Healthy Place to Die (17 page)

I might be doing him an injustice in suspecting him of knowing more than he had told me. Perhaps he had been intending to come to the spa and talk about food. Perhaps he had tried to get others to replace him and couldn’t. I recalled that the universal surprise in finding me at the spa was really surprise that Carver Armitage was not there. But perhaps also—just perhaps—there might be more to it than that.

From the public phone, I called St. Giles’s Hospital in London. A string of helpful voices bounced me round a circuit before I was talking to Sister Blackstone. She had an ice-encrusted voice and an Arctic manner. She must strike terror into the hearts of the nursing staff, I thought, and her patients must dread the sound of her approaching footsteps. Certainly, Baron Victor Frankenstein would never have selected her as his assistant on that fateful night when thunder clapped and lightning flashed through the dome of the castle laboratory—he would have feared that she would terrify his creation.

“Mr. Armitage?” she repeated. “Yes, he was under my care.”

Poor fellow, I thought, he’ll never be the same again. I said, “Isn’t he still there in the hospital?”

“Of course not. We discharged him some days ago.”

“I thought he was going be there another week?” I said.

“Certainly not,” she said firmly. “Not for such a minor matter.”

Minor to you maybe, I thought, but for Carver a matter of great importance.

“Was his treatment, er, successful?” I asked, trying to keep our line of communication open.

“We considered alternate treatments,” she said loftily. “Amputation was one of them but—”

“Amputation!”

I probably groaned.

“It wasn’t a serious matter,” her flinty tones told me. “He wouldn’t have missed it.”

She must have heard me gulp. “I don’t know him really well,” I explained, “but I think he would have considered himself disastrously incapacitated had you used the knife on him.”

She sniffed. It is not easy to convey a volume of meaning in a sniff, but she did it admirably. I didn’t need to ask in order to know that she did not agree with me.

“So how did you treat him?” I asked.

Her voice hardened, if that were possible. “I must question your authority to ask such questions over the telephone. Just who are you? Are you a doctor?”

“I’m his half brother,” I ad-libbed. “I just came back from Zimbabwe.”

“Zimbabwe?” she repeated, and skepticism dripped out of the telephone.

“You probably call it Rhodesia—us old hands do most of the time.”

“In that case, you should call Mr. Armitage and ask him these questions.”

“We’ve sort of lost touch—you know how it is.” There was no answer. Apparently she didn’t know. I went on, “Besides, matters of a sensitive nature such as this require delicate handling even between half brothers.”

“Sensitive! Delicate! What’s sensitive or delicate about a painful end joint, little finger, left hand?”

Was this jaunty hospital jargon? I wondered. Euphemisms of the profession?

“He
was
in the impotence ward, wasn’t he?”

The silence that followed could have swallowed an Alp.

“For a little finger?” Her scorn would have daunted the Russian army. “No, he came in for an examination. He left before noon.”

“Did his doctor send him?” I asked.

“Of course not. He came in of his own accord.”

My mind was spinning. Carver had admitted himself to St. Giles for a miniscule matter that sounded like a hangnail and called me at that time. I had to admit that it was a great way to get sympathy, especially the “male thing,” which guarded against probing questions.

“Thank you, Sister,” I said weakly, and hung up the phone.

So Carver had wanted me to come here in his place. He had gone to some lengths to make sure that I did so.

Had he wanted me to get killed in his place?

H
OW DO YOU INVESTIGATE
when there is nowhere to go? No doubt real detectives would know what to do. With vast armies of men and women, inexhaustible files and highly ingenious computers, they find a score of avenues to explore. But a food detective like me … I was always explaining to people that I’m not a detective at all, really. Now I had to believe it.

Two missing women and two attempts on my life—maybe three. Must be enough clues there, somewhere. … Even the fictional detectives would be able to find them. If Sherlock Holmes were involved, he would be puffing on his pipe. Lord Peter Wimsey would be gazing at one of his rose beds, Nero Wolfe would be seeking inspiration in a bottle of beer, whereas Mike Hammer would be pounding his fists into a face, any face. No help to be found there. I didn’t smoke a pipe, didn’t own a Ming vase, liked beer but didn’t find inspiration in it, and abhorred pugilistics.

Carver Armitage’s antics baffled me too. Getting me to feel sorry for him and then dispatching me here where I would be a target for assassination was not friendly behavior. It was true we were not exactly friends, but it was not the behavior to use even with acquaintances.

It was the next morning, and I was feeling frustrated. Breakfast had not helped the mental processes, and I had a couple of hours before the morning session was to start. Plenty of time to find clues—if only I knew how.

“Ask questions” was the only useful piece of advice I could give myself. It lacked brilliance, I admitted. It might be dangerous, I warned myself. Initially, there was only one place to start. I went to the public phone and called Carver’s number in London. There was no answer, and his answering machine did not even respond.

I went to the reception desk. Monique was not on duty this time. It was a very young man with slicked-down hair. He had a Swiss-German accent and was trying to grow a mustache with very little sign of success. I used the same ploy as before.

“Is there a message for me?” I gave him my name and when the inevitable head shake came, I frowned in disappointment. “That’s strange. I had a breakfast appointment with Janet Hargrave and she didn’t show up. I’ve looked everywhere and can’t find her.”

He was eager to help. He called her room and got no answer. He pushed keys on the computer, looked surprised, then said, “Just a moment” and went to the cashier’s desk. It was a rerun all the way. When he came back, he said apologetically, “I’m sorry, Miss Hargrave checked out.”

“How did she go?”

It was the same answer as with Kathleen. “A taxi to the airport.”

Behind me, a voice said in an incredulous tone, “Janet Hargrave’s left?”

It was Elaine. She was wearing a yellow-and-white shirt and white slacks, looking more appropriately dressed for lunch on the lawn than for the upcoming cooking presentation.

Yes, she has, I told her.

She looked perplexed. “That’s abrupt, isn’t it?”

“Very. You’ve been talking to her?”

“Yes.” She looked around. It was not a furtive movement, for she was not a furtive person by any means. Still, she obviously didn’t want any eavesdroppers and that made me very curious. She moved away from reception and so did I. She wouldn’t be easy to grill, but maybe I could learn something if I employed all the techniques that I recalled from both real and fictional detectives.

“I talked to her too,” I said. That was one of my limited repertoire of ruses, and it was intended to make the witness think that you knew more than you really did.

Maybe it was working. She shot me a look of surprise. “What were you talking to her about?”

Ouch. Elaine had a more direct approach than I did.

“She was concerned about Kathleen Evans.”

That came close to scoring a hit. If Elaine was going to cross-examine in court, she might want to brush up on nonchalance.

I decided to follow up and show how honest I was being. “Kathleen left very abruptly—like Janet.”

“Yes, I know. I talked to Kathleen too.”

I recalled seeing the two of them in conversation and thinking that they had looked as if they might already have been acquainted.

“I believe you knew her previously, didn’t you?”

“No,” she said. An emphatic head shake reinforced the word.

“She seemed to have some other reason for being here and not just doing a story for the magazine,” I suggested.

“I wouldn’t know,” Elaine said. She seemed to consider a more cooperative reaction. “Well, she might have,” she conceded. “I wish I was sure what it was.”

“Does this have some connection with your murder case?”

“Frankly, I don’t see how it can,” she said, meeting my eyes. “But there might be some tenuous link.”

“What does that mean?”

“Well, for instance, some person connected with my case might be involved with what’s going on here at the spa.”

“Is something going on here at the spa?” I asked with all my most bright-eyed innocence.

“Shall we take a stroll?” Elaine offered.

We went outside and along the wide concrete walk between the reception and the next building, the one with several conference rooms. Other strollers were out too, especially those who were having guilt pangs after the rich Danish pastries, the heavy pumpernickel bread, the creamy omelettes, and the German sausages. Elaine waited until no one was within earshot.

“You’re an investigator,” she began. “Kathleen Evans has left suddenly and now Janet Hargrave has too.”

“I don’t see how you can put those three facts together and come up with any kind of conclusion.”

