Chapter 19: Last year's winner comes back to the carving tables in a headscarf

Simon Tolley's pumpkins are piled in the Flower Hall like footballs after a match, orange, green and the grey-blue of an old slate roof. Tip any one of them over and you will find a number chalked on the flat underneath. Simon weighs every pumpkin the day it arrives and chalks its weight there, so that nobody can argue at the till.

The buyer in the long scarf paid with old green vouchers, and those vouchers are the first half of the answer. Last October the carving contest committee gave its winner a little book of green vouchers, good at any Flower Hall stall.

Nobody else got one; the runners-up took home ribbons. Only one person in the market could pay in that green paper: last year's winner, Winona Quist.

Simon's weighing book shows what she bought: thirty-one kilos, twenty-eight and twenty-six, the three biggest pumpkins of the year. This morning, the third Saturday of October and the day of the market's last carving contest ever, someone collected the twenty-eight from under the sack. The other two are still there.

First: A rule that keeps a champion on the bench

The contest has one old rule that nobody has ever broken. A winner may not carve again for three years. “It gives the rest of us a chance,” says Yvette Stroud, who has run the contest for twenty years with a clipboard and a whistle. Winona Quist wrote to her in September to say she would be away.

This year the prize purse is the biggest it has ever been, collected stall by stall for the farewell. Entering under a false name to take it would be deception, plain and simple. Inspector Elena Dorn, who loves the contest and has never once carved a pumpkin, asks Yvette to let you both watch from the end of the hall.

Second: Four tables under the glass roof

Four carvers stand at four tables under the glass roof, each with a board, the market's own carving tools, a bucket for the insides and a pumpkin of their own choosing.

At table one stands Ulla Ryder, eighty years old, carving her twentieth contest pumpkin. It is small and round, and she talks to it. She tells you she watched the very first contest as a girl, when the Flower Hall still had gas lamps and the judges walked along the tables with a candle each, and the hall smelled of hot pumpkin for a week.

At table two, Rhoda Underwood, a newcomer in a flowered headscarf and large tinted glasses, has a giant. At table three, Theo Wilks, aged twelve, has a pumpkin barely bigger than his head.

At table four, Wesley Strand has a giant too, grown in his own garden. There is still soil in its creases, and the stalk was cut so recently that it is wet.

Rhoda is tall, Wesley is tall, and from the end of the hall, in the October light coming grey through the glass, you could not swear to anybody's face. Yvette blows the whistle. The lids come off first, as they always do.

Dorn strolls past table two and asks Rhoda, in a friendly way, whether she has carved before. “Never,” Rhoda says, very low, without lifting her head from her pumpkin. The tinted glasses stay fixed on the work, as steady as a darts player's eye on the board.

Third: A photograph above the café counter

At half-time, while the carvers drink tea, you slip into the café. Mrs. Odile Fenn keeps a photograph of every contest winner over her counter, a long row of them going brown at the edges, and the newest is last year's: Winona Quist with her winning cat-faced pumpkin.

The lid sits beside the pumpkin in the photograph. Cut into its edge is a small square notch, like the notch on a key, so that the lid can only go back on one way. It was Winona's own trick, and the judges loved it. “Never saw a lid fit so well,” Mrs. Fenn says. “Forty years of wobbly lids, and then that.”

Fourth: What Winona did with her seeds

Mrs. Fenn remembers something the photograph does not show. Winona never threw away a seed. She scooped every one out of her pumpkin into a twist of paper and brought it into the café to dry on the warm shelf above the stove. “Next year's winners,” she called them. “She'd grow her own from them.”

Nobody else ever asked for the stove shelf, Mrs. Fenn says, and she has not seen a twist of seeds up there since. She says it the way old supporters talk about a player who left the club.

Fifth: Lids with notches and lids without

Back in the Flower Hall, you walk slowly along the four tables. Ulla's lid is round. Theo's is round and rather jagged. Rhoda Underwood's has a neat square notch.

So does Wesley Strand's. He catches you looking and grins. “Saw the photo in the café. If it won last year, it's worth a try.” Plenty of carvers have copied the notch this year, Yvette says. It is the fashion.

Then the buckets. Wesley scoops everything, seeds and strings together, straight into his bucket. Theo flicks his seeds at his friends in the crowd until Yvette blows her whistle at him. Ulla picks hers out one by one into a paper twist; she feeds the birds on her windowsill with them, she tells you, and has done for sixty years.

Rhoda Underwood picks out every seed into a twist of paper too, and sets it carefully on the corner of her board.

Sixth: What Dorn wants you to look at

Dorn leans against a pillar and watches the four tables like a tennis umpire watching a long rally, head turning, saying nothing. When Yvette has the carvers lift their pumpkins onto the long table for the judges' sheet, every base is in view for a moment: a four chalked under Ulla's, a six under Theo's, twenty-eight under Rhoda's, and under Wesley's no chalk at all, only garden soil.

Then she sends you to borrow Simon's weighing book, and you read it twice: one pumpkin of thirty-one kilos, one of twenty-eight, one of twenty-six, all paid in green vouchers on the same day, and nothing else over twenty all season. Only then does she give you her list.

Check what is a habit and what is a fashion. Anyone can copy what is in a photograph; nobody copies what was never in it.

Check where each thing came from. A pumpkin has a history like anything else: a garden, a stall, a weighing book.

Check two clues together. One clue usually leaves you with two people; two clues that cross leave you with one.

Seventh: The first way, by the seeds and the notched lid

Take the notch first. It was Winona's trick, but it hangs in a photograph in the café for anyone to copy, and Wesley did. So the notch gives you two carvers, Rhoda and Wesley.

Now the seeds. The paper twist was Winona's private habit, known to Mrs. Fenn and nobody else, and no photograph ever showed it. Ulla saves her seeds too, for her birds.

So the seeds give you two carvers as well, Rhoda and Ulla. Neither clue alone is enough. But only one carver sits in both pairs, like the one square where two lines of pieces cross on a chessboard. Table two.

Eighth: The second way, by the number chalked underneath

Now go back to the long table, where every base was in view. Ulla's was chalked with a four. Theo's with a six. Wesley's had no chalk at all, only garden soil, because it never went near Simon's scales.

Rhoda Underwood's base said twenty-eight. Simon sold only one pumpkin of twenty-eight kilos this season, and it was paid for in green vouchers that only last year's winner could have had. The weighing book and the chalk agree, like two linesmen raising their flags at once. That road also ends at table two.

Ninth: A cat-faced pumpkin carved out of competition

When Dorn asks quietly for the tinted glasses, Rhoda Underwood takes them off herself, and the headscarf after them. Winona Quist laughs and cries at once. “It's the last one,” she says. “The last contest under that roof. I couldn't just sit and watch. I kept that voucher book a whole year without spending a page. Nothing seemed good enough to buy with it. Until this.”

Yvette blows her whistle very hard and reads out the rule, and Winona hands back her entry form without a word. But the carvers hold a vote, and they ask for her cat-faced pumpkin to sit on the café counter, out of competition, lit up under last year's photograph.

The prize goes to Ulla Ryder, after twenty years of trying. Pim rings the bell three times for her, which nobody can remember him doing for a pumpkin before, and the whole Flower Hall cheers like a crowd at a cup final. Winona's twist of seeds goes up on the shelf above the café stove, where it belongs.

Only one person in the café did not cheer. All afternoon an old man sat in the corner by the steamed window with a small chessboard set out in front of him, and he never once looked at a pumpkin. He watched the board, and he watched the people. Who was he?