Chapter 3: Somebody else wore the flower seller's green shawl

The shawl hangs on a brass hook at the back of the flower stall. It is green wool with a long fringe, faded to the colour of moss on one shoulder, where the afternoon sun comes through the glass roof and lands on it every day. Hester Arden wears it only at work, the way a footballer leaves his boots in the changing room.

By the time you and Dorn pushed through the Saturday crowd at the Flower Hall door, the shawl was back on its hook and the woman inside it was gone. The stall's curtain was half drawn. A card on it said, in Hester's big round hand, “Closed until Monday.”

That is the answer to the green shawl at the door. It was not Hester. Hester had slipped on the ice by the café steps on Wednesday and broken her wrist. Somebody else had put on her shawl, and with it her name.

First: Roses paid for, half in advance

By Monday the customers come to find you, and by Monday afternoon you have filled four pages of your notebook with their names, their slips and their worried faces.

A young man who wants red roses for his girl. A teacher who wants white ones for her mother. A waiter who has ordered three dozen for the restaurant where he works. All of them paid half the price in advance for the week of the fourteenth, the busiest week of the flower year.

Each has a small paper slip, torn from a cheap notebook, with the order and a scrawled “H.A.” at the bottom. The woman in the green shawl wrote them on Friday and Saturday afternoon, between two and four. She had a cold, they say. She kept the shawl up to her chin.

“Busiest week of the year,” Dorn says, reading the slips. “Somebody chose the game and the day very carefully.”

Second: The flower seller at home with her arm in a sling

You walk round to see Hester, who lives three streets from the market, above a shoe mender's. She opens the door with her right arm in plaster and her temper in very good working order, and you duck to follow her into two small rooms with dried flowers hanging from every beam.

“I never take a penny before the flowers are in the bucket,” she says. “Never have. And I don't keep a notebook, I keep it all up here.” She taps her head with her good hand. “Forty years. My regulars know that.”

Who are her regulars? Mrs. Callow, for one, who has bought sweet peas every week for twenty years and calls Hester “young lady” though Hester is sixty. Mr. Ewart, for another, who started in October and comes every Friday for white tulips for his mother, and always stays to talk.

Who could have taken the shawl from its hook? Anyone who walks the Flower Hall, Hester says. But anyone who wanted to pass for her would need to know the stall, the shawl, and the customers.

Third: The woman who knew one name and not another

You find Mrs. Callow at the bus stop.

On Friday at three, she says, she went to the stall for her sweet peas, and the woman in the shawl knew her at once. “Not today, Mrs. Callow,” she croaked through the shawl, “I've a terrible cold, come back Monday, love.” She never once let Mrs. Callow see more than her eyes, and she waved her away before the old lady could come close enough to wonder.

You find Mr. Ewart at his work. On Friday at half past two he went to the stall for his white tulips. The woman in the shawl took his order for the fourteenth and his money, and asked him to spell his name. He was hurt. Hester always asks after his mother.

The young man with the red roses adds one more thing. He asked to see the white roses for his girl's mother. They sit in the top bucket, on the high shelf. The woman in the shawl turned over an empty crate, climbed up on it, and lifted one down to show him.

That evening Pim, locking up, finds the crate still standing upside down under the high shelf. He frowns at it. Hester never needs a crate. She can reach that shelf flat-footed.

Fourth: Three women around the café stove

Three women know the Flower Hall well enough to be worth a cup of tea, and by luck, or by Dorn's arranging, all three are in Mrs. Odile Fenn's café at five. You hang your coat on the hook marked with a small brass number six and sit down where you can watch them.

Cora Byrne runs the ribbon stall next to Hester's. She has been there every day this winter. Mr. Ewart comes in for his tea while you sit there, and Cora calls across, “Tulips not the same without Hester, Mr. Ewart?” and asks after his mother. Then, when Mrs. Fenn cannot find the sugar tin, Cora reaches up and takes it down from the top of the tall dresser without even stretching.

Freda Hume sells candles in the Long Hall, two halls away, and has twice asked Hester for a corner of the flower stall to sell from. She came to the market in November, she tells you, so this is her first winter and the market's last. She ducks as she stands to leave, but not quite enough, and knocks her head on the café's low brass lamp, as she does, Mrs. Fenn says, every day.

Gwen Darby worked at Hester's side for six years, until a quarrel about wages last March. She has not set foot in the Flower Hall since, she says. She sits on the high stool at the counter. Her feet do not reach the floor; they swing like a child's. She says she was at home all Friday and Saturday afternoon.

Fifth: What a shawl cannot hide

On the walk back through the dark Flower Hall, Dorn stops by the empty stall and gives you the list.

Check what the stranger knew. A borrowed name brings some of its friends with it, but never all of them.

Check what the stranger did not know. One missing name can be louder than ten right ones.

Check the body under the costume. A shawl hides a face; it does not change how high a person can reach.

Check every newcomer and every old hand against the calendar. Who was here in March, who arrived in October, who only came in November?

You have met everyone now, and you have heard every clue that Dorn has heard. Think, like a chess player counting which squares each piece can really reach. Which of the three women wore the shawl?

Sixth: The first way, by the names she knew

The woman in the shawl knew Mrs. Callow by name and sent her away, because Mrs. Callow knew Hester's face and voice too well. So she knew the stall's old customers. Freda arrived in November, sells in another hall, and has never stood at Hester's stall long enough to learn a customer's name. It was not Freda.

She did not know Mr. Ewart, who has come every Friday since October and talks to Cora across the aisle every week. So she had not been near the stall this autumn. Cora greeted him by name over her tea. It was not Cora.

Who knew the twenty-year customer but not the October one? Someone who worked the stall for years and then left before autumn. Gwen left in March.

Seventh: The second way, by the crate under the top shelf

Now put the names away. Hester reaches the high shelf flat-footed. The woman in the shawl needed a crate to lift the white roses down, and the crate was still there when Pim locked up.

Cora takes the sugar tin from the top of the dresser without stretching. Freda knocks her head on a lamp that everyone else walks under. Neither of them needs a crate to reach a shelf that Hester reaches standing. Gwen's feet swing above the café floor from a stool. Like a short goalkeeper facing a high ball, she needed something to stand on.

Two roads, the calendar and the crate, and both stop at Gwen Darby's swinging feet.

Eighth: Roses for the fourteenth

Gwen gives up before her tea is cold. You only have to set the slips out on the counter in front of her, one by one, like a hand of cards laid face up, and she stops pretending.

The money is in a biscuit tin under her bed, every coin, with the slips copied out. She had meant to take it and vanish to her sister's for a month, and to let Hester's name carry the blame.

Hester takes the tin with her good hand and, after a long look at Gwen, a short look at the crate, and a word nobody repeats, she does something nobody expects. She lets Gwen fill every one of the orders, unpaid, with her own two hands, for the busiest week of the last flower year the Old Market will ever have.

On the fourteenth the Flower Hall smells like a summer garden. The young man gets his roses. Mr. Ewart gets his tulips and a long talk. Mrs. Callow gets her sweet peas, and calls Gwen “young lady” too.

You take your coat from hook number six on your way out of the café that night, and you notice that every hook on the long rail has its own small brass number swinging beneath it. And why, in a café where everybody knows everybody's coat, does Mrs. Fenn number every single hook?