She shook her head. “It’s not something I need to prove.”

“I am not here for the purpose of investigating. I came to replace Carver Armitage, who is unfortunately hospitalized. What did you find out about Kathleen’s abrupt departure?” I asked.

“Well, she isn’t back in her office.”

“Maybe she has another assignment.”

“I don’t think so,” she said, watching me for telltale reactions. “Her office thought she was still here.”

So Elaine had called
Good Food
magazine as well. The girl there must be wondering by now about all these phone calls. She would be wondering even more if Janet didn’t return to the office.

I was in a quandary as to how much I should confide in Elaine. Whatever it was she was looking into just might have something to do with the strange happenings here at the spa, although her description of it as being a “tenuous link” suggested that she didn’t think so.

“Maybe we should pool information.” I tossed it out lightly.

She took it the same way. “Maybe. You first.”

“Kathleen asked me to meet her in the Seaweed Forest. She was there but when I, er, wanted to talk to her, she disappeared. She hasn’t been seen since as far as I can make out. She has not gone back to her office, and when I asked about her here, they said she had checked out and taken a taxi to the airport.”

It was as near to the truth as I wanted to venture. As to whether Kathleen was alive or dead, my best guess was that she was dead, but I wasn’t ready to bring that up until I knew where Elaine stood.

“You called her office?”

I had expected her to be astute enough to catch that. “Yes. As you did.”

“And now Janet has disappeared just as abruptly,” she said, reflectively.

I nodded. “Now it’s your turn. You said we’d pool information.”

“I said ‘maybe.’”

“If you have something to hide, it makes me suspect that you are more involved in this than you’re admitting.”

We reached the end of the concrete walkway. We stopped and faced one another.

“Give me one more day,” she said. “I have some phone calls to make. I expect to learn enough to clarify a lot of points.”

I didn’t have a lot of choice. Nevertheless, I tried to sound as if I were being magnanimous as I paused and then said, “All right, but one thing—don’t call from your room—and Elaine …”

“Yes?”

“Be careful.”

She looked surprised, as if the thought had not occurred to her that she might be in danger. I did want her to be careful but at the same time, any hint that she was threatened might render her more likely to share information. I ought to be ashamed of myself for using such tactics, I thought. Lord Peter would never do anything so ungallant. No, but Mike Hammer would, came my immediate response.

The morning session was to be a hands-on affair, and well before ten o’clock all hands were on deck and eager to get in on some culinary action. Leighton Vance and Michel Leblanc were joint presenters today, and the subject was puff pastry.

Lines of tables were set up and trays of ingredients were on each one. The “students” sat in rows. Marta Giannini sat at the front, looking glamorous in a new cooking outfit that must have come from Emmanuel Ungaro rather than Williams-Sonoma. Oriana Frascati was looking studious and already had her notebook open and was gazing at a screen full of moving stars. Helmut Helberg was carefully tying a large apron around his substantial middle, and I heard Millicent Manners saying, “I am really looking forward to this—it’s just what I need to learn.”

“The greatest discovery of the modern kitchen,” was Leighton’s opening statement. “That’s what Auguste Kettner called puff pastry,” he went on, “and the emphasis is on ‘the kitchen’ because that is exactly where pastry originated. Other culinary discoveries have come about in other ways, but pastry comes from the kitchen.”

Michel took up the presentation at that point. “The most difficult pastry of all is the puff pastry, so we are going to teach you how to make this. When you have mastered puff pastry, all the others come easy. In French, we call it
mille feuilles,
and you will see why in a moment. This is the kind of pastry used in
vol-au-vents
—I like to translate that as ‘gone with the wind,’ which describes how light it is.”

“I’m going to describe what Michel is doing,” said Leighton. “He has flour on the pastry slab and is adding salt. He is making a well in the middle of it and is pouring water into it. Now, he is mixing it into a smooth paste. He is leaving it to cool from the heat of his hands. … Now he has a slab of butter which has come straight from the refrigerator to make sure it is cold. He is pressing the butter slab flat. … Now he rolls out the paste to a large square and lays the butter on it.”