Chapter 16: A man walks into Rag Row and walks out as somebody else

Rag Row runs along the north wall of the Long Hall, under panes of glass that nobody has properly cleaned in living memory. Twelve second-hand stalls stand there in a crooked line. Coats hang shoulder to shoulder on iron rails, packed as tight as a football crowd at kickoff, and the whole row smells of mothballs, rain and other people's winters.

At the far end stands the theatre box, Vera Sallow's tall cabinet of narrow drawers. The labels are written in faded brown ink: beards, moustaches, eyebrows, noses, spectacles with plain glass. When the old theatres closed, their faces came here. For forty years children have dared each other to open the drawer marked noses.

This Saturday in September is the last Harvest Fair the Old Market will ever hold, and half the market has come in costume. You walk the row at seven with one question from the night still in your pocket. Who was the man in the borrowed coat that the night watchman saw slipping out at dawn?

The answer is hanging on Ruth Quarry's rail. It is Pim's long brown coat, the one that lives on the hook beside the bell rope, with the odd brass button Pim sewed on years ago. There is a price ticket pinned to its sleeve. The man in the borrowed coat did not run away. He came back, and he changed his skin.

First: Pim's brown coat comes back with a price on it

“Five past seven,” Ruth says, “before I had the shutters right up.” A man handed her the brown coat as part payment. He took a brown felt hat from the basket and a long green coat from the rail, and he would not let her take up the sleeves, though they hung over his knuckles. Then he crossed to the theatre box.

Vera remembers him too. A grey moustache, round wire spectacles, paid in coins, gone in four minutes. “I offered him grey eyebrows to go with the moustache,” she says. “A grey moustache under dark brows looks like a badger in a wig. He said he had no time. Never once looked in my mirror.”

Inspector Elena Dorn listens with her hands deep in her pockets. Then she tells you the rest. At midnight the fair committee locked the harvest raffle money in its tin box in the office behind the Long Hall. At six the office door stood open and the box was gone.

The gates were watched all night. The only door that opened before seven was the Fish Hall gate, at dawn, when the porters start hosing the floor. The watchman is certain the man in Pim's coat went out through it with empty hands, swinging.

“So the box never left,” Dorn says. “He hid it, went out, and came back in at seven as a customer. Today every second person walks home with a basket of apples. He means to be one of them.”

Second: Nine green coats and fourteen grey moustaches

Here is the trouble. On Harvest Fair Saturday the second-hand stalls sell costumes by the armful, and the costume everyone wants is the old farmer: brown hat, long green coat, grey moustache. By eight o'clock Ruth has sold nine green coats. Vera has sold fourteen moustaches, most of them grey, and has given up trying to remember the faces under the faces.

It is hide-and-seek in a field of scarecrows. You count farmers on your way to the café and give up at twenty.

Third: Three farmers at the café window

Mrs. Odile Fenn's windows are steamed from top to bottom, as they have been every autumn morning for thirty years, and someone has drawn a pumpkin in the mist.

Painted on the inside of the door, in letters as old as the café, is her one rule: Hats on the hooks, gentlemen. Three farmers sit inside, and Ruth, peering past you, says any of their green coats could be the one she sold.

The farmer at the counter has hung his brown hat on a hook; his own hair underneath is grey and cropped short. He is laughing at something Mrs. Fenn has said and drinking scalding tea in great gulps, and one corner of his moustache has begun to curl away from his lip like a page in the rain.

His trousers are tucked into black rubber boots, and a fish scale shines on his cuff: a Fish Hall porter on his break.

The farmer with the newspaper has hung his hat up too, over thick black hair and thick black brows. He drinks his coffee hot. Before each sip he peels the moustache off, lays it on the saucer like a sleeping caterpillar, and presses it back afterwards with his thumb.

The farmer by the window ordered a hot chocolate twenty minutes ago. It is still full, and a skin has formed on top. He sits half turned from the steaming glass with his hat still on, the brim pulled low. Under it, above the round spectacles, are two eyebrows of bright copper red.

Fourth: What Vera tells everyone who buys a face

Back at the theatre box, Vera holds up a small brown bottle of spirit gum. She gives the same warning with every face she sells, and she gives it to you now, word for word. “Nothing hot for the first hour. Steam lifts it. And don't laugh too hard, or you'll lose it in your soup.”

Most customers laugh anyway. It is a fair, after all. A moustache that falls into the soup is half the fun.

Fifth: What the watchman saw under the gate lamp

The night watchman, asked again over a mug of tea, adds one thing he had not thought worth saying. Under the lamp at the Fish Hall gate the man had no hat, and his hair was red as a fox.

Dorn taps the edge of the café table as if it were a chessboard. “He has moved every piece he could think of,” she says. “Now let's look at the ones he forgot.” Then she gives you the list she keeps in her head.

Check the edges of a disguise first. People buy a face from the middle outwards, and time and money run out before the edges.

Check what each person does with the costume when nobody seems to be watching. A player treats a disguise as a toy. A man in hiding treats it as his only face.

Check the house rules. Anyone who breaks a thirty-year rule in front of everybody usually has a reason.

Check the cup. People who are waiting drink; people who are hiding often forget to.

Sixth: The first way, by the red eyebrows under the brim

Start under the gate lamp. The man in Pim's coat had hair as red as a fox. At Rag Row he bought a hat to cover it, a moustache and spectacles for the middle of his face, and he turned down Vera's grey eyebrows. So whatever else changed, his own red brows stayed.

In the café, two farmers obeyed Mrs. Fenn's rule and showed you grey hair and black hair. The third broke the oldest rule in the room and kept his hat on, and the only hair you can see on him, two copper eyebrows above the spectacles, is exactly the colour the watchman saw.

Seventh: The second way, by the chocolate going cold

Now forget hair and look at the cups. All three moustaches are new this morning, and all three men heard Vera's warning. Two of them treat it as a fair-day joke.

The porter laughs and lets the steam curl his moustache; if it lands in his tea, so what. The newspaper reader takes his off to drink, which no man in hiding would do with an inspector buying coffee at the next table.

The farmer by the window can afford neither. He wanted something hot and ordered it, then remembered the warning, so the chocolate grows a skin while his face stays exactly where it is.

The same man, both times. Two different roads, one front door.

Eighth: The tin box under the apple crates

You do not arrest him in the café. You wait. At twenty to ten the farmer by the window leaves a coin beside the cold chocolate and strolls down the Long Hall to the corner where apple crates are stacked six high for the fair.

He lifts the bottom crate of one stack as if he has done it a hundred times and slides a tin box out into a basket.

Dorn's hand lands on his shoulder like a referee's whistle. The moustache comes away in his fingers when he rubs his face, and Ruth, who has followed you with her shawl over her head, says the name before Dorn does: Quentin Rook, who sold raffle tickets at the fair office all week and knew exactly where the box was kept.

Pim gets the brown coat back at noon, odd button and all, and rings the dinner bell twice as hard as usual. Mrs. Fenn says she has not heard it so cheerful since the old Harvest Fairs, when the queue for her soup ran right out of the door.

Remember: a disguise bought in five minutes always leaves something of the old face showing, so look at the edges.

Only one thing still bothers you as the crates go back to their stall. Every one of them is stencilled in black with the name of an old farmer whose knees, everybody in Rag Row says, gave up on market mornings last autumn. So whose apples were sitting in those crates, and who is selling them under his name?