Detective Chief Inspector Barnaby was cooking Moules à I’Indienne, pounding away at some cardamom seeds in a stone pestle. He wore a long cotton tablier of the sort favoured by waiters in speakeasy-type dives and had a glass of Frog’s Leap Chardonnay to hand. It had dawned on Tom the hard way, and over many years, that Joyce, his beloved prop and mainstay, was not going to (indeed saw no reason to) improve her cooking.
