In the Kitchen Read Free

the head there's some splashes around the place – like you might get if someone had been hit on the back of the head, for instance.'
    'You're not saying ...' began Maddox.
    'I'm not. The CSM's taken a sample. Crime scene manager. We do like our acronyms.'
    'And the splashes?' said Gabe.
    'Bit of a boozer, was he? Few empties down there. Probably what's happened is he slipped over, cut his head, got up and staggered around a bit, and fell back down. I don't blame the duty officer for calling it, but when I can get a BPA expert down there – should be someone on his way now ...' He checked his watch. 'Blood pattern analysis. When I get my BPA guy down there, hundred to one that's what he'll say.'
    'So all this is a formality,' said Maddox.
    'No sign of robbery or anything like that. His things don't seem to have been disturbed. Of course we'll be thorough. Once you set the ball rolling, you see, you've got to work it through to the end.'
    'Can we open again tomorrow?' said Maddox.
    The detective stuck his hands in his trouser pockets. He looked, Gabriel thought, somehow disappointing in his brown chinos and oatmeal sports jacket.
    'Don't see why not,' said Parks. 'Should have the body out of there soon. The CSM's got to bag the head and hands and then it can go for the post mortem.
    That area will stay cordoned off for the time being.'
    'The post mortem's the end of it?' said the general manager.
    'The coroner will give his initial findings – injuries consistent with a fall, that kind of thing, open an inquest and adjourn it awaiting the final police report.'
    'And the post-mortem results you get back when?'
    'Unless the BPA throws up any surprises it won't go through on a rush job. We can get it done in forty-eight hours if there's cause, otherwise it's more like five or six days. Ah, looks like my blood man's arrived. I take it you've called environmental health?'
    'Oh yes,' said Mr Maddox grimly. 'We've called in the council. We've called in Health and Safety. We've not called in the navy yet, but we've called everyone else.'
    Gabe checked the time. Nearly ten thirty. He had been sitting in his office over half an hour without getting a single thing done. He tried to remember the last time he'd spoken to the Ukrainian. A conversation about the grease on the extractor hoods, but that was about a month ago. 'Yes, Chef,' Yuri would have said. 'I'll see to it, Chef.' Something like that. There wasn't much call for an executive chef to speak to a night porter unless he was giving trouble and Yuri, until yesterday, had been no trouble at all.
    Oona knocked and entered the office, all in one bustling move. She squashed her backside into the orange plastic seat. 'I been keepin' up the spirits out there with a little bitta prayer.' Her voice was invariably strangled, as though she was just about managing not to laugh or cry or shout. She leaned her elbows on the desk and rested her chin on her hands.
    We're not here for tea and bloody buns, thought Gabe. There was something about Oona that infuriated him. It wasn't the fact that she was so often late for work, it wasn't the inefficient manner in which she worked, it wasn't that her idea of fine dining was stew and dumplings with a sprig of parsley on top, and it wasn't even the fact that she couldn't cook so much as a fish finger without managing to cock it up. He had worked with lazier cooks, stupider cooks, cooks who would serve up a bowl of sick if they thought they could get away with it. What offended him about Oona was simply this: her domesticity.
    When she blew into his office and sat down it was as if she had just got home with the shopping, looking forward to a cuppa and a chat. The way she talked, the way she walked, the way she pressed her bosom when she was thinking, all of it, at core, was irreducibly and inescapably domestic. In Gabe's experience, women who worked in kitchens – and there were a few – worked the hardest, swore the loudest and told the dirtiest jokes.