum cooking pots to produce the sauce, similar to domestic kitchen saucepans only bigger, with handles on each side. The ones that Stress-Free Catering had provided would each hold about six liters of liquid, if full. I had estimated that we would require fifty milliliters of sauce per person. So for two hundred and fifty servings, I had needed twelve and a half liters of sauce. I had made it in four separate batches, just in case a batch curdled. In the end, all four batches had been fine, and there had been plenty left over. I remembered it well, as I loved the sauce and had poured extra on my own dinner. Just my bad luck.
The four half-full pots had stood in the serving area, where we had made up the dinners on the plates with the sliced stuffed chicken breasts, the roasted new potatoes, the snow peas and the sauce, with a sprig of parsley on the potatoes to garnish. The pots hadn’t been directly heated on a range for some minutes, as I had judged that they were hot enough and would maintain their temperature throughout the serving if simply placed on top of the hot stainless steel servers. I had told one of the temporary kitchen staff to stir the sauce to prevent it from separating. He had been of little use for anything else, and I remembered him because it had taken me some time to explain what was required because he didn’t understand English very well. I had assumed at the time that he was Polish or Czech, or from some other eastern European country, as so many staff in the catering business seem to be these days.
I reckoned there had been about a ten-minute window when the beans could have been added to the sauce between being moved from the kitchen and the service. At that time, I mostly had been around the corner in the kitchen or out in the dining area. Either way, I had been out of sight of the pots during that vital time. Due to the positioning between the kitchen and the dining room, almost any of the staff that night could have had the chance to add something to the pots. But it had to have been someone who knew the place, and surely my stirrer or someone else would have seen them. It still made little sense to me.
“So what do you suggest we do?” said Gary.
“Nothing we can do,” I said, “except carry on as before. We have sixty-five booked for dinner, and, so far, no one has called today to cancel.”
The telephone on my desk rang. Why didn’t I keep my stupid mouth shut, I thought, as I lifted the receiver.
“Hello,” I said. “Hay Net restaurant.”
“Max? Is that you?” said a female voice.
“Certainly is,” I said.
“Good. This is Emma Kealy. I understand you saw George at Elizabeth’s funeral yesterday.”
“Yes,” I said, “I did. I’m so sorry about Elizabeth.”
“Yes,” she said. “Thank you. A dreadful thing, especially for poor Neil.” She paused for a moment. “But life has to go on for the rest of us.”
“How can I help?” I asked her.
“Well, George tells me that he canceled our booking for tonight.”
“Yes, he did. He said to leave it for a while.”
“Stupid old fool,” she said. “We still have people staying tonight, and there’s no food in the house. What does he think I’m going to do? Go to the Raj of India?” The Raj of India was a seedy take-out curry place on Palace Street. It would never have crossed my mind that Emma Kealy would have even known about it, let alone thought of going there. “Can you fit four of us in for tonight at eight-thirty?” she said imploringly. “I will perfectly understand if we can’t have our usual table.”
“Of course we can fit you in,” I said. “Look forward to seeing you.”
“Great. See you later, then.” I could hear the relief in her voice. I wondered how much of a row had gone on between her and George.
I put the phone down and looked at Gary and Carl. “Four more bookings for tonight,” I said, smiling. Thank goodness for the Kealys.
The other two went into the kitchen to start preparing for dinner while I sat at my desk to complete some paperwork. I shuffled the stack of already-tidy papers, checking that there were no outstanding bills that had to be paid immediately. I came across the delivery note from Leigh Foods, the supplier I had used for the gala dinner. I looked through the ingredients again, as if I could have missed the kidney beans before. They weren’t there. Of course they weren’t there. I would swear on my father’s grave that I had not put any damn kidney beans in that dinner.