Chapter 11: A bear and a fox tell different stories

Look at the fox mask on the hook at the top of the Clock Gallery stairs. Pressed paper, light as a biscuit. Black-tipped ears, white cheeks, a long orange face with a narrow smile. The orange is deep and glossy, and if you put your nose close it still smells of paint.

That was the second fox. Jutta Imre, who has made the masks for the midsummer night market since before Pim rang his first bell, had sold her only fox on the morning of the strawberry contest to a mother with a small, fierce boy. An hour later Mattias Kerr came up the stairs and begged for one exactly like it.

So she painted another. Her orange is an old recipe that dries slowly. She put the last coat on during the afternoon of midsummer itself, handed it over at six, and warned him. “Don't touch the face till morning. That orange stains like a cricket ball stains a bowler's trousers.”

All round the fox hang the others, a whole silent crowd of them: owls, hares, a grey heron, a crooked moon. Jutta's stall has been at the top of these stairs for so long that the wall behind it is a paler colour where the masks have shaded it from forty summers of sun.

First: A bear runs from the raffle table

Midsummer is the one night of the year the Old Market stays open until twelve. Lanterns hang between the iron pillars, the band plays on the café terrace, and everybody wears a mask, because everybody always has. The custom began, Pim says, the summer the roof was finished, when the glaziers came down from their scaffolding in paper masks and danced with the flower sellers until the bell rang twelve. This was the last time, and the halls were so full you could hardly turn round.

Old couples who had met at the night market danced under the lanterns where they had first danced, and the fishmongers sang along to tunes their grandfathers had sung.

“Save me a dance for the waltz,” Mrs. Fenn told Inspector Elena Dorn, at about nine. “The midsummer waltz, at midnight, when Pim rings twelve. It's been the last tune of the night for forty years, and I've danced it every time.”

At a quarter past ten, in the Flower Hall, Olga Nest turned from the raffle table to hand a little girl her ticket. When she turned back, the tin of ticket money was gone, and a figure in a brown bear mask was pushing away through the crowd towards the Long Hall. “The bear!” she shouted. It was a long way off already.

Jutta Imre came down from the gallery when she heard, wiping her hands on her apron. “There's only one bear in the market tonight,” she said. “I make one of each animal, never two the same. That fox is the only time I've broken the rule, and only because the boy begged. The bear went a week ago, to Linus Pell. Dry as a bone.”

You found two masks at a café table ten minutes later: a brown bear and a bright orange fox, side by side, sharing a jug of lemonade. Under the bear was Linus Pell. Under the fox was Mattias Kerr. They have been friends since they were boys selling newspapers at the market gate.

You had seen the pair of them earlier, at about ten, a bear and a fox stamping through a polka on the terrace, with half the café clapping the beat.

Second: Two friends tell two stories

Linus took off the bear at once and spoke first. “It wasn't me at quarter past ten,” he said. “Mattias and I swapped masks when the band played the midsummer waltz, about ten. He wanted to dance as a bear. We swapped back just now. If a bear took the tin, it was him.”

Mattias stared at him. He lifted the fox off his face slowly, as if it hurt. “We never swapped,” he said. “I've worn this fox all night. I've not had that bear on my head once.”

One of them was lying, and the other had just been handed a very nasty card to play. It was like a game of hide-and-seek in which two players both swear the other was the one hiding behind the curtain.

Olga came up behind you, breathless, and said she had only seen the back of the bear: brown fur, round ears, nothing else. A mask is a uniform, and a uniform has no face.

Dorn looked at both faces for a long moment in the lantern light. Then she looked at both masks, and at both pairs of hands resting on the café table among the lemonade glasses. You did the same, because by now you know what she is going to ask.

Mattias had faint orange smudges along both cheekbones and across the bridge of his nose, and orange on the tips of three fingers. Linus's face, where the bear had been, was flushed and sweaty and perfectly clean. So were his hands.

Linus saw you looking and was ready for it. “Paint?” he said. “I wiped it off on the way back.” He pulled out his handkerchief and waved it like a flag. It was white, crisp and folded in four, with not a speck of orange on it anywhere.

Third: Dorn reads the night by lantern light

She gave you the list right there, between the lemonade and the lanterns, keeping her voice down so that neither friend could hear it.

Check the faces under the masks. A mask leaves something behind on the face that wore it, if you know what to look for.

Check what was fresh and what was old. A thing made last week and a thing finished this afternoon do not behave the same way.

Check the time a story gives against the times everybody knows. The market runs on customs, and customs keep better time than watches.

Check who changed his story and who did not. A man who never swapped has nothing to explain.

Stop now. You have both masks, both faces and both stories. Take your time; the band still has well over an hour to play. Which of the two friends was the bear at a quarter past ten?

Fourth: The first way, by the orange on the cheeks

Start with the fox. Its paint was still soft when Jutta handed it over at six; she warned that it would stain. Mattias wore it, and the orange is all over his cheekbones and fingers, exactly as she said it would be. Wet paint is the most honest witness in the market: it cannot be frightened, it cannot be bought, and it marks whoever touches it, friend or thief, without asking which.

Now take Linus at his word. If he really wore that fox from ten until just before you arrived, it pressed on his face for half an hour on a warm night. He would be marked like his friend, cheek and nose and fingers.

He is spotless, and the handkerchief he offered to explain it away is as white as the café tablecloth. Jutta's orange does not wipe off a face without leaving its colour on whatever wiped it. Linus never wore the fox. So there was no swap. And if there was no swap, the bear at a quarter past ten was the man who owned the bear.

Fifth: The second way, by the midnight waltz

Now leave the paint alone and listen to the story. Linus did not just say they swapped at ten. He tied it to a moment everybody in the market knows: the midsummer waltz.

But the midsummer waltz is played at midnight, when Pim rings twelve, and has been the last tune of the night for forty years. Mrs. Fenn has danced it every time. At ten o'clock it had not been played.

At the moment you sat down at the café table, it still had not been played. Linus fixed his swap to a dance that had not happened yet.

A true story can get a time a little wrong. It does not hang itself on the one tune that everyone can check. Linus invented the swap and picked the first landmark that came into his head, like a tennis player who calls a ball out before it has even bounced.

Two separate roads, one through the paint and one through the music, arrive at the same café table and the same brown bear.

The ticket money was folded up inside the hollow snout of the bear, where Linus had pushed it as he ran. He had lost his week's wages at the card tables in the back room of a public house and had hoped, he said miserably, to win them back before anyone noticed.

Mattias did not speak to him for the rest of the night. But at midnight, when Pim rang twelve and the band began the waltz, he walked Olga Nest out onto the café terrace with orange still on his cheeks, and Mrs. Fenn, true to her word, danced with Dorn. Olga drew the raffle at the last stroke, and the hamper went to Pim, who had bought a ticket every midsummer for forty years and never won so much as a jar of jam.

You walked home under the last of the lanterns, with the waltz still going round in your head. And why, three weeks later, on the hottest morning of the year, did the ice cart stop at the Fish Hall twice?