What Happened Next

The Old Market closed at midnight on New Year's Eve, as everyone knew it would. The demolition men came in spring, as everyone knew they would. What nobody expected was how many people came to watch the iron roof come down: hundreds of them, standing in the square in their coats, pointing at windows and saying, “That was where the flowers were. That was the café. That was where the dog slept.”

Inspector Elena Dorn retired in the same spring. She had been offered a desk at headquarters and turned it down with one of her quick, cheerful refusals. On fine afternoons she can still be found at the stone chess tables, which moved to the park with their brass plate, playing anyone who sits down, giving them a pawn start if they are young, and winning anyway. When someone tells her the market was only a building, she smiles and asks them what was on the third pitch from the clock. Nobody ever knows. She always does.

Pim kept the bell. The town had meant to hang it in the new building, but the new building had no tower, no iron post and no rope, so the bell went with him to the little yard behind his house. Every morning at the old opening hour, the neighbours hear one deep note and then another. Nobody has ever complained, and several of them set their clocks by it. Across town, the great clock of the Long Hall ticks on in the town museum, and Walter Yelland still climbs up to wind it every Sunday, exactly as the auction promised.

Mrs. Odile Fenn opened a new café on the corner of the square, smaller than the old one, with the same tea and the same steamed windows in winter. On the wall by the door she hung the kitchen doorframe from the old café, with the pencil lines and initials of every chess champion Pim ever measured, and beside the line marked X.Q. a small card in her own hand: “Nobody grows taller.” She still serves her lemon on a little saucer to anyone who asks, and to some who do not.

The stallholders scattered and then, slowly, found each other again. The flower seller and the egg sisters share a covered pitch at the Saturday market by the river: Edie keeps the mornings in the blue headscarf, and Florrie, forgiven at last, rides in on her blue bicycle for the afternoons and never swaps without saying so. The twin fishmongers run one stall between them and still argue about whose turn it is to work the ice. The Quint sisters put away the green hat for good and now knit on the same bench in the park, side by side, so that at last everyone can see there are two of them.

And you? You were posted to the new station on the other side of the square, with a window that looks out at the place where the Long Hall used to be. Every January, on the first cold morning, you walk across the square before work and buy a bag of chestnuts at the gate that is no longer there, from a cart that came back. You check the coals before you pay. Old habits.

A Guide for Reading Groups and Families

These cases are made to be argued over. The best way to read them together is out loud, one chapter at a time, stopping just before the first of the two ways to solve it. At that point everyone writes down a name and one reason on a slip of paper, folds it, and puts it in a cup. Then read on.

When both ways have been read, open the slips. Did anyone find the right answer for a different reason from either of the book's two ways? Often that third way is just as good, and saying it aloud is half the fun.

For younger readers, read the checklist paragraphs twice and let them choose one thing to check on the next page. For older readers and groups, try timing the reading: whoever names the answer first, with a reason that holds, scores a point, the way a quiz team would.

Questions for the first months, January to April: Which clue did you notice but not trust? Why do people believe a face they half know more easily than a face they have never seen?

Questions for the summer cases, May to August: Several tricks depend on a crowd, a mask or a hood. What makes a person easier to replace in a crowd, and what makes them harder?

Questions for the autumn and winter, September to December: Many of the last cases turn on old habits, a pencil line, a drawer that sticks, a way of serving tea. Which habit of your own would give you away if somebody tried to pretend to be you?

Questions for the whole book: Elena Dorn often finds the same answer twice by two different roads. Why does she bother with the second road? And what does the Old Market teach you about the places in your own life that will not be there forever?

Where to Learn More

If you enjoyed solving these cases, a public library is the best place to go next. Most libraries keep a shelf of classic fair-play mysteries and books of logic puzzles, and librarians are usually delighted to suggest the next one.

Puzzle clubs and chess clubs meet in many towns, often in libraries, schools and community halls. Both are friendly places to practise the habit this book is built on: looking at the whole board, noticing what has changed, and checking an answer a second way before you trust it.

If the Old Market made you curious about your own town's past, a local history society or a town archive can show you old photographs, maps and stall registers of markets that have closed or changed. Many old markets still stand and are busy every week; visiting one with a notebook and an eye for small details is a very good way to spend a Saturday morning.

And if you would like to know how real detectives work, many police forces and museums offer open days, talks and exhibitions for the public, where you can ask questions of the people who do the job.