FIELD WARM-UP
Start with a short puzzle inspired by the case.
Thursday was quiz night at the Ploughman’s Rest, and had been for as long as anyone could remember setting one, which meant Philip Hearley had long ago stopped writing new picture rounds and simply rotated the old ones on a cycle nobody but him seemed to have noticed.
“Right,” he said, from behind the bar, holding the answer sheet at the particular arm’s length he’d adopted since giving up on finding his other glasses. “Question eleven. What year was the millpond wall rebuilt?”
There was a pause of the kind that precedes trouble.
“Nineteen-twelve,” said old Mr Coker, from his corner, with the flat certainty of a man who had been saying it for thirty years and saw no reason to stop now.
“Nineteen-twenty-two,” said Mrs Fewings, from the next table over, not even looking up from her pencil. “My father helped carry the stone. He’d have known.”
“Your father,” said Mr Coker, “was eleven.”
“Eleven-year-olds carry stone.”
“Not that much of it.”
Philip, who had learned some years ago that the correct response to a quiz dispute was to let it exhaust itself rather than attempt to referee it, refilled a glass that hadn’t quite finished being empty and said nothing whatsoever.
“It’s on the noticeboard,” called Del, from the kitchen hatch, not looking up from whatever was currently demanding more attention than a wall built before either combatant had been born. “Been there years. Settle it yourselves.”
This proved to be, if anything, a serious tactical error.
There were, it emerged over the following ten minutes, two noticeboards. There was the one currently pinned outside the church hall, which gave the wall’s completion as 1912, in the careful copperplate of a parish clerk three clerks retired. And there was the older one, rescued some years back from a skip during the hall’s rewiring and now framed, for reasons nobody could quite reconstruct, on the wall of the gents’, which gave it as 1922, in a hand nobody could identify at all.
“Well, there you are,” said Mrs Fewings, with the air of a woman who had just won a great deal more than a pub quiz. “Two boards. Two dates. I’m not wrong, I’m simply differently informed.”
“You’re not differently informed,” said Mr Coker. “You’re reading it off the wall in the gents’.”
“I am not reading anything off any wall in any gents’, Reginald, and I’ll thank you to withdraw the implication.”
“Sandra reads it off the wall in the gents’ every quiz night,” Del called through, with the tranquil confidence of someone who had clearly witnessed this exact argument reach this exact point on more than one previous Thursday. “She sends her nephew in to check.”
A silence fell over the table that suggested this information had not been intended for general circulation.
“He simply happened to be passing,” Mrs Fewings said, with dignity.
“Through the gents’.”
“He’s twelve. He has no fixed views on where he passes.”
Sebastian Braithwaite, at the bar with a pint he had not yet managed to finish on account of the entertainment, caught Philip’s eye. Philip’s expression did not change in any particular that a stranger could have named, and yet somehow conveyed, with total clarity, that this was Thursday, that it was always Thursday, and that he had made his peace with it some years before either combatant had.
“Do you ever intend to correct one of the boards?” Sebastian asked.
“Which one?”
“Whichever’s wrong.”
“Couldn’t say which that is.” Philip set down the glass he’d been not-quite-polishing and reached for the next. