Chapter 17: The last Wainwright apples come from two doors along

An apple crate is a plain thing until you look at it properly. Six slats of pale pine on each side, two handholds cut like smiles, corners fixed with square old nails that have rusted a brown ring into the wood. On both ends, in black stencil gone soft at the edges: T. Wainwright, Upper Orchard.

Those are the crates that hid the raffle box, and their letters lead straight to the answer you were looking for. Whose apples were in them? Not Tobias Wainwright's. The crates are his. The apples, and the young man selling them under his name, belong to somebody else.

First: The corner stall has a new name painted on it

For fifty-one years Tobias Wainwright sold russets at the corner of the Long Hall, every autumn, from the same blue lorry. Last autumn his knees told him to stop. Yet this September the corner stall is open again, and a fresh board hangs over it: Wainwright's Russets, the Last Year.

Behind the board stands a cheerful young man in a clean apron who calls himself Will Wainwright, the grandson. He is doing a roaring trade. Old stallholders shake his hand. Customers pay nearly double for “the last Wainwright apples the market will ever see”, and some of them buy a second bag just to have something to remember.

An old woman in the queue tells you she bought her first russet at this corner when she was six, from a man with soil under his fingernails who gave every child the smallest apple on the pile for nothing. She buys three bags. She does not look closely at any of them.

“Picked them off Grandad's trees yesterday,” the young man tells you, polishing one on his sleeve. “Loaded the old lorry last night and drove down at dawn. Three hours. His knees won't take it any more, so here I am, every morning till the end.”

You ask where he parks. He waves a hand towards the back of the hall. “Round in the lane, with the others.” He has the easy smile of a card player who has never yet been asked to show his hand. His knuckles are raw and red, as if he has spent the night handling something icy, though the September morning is mild.

Second: What Sybil keeps in her apron pocket

Sybil Varley has sold honey at the next stall for almost as long as Wainwright sold apples, and she keeps his last letter in her apron pocket, folded small. She reads it to you in the café, while Mrs. Odile Fenn tops up the teapot and pretends not to listen.

The letter says his knees are finished, the orchard is let to a neighbour, and he has sold his old crates to Stanley Rudd's cold store on the square, “so they will go on carrying apples, even if they are not mine”. It says nothing about a grandson. It does not say he has none, either.

Nor does it say what everyone at this end of the Long Hall already knew, because Tobias never needed to write it down. Sybil supplies that part herself, between sips.

“Tobias's russets were rough and dull as a cricket ball after a long innings,” she says. “You could strike a match on them. Straight off the tree and onto the stall, in that same blue lorry, every October. He'd sooner have sold you his boots than stuck a label on an apple.”

Third: Small shiny squares on red skins

Back at the corner, you look at the apples properly. They are red, round and polished so bright that you can see the roof lights in them. Not one of them is rough.

And on several, if you tilt them to the light, there is a tiny square patch, stickier and shinier than the rest of the skin, where something small has been peeled away.

Stanley Rudd, two doors along the square, is the market's wholesaler. His apples come by the trainload from big packing houses, and every apple from a packing house wears a small paper label with a number on it. Shoppers peel them off at home, and the gum leaves exactly that shiny square.

Then Pim, who unlocks the lane door every morning at six for the lorries, shows you the little book in which he writes down every lorry that unloads at the Long Hall.

The old pages are soft as cloth. Forty autumns of a blue lorry for the corner stall, in Pim's careful capitals. This September, not one lorry for the corner stall, on any morning.

“Lorry?” Pim says. “That lad comes in from the square just after six, through the front gate, pushing a hand barrow. Every day. I hold the gate for him.” Pim says it the way a goalkeeper describes a goal he let in, sorry and quite sure.

Inspector Elena Dorn buys one apple, takes a bite and chews it slowly. Then, under the arcade, she counts the list out on her fingers like a darts player adding up a score.

Check the goods against the story. Fruit, bread and fish all carry marks of where they slept last night.

Check the road. If someone says three hours in a lorry, ask who saw the lorry.

Check what the old stallholders remember. In a market this old, somebody always knew the real one.

Check who owns the boxes. A name on a crate tells you where the crate came from, not where the apples did.

Fourth: The first way, by the marks of peeled labels

Begin with the skins, and with the letter. The little shiny squares are the marks of peeled-off labels, and labels go on apples at a packing house, not in an orchard. Tobias Wainwright never labelled an apple in his life, and an apple picked off his trees yesterday could not carry a label's ghost today.

Besides, by Tobias's own letter, the orchard is let to a neighbour; there are no longer any Grandad's trees to pick. Even those raw knuckles on a mild morning speak of a cold room, not an orchard.

Packing-house apples in this market come through one place, Rudd's, which also holds every one of Wainwright's old crates. Add the polished red skins, nothing like Sybil's match-striking russets, and the stall is selling Rudd's apples in Rudd's crates. A grandson selling his grandfather's harvest would have no reason to buy someone else's.

Fifth: The second way, by Pim's book of lorries

Now forget the fruit and follow the wheels. The young man says he drives three hours every morning in his grandfather's old lorry. Pim's book, kept faithfully every morning at the only door where lorries can unload, shows no lorry for the corner stall all September.

What Pim did see, every morning just after six, was a hand barrow pushed in from the square. Nobody pushes a barrow for three hours. Whatever was on it came from somewhere a short walk away, and the only place on the square that is open at six with crates of apples to spare is Rudd's cold store.

Two roads, one answer: the apples come from two doors along, and the man selling them is not who he says.

Notice that the lane is where he said he parks. It is the one place in the market where a lorry would have been seen and written down, by someone who has kept that book faithfully since before the young man was born. A lie is like a bad bluff: it fails at the exact spot where the other player can check it.

Stanley Rudd confirms it within the hour, red in the face and still in his cold-store coat. The cheerful young man is Victor Yorke, Rudd's night porter. Every morning he has been loading ordinary red apples onto a barrow, tipping them into Wainwright's old crates, peeling off the labels and selling them at double the price under a name the whole market loved.

“Everyone wanted the last Wainwright apple,” Victor says, staring at his boots. “I only gave them what they wanted.” Dorn hands him back the half-eaten apple. “No,” she says. “You gave them a name. They wanted the man.”

Victor pays back every customer he can find, and Sybil writes to the Upper Orchard that same evening. On the first Saturday of October a reply comes in a shaky hand: no grandson at all, and a small bag of real russets, rough as sandpaper, for Pim, as there has been every October since Pim first rang the bell.

Sybil reads the last line of that reply aloud to the whole café, standing up to do it, as if it were a speech at a prize-giving. “Tell the market I shall miss it. Tell the bell I shall listen for it on still mornings.” Mrs. Fenn has to go and see to something in the kitchen.

On the afternoon that reply arrives, the rain starts drumming on the glass roof, and on your way through the arcade you stop at the umbrella mender's stall beside the café. Before she hands a mended umbrella back to an old man, she opens it, ties a tiny knot of red thread around one of the ribs, and closes it again. Why the red thread?