The Bell Before Opening

It is still dark when you reach the Old Market on your first morning, and colder than you expected. The square is empty. Frost has turned the cobbles grey, and the great iron roof rises above you like the ribs of a ship turned upside down.

A small door is open beside the main gates. Light spills out of it. You check your collar, check your notebook, check that the new badge is still in your pocket, and step inside.

“You must be the sergeant.”

The voice comes from the shadows between two shuttered stalls. A woman steps forward with a paper cup of tea in each hand. She holds one out to you before you can answer. She is Inspector Elena Dorn, and she has been waiting.

“Drink it while it's hot,” she says. “Nobody thinks well with cold hands. Come on. We have twenty minutes before Pim rings the bell, and there is a lot to see.”

You follow her down the Long Hall. Your footsteps ring on the stone. On both sides the stalls sleep under canvas covers, and the covers have shapes: the hump of a cheese counter, the sharp corners of a bread rack, the tall spikes of a flower bucket waiting for its flowers. Somewhere a pigeon shifts on a beam high above you.

Dorn walks fast. She talks faster. She points without looking, the way a footballer passes to a teammate she knows will be there.

“Fish Hall to the left. Wear your oldest shoes in there. Flower Hall straight on, and the flower sellers will tell you everything that happens in this market, usually before it happens. The Clock Gallery is up those stairs. Don't lean on the railing; it has been loose since before you were born. And the corner café belongs to Mrs. Odile Fenn, who makes the best tea in the town and will not let you pay for it in your first week, so don't try.”

You try to write it all down. Your pen is slow in the cold.

At the end of the Long Hall, Dorn stops. In front of you is a wall of small wooden drawers, hundreds of them, each with a brass number. Some numbers are worn almost smooth.

“The old stall register,” she says. “Every stall that ever stood in this market has a drawer. Every holder of every stall left a card. Names, dates, sometimes a photograph. A thousand faces, give or take.” She taps one drawer with a gloved finger. “And half of them, at one time or another, pretended to be somebody else.”

You look at her to see if she is joking. She is smiling, but not joking.

“A market is a strange place, Sergeant. Everybody is on show and nobody is looking. People come here to buy, to sell, to meet, to hide. A stranger behind a stall is just the owner's cousin. A face in a crowd is just a face. That is why the tricks work. Twins swap places. A stand-in takes over for a day. A coat changes hands and a name goes with it. Our job is to look, really look, when everybody else is only seeing.”

A door creaks behind you. An old man in a long brown coat comes slowly across the hall with a lantern. His face is lined like a walnut. He nods to Dorn and lifts the lantern towards you, as if checking a coin for a forgery.

“This is Pim,” Dorn says. “He has rung the market bell every morning for forty-one years.”

“Forty-two in March,” says Pim.

“Forty-two in March.”

Pim studies you a moment longer. Then he goes to the iron post in the middle of the hall, where a rope hangs down from the dark under the roof, and he waits with one hand on it, looking up at the great clock that hangs from the middle girder of the Long Hall.

Dorn lowers her voice. “There is one more thing you should know before the bell. This is the last year. The town has sold the building. On the last night of December, the doors close for good, and in the spring they start knocking it down.” She looks along the Long Hall, at the sleeping stalls, at the frost on the high glass. “So you and I are going to keep this place honest for one more year. Twelve months. Every trick, every borrowed name, every false face. Agreed?”

You have no idea what you are agreeing to. You say yes anyway.

The big hand of the clock reaches the hour. Pim pulls the rope. Far above you the bell answers, one deep note and then another, and the sound rolls down the halls like a ball down a long lane. All around you, as if the bell has woken them, canvas covers begin to lift. A shutter rattles up. Someone laughs. Someone shouts for change. The smell of hot bread arrives from nowhere.

The Old Market opens its eyes for the last January of its life.

And at the main gate, where the chestnut seller always stands, a man you have never seen before is lighting the brazier.

Prologue: A stranger is roasting the chestnuts today

Half an hour ago the halls were black. You walked behind Elena Dorn past canvas-covered stalls, the paper cup of tea she had handed you warming your fingers, and she told you that this would be the Old Market's last year. Then Pim hauled on the rope at the iron post, and the bell woke everything.

You remember one more thing from that moment. Through the open main gate, as the bell rang, you saw a man you had never seen before bending over the chestnut brazier with a lit match in his hand.

Now the lamps are lit. The glass roof has gone from ink to grey, the Fish Hall smells of ice and salt, and the café on the corner has already steamed its windows white. Dorn's morning round ends where it always ends. At the main gate.

“Thirty winters,” she says, “Gus Harrow has roasted chestnuts at this gate. A bag from Gus is how the market says good morning. When I was a girl he gave the split ones away free to anyone under ten.”

There is no Gus. Behind the iron brazier stands a young man in a flat cap and a long grey scarf, darned at one end with a bright orange patch. He turns the chestnuts with a little shovel as if they might bite him.

“Clem Bastow,” he says. “Gus is my grandad. His chest is bad, so he sent me.” He hands you a bag at five past seven by the gate clock. The chestnuts are cut with neat crosses, split open, roasted brown, almost too hot to hold.

Dorn eats one slowly. Then Clem lowers his voice. The green tin cash box that lives in the drawer under the cart, with the whole week's takings in it, is gone. Gus takes it to the bank on Fridays. Today is Thursday.

First: The cart left the lodge before the bell

Pim comes out to the gate with his lantern still in his hand, and his story comes out in short puffs of white breath. His palms are red from the rope; he has rung that bell every morning for longer than most of the stallholders have been alive. The chestnut cart sleeps every night in the gate lodge. Pim keeps its key on a hook inside his little window.

