The studio lights were harsh on Nicola’s pastry. They were so bright they bleached the golden-brown colour from the blintz’s shell and made it appear pale and undercooked. When Carlos Fielding cut into a corner of the blintz, breaking easily through the layers of puff pastry and securing himself a mixture of steaming apples, seasoned with cheese and cinnamon, the dessert still looked too pale to be really appetising.
Fielding seemed untroubled.
He winked at Nicola as he raised the forkful to his mouth.
Nicola watched him with breathless expectation.
Fielding had the dessert in his mouth for less than ten seconds before he spat it out. He was shaking his head and holding his hand up, as though surrendering.
‘Cut!’ he cried. ‘For Christ’s sake, please. Cut.’
The director echoed Fielding’s cry, then, red with fury, stormed over and pointed a warning finger in Fielding’s face. ‘Stop being such a diva,’ he roared. ‘You’re not the one who tells my crew to cut.’
Fielding sneered at the director. ‘And you’re not the one with a mouthful of irradiated dog shit testing their gag reflex. So, unless you want live footage of me puking all over your Master Baker set, you’ll stop filming for a moment so I can get a drink and get this piss-awful taste out of my mouth.’
Surprised by the onslaught, the director stepped back.
Fielding paused and flashed a thin smile at the bewildered Nicola. ‘No offence,’ he added coolly. ‘I’m sure this would be a lovely delicacy in a prison or in some sort of zoo where they don’t like the animals.’
Nicola studied him with an expression of pained horror.
Fielding placed a hand over his mouth as though he was holding back involuntary reflux. He steadied himself and then asked, ‘What the hell did you put in that blintz? Did you really want the filling to taste partially digested?’
Nicola ran away sobbing.
The director was walking away from Fielding, signalling for the filming team to take five and telling the studio audience that they’d be resuming as soon as Carlos had recovered from his ‘ordeal’.
Trudy watched as Fielding waylaid one of the studio runners and demanded a bottle of water. Quietly she muttered a prayer, desperate for any gods listening to make sure she never ended up being as big a diva as he was. She wondered what it would be like to be so self-obsessed and care so little for the feelings of everyone else. It couldn’t be a pleasant way to live.
‘He looks more butch on TV,’ Daryl told Trudy.
Daryl was on the set in her capacity as Trudy’s PA. She wore a Michael van der Ham miniskirt, the pattern an abstract blend of blacks and silvers on silk jacquard. She handed Trudy a bottle of mineral water so she could get a drink before filming resumed.
‘You say that everyone on TV looks butch,’ Trudy reminded her. ‘I think you have a thing for butch TV stars.’
‘Except you,’ Daryl corrected. ‘You come across as very butch on TV. But I don’t have a thing for you.’
Trudy didn’t know whether to be relieved or crushed.
‘Do I really come across as butch?’
‘Not really. You’re possibly the fairest judge on the set. Carlos is too quick to be rude for the sake of being rude. Tom is a sucker for a story of hardship or personal bad luck. But you make judgements based on the proper criteria of the competition. You base your judgements on the food alone.’
Trudy considered this and realised that was exactly how she was trying to judge the competition. She gave Daryl a grateful peck on the cheek and thanked her.
Daryl looked quietly pleased with herself.
They were filming the last of the Master Baker preliminary rounds. Two of the winning contestants from this evening’s show would go on to the semi-finals in the following weeks. During the semi-finals, as had happened in the previous rounds, contestants would be whittled down by their ability to produce quality desserts. Considering the way Nicola was now crying over her disrespected blintzes, shouting promises of retribution and refusing to let Carlos Fielding insult her again, Trudy thought she knew the name of at least one contestant who wouldn’t be going through to the next stage.
A clatter of dropped pans snatched her attention to the studio’s third stage set. The evening’s final pair of contestants were preparing their workstations in readiness for the next round of filming. A blushing man knelt over a set of empty pans he had dropped. He picked them up and Trudy saw that one of his fingers was bandaged by a blue plaster. There was something about his posture that seemed familiar. Even more maddening, when he half-turned, she recognised his face but she didn’t know where she knew him from.
