Chapter 4: A polite stranger brings back the wrong coat

The coat rail in Mrs. Odile Fenn's café runs along the wall by the door: eight iron hooks, black with paint laid on over the years, each with a small brass disc hanging beneath it, stamped with a number from one to eight. The discs are worn smooth. When you hang your coat on hook six, your thumb finds the number without your looking.

Mrs. Fenn tells you why they are there. In her first winter behind the counter, two young men hung two grey coats side by side, and one of them went home in the wrong one, with a ring in its pocket that the other had meant to give his sweetheart that evening. It took a week of notices in the window to swap them back.

“The wedding went ahead,” she says. “And I went out and bought eight brass numbers.” Ever since, she asks every customer the same question with every order, “Which hook, love?”, and writes the answer on the bill.

First: Hook four, hook five and the rent envelope

Ezra Gault collects the market's rents. Every Friday morning he goes from stall to stall with his ledger, and every Friday at noon he hangs his navy coat on hook four, eats Mrs. Fenn's soup and walks the fat brown rent envelope to the bank. Twenty years, the same hook. You could set Pim's bell by him.

Before he sits down he pats the inside pocket twice, a habit so old that the regulars at the counter sometimes pat their own pockets when they see him do it.

This Friday in March, at ten past twelve, a stranger in a navy coat comes in out of the rain, says “Five,” when Mrs. Fenn asks, hangs his coat on hook five beside Ezra's, and has soup by the window. At twenty-five to one he pays at the counter, while Mrs. Fenn says “Hook five” and turns away to the kitchen.

In between, Cyril Hatch, Mrs. Fenn's pot-boy, lifts the dripping coat from hook five, hangs it on the stove rail to steam for ten minutes, and puts it back. Back on five, he says. He is almost sure. Coats get muddled every winter, he adds quickly, it's nobody's fault. The rail was crowded and the stove was hot and he had six cups in his other hand.

Dorn is in the café the whole time, two tables away, with her back to the rail and a pocket chess set in front of her, losing a game to herself. She saw nothing. She says so with some irritation.

The stranger leaves wearing a navy coat. At ten to one Ezra lifts the only navy coat left on the rail and walks to the bank. At the bank he reaches into the inside pocket and finds no envelope.

He finds, instead, somebody else's papers.

A letter addressed to Mr. Adrian Fleet at a lodging house across the river. A library ticket in the same name. A tram ticket. Ezra comes back through the rain grey in the face. Twenty years of Fridays, and never a coin lost. Dorn folds up her chess set, and you take out your notebook.

Before the café closes, Dorn asks Ezra, Mrs. Fenn and Cyril to say nothing about the envelope to anyone, not a word, not even to Pim. They promise. You watch Mrs. Fenn press her lips together as if she were holding a pin between them.

Second: A polite man returns the wrong coat

At nine the next morning the stranger walks into the café with a navy coat over his arm and a sorry smile on his face. He is Adrian Fleet, he says. He took the wrong coat; the two are as like as two chess pawns. He noticed only last night.

“I've brought back the rent collector's coat,” he says, laying it on the counter. “I'm afraid there was nothing much in it. Was there meant to be? And may I have my own back? I've worn that old thing for ten winters.”

Ezra's coat, when Ezra turns it out, holds what he says it always holds: a handkerchief and a pencil stub. Nothing with his name. Nothing with his work. That is the way Ezra likes it.

The coat itself is shiny at both elbows, where he leans on his ledger at every stall, and one cuff is frayed white where it rubs the edge of the page. Twenty years of rents are written into that cloth. This is the last year there will be any rents to collect.

Fleet's coat lies on the next table, where Dorn has spread it out. It is the same navy cloth, the same buttons, the same length. You look at it closely, as you are learning to. The cuffs are crisp. The elbows are smooth. The two outer pockets are still closed with a few loose white stitches. Only the inside pocket, where the papers were, has been opened.

Third: Two navy coats laid side by side

Fleet sits and waits, perfectly calm, like a tennis player who has served what he thinks is an ace and is waiting for the umpire to call it. Dorn takes you over to the window, where the glass has begun to steam.

Check the wear. Elbows, cuffs and pocket edges tell you how long a coat has been lived in, whatever its owner says.

Check the pockets. What is in them, what is missing, and which pockets have ever been opened at all.

Check what a stranger knows. A man who has just walked in out of the rain knows only what he has been told or has seen.

Check the papers last, not first. Papers are the easiest thing in any pocket to put there on purpose.

Was this an honest mix-up, with Cyril's stove rail to blame, and somebody else took the envelope, perhaps in the street, perhaps at the bank? Or was it a trick? Decide before you read on, and decide how you know.

Fourth: The first way, by the stitches in the pockets

When a coat leaves the tailor's, its outer pockets are often tacked shut with a few loose stitches, so that they hang flat in the shop. Most people snip them the first week, the first time they want to put their hands in their pockets on a cold day.

Fleet's coat still has its stitches. Its cuffs are crisp and its elbows smooth. Lay it beside Ezra's, with the shiny elbows and the frayed cuff, and you can see what twenty winters do to navy cloth. That coat has not lived through ten winters. It has not lived through one. It was bought new, in the same cloth and cut as Ezra's, by someone who had studied Ezra's coat.

And only the inside pocket was open, the one where the papers sat waiting to be found. Even if Cyril did put the coats back on the wrong hooks, that would explain the wrong coat, not the new one. A man who swaps coats by accident does not carry a new coat with a ready-made story in it, like a card player with an ace tucked up his sleeve before the deal.

Fifth: The second way, by a name he should not have known

Put the stitches aside and listen to him again. “I've brought back the rent collector's coat,” Fleet said.

How did he know? Ezra's pockets hold a handkerchief and a pencil, nothing with his name, nothing with his work. A stranger who took the wrong coat by accident would bring back “this coat” or “the other gentleman's coat.” Only a man who had watched Ezra, and knew what he did and what he carried on Fridays, could call it the rent collector's.

Nobody told him overnight, either. Dorn's silence held: no notice in the window, no word to Pim, and Mrs. Fenn's lips stayed shut all evening, which you saw with your own eyes. Fleet had watched Ezra pat that pocket. He had probably watched Ezra for weeks, like a scout in the stands studying one player and nobody else.

Fleet listens to both ways with the same pleasant smile, but it has grown thinner, like a footballer's when the referee walks slowly towards him with a hand in his pocket.

Two ways, one answer: the swap was planned. The stitches say the coat was bought for the trick; his own tongue says he knew whose coat he was taking.

Dorn sends a constable to the lodging house on the letter. Nobody there has ever heard of Adrian Fleet. The man at the table gives his real name before lunch, Hector Duggan, and the rent envelope comes out from under a floorboard in his room that afternoon, the paper soft from his hands but the money all there.

Ezra goes back to hook four. Mrs. Fenn writes his hook on his bill as if he were a stranger, which, she says, is the whole point of brass numbers.

Remember: papers that turn up exactly where they will be found are the first thing to doubt, not the last.

Walking back through the Long Hall after lunch, you pass a man in a peaked cap with a black case, pressing a seal into the spice merchant's brass scale while she watches with her arms folded. Dorn slows down and frowns. And why was an inspector of weights sealing scales in the Old Market in March, when everyone knew the inspector only ever came in October?