“Gus came for the key at ten past six,” he says. “Cap pulled down, scarf up to his nose, coughing like a cart with a loose wheel. He held up a hand, I gave him the key. The lamp over my hatch was on. I saw his orange darn plain as day.”

“Did he speak?” Dorn asks. Pim shakes his head. “Too busy coughing. Then I went to fill my lantern and walked the halls till the bell, and you two were in there in the dark, poking about.”

Clem tells it differently. He came at seven, with the opening bell. The cart was already out at the gate, the padlock hanging open, the coals stone cold and the drawer empty. So he struck a match, lit the coals himself and got to work, because Gus would never forgive a cold gate. You saw him do it yourself, he points out, when the bell rang.

Edwin Fairley sells newspapers at the same gate and has done since half past five. He coughs too. He wears a grey scarf too, plain wool without a patch, and he does not hide what he thinks of Gus's smoke drifting over his headlines, or of Gus.

“Gus wheeled the cart out at a quarter past six,” Edwin says. “I said good morning. He didn't answer. He was bent over his drawer when I went round the corner to the van for my second bundle, the way I do every day at twenty past.”

“I sort the bundle in the van, out of the wind. I came back at seven, and there was the boy at the cart instead of Gus. Ask the boy where his grandad went, not me.”

While Edwin talks, you look up. High above the gate, in the windows of the Clock Gallery, one lamp burns, and a young man moves along a wall of clocks, opening their faces one by one and winding them.

Then Mrs. Odile Fenn hurries over from the café with a tea towel still on her shoulder. Gus's daughter telephoned at half past five, she says. The café's telephone is the only one near the gate, and Mrs. Fenn has taken the gate's messages for longer than Clem has been alive.

“Gus is in bed with his chest and won't get up before noon,” she repeats. “Last night he gave Clem his cap and his scarf, so the customers would know the cart.”

“And he said, tell them the coals want forty minutes. Clem must light them at half past six, the way Gus always does, or there'll be nothing to sell at the bell.”

Who knew where the tin lived? Anyone, Edwin shrugs, who has watched Gus count his coins on the lid of the cart on a Friday. Edwin has, for twenty years. So has Clem, since he was small enough to sit on the cart.

Second: Two grey scarves at the main gate

Dorn walks once round the cart, the way a chess player walks round a board in her head before touching a single piece. She does not hurry.

“Here is what we look at,” she says quietly, so that only you can hear.

Check the coals. Fire keeps its own clock, and it never lies about when it was lit.

Check the clothes. A cap and a scarf can turn one man into another in the dark, so ask where each one spent the night.

Check every story against the clock on the gate. Who says what happened at ten past six, at a quarter past, at twenty past, at seven?

Check who knew where the thing was kept. A thief who goes straight to a drawer has been told about the drawer, or has watched it opened.

Check what each witness could actually see. A man walking the halls with a lantern, or sorting papers round a corner in a van, sees nothing of the gate at all.

Three people now stand around the brazier: Clem with the shovel, Edwin with his papers, Pim with his keys. Each one has told you the truth, or something wearing its clothes. Before you read on, decide who wheeled the cart out at ten past six.

Third: The first way, by the heat of the coals

Start with the bag in your hand. At five past seven you were given chestnuts that were cut, split and roasted all the way through. Mrs. Fenn has told you, in Gus's own words, that the coals want forty minutes before anything can be sold.

So the fire was burning by about twenty-five past six. Yet at seven, with the bell, you saw Clem bend over the brazier with a match. If he had really lit it then, from cold, at five past seven he would have been standing beside a tray of raw chestnuts and a fire just starting to glow. He was not.

What you saw at the bell was a show: a match held over coals that were already hot, struck at the one moment when the whole gate would be looking. Nobody lights a brazier in the January dark and then strolls away from it. Whoever lit it stayed beside it, and nobody saw that stretch: Pim was walking the halls, Edwin was round the corner in his van.

Clem was at the gate long before seven, and he said he was not, to make you believe that an earlier visitor in Gus's cap had already been and gone with the cash box. Clem wanted to be the honest grandson who came later. Like a relay runner who swears he never touched the baton, he forgot that the stopwatch was still running in his own hands.

Fourth: The second way, by the orange darn

Now forget the fire and follow the scarf. Under the lamp at his hatch, Pim saw the orange darn at ten past six. There is only one such scarf at the gate. Edwin's scarf is plain; you have stood a yard from it all morning.

Mrs. Fenn's message tells you where the darned scarf spent the night: Gus gave it to Clem last night, and Gus himself is in bed until noon. So at ten past six that scarf was on Clem's neck, or on the neck of someone Clem lent it to, and Clem has named nobody.

Two different roads, then, the hot one and the woollen one, and they meet at the same young man. Edwin, with his cough and his grey scarf, was only a decoy, the way a defender's dummy run pulls you to the wrong side of the pitch.

Dorn asks Clem to tip out the coal bin under the cart. He looks at her for a long moment, like a card player who knows the last trick is lost. Under the charcoal, black with dust, lies the green tin, every coin still in it.

Clem owed money to friends who were not friends, and he thought one quick morning in his grandfather's cap would settle it.

Dorn carries the tin to Gus's house herself at noon. Gus coughs, grumbles, and cannot stay angry for more than a minute with the boy who used to sit on his cart. Gus keeps the boy at the cart, and keeps the scarf.

Remember: a disguise can change a face in the dark, but it cannot change what the fire, the bell and the gate clock all saw.

As you walk back inside, chestnuts warm in your pocket, you glance up once more at the Clock Gallery. The lamp is still burning. And who was the young man winding every clock on that wall at dawn, in a shop whose old clockmender never opened before ten?