The Semi-Sweet Hereafter (6 page)

“An apprenticeship like Hugh's?” I asked, encouraging her. Jeremy and Phoebe had run separate businesses, but they must have collaborated. Plus, Nicola needed to know I was listening.

“That's right.” Nicola offered me a biscotto. I demurred. She shrugged and kept eating. It was remarkable that she managed to pack away so many goodies. Unfortunately, she caught me noticing and gave me a defensive look. “I haven't tasted sugar for months. Jeremy had all of us on his ‘clean eating' plan.”

Aha. The same healthy-eating kick Phoebe had mentioned—the one championed by Jeremy's trainer, Liam Taylor. I doubted we'd get along. His approach to eating would give me nightmares.

“Come by Primrose,” I offered. “I'll hook you up.”

Nicola laughed, that awkward moment between us forgotten. “I might just do that, if you've managed to improve things already. I heard the baked goods really went downhill at the shop after Jeremy hired away all Phoebe's bakers. But maybe he wanted to get a jump on consolidating their assets for himself before the divorce papers were served. Who knows with him?”

I almost choked on my latte. “
Divorce papers?
”

“You didn't know?” Nicola looked perplexed. “I thought that was why Phoebe needed your help—because Jeremy had poached all the talent on her staff. She was at risk of being exposed as a talentless fraud. They had epic fights about who owned what, who was responsible for what, and whose fault everything was.”

“Fights?” I hadn't known about any marital discord. Even the staff at Primrose hadn't gossiped about Phoebe's marriage.

Of course, I didn't know if Nicola was trustworthy or simply bitter—eager to bad-mouth her former boss. I
did
know that I didn't much care for her take on Phoebe. Calling Phoebe Wright a fraud was putting a pretty harsh spin on things.

Wealthy people routinely started boutiques, candy stores, art galleries, and more—businesses that produced an income but were actually hobbies. If you could do the same, wouldn't you?

On the other hand, the staff at Primrose
was
surprisingly green. And they
were
mostly newcomers to the shop. Hmm.

Maybe, just as Phoebe had pretended to be “working out” new recipes, she'd pretended to be “temporarily shorthanded,” too. That had been her excuse for needing my troubleshooting skills.

I didn't like the idea that she'd hidden her true problems from me. But then, someone like her would value privacy and propriety, wouldn't they? Her personal life wasn't my business.

“As I said, Jeremy wasn't an easy man to deal with. I'm sure he stole away those bakers out of sheer spite.” Nicola looked me square in the eye. “He was mean, Jeremy was. Before he died, he found time to blackball me in the industry, just because I corrected one little typo. Now I'm unemployable.”

“But you have other skills,” I tried. “Your degree?”

“Didn't get me a job before Jeremy and can't now, either.”

“Can you bake?” I hoped to cheer her up. “I'll hire you.”

“Thanks, but I need to think about my next move more carefully this time. I jumped into that job with Jeremy, and that was a disaster, to say the least.” Nicola shifted her gaze to the tabloid paper lying beside my latte. She gave me a semi-smile. “You're lucky you never knew him, Hayden. I certainly wish I never had. We're all better off now that Jeremy is gone.” Then she thanked me for bringing her things, took them upstairs with her, and left me behind with more questions than answers . . . and more food for thought than I'd counted on getting.

Also, a major appetite for cake. I ventured to the café's counter and bought a wedge of triple-layered mocha, then savored that slice while considering my suspects. So far, no one stood out. But maybe meeting Liam Taylor would change that.

Four

I couldn't get away to meet Jeremy's trainer. I was called back to Primrose instead, to troubleshoot a batch of failed brownies. Those are the breaks of chocolate whispering, though.

When I arrived, the shop was nearly devoid of customers but chockablock with the dizzying fragrances of chocolate, butter, and sugar. Also, a faint undercurrent of burnt brownies. Uh-oh.

It hadn't been a false alarm, then. I'd hoped that my high standards might have affected the staff's assessment of the situation, leading them to call me to deal with a minimally flawed batch of crumbly or overly moist sweets. I guessed not.

