Chapter 6: Two sisters share one blue headscarf at the egg stall

On a nail at the back of the egg stall hangs a blue headscarf, faded at the knot. Below it, stacked to shoulder height, stand the grey cardboard trays, thirty eggs to a tray, brown and white and speckled, with a tuft of straw still stuck to some of them. The stall smells of straw, cardboard and cold mornings.

The headscarf is the answer to the egg seller who knew Dorn at half past eight and did not know her just after noon. It belongs to the stall, not to a person. At twelve o'clock every day it changes heads, passed from one sister to the other like a baton in a relay race.

Edie Ganton has worked the morning shift for twenty years. She knows Dorn, Dorn's mother and Dorn's mother's favourite eggs. Florrie Ganton, three years younger, came to the stall this winter to work the afternoons. Under the same blue scarf, with the same round face and the same quick hands, the two sisters are hard to tell apart from three yards away.

The surest difference is the bicycle: Florrie rides in from the farm, and Edie, who never learned, says she is too old to start now and walks from her flat behind the bakery.

Harold Birch owns the stall and the hens. He is a farmer of fixed habits and fixed rules, and his first rule is written on a card pinned beside the headscarf: “Edie mornings, seven to twelve. Florrie afternoons, twelve to five. No swapping.”

Years ago, he tells you, two girls swapped shifts behind his back and the tin was short for a month. He has never trusted a swap since. His father kept hens on the same farm and sold eggs from the same corner, and Harold still counts the tin each evening with his father's brass pencil behind his ear.

On a Thursday in April, the week before Easter, when the Long Hall is hung with paper eggs and every child in the market is counting the days, the tin is short again.

Very short.

Harold stands by the trays with his cap in his hands, turning it round and round. “Twenty years,” he says. “Never a penny short, not with Edie. Not once.”

At ten that morning, Alfie Dunn, the boy from the bakery across the square, brought the money for thirty dozen eggs for the Easter baking. He paid the woman in the blue headscarf in notes, counted them onto the trays in front of her, and watched her fold them into her apron pocket. She was busy with another customer and barely looked at him.

That evening, when Harold counted the tin, the bakery's money was not there. The eggs had gone across the square. The notes had gone somewhere else.

On Friday morning you sit with each sister in turn, in the back of the café, while Mrs. Odile Fenn keeps the teapot busy and pretends not to listen.

Edie says she worked her shift as usual, seven to twelve. No bakery boy paid her anything. If he paid somebody, it was not her. She keeps her eyes on her cup the whole time, and you notice that she drinks her tea only when it has gone cool.

Florrie says she worked her shift as usual, twelve to five, and came in at noon the way she always does, on her blue bicycle from the farm road.

Before that, she says, she was at the farm all morning, collecting eggs. Harold, asked, says he was out in the far field from dawn and saw nobody at all. Florrie knows nothing about any bakery money. She looks you straight in the eye, like a card player who has been told that is what honest people do.

Alfie is twelve, and he takes his errand as seriously as a cup final. He is certain about ten o'clock. The bakery's clock and the market's clock both said so, and the baker, a tall floury woman with a voice like a ship's horn, made him repeat the sum twice before he left.

The baker confirms it from her doorway, flour to the elbows: five to ten, notes in his fist, and back again by a quarter past with a receipt for nothing, because the egg woman never wrote one.

So you have two sisters, two shifts, one blue scarf and one missing pile of notes. If the rule held, the woman at the stall at ten was Edie. But Dorn is not looking at the rule. She is looking at the sisters.

“When a rule says two people never swap,” she says, “the first thing to ask is whether they did.”

You think of the blue headscarf on its nail, passing from one head to the other at noon, and of how easily it could pass at seven instead, with nobody but the two sisters any the wiser.

Then she gives you her list, quickly, between sips.

Check how each person came and went. Feet, buses, bicycles: everybody arrives somehow, and somebody usually notices.

Check the body for what it remembers. A burn, a limp, a cold, a numb lip: the body keeps its own diary of the day.

Check what you have seen with your own eyes in the last hour, before you believe anything you are told.

Check the rule itself. A rule pinned on a nail tells you what ought to happen, which is not always the same as what did.

Two more things you learn before you leave.

The first comes from Pim. Since a bicycle was stolen from the goods gate last spring, he keeps a little blackboard beside the rack and chalks up the time each bicycle comes in. On Thursday the board said: “Blue bicycle, ten to seven.” There is only one blue bicycle at the market, and it is Florrie's.

The second comes from Mrs. Fenn, once the sisters have gone. On Thursday morning, she says, Edie came in at a quarter to eleven, straight from the dentist's chair, and Mrs. Fenn hardly knew her. Half of Edie's face was asleep, and all she could mumble was “An hour and a half in that chair.” She could not drink her tea; she sat with it until it went cold and then left it. Edie was the only Ganton through the café door all morning.

Stop there. Who stood behind the eggs at ten o'clock on Thursday morning?

First: The first way, by the bicycle in Pim's rack

Florrie says she came in at noon on her blue bicycle, as usual. But Pim's board says the blue bicycle came through the goods gate at ten to seven, and Pim chalks the time the moment a wheel touches his rack, like a referee writing a goal in his notebook.

Nobody else rides that bicycle; Edie cannot ride at all. A woman who arrives at ten to seven for a shift that starts at twelve is not having a lie-in. Florrie was at the market from the morning bell. She was not sitting in the café; Mrs. Fenn saw only Edie that morning. She was where a woman in a blue headscarf is meant to be: behind the eggs.

So the sisters swapped. Florrie worked the morning, and Florrie took the bakery's money from Alfie at ten.

Second: The second way, by the tea that went cold

Now leave the bicycle in its rack and think only about Edie. She says she stood at the stall from seven until twelve without a break. Yet at a quarter to eleven she was in the café with half her face numb from the dentist, unable to drink.

She came straight from the chair, and by her own mumbled words she had been in it for an hour and a half. Count back from a quarter to eleven: from about a quarter past nine, Edie was in a dentist's chair, right across Alfie's ten o'clock. And look again at what you saw yourself today: she still lets her tea go cool, because the tooth is still tender.

So Edie was not behind the eggs at ten. Somebody in the blue headscarf was, and only two people ever wear that scarf. The woman at the stall at ten o'clock was Florrie.

Two ways, the bicycle and the teacup, and they meet at the same blue scarf. Florrie offered to swap on Wednesday, so that Edie could see the dentist. Edie said yes and asked her to keep quiet about it, because of Harold's card. Florrie kept quiet about something else.

When you lay it out, Florrie gives up faster than a card player holding nothing at all. The notes are in the saddlebag of the blue bicycle, still in their bakery band. Edie, who lied only to keep her job, goes red to the roots of her hair and tells Harold everything herself.

Harold growls for a week. Nobody expects anything else. Then he takes his card down from the nail and writes a new one: “Tell me when you swap.” Florrie is gone from the stall. Edie wears the blue scarf all day now, and drinks her tea hot again.

Remember: a rule tells you what should have happened, and the clues tell you what did.

Across the aisle from the egg stall, the bookstall has pinned up a fresh poster with an old photograph of a dark-haired young woman, a pencil behind her ear: a famous novelist, now eighty, will come to sign her books one April evening. Edie, wrapping Dorn's eggs, shakes her head at it. And why would a writer who, the bookseller swore, had not left her house in ten years, agree to sign books under the Old Market's roof?