Chapter 13: A seaside postcard asks for the blue album

Look at the postcard pinned above the till of the stamp stall. A pier on iron legs, a row of striped bathing huts, a sea bluer than any sea has ever been. On the back, a neat hand in black ink, a crooked everyday stamp, and over the stamp a round postmark with a tiny bell in the middle.

That little bell is the mark of the market's own post office, the narrow counter at the foot of the Clock Gallery stairs, where stallholders have posted their letters for a hundred years. Hold on to that bell. It matters.

The stall itself smells of old paper and gum. Generations of children have spent their pocket money there on paper packets of stamps from countries they could not pronounce, and grown up, and come back with their own children to do the same.

And the new girl behind the counter all July? She was Nina Ilves, who had started in June. She was minding the stall alone because Leopold Marsh, who had sold stamps on that pitch for thirty years, had finally been persuaded to take a holiday.

First: A holiday after thirty summers

He went for a fortnight, to his sister's house by the lakes in the mountains. He hung a little sign on the stall, “Mr. Marsh away until the 28th”, and left Nina a tin for change, a list of regular customers and a note in his small, careful writing: “Don't let anyone talk you down on the airmails. Leo.”

He always signed his notes to her that way. There was a little pile of them on a nail under the counter, every one ending “Leo”. He was not a man for surnames among friends.

Second: The card that came on Thursday

The seaside card arrived on the Thursday of his second week. It read: “Dear Nina, a gentleman named Mr. Oakes will call on Friday for the blue album from under the counter. He has paid me in full. Please hand it over. L. Marsh.”

Nina was new and anxious to please. She did think it a little odd, because the blue album was not under the counter; she had watched Mr. Marsh lock it in the safe on her first morning. But she fetched it from the safe all the same.

On Friday afternoon a stranger with a grey moustache and a hat pulled well down came to the counter and gave the name Oakes.

He kept his gloves on, in July, and his face turned towards the window. When Nina knelt at the safe instead of reaching under the counter, he looked down at her in surprise. “Oh. The safe,” he said. Then he took the album, raised his hat, and was gone. She had never seen him before.

The blue album holds the best stamps Leopold Marsh ever owned, thirty years of patient collecting. It was worth more than the rest of the stall put together.

Third: Three people who knew the stall was unguarded

Anyone could read the sign; half the market climbs the Clock Gallery stairs in a week, for the clockmenders and the map seller and the view down into the Long Hall through the railings, where the smell of coffee comes up like warm weather. But three people stood out. Inspector Elena Dorn met each of them in turn, the way a chess player studies the three pieces that can reach a square.

Imogen Marsh, his niece, helps at the stall on Saturdays.

She showed you a note her uncle had left her the week he went away, pinned to a sheet of stamps: “For your scrapbook, love, Uncle Leo.”

She knew he had gone to the lakes. She is her uncle's only heir, people say, and some say she would rather have the money than the stamps. She laughed about the blue album. “He moved it into the safe in May, after that row. He'd kept it under the counter since before I was born.”

Jonah Lusk sells old maps on the next pitch and has been Marsh's neighbour for twenty years. His trade has been thin all year; nobody buys a map of a town when the market that sold it is closing.

Jonah had a birthday card from Marsh in his wallet, signed “Leo”. He knew about the lakes. “It was me who helped him carry the blue album to the safe,” he said. “Heavy as a sack of coal. The day after Kett came.”

Patrick Kett collects stamps and does not forgive easily. In May he had offered for the blue album, been refused, and shouted at Marsh in front of half the Clock Gallery.

He showed you, with some pride, the letter of refusal he had received the next morning: “Dear Mr. Kett, the album is not for sale. L. Marsh.” He had not been back to the stall since. “I swore I wouldn't,” he said. “I keep my word.”

Fourth: Dorn reads a postcard like a scoresheet

Back at the stall, Dorn took the card down from its pin and held it by the edges. Then she gave you the list, tapping each point on the counter.

Check where it was posted, not where the picture is. A picture can be bought anywhere; a postmark cannot.

Check how it is signed. People sign differently for friends and for customers, and they rarely notice they do it.

Check what it asks for, and whether the writer knew where that thing really was.

Check what a forger got wrong that the real sender could never get wrong. Mistakes of that kind are like fingerprints left in the soft part of a cricket pitch.

Leopold Marsh came home a day early, brown and rested, and read the card standing at his own counter.

He was the kind of man who reads a postcard the way a referee reads a team sheet, slowly, every name. “I never wrote a word of it,” he said. “I was by the lakes, not the sea. And I haven't written 'L. Marsh' to anyone I know since I left school.”

Now stop. The postmark tells you the card never went near the sea: it was posted here, at the market's own counter, by somebody who could walk to it. Which of the three wrote it?

Fifth: The first way, by the signature at the bottom

Look at how the card is signed: “L. Marsh”. Now look at the signatures you have seen. To Nina, every note says “Leo”. To Imogen, “Uncle Leo”. To Jonah, on a birthday card, “Leo”. The only person who received an “L. Marsh” was Patrick Kett, on a letter of refusal, because to Marsh he was a customer and nothing more.

A forger copies the version he has seen, the way a boy in the park copies a famous free kick from the newsreel and gets every step of the run-up right except the one he never saw. Imogen or Jonah, writing to Nina in Marsh's name, would have signed “Leo” without thinking. Only someone who knew Marsh from receipts and business letters would choose “L. Marsh”. The signature points at Kett like a dart that has landed in the bull.

Sixth: The second way, by the empty shelf under the counter

Now forget the signature and read what the card asks for: “the blue album from under the counter”. For thirty years that was true. Since May it has not been. Marsh moved the album into the safe the day after the row, with Jonah carrying it, and Imogen teased him about it.

So both of them knew exactly where it was. A card from either of them would have said “from the safe”, or said nothing at all. The writer's picture of the stall was a picture from May, taken on the day of the row and never updated, because the writer had not been back since. Only one of the three swore he had not set foot there since May, and kept his word.

And think again of the stranger at the counter, who watched Nina kneel at the safe and said, in plain surprise, “Oh. The safe.” A man who had carried the album to the safe himself, or teased his uncle about it, would not have been surprised at all.

Seventh: The album comes home to the Clock Gallery

Kett had kept his word, in his own way. He had not set foot at the stall as Patrick Kett. He came as “Mr. Oakes”, in a hat and a stuck-on moustache, to a girl who had started in June and had never seen his face. His surprise at the safe had been the only honest moment of his afternoon.

The blue album was in his wardrobe, wrapped in a towel, every stamp in place. He had not meant to sell it. He had only meant, he said, to own it for a while, which Dorn told him was what every thief means.

Marsh carried it back up the stairs himself and put it, after a long pause, under the counter, where it had lived for thirty years. “Only five months left,” he said. “It may as well spend them at home.”

Then he bought Nina an ice from the café, which she ate on the top stair, looking down at the Long Hall, and that evening there was a new note on the nail with the others: “Well held, under fire. Leo.”

Across the hall, on the first morning of August, a smell drifted up the stairs that did not belong in a market at all. And why did the cheese stall in the Long Hall smell of soap?