I stepped past a mother with a portable pram and a businessman with a copy of the
Financial Times
tucked under his suited elbow. I spied a customer with a tabloid paper, too.

The press's take was that Jeremy Wright had been murdered (
IN COLD BLOOD
! the headlines hollered) by any number of suspects. An angry employee. A deranged fan. A jilted would-be lover. One “source” even envisioned a secret plot by MI6. (Now known as “SIS,” the British Secret Intelligence Service, by the way. James Bond movies had been altered forever, it turned out.)

The tabloid press definitely stood to gain from an event like Jeremy's suspicious death. After all, nothing stoked the public's prurient interest as much as a celebrity's untimely death did. The free papers given away on street corners would benefit from increased ad sales—sales that would buy them another year or two of operations, despite the encroachment of Wi-Fi on the Underground luring away their (former) readers to cell phone games and texting. The legitimate press would benefit from runaway sales, period. Even TV broadcasts were going crazy.

For all kinds of media, Jeremy's demise was a win-win.

That macabre situation brought up more than a few ghoulish questions. Could someone in the press have been desperate enough—or motivated enough—to have engineered Jeremy's murder, I wondered? Or, given Jeremy's supposedly legendary temper, to have actually bludgeoned him to death themselves? I doubted it.

But seeing those tabloid papers at Primrose, I couldn't discount the possibility altogether. The next time I returned to the Wrights' guesthouse, I needed to talk to a journalist.

In the back of the house—where the shop's kitchens, work space, ovens, walk-in refrigerator and freezer, and office were all shoehorned into far too little space—the bakers all made room for me. I grabbed an apron and pulled it over my head.

The full sheet pan of brownies in front of me was . . . abysmal. The brownies smelled nicely chocolaty, so that was a plus. But they lacked the glossy, crackly surface that all good brownies should have. When I cut one, it mushed to bits, too soft to hold together. When I sniffed it, I detected hints of charred sugar.

That might not have been all bad. Technically, caramel is burnt sugar
—
expertly burnt sugar—mixed with cream and butter. But these brownies had not been expertly made. Not in the least.

The assembled bakers shifted, staring hopefully at me. I couldn't bear to disappoint them. That was no way to teach.

“Not bad,” I told them with an encouraging smile. “Ten minutes less baking time, a slightly heavier hand with the flour, and more time spent whisking the eggs with the sugar, and you'd have a wonderful fudgy brownie here.” I tasted a crumb. “The chocolate must have burned in the bain-marie.” That was the first step—melting at least two kinds of chocolate together with butter in a bowl set over simmering (never boiling!) water. I rolled up my sleeves. “Let's try again. Together this time.”

Hugh Menadue hesitated beside me, tall and broad-shouldered in chef's whites. He'd tied a bandanna on his head. “Don't see the point, me.” He frowned. “We're all bloody doomed anyway.”

“No, we're not!” disagreed the petite, plump baker beside him. No longer an apprentice, Myra had been through the fire. Her grit and experience showed. “Phoebe will set things right.”

There was a general murmur of agreement over that. Except for Hugh, who was the newest apprentice, they all seemed to have the opinion that Phoebe would be able to right the ship.

Largely, I figured, with my chocolate-whispering help.

“It's a matter of time. You're all a bunch of blind idiots, if you can't see that.” Hugh's sinewy muscles flexed beneath the rolled-up sleeves of his whites, showing off multiple tattoos. Beneath his bandanna, he had wild hair and a pierced eyebrow. In his combat boots, he carried a knife. I'd seen it when he'd hoisted some trash. “I never should have come here.”

He whipped off his apron, untying it with nimble fingers. He hurled it away. His knuckles bore multiple tattoos, too.

On a stream of swearing, Hugh stomped toward the back door.

Myra nudged me. “Shouldn't we go after him?”

“Nope.” Hugh needed time to cool off—time to regain hope that his apprenticeship would work out. “He'll be back.”

Everyone looked dubious, but I was certain. I've known people like Hugh Menadue—proud, hotheaded, and impervious to the dangers of fire, knives, and 115-degree heat—for years now. He was born to work in the restaurant business. He was family now.

We all were. That was my rule. When consulting, my first order of business was diagnosing interpersonal problems in any given environment and dealing with them. Only after that did I tackle brittle cookies, failed viennoiserie, or fallen gâteaux.

With Hugh momentarily left to his own devices—and, most likely, the comforts of a cigarette in the alleyway—I set about assigning tasks. One baker chopped chocolate with a sharp chef's knife, turning it from a solid block to uniform tiny shards. Another cracked room-temperature eggs, kept that way so they'd blend uniformly with the batter and not “curdle” it—basically, overchill the butter in the mix, and make it harden into small lumps. Another sifted flour. A fourth added hot coffee to cocoa powder, melting the cocoa butter trapped within those particles and enabling them to meld smoothly with the brownie batter.

That's a trick you might not have heard of. Although it seems efficient (and obvious) to combine dry cocoa powder with flour, it's almost always better to mix it with a liquid first. Otherwise, you're leaving flavor untapped. Just take one whiff of the resulting slurry—as I did then—and you'll be a convert.

As the (lackadaisical) business went on in Primrose's front of house, we went on with our (umpteenth) brownie lesson in the back. I might have despaired of ever teaching the beginner staff the best ways to grind almonds for macarons or beat eggs for genoise, but their mistakes were the best way to learn.

I can tell you twenty times not to overbeat the sugar and butter for chocolate chip cookies, to substitute part bread flour for cakier results, to add more salt than you think you need, to chill the dough before baking, and not to reuse a sheet pan before it's cool . . . on and on and on. But until you've spent forty-five minutes laboriously mixing chocolate chip cookie dough—only to scoop it, bake it, and wind up with a lavalike spread of greasy, flat, sadness-inducing cookies—you just won't get it.

While the resulting (refined) brownies baked, I got busy checking with Primrose's resident chocolatier. To my relief, the department that handled truffles, fudge, and handmade bars full of cacao nibs, nuts, and dried fruit was doing just fine. Evidently, Phoebe had lucked into someone skilled to handle her confectionary—that, or Jeremy hadn't been interested in stealing away the person responsible for ganache and molded candy.

I helped to troubleshoot a batch of chocolate-cream filling that was destined for chocolate and vanilla trifles, making sure it contained the correct balance of dark and semi-sweet chocolate. I tasted a fresh sample of pain au chocolat and pronounced it acceptable. I oversaw the production of loaf cakes studded with chocolate and frosted with spicy ginger icing.

All the while, I listened. Carefully. There was no mention of marital disharmony between Phoebe and Jeremy. In fact, several employees asked me how Phoebe was getting on. Their concern for her well-being seemed genuine. I was touched.

Hugh lumbered inside, smelling of tobacco but full of newfound equanimity. I knew it would be better not to dwell on his earlier outburst. Men like Hugh—proud, bellicose, and new to the task at hand—needed space to thrive. I was happy to give it.

“I can handle that.” Hugh nodded at the Breton-style sea salt caramels I'd been wrapping. His gaze was forthright, his hands reddened by recent washing. He angled his shoulder toward the other side of the chocolaterie-pâtisserie's kitchen. “You'll be wanting to check on Poppy's buttercream, anyway.”

His approach was an invitation for us to start fresh. I recognized that. With Hugh, a lot of things remained unspoken.

He caught my eye and grinned. “I'm serious,” he nudged. “It's a disaster situation of sugar and egg whites over there.”

I laughed and nodded. “Good eye. Thanks for the tip.”

Although Hugh was new at Primrose—brought to the shop via Jeremy's charity program—he had all he needed to succeed: good instincts and a willingness to learn. Despite his inherent cynicism, I knew he could succeed. Anything else was a bonus.

Almost two hours later, I'd successfully reset the kitchen. The bakers were turning out the last orders of the day, filling the rolling metal baker's racks with confections and baked goods to sell to the after-school students, post-yoga mums, and stockbrokers from The City who needed “homemade” tarts for dinner parties. Their wives, who generally didn't work in the Square Mile, wouldn't mind the subterfuge. Happy wife, happy life.

Speaking of which . . . with Phoebe away from Primrose, I was free to do a little well-intentioned snooping. I needed to know if the divorce rumors Nicola Mitchell had mentioned were valid.

Whipping off my (now chocolate-smeared) apron, I exhaled a satisfied breath and ducked around the corner. Phoebe's office was tiny, hopelessly cluttered, and (blessedly) deserted. With the place to myself, I examined the computer and bulletin board, the calendar and filing cabinet, the desktop diary (“planner,” to you and me), and the cardigan Phoebe had left hanging on the coatrack. Her perfume clung to it. Reminded of her, I hesitated.

Was prying in here really the right thing to do?

Even DC Mishra and the police hadn't come to Primrose.

The clatter of baking pans in the kitchen made me jump and decided the issue for me. I might not have this chance again. I had to act. For myself. For Jeremy. He deserved justice.

I grabbed the cardigan. My fingertips encountered ultrasoft cashmere in a suitably Londonesque shade of inky blue, with a discreet sewn-in label denoting the garment's bespoke origins and a crackle in one of the pockets. I withdrew a paper scrap.

I expected . . . well, I'm not sure what I expected to find, actually. A receipt for a marriage-ending extravagance, maybe. A matchbook with a lover's phone number. A top secret recipe.

Instead, it was a Crazy-for-Coconut Vitality Bar wrapper.

That's all it was. One of those “power snacks” targeted at women. An engineered pseudo-food that used empowerment buzzwords to sell precisely 150 calories of “energy” and “indulgence.”

I frowned at it with antipathy, reminded of Phoebe's fear of being caught eating breakfast on camera. Obviously, keeping her willowy figure wasn't easy for her. Was it for anyone?

I started to replace the wrapper where I'd found it, not wanting Phoebe to realize that anyone had uncovered her secret stash. Then I did a double take as I recognized the wrapper's logo. Hambleton & Hart. The same company whose ready-to-bake products had littered the guesthouse's kitchen counters.

Someone from Hambleton & Hart was supposed to have given a statement at the London Metropolitan Police department, I recalled. Neither George nor DC Mishra had clued me in to the results. Nor were they likely to. I'd assumed Jeremy had been filming one of his TV cooking shows in the guesthouse, given the A/V equipment that was (still) on hand. Had he incorporated “molten chocolate-flavored dessert delight” and “strawberry surprise” into his latest (inevitably successful) venture?

I made a note to look into it. I wasn't sure how I'd gain access to Hambleton & Hart, but I was a food professional, wasn't I? I didn't usually seek out clients, but maybe I could get an appointment to discuss chocolate whispering on the company's behalf
. . . if
they used any genuine chocolate, that was.

Wondering if Phoebe's “vitality bar” counted as evidence that I ought to report, I studied it. Then I shook my head and replaced the wrapper where I'd discovered it. Satya Mishra would be unlikely to consider Phoebe's snack attack relevant to her investigation. But that didn't mean
I
shouldn't speak to someone at Hambleton & Hart about their work with Jeremy. At the least, I might be able to find out where that metlapil came from.

With that decided, I took one final look around. I'd have to enlist Travis to have a comprehensive look into Phoebe's finances. But even if I didn't get another opportunity to scrutinize the office, I'd done a thorough job of inspecting the place. I'd done my due diligence. I'd found nothing. No evidence of divorce papers. No suggestion of anything underhanded or even vaguely questionable. Nothing at all to do with Jeremy.

Nothing that would motivate a murder, certainly.

I guessed Nicola had been deliberately stirring the pot, doing her utmost to smear Jeremy. Exactly the way, she'd said, that he'd slandered her. But now I doubted that I could trust Nicola, no matter how unfairly ill-treated she'd seemed to be.