Chapter 2: Two brothers in yellow oilskins tell one story each

The Brede fish stall is a slope of crushed ice ten feet long, with the fish laid on it head to tail like players lined up for a team photograph. Above it hangs a black slate. Every morning at seven the prices go up in chalk, and every evening they are wiped off with a wet sleeve.

Two men work behind that ice. Same height, same red hands, same yellow oilskins, same laugh. Hugh Brede and Arthur Brede are twins, and that is the whole answer to the fishmonger you met on the gallery stairs in January: Arthur was climbing up to hand in his watch for mending, while Hugh stood below weighing cod.

There is one difference, if you stand there long enough. When the prices go up, Hugh puts on a pair of reading glasses to chalk them, then takes them off and leaves them on the scale. Arthur chalks without glasses and can read the slate from the far end of the hall.

“Forty years their father had this stall,” Dorn says on a grey Saturday in February, “and I never once saw him smile. The boys smile all day. It's the only way to tell them from him.”

That Saturday the smiling stops.

First: Two yellow oilskins and one crate of eels

At five that morning, someone lifted a crate of live eels out of a van behind the Fish Hall. The van belongs to Gideon Ashby, who catches eels in the marsh channels and sells them to cooks, never to stalls. He wants them back, and he is loud about it.

His grandfather sold eels at this market from a barrel by the main gate, he tells the whole Fish Hall, and no Ashby has ever been robbed under this roof until today.

At half past seven, Daphne Cole, who cooks at the dining rooms across the square, bought a kilo of eels at the Brede stall. They were cheap, wrapped in yesterday's newspaper, and the change came back in coins that smelled of the sea. She was pleased. Then, at nine, she met Gideon in the café and heard about his crate, and her pleasure went cold.

“One of the Bredes sold them to me,” she says. “Oilskin, red hands, that grin. Don't ask me which. Nobody can tell which.”

So you ask the brothers. Each says the same thing. At half past seven he was in Mrs. Odile Fenn's café having his breakfast, and his brother was alone at the stall. Each says it calmly, and each looks hurt that his own twin would say otherwise.

Mrs. Fenn can help, a little.

Only one Brede came into the café that morning, at a quarter past seven, and he stayed until ten to eight. She cannot say which one. In thirty years she has never been able to say which one. Where he sat she cannot say either; on a Saturday the café is so full of steam and elbows that she pours tea by memory.

“He had the morning paper,” she says. “Then he pushed it at me and asked me to read him the football results, because the print had gone small on him. So I read them out. His team lost.”

Hugh tells his story first, and keeps it short. He had his eggs, he read the paper, his team lost, he came back to the stall at ten to eight. When Dorn asks about his glasses, he shrugs. “Only for chalk,” he says, as if glasses were a thing that happened to other people.

Arthur tells his story next, and makes it long. He had his eggs too, and the paper too, and the sad football. He sat at the window table, he says, with a pot of tea, and watched the world go by. He watched you and Dorn cross the square at half past seven, as it happens, you with your collar up and Dorn with her hands in her pockets.

It is true that you crossed the square at half past seven. You remember it well. You remember the café as you passed: its windows white with steam from top to bottom, so thick that you could not even see the lamp inside, only a soft yellow glow. Mrs. Fenn says they stayed that way until nine. Nobody wiped them, she adds; she would have had words.

Arthur points at the scale. Hugh's glasses are lying on it now, beside the chalk. “There you are,” Arthur says. “Hugh's glasses. Hugh was at the stall.”

Hugh goes red to the ears and says nothing at all, which in a Brede is very loud. Gideon, who has been listening from the end of the ice, says he does not care which of them it was, as long as somebody pays.

Dorn takes you a few steps away, past the ice, and gives you her list in a low voice.

Check what each person needs to see with. Eyes, glasses, light: a story has to fit the body that tells it.

Check what each person says he saw. Then go and stand where he stood, and see if it can be seen.

Check the things left lying about. An object in the right place can still tell the wrong story, if you do not ask when it was put there.

Check how a story is dressed. A true account is often short and a little dull; a false one tends to arrive in its best clothes.

Check the witness behind the alibi. Mrs. Fenn cannot tell the twins apart, but she remembers exactly what one of them did.

Two stories, then, that match almost word for word, the way twins' stories do. Like two goalkeepers in identical shirts, the brothers stand side by side and dare you to pick. Pick, then, before you read on. Which twin sold the eels?

Second: The first way, by the football results

Start with the café. The Brede at the counter could not read the small print of his newspaper and asked Mrs. Fenn to read it for him. That is what a man does when he needs reading glasses and has not got them with him.

Hugh needs reading glasses, whatever he says about chalk; a man who will not admit it is exactly the man who would rather hear the football read aloud than say why.

You saw him put them on to chalk the slate, and take them off, and leave them on the scale. Arthur does not need them; he reads that slate from the far end of the hall. A man with Arthur's eyes would not push the paper across the counter.

And Hugh's glasses on the scale, which Arthur held up as proof against his brother, prove the opposite. They were on the scale because Hugh left them there at seven, when he chalked. That is why, at a quarter past seven, he could not read the football.

So the Brede in the café was Hugh. The Brede at the stall at half past seven, selling cheap eels to Daphne Cole, was Arthur.

Third: The second way, by the steamed window

Now leave the eyes alone and take Arthur's own story. He says that from the window table he watched you and Dorn cross the square at half past seven.

Go back in your memory and stand where he says he sat. At half past seven the café windows were white from top to bottom; you passed them yourself and could not even make out the lamp. They stayed white until nine, and nobody wiped a hole in them. Nobody inside that café could have watched anyone cross the square.

So Arthur was not at that table. Where could he have seen you from? From the open front of the Fish Hall, where the stall faces the square. He saw you, all right. He saw you from behind the ice.

Notice, too, how he told it. Hugh's story was short and a little sulky. Arthur's had your collar and Dorn's pockets in it, the kind of bright detail a liar adds to make you nod, like a tennis player who talks too much between points.

Two ways, two different kinds of clue, one answer. Arthur was at the stall. Arthur sold the eels.

He bought the crate at six from a man in the lane behind the hall, for a handful of coins, and told himself not to ask questions. The stall had had a thin winter, and the thought of the market's last year had made him reckless. A bargain is a bargain, he says. Not this one.

His brother, squinting over a newspaper he could not read, had covered for him without knowing it. Arthur, like a darts player who blames the board, tried to put the miss on Hugh.

Gideon gets back what is left of his crate. Arthur pays Daphne back and pays Gideon too, and for a week the twins work in silence on either side of the ice, passing the scoop back and forth without a word, which, Mrs. Fenn says, is the quietest the Fish Hall has been since their father retired.

Remember: when two people look exactly alike, stop looking at their faces and ask what each of them could really see.

Late that afternoon, walking back past the Flower Hall, you notice a woman in a long green shawl at the door, taking money for roses and writing in a little book. Dorn stops dead. And why was the flower seller's famous green shawl taking orders at the Flower Hall door, when the flower seller herself was at home with her wrist in plaster?