Chapter 12: The ice arrives before the ice house opens

Look at the block of ice on the Fish Hall floor at seven in the morning. It is the size of a family bible, cloudy at the heart, clear at the edges, and it is shrinking while you watch. A dark lake spreads out from it across the stones. On the hottest morning of the year, nothing in the market is in more of a hurry.

Why had the ice cart stopped at the Fish Hall twice that morning? Because only the second cart came from the ice house. The first came from somewhere else entirely, and so did the man who pushed it.

Ice has been coming to the Fish Hall the same way for forty years: one old man, one cart, one leather pad on his shoulder, every morning at a quarter past six. Stallholders still remember sucking the chips he chiselled off for them as children, sitting on upturned crates in the cold, wet dark before the lamps were lit. Ask any of them and they will tell you the old man never once arrived early, and never once arrived late. He set his pace by the great clock, and the hall set its morning by him.

First: A cart of ice comes too early

Ilse Marno, who has gutted fish at the third slab on the left for thirty years and talks to her herrings as if they were nephews, told the story to Inspector Elena Dorn and to you while the ice dripped round your shoes.

At ten to six, before Pim rang the opening bell and before the hall lamps were lit, a man pushed a cart of ice up to the cold room door. Cap pulled low, sleeves rolled, very few words. “The old man's down with a cold,” he said. “I'm the new lad.”

He carried the blocks hugged against his chest, arms wrapped round them, like a goalkeeper gathering a high ball. He went into the cold room twice. Then he was gone, and Ilse, busy with a box of mackerel and half asleep, thought no more of it.

At half past six a second ice cart came round the corner. Its driver was Oren Lakes, the real new lad, a tall, shy boy with the ice house's leather pad on his right shoulder and each block riding on it the proper way.

“The ice house doesn't open its doors till six,” he said, when Ilse told him he had been already. “And it's twenty minutes from here with a cart.”

Behind the cold room is the little Fish Hall office. In the office, waiting for the bank, had been the canvas bag holding the week's rent from every fish stall in the hall. It was not there now.

Pim had one small thing to add. Crossing the dark hall with his lantern just before six, on his first round of the day, he had seen a man with an ice cart at the far end of the hall, turning not out into the street, as any cart going back to the ice house would, but inwards, towards the Long Hall. In the dark he had seen nothing else. “A cap and a back,” he said sadly. “Forty years I've watched this hall wake up, and all I saw was a cap and a back.”

By seven the hall was full, the lamps were lit and the heat was already pressing down through the glass roof like a hand. Dorn stood in the spreading water and gave you her list the way a coach gives a team talk at half-time: fast, and expecting every word to be used.

Check how a stranger carried his load. Every trade has its own way of lifting, and a borrowed trade gets it wrong.

Check what is wet and what is dry. On a hot morning everybody sweats, but not everybody gets wet in the same places.

Check who could have known what the stranger said. A lie is built of bricks, and every brick came from somewhere.

Check where each person was when the hall was still dark. An hour before opening, the market has very few witnesses, so treasure the ones it has.

Then you looked at who was there, and the field was small. Oren, the new lad, was stacking his blocks in the cold room with a face like a wet weekend. His shirt was dark over the right shoulder, where the pad sat, and nowhere else.

Nadia Prew, the oyster woman, had come in on the seven o'clock bus, brown from three days at the oyster beds on the coast road. She had heard nothing of anybody's cold. She had heard nothing of anything, she said, but gulls.

Konrad Pye, a porter from the Long Hall, was stacking fish boxes by the door. He was soaked. His shirt was dark and wet down the whole of the front, chest to belt. “Hottest day of the year,” he said, grinning, and wiped his forehead with his wrist.

You walked round behind him to fetch a box. His back and shoulders were dry.

Dorn asked him where he had been at ten to six. “In bed,” he said. “I came in at half past six, same as every day. Ask anyone.” Nobody had seen him come in. Nobody had seen anybody. At half past six the Fish Hall is all elbows and crates and steam, and no one looks at a porter.

Dorn sent you to the café telephone to ring the ice house. The foreman answered on the second ring. Oren had been waiting in the ice house yard with him from half past five until the doors opened at six, and had left with the first cart of the day.

“Shy lad,” said the foreman. “Hardly said a word to me all that time.”

Mrs. Fenn, crossing from the café with a tray of tea because she always does when the police stand in puddles, added the last piece without knowing it was one. The old ice man had sat at her corner table the afternoon before, sneezing into his cup, and said he would send the new lad in the morning.

“Only Konrad was at the table with him,” she said. “He bought the poor man his tea. I never told a soul.”

Stop and think, while the ice still lasts. You have heard every witness the dark hall had to offer, and seen every shirt. Who was the first ice man?

Second: The first way, by the wet shirt front

A porter carries his boxes on his back and shoulders. That is a porter's trade, as surely as the leather pad is the ice man's. On a hot morning a porter's shirt goes dark across the back first, where the boxes ride and the heat is trapped.

Konrad's shirt was the wrong way round: soaked down the front, dry at the back. That is not a porter's sweat. That is meltwater, from blocks of ice hugged against the chest, exactly as Ilse saw the first ice man carry them. A coach would call it bad technique. Dorn called it a confession written in water. Oren's shirt was wet where his pad sat and nowhere else, which is how an ice man's shirt looks after the proper carry. Only one shirt in the hall matched the stranger's way of carrying.

One carry. One shirt. One man.

Third: The second way, by the cold nobody else heard about

Leave the shirts and listen to the words. The first ice man did not just say he came from the ice house. He said that the old man was down with a cold and that he was the new lad. Both things were true. That is what made the lie so good, and what gives it away.

Who could have known them before six o'clock? Not Nadia, three days on the coast with the gulls. Not Ilse, who was surprised by both carts.

Oren knew, of course, but at ten to six he was standing in the ice house yard with the foreman, twenty minutes away. The old ice man said it once, at Mrs. Fenn's corner table, with one listener. Mrs. Fenn told nobody. The only man who carried that news out of the café was Konrad.

It is like a card game in which only two players have seen a certain card, and one of them is sitting at another table entirely. You do not need to see the other player's hand to know who played it.

Konrad had loaded the market's own barrow with yesterday's ice from the cellar, to which every porter has a key, and borrowed a story he had been given over a cup of tea. The rent bag was under the fish boxes by the door. He had meant to carry it out at noon in an empty crate, while the hall was busy and the ice was long forgotten.

He did not deny it for long. When the market closed in December, he said, the porters would be the first to go, and no one would hire a man of his age to carry boxes anywhere else. Dorn heard him out, then took him quietly through the Long Hall, round the back of the stalls, so that the fishmongers would not have to watch.

Remember: a disguise can hide what a person looks like, but never what that person happens to know.

By eight the block on the floor was a puddle. By nine the puddle was steam. The old ice man came in the next week, still sniffing, to shake Ilse's hand and say that this would be his last summer too: the ice house was closing in the autumn, a few months ahead of the market. And why had the stamp stall in the Clock Gallery a new girl behind its counter all that July, and a seaside postcard pinned above its till?