Chapter 21: The treasurer drinks a coffee and takes the ledger in the same minute

The oak cabinet in the market office upstairs is older than anyone who works there. It stands on carved lion's feet, its brass lock is the size of a pocket watch, and its one deep drawer sticks unless you lift it a finger's width before you pull.

On the shelf inside there is a clean rectangle in the dust where the great ledger lay for sixty years.

Across the room is the rent window, a little hatch with a brass bell, where every stallholder in the market has queued on rent day since before the plane trees in the square were planted. Pim queued there as a young porter. So did Mrs. Odile Fenn's mother, with the café's rent tied up in a handkerchief.

So how can one man be in two places at the same minute? He cannot. At ten past three one of the two grey hats was the treasurer and the other was somebody wearing his face. The question you carry up the stairs is which was which.

First: Two grey hats at ten past three

The great ledger holds every rent paid in the Old Market for sixty years. This winter it matters more than ever, because every stallholder's closing payment will be worked out from it, line by line, by the auditors next week.

Wanda Sorrel, the office clerk, tells it plainly. At ten past three by the office clock, Silas Upton, the treasurer, came in wearing his grey hat. He unhooked the key from his watch chain, opened the cabinet, lifted the drawer and pulled, took out the ledger, said “For the auditors,” and went down the back stairs.

“He was in a hurry,” Wanda says. “Didn't take his hat off, didn't say good afternoon, hardly looked at me. But he's been in a hurry all month, with the auditors coming. I thought nothing of it.”

At ten past three by the café clock, you and Inspector Elena Dorn watched Silas Upton, in his grey hat, buy a coffee at the counter downstairs. Pim sets both clocks to the bell every morning, and they have not been a minute apart in thirty years.

You remember the man at the counter clearly, because he made sure you would. He stood with his back half turned, but twice he looked across at your table, and once he raised his grey hat to Dorn, the way a footballer waves to the stand where the cameras are.

Second: The cabinet that only opens one way

Dorn kneels by the cabinet and you hold the lamp. The lock has no scratches, not one. The wood around the drawer is unmarked. Whoever opened it used a key and knew the trick of the drawer.

“There is one key,” Wanda says. “Mr. Upton's, on his watch chain. And the drawer, well, I know the lift and he knows the lift. Anybody else yanks it and it jams like a goalkeeper's glove on a wet ball. The auditors tried it last spring. It took them ten minutes and a screwdriver.”

Third: What Mrs. Fenn heard at the counter

Downstairs, Mrs. Fenn is still drying the cup he drank from. “Something was wrong with him today,” she says. “He paid with a note and walked off without his change. Thirty years Silas Upton has counted his change twice at my counter, every coin, as carefully as a chess player counting the pieces after a long game.”

She sets the cup down. “And he called me madam. Madam! Thirty years he has called me Odile.”

She remembers the treasurer as a young clerk, coming down on quiet Sunday afternoons when the market was shut, spreading his rent sheets over her corner table and adding up every column twice with a little silver pencil while his coffee went cold beside him, happy as a boy with a jigsaw.

Fourth: The treasurer comes back with a story

At twenty to four Silas Upton walks into the office, sees the empty shelf and turns white, then red. “Ledger? I haven't touched it. I was in the café at ten past three. The inspector saw me herself.”

Somebody, he says, must have dressed up as him and fooled poor Wanda. Dorn asks, mildly, whether the key ever leaves his chain. He nearly laughs. “Not in thirty years. Not for a minute. I sleep with it on. Ask anyone.”

Wanda nods. The whole market knows it. And after his coffee, Dorn asks, where did he go? Round the Flower Hall, he says, for a breath of air. He did not speak to anybody there.

He lifts the chain to show you. The key hangs there, heavy and old, beside a little silver pencil. He looks very sure of himself, like a card player who has just laid down what he thinks is the winning hand.

Fifth: Dorn's list on the back of a menu

Dorn borrows a menu from the café, turns it over and writes on the back in pencil, then hands it to you. It is the shortest list she has given you all year.

Check what only the real person has. A face can be copied and a hat bought, but a key on a chain goes where its owner goes.

Check what only the real person knows. Every old cabinet, door and drawer has its own small trick.

Check what only the real person does without thinking. Habits of thirty years are harder to copy than a coat.

Check who wanted to be seen, and by whom. An alibi is worth most when it is handed to the police.

Sixth: The first way, by the key on the watch chain

Take the treasurer at his word. The key has not left his chain for thirty years, not for a minute; he says so, and the whole market agrees.

The cabinet was opened with a key, without one scratch, by a man who unhooked it from a watch chain. The drawer was lifted just so, a knack only Upton and Wanda know, which beat two auditors with a screwdriver.

An impostor in the office would have needed that key, and by Upton's own proud boast nobody else could have had it for a minute.

So the man upstairs had Upton's key on Upton's chain and Upton's knack in his hands. The boast closes the door on his impostor story, like a checkmate he set up against himself. The man in the office was Silas Upton.

Seventh: The second way, by the name he forgot

Now start downstairs. A man who has called the café owner Odile for thirty years does not suddenly call her madam. A treasurer who counts every coin twice does not walk away from his change. The man at the counter wore the hat but not the habits, so he was not Upton.

And if Upton was not at the counter, where was he at ten past three? Upstairs, opening his own cabinet, while a double drank coffee within arm's reach of an inspector and raised his hat to make sure she noticed.

The café man was never there to fool Wanda. He was there to fool you. Two roads, one answer, and the answer is the man who said he had been robbed.

The rest comes quickly. You run down the back stairs, eighteen steep steps, to the parcel office at the bottom, where stallholders send and collect their parcels. The parcel clerk remembers the treasurer handing in a heavy bundle at a quarter past three, “for the four o'clock van”.

In the outgoing sack you find it: brown paper, string, addressed to Upton's sister. Inside is the great ledger, and in its last pages are three years of rents that never reached the market's bank. The auditors would have found the gap next week, line by line.

Wanda carries the ledger back upstairs in both arms like a baby and lays it on its clean rectangle in the dust.

Mrs. Fenn is the one who finds the double. At five o'clock, wiping a clear patch in her steamed window, she sees a grey hat waiting at the tram stop across the square. It is Wyatt Renshaw, Upton's brother-in-law, with the same narrow shoulders and a hat bought the same morning, and he comes back with you without a fuss, almost relieved, as if he had been waiting all afternoon for somebody to ask.

Upton's plan, it turns out, was to let the ledger be lost for a fortnight and then find it again in some dusty corner, with its last three years of pages gone and an impostor to blame, while the inspector herself swore he had been drinking coffee downstairs. Dorn admits it was a clever opening. It simply ran into the one piece he could never move: his own watch chain.

That evening the rent window's little brass bell rings once more, because Pim cannot resist pressing it on his way past. Every stallholder's closing payment will be counted from a ledger that is whole again.

One more parcel, on the shelf of parcels waiting to be collected, catches your eye. It is from the costume hire shop, and it holds a red winter costume with a white beard, addressed to the toy stall in the Long Hall. But the toy stall's own costume was delivered last week, and the toy stall only ever needs one. Who ordered a second?