Chapter 15: Two lanterns change places in the middle of the night

Look at the night watchman's lantern hanging on its nail by the Fish Hall door. Brass, dented, warm to the touch even in the morning. Three of its panes are clear glass. The fourth is red: a piece of the old Flower Hall window, broken in a storm thirty years ago and fitted in by Jarek Nolte himself, who has carried this lantern every night since.

The market at night belongs to the watchmen. The stalls stand shrouded under their canvas like sleeping horses, the glass roof holds a little starlight, the cats come out of the cellars, and the only sounds are footsteps, the drip of the Fish Hall taps and Pim's bell clock clearing its throat before each hour. Jarek says the halls breathe. Nobody laughs at him.

In December the halls will stop breathing, and there will be nothing left to watch. Both men know it. Jarek has started taking the long way round the Flower Hall, past the pillars where he courted his wife, simply because there will not be many more chances.

So why had Pim, at his window at half past three, seen that red glow moving through the Clock Gallery, which is not Jarek's round at all? Because that night, against every rule the market has, Jarek and the other watchman, Leif Moss, had traded rounds.

The market has two night rounds. Jarek's takes in the Fish Hall, the Long Hall and the cellars.

Leif's takes in the Flower Hall, the Clock Gallery and the roof walk.

Each round has its own watch clock, hanging at its own starting door: a heavy round box that a watchman carries with him, turning a key at every station so that the clock punches the station and the time on a paper tape inside. The clock belongs to the round, not to the man.

The lanterns are another matter. They belong to the men. Leif carries a plain one with four clear panes, bought new the year he started. Jarek would sooner lend you his teeth than his lantern, and Leif, when you ask, says he has never so much as held it.

First: The watches vanish between rounds

Ottmar Inge, who mends watches in the Clock Gallery, worked late that night and locked his glass case at half past eleven with forty old pocket watches inside, ticking softly in their velvet rows. At a quarter past two, the red lantern came up the gallery stairs, found the case open and empty, and rang the alarm bell. The sound went through the empty halls like a whistle at the end of a cup final, and half the street woke up.

By morning both watchmen had admitted the trade. Pim had seen the red lantern, and there was no point denying it. But they did not agree about when it had happened, and that one disagreement was the whole case.

“At two,” said Jarek, who is grey and slow and has walked the halls for thirty years. “Leif came down to the Fish Hall door at two and asked me to take the gallery. His knee was bad on the stairs, he said. So I gave him my clock and took his. Fifteen minutes later I found the case.”

“At midnight,” said Leif, who is young and quick and rubbed his knee as he spoke. He looked tired. He looked honest. He looked, Mrs. Fenn said afterwards, like a boy who has broken a window and come round to ask whose ball it was. “I asked him at midnight. He's had the gallery since twelve. Whatever happened up there happened on his watch, not mine.”

If Leif was right, Jarek had walked the gallery from midnight, and finding the empty case at a quarter past two was a fine way to look innocent.

If Jarek was right, the gallery had been Leif's from half past eleven until two, and every watch had gone while Leif held the key.

Pim, asked what else he had seen in the night, shrugged. He had woken at half past one as well, he said, and looked out at the roof, and seen nothing odd. “The white lantern up in the gallery and the red one down in the Fish Hall. Same as every night for twenty years.”

It was only at half past three that the red one had been in the wrong place.

Then Inspector Elena Dorn opened both watch clocks and unrolled both tapes on Mrs. Fenn's counter, among the breakfast cups.

Everybody in the market knows the two men's pace. Jarek walks his round in fifty minutes, every hour, the stations falling at the same minutes night after night; the porters say you could set Pim's bell by him. Leif races his round in thirty-five and spends the rest of the hour with his feet up on the roof walk.

The gallery tape, up to two o'clock, showed rounds of thirty-five minutes. From two o'clock on, it showed rounds of fifty. The downstairs tape showed exactly the opposite: fifty-minute rounds until two, thirty-five-minute rounds after.

Second: Dorn's list along the roof walk

Dorn took you up onto the roof walk afterwards, where the glass panes run away from you like the squares of an enormous chessboard, and gave you her list in the morning sun.

Check what a witness saw when nothing seemed odd. The ordinary sighting is the one nobody bothers to lie about.

Check each record for the hand that made it. A paper tape shows the times, but the times show the man.

Check the time a story gives against everything else that happened at that time.

Check who gains from each version. Two men can tell the same story with a single hour moved, and that hour can decide everything.

Now stop. Did the two watchmen trade at midnight or at two, and so who had the gallery when the watches went?

Third: The first way, by the lantern at half past one

Pim looked out at half past one and saw nothing odd: the white lantern in the gallery and the red one in the Fish Hall. Jarek's lantern is the red one, and nobody else carries it. Leif's is the white one. Could the two men have swapped lanterns along with their rounds? Not that pair. Jarek would sooner lend you his teeth, and Leif says himself that he has never even held it.

If the two men had traded at midnight, Jarek would have been in the gallery at half past one, and Pim would have seen red up there. He saw white. At half past one the red lantern was still downstairs, on its old round, which means the trade had not yet happened. It happened after half past one and before half past three, when Pim saw red in the gallery at last. That fits two o'clock. It does not fit midnight.

So from half past eleven until two, the gallery was Leif's. The sighting that nobody thought worth mentioning was the one that settled it, like a quiet pawn that turns out to be guarding the whole board.

Fourth: The second way, by the pace on the paper tape

Now forget the lanterns and read the tapes. The clocks belong to the rounds, so each tape shows the pace of whoever carried it. Fifty minutes is Jarek's pace. Thirty-five is Leif's. Each man's pace is as recognisable as a runner's stride to a coach who has watched him train for years.

On the gallery tape, the quick thirty-five-minute rounds run until two o'clock and then the slow fifty-minute rounds begin. On the downstairs tape it is the other way round. The paces changed hands at two. Before two, the quick man walked the gallery.

Leif tried one last move. He had been tired that night, he said, and slow downstairs. Perhaps; a young man can walk slowly if he wants to. But then who raced the gallery in thirty-five minutes before two? Not Jarek, who has not hurried anywhere since the roof was reglazed. An old man cannot borrow a young man's legs.

Two roads, one finish. Leif had the gallery when the watches went. He had emptied the case on his last quick round before two, asked for the trade with his story about the knee, and left Jarek to find the empty velvet and ring the bell.

Then he moved the trade back two hours, to hand Jarek the blame. The forty watches were wrapped in a cloth in the gutter of the roof walk, under the very panes where he liked to put his feet up.

On the way down to fetch them, Leif forgot his bad knee and took the gallery stairs two at a time. Nobody said anything. Nobody needed to.

Ottmar Inge wound every one of them that afternoon and set them going together, and the Clock Gallery ticked like a field of crickets. He said he had not heard so many of his watches going at once since the day his father opened the stall, when the market had no idea it would ever close.

Jarek kept his job and his red lantern, and walked his rounds a little more slowly than ever. Weeks later, at the end of the night before the Harvest Fair, he came off his last round at dawn with one more odd thing to report, so small he nearly kept it to himself: a man in Pim's long brown coat, odd brass button and all, slipping out through the Fish Hall gate.

And who was the man in the borrowed coat that the night watchman saw slipping out at dawn?