Dead Heat - By Dick Francis & Felix Francis Page 0,51

event.

‘You really think you can get a table?’ she said.

‘Of course I can,’ I replied. ‘No problem.’

I hoped I was right. It might just save me ten grand.

CHAPTER 9

We were seated at a table for two against the wall near the door. Let’s face it, it wasn’t the best table in the place, but Caroline was impressed nevertheless.

‘I never thought you would manage to get a table,’ she said when she arrived. ‘To be honest, if I had thought you actually could, I wouldn’t have suggested it in the first place. I’m not at all certain that I really want to be here.’ And she had a scowl on her face to prove it.

I wasn’t sure how to take that comment, but she had come and that was all that was important to me at the time. Over the past couple of days I had tried hard to recall the string quartet at the gala dinner. I knew that they had all worn long black dresses with their hair tied back in pony tails, but, try as I might, I couldn’t remember their faces. However, when Caroline had walked through the front door of the Restaurant Gordon Ramsay, I had known her straight away.

Securing a table had been hard, and many favours had been cashed and more still promised. ‘Sorry,’ they had said on the telephone, with a degree of amusement at my folly, ‘tables are usually booked two months in advance.’ They hadn’t needed to add that less than two days was in ‘absolutely no chance’ territory.

However, I was not a celebrity chef, albeit a very minor one, for nothing. The world of cordon bleu cookery may be as competitive as any, with chefs happily dreaming of using their cooks’ knives on the throats of their rivals, but, deep down, we knew that we needed them alive and well, not only to maintain the public interest in all things kitchen, but also to be the guests on each other’s television shows.

Having sold my soul, if not exactly to the devil then to the keeper of his kitchen, and having made promises that may be difficult, if not impossible, to honour, I was rewarded with an offer of ‘a small extra table fitted in to the already full dining room at nine o’clock. But it might be close to the door.’

‘That’s great,’ I had said. On the pavement outside would have been fine by me.

‘You must know Gordon Ramsay very well to have got this,’ Caroline said.

‘Professional courtesy,’ I said, smiling. ‘We chefs stick together.’ What a load of rubbish, but better than telling her that I had needed to beg for this table. Perhaps the ten-grand lawsuit would have been cheaper in the long run.

‘Is he nice?’ she asked. ‘He always seems so rude on his TV programmes.’

‘Very nice,’ I said. ‘He just puts on an act for the television.’ In truth, I had never actually met Gordon Ramsay but I wasn’t going to tell Caroline that, not yet anyway.

‘So,’ I said, changing the subject, ‘tell me about what you do.’

‘I make music,’ she replied. ‘And you make food. So you sustain, and I entertain.’ She smiled at her joke. It transformed her face. It was like opening the curtains in the morning and allowing in the sunlight.

‘Isn’t music described as food for the soul?’ I said.

‘The quote is actually about passion,’ she said. ‘There’s sure no passion in the human soul, but finds its food in music. I can’t remember who said it, or even what it means, but it was carved on a wooden plaque in the hallway at my music school.’

‘Which school?’ I asked.

‘RCM,’ she said. ‘Royal College of Music.’

‘Ah,’ I said. ‘And why the viola?’

‘That stems from when I was at junior school. The music teacher was a viola player and I wanted to be like her. She was great.’ Caroline smiled again. ‘She taught me to enjoy performance. It was a gift I will always be grateful for. So many of my colleagues in the orchestra love music but they con’t really enjoy the performance of it. It seems such a shame. For me, music is the performance. It’s why I say that I make music, not play it.’

I sat and watched her. My memory had not been wrong. She was tall and elegant, not dressed tonight in black but in a cream skirt below a shiny silver wraparound blouse that raised my heart-rate each time she leaned forward. Her hair was very light