‘Who’s that guy?’ she asked Daryl, pointing.
‘Which one? The unsuccessful pan juggler?’
He was standing up and had turned so she could now see him properly. He wore a badge that identified him as Victor but the name was of no help. Trudy figured, if she’d met him before, she either didn’t know him well enough to know his name, or had known him by a different name.
‘I don’t know him,’ said Daryl.
Trudy felt sure she had met him somewhere before. She tried to picture him without the bald head and the goatee but her imagination refused to participate in the identification game. There was something in his eyes, narrow and unsympathetic, that stirred a prickle of unease.
‘Do you want me to go and find out who he is?’ Daryl asked.
‘No,’ Trudy said. ‘I’m sure it will come to me eventually.’
Tom Yates joined them. He was shaking his head in bewilderment over the ferocity of Carlos’s outburst and asking Trudy what they could do to address Nicola’s upset. ‘The poor lass is in bits,’ he confided. ‘And she’s so angry. She says it’s a shame Carlos didn’t choke on her blintz.’
Trudy shrugged sympathetically. She could see Tom was getting ready to ask a favour and she had a foreboding of what it might be.
‘The director will be over here in a moment,’ Tom explained.
Trudy shook her head.
‘He’ll want one of us to taste Nicola’s blintz,’ Tom went on. ‘Are we going to toss a coin or draw straws? Or do you have a penchant for sampling something that’s been described as irradiated dog shit?’
‘Tom,’ she began, ‘if Nicola’s blintz tastes as bad as Carlos made out, I’m not sure I want to eat it.’
Tom dismissed her objection with a wave of his hand. ‘You know what a drama queen Carlos is about these things,’ he reminded her. ‘It’s an apple blintz. How bad can it really taste?’
Probably not too bad, Trudy conceded, although she had never been a big lover of the combination of cheese and apple. Nevertheless, she nodded agreement and said she would keep an open mind if she was called on to judge the blintz.
The director approached and asked Tom to give a second opinion on Nicola’s apple blintz. Trudy resisted the urge to sigh with relief.
‘Trudy could do it,’ Tom suggested.
‘You’ll be better,’ the director insisted. ‘We need her to calm down and you’re the man for the job.’
Trudy tried not to give a grin of triumph.
Tom nodded an unwilling consent and made his way across the studio with the director. In fairness, Trudy thought, Tom was a natural diplomat and always seemed to know the right thing to say. She knew she didn’t possess any of his considerable people skills and felt sure Nicola was in good hands with him. Daryl stepped back to her place behind the cameras when the assistant director led Trudy and Carlos to the evening’s final pair of contestants.
‘Did it really taste that bad?’ Trudy asked Carlos.
‘It was the most disgusting thing I’ve had in my mouth since I was a teenage boy and experimenting with my sexuality.’
She found herself smiling. ‘You really upset the poor woman.’
‘She’ll get over it,’ Carlos said. ‘She’s basking in her fifteen minutes and I suspect she’s got a new best friend in Tom.’
Trudy glanced toward the pair.
Nicola was hugging Tom and laughing with him as the pair finished off the blintz she’d made. Tom was smiling enthusiastically and hurling dismissive waves in Carlos’s direction.
‘How does he do that with people?’ Carlos marvelled. ‘How does he get them to like him so effortlessly?’
Trudy wanted to tell him it was probably easy if you didn’t insult them and their hard work, but she kept the opinion to herself. ‘Everybody loves Tom,’ she said quietly.
‘Everybody loves him,’ Carlos repeated. ‘That sounds like the surest way to get a disease.’ He shrugged the matter aside and stepped forward to meet the final contestants.
Alongside the bald and goateed man called Victor was a shy young woman, Amy, who seemed petrified by the TV cameras. Trudy said hello to them both and then studied Victor’s face more closely.
‘I’m sure I know you from somewhere,’ she told him.
He raised an eyebrow and seemed curious. ‘Where?’ he asked.
