Chapter 10: The heaviest strawberry of June arrives sweating

Look at the strawberry scale. Two brass pans, polished once a year until they glow like trumpets. A velvet box of weights, the smallest no bigger than a fingernail. And in the left pan a small dent, from the June a champion dropped his best weight and wept.

It comes out of its cupboard for one morning only, and that morning brought the answer to a question you had forgotten. The basket of ripe strawberries on Mrs. Fenn's counter, back in May? A man in a straw hat had left it, with a card tucked under the handle: “With the compliments of plot 14.” The choir ate the berries. Inspector Elena Dorn kept the card.

She had kept it for five weeks without saying why. That is her way. She plays a case the way she plays chess at the café tables on Sunday afternoons, keeping a quiet piece back in the corner until the moment it matters.

First: The rules are older than the roof

The Strawberry Weighing is open only to growers from the allotments along the canal, twenty minutes' walk from the market. The rules hang on a pillar in a frame so old the glass has gone wavy. No glass and no frames on the plots. Berries picked the same morning.

The keeper opens the allotment gate when Pim's seven o'clock bell comes across the water, and not a minute before. Entries close with the nine o'clock bell. The judge, Lavinia Orme, asks every grower the same two questions: “Which plot?” and “When picked?”

This year the prize was the last silver cup the market would ever give. After December, there would be no market to give it. Old growers came in their best hats, carrying their berries in cotton wool like eggs, and stood under the glass roof telling each other about the hot June of long ago when the winning berry was as big as a plum.

Second: An early cup of tea behind steamed glass

Dorn sent you to the café at a quarter to seven. “People who come early to a contest,” she said, “are either very keen or very busy. Find out which.”

There was one early customer. A man in a straw hat sat at the window table with a pot of tea and a covered basket at his feet. You watched him through the steam on the glass. At seven Pim's bell rang. The man turned a page of his newspaper and poured another cup.

At a quarter to eight he was still there. At eight he paid, picked up his basket and walked across to the Flower Hall to register. You noticed, because Dorn had trained you to notice such things, that his shoes were polished and perfectly dry, and that his trouser turn-ups were as clean as a new deck of cards.

Third: Twelve saucers wait in a row

Twelve white saucers stood on a long table, each with a number and a name. The man in the straw hat gave his: “Oskar Pardew, plot 14.” When picked? “Half past seven, with the dew on.” Lavinia Orme wrote it down.

His berry was enormous. It sat on saucer 12 like a prize-fighter in the ring, glossy and dark, and the other growers drifted past it the way darts players drift past a rival's board, pretending not to look.

Fourth: A second man gives the same name

At ten to nine a young man ran in, red in the face, with mud to the knees of his trousers and wet boots. It had rained in the night, and the canal path was soft. He held out a small punnet of modest berries. “Oskar Pardew,” he panted. “Plot 14.”

Uproar. Two Oskars. The straw hat said calmly that he had never seen the boy in his life. “He's heard my berry is the biggest, and he wants my cup.” The young man went white.

Nobody could help. Plot 14 had changed hands that spring, and nobody at the market had yet met its new tenant. Lavinia had a name on a list and no face to put to it.

The young man explained himself in a rush. He had been waiting at the gate when the bell came over the water, had walked every row looking for his single best berry, and had picked it last, at the far end, by the compost heaps. Then he had run. “Anyone can get muddy,” the straw hat said pleasantly, and some of the crowd nodded.

Fifth: The heaviest berry sweats on its saucer

The nine o'clock bell rang, and the weighing began. It is a slow ceremony, berry after berry, tiny weight after tiny weight, the whole hall holding its breath like a crowd at a long tennis rally.

Saucer 12 won easily. But as Lavinia lifted it into the pan, you saw beads of water standing on its skin, and the brass under it misted over. The other berries on the table were dry. The hall was warm; the door was open to a June morning. Lavinia frowned and wiped the pan with her handkerchief.

Sixth: Dorn turns the contest into a lesson

Dorn did not take sides. She took you to one end of the long table and gave you a list instead.

Check the claim against the calendar. Fruit keeps its own timetable, and no name can hurry it.

Check the temperature of the evidence. Things that have been somewhere cold carry the cold with them for a while.

Check the clock against the distance. Twenty minutes is twenty minutes, whoever is walking.

Check the boots. A man who says he was in a wet field should have brought some of it with him.

Seventh: An old champion remembers June mornings

Nikolai Mott, who has grown strawberries on plot 9 for forty years and won the cup eleven times, was asked his opinion, and gave it the way he plays cards, slowly, and only when sure.

“A berry picked at dawn is warm by nine,” he said. “A berry that sweats in a warm room has come out of somewhere cold. And on the canal plots there is no ripe berry before June. Not mine, not anybody's. Not without glass.”

Dorn showed him the card from May. He read it twice and handed it back without a word.

Stop there and think. Which man is the real grower of plot 14?

Eighth: The first way, by the beads of water

Start with the berry on saucer 12. It was cold enough to mist the brass in a warm hall. A berry picked at half past seven in the open, as its owner claimed, would have been as warm as the morning by nine. This one had spent the night somewhere cold.

So it was not picked that morning, and the man who entered it lied about when. Now add the card. In May, when no plot on the canal had a ripe berry, somebody handed out ripe berries in plot 14's name. Those berries came from under glass, and so did this one. The straw hat was a glasshouse grower borrowing a plot.

Ninth: The second way, by the seven o'clock bell

Forget the berry and use the clock. The allotment gate opens with the seven o'clock bell and not before. From the gate to the market is twenty minutes on foot.

At seven, when the gate swung open, the man in the straw hat was sitting at the café window with his basket already at his feet. You watched him there until eight. He could not have picked at half past seven on a plot twenty minutes away. The muddy young man, on the other hand, ran in at ten to nine with the canal path still on his trousers.

The boots say the same. After a night of rain the path along the canal was soft, and anybody who walked it that morning carried some of it into the hall. The straw hat's shoes were polished and dry. He had not been near the water.

Tenth: The last silver cup finds its grower

The straw hat belonged to Lucan Inch, who grows strawberries under glass beyond the canal and is barred from every amateur contest for that very reason. He had heard that plot 14 had a new tenant whom nobody had met, and he had spent May making plot 14's name sound familiar.

He had wanted the last cup for his shop window, to sell his glasshouse berries for years as the champion's own. He left without his berry, and without his hat, which Pim found under the table and hung on the rules pillar like a trophy of a different kind.

The real Oskar Pardew's punnet weighed in fourth. The last silver cup went to Nikolai Mott, his twelfth, and he held it up to the glass roof as if he were showing it to every June he had ever grown.

Then he put an arm round the young man's muddy shoulders and promised to show him, next spring, where the sun sits longest on plot 14, even if there would be no market left to weigh the berries in.

Remember: when two people give the same name, stop listening to the name and start checking the clock and the weather.

On your way out you passed the Clock Gallery stairs, still smelling of strawberries and wet boots. And why was the mask-maker at the top of them painting a second fox face, when she had sold her only fox that very morning?