She shook her head. ‘I can’t remember. I guess it’ll come back to me soon.’
‘Let me know when it does.’
His smile, while civil and polite, seemed to be masking something. She wondered if he already knew where they’d met before, and then dismissed that idea as paranoid. Why would someone keep such information secret?
Then the hubbub of the show was beginning and Victor and Amy were being rushed off to their separate workstations where they were working on the next stage of the evening’s desserts. Victor was making crêpes tulipes with raspberry sorbet whilst Amy had elected to serve a traditional apricot-almond clafoutis. Some preparation had been needed for both dishes and the chefs quickly immersed themselves in their work beneath the intense pressure of the cameras and the lights.
Trudy wanted to spend some time on Victor’s station so she could solve the mystery of his identity. To make the situation even more infuriating, whenever she tried to chat with him and learn a little more about him, Victor seemed strangely evasive and uncommunicative.
She mentioned this to Daryl, who told her she was worrying for nothing.
‘He’s a chef,’ Daryl reminded Trudy. ‘You’re all peculiar when you’re cooking. I’ve seen Charlotte concentrating over her pizzas like she’s giving birth to an immaculate conception. You can spend days brooding on a single flavour if you don’t think it’s quite right and I’ve seen Bill go –’
She stopped abruptly.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to talk about him.’
‘Do I really spend days brooding on a single flavour?’
‘Days,’ Daryl agreed. ‘How long were you working on your mocha-chocolate ganache recipe?’
Trudy nodded reluctant agreement. She couldn’t recall exactly how long she’d been working on that dessert but she did know that the worst parts had covered a stressful couple of weeks. Although Daryl hadn’t finished voicing her sentiments on Bill, Trudy knew that he could sometimes be aloof when his thoughts were preoccupied by something in the kitchen.
‘In other words, I don’t think his behaviour is particularly peculiar,’ Daryl said. ‘It’s certainly no more peculiar than the rest of you moody culinary types.’
As an explanation, Trudy knew it made sense. And, even though it wasn’t a satisfying response, she refused to let herself dwell on the problem any longer. She went to find Nicola and see how she was coping after Carlos’s unforgivable outburst.
Fifteen minutes later the desserts were finished and served. Trudy complimented Amy on the lightness of her clafoutis whilst Carlos exclaimed enthusiastically over Victor’s tulipes. Another break was called while the three judges retired to a small room where they discussed their choices and made a final decision on the winning two contestants for the week. The format was now so familiar to her that Trudy was the first to speak when the door closed behind them.
‘Amy needs to be in the final,’ she explained. ‘Her clafoutis is gorgeous.’
They argued and cajoled for half an hour. There was a cameraman with them, filming as they exchanged cutting comments about each other and murmured compliments and condemnations about the chefs and the dishes they had prepared. Eventually, the three of them went out to face the contestants and announce their verdict.
‘It’s been a close debate,’ Tom explained, acting as spokesman. ‘But we’ve finally come to a decision. The two contestants going through to the semi-finals are Amy and Victor.’
There was good-natured handshaking and murmurs of congratulations. Victor and Amy hugged and the scene ended with a shot of Nicola scowling at Carlos. Trudy pulled her gaze away from the woman’s expression of pained animosity. She didn’t like to see someone so upset and she tried to find something of interest to watch that would give her a reason to look in a different direction.
Her gaze fell on Victor.
She watched him walk away from the studio’s set of kitchen work surfaces and cookery paraphernalia and step over to someone in the front row of the studio audience. It was not unusual for contestants to have family and friends in the audience to offer support. Trudy wondered if a glimpse of his friends and family might give her a clue where she knew him from.
Victor bent down. From the way his shoulders were bent, Trudy guessed he was whispering confidentially to his friend. The lights on the studio set were so bright it was difficult to see beyond their glare. Trudy craned her neck and shielded her eyes to peer, still anxious for a clue to his identity. She sat quickly back in her chair when she saw who he was talking with.
Victor was a friend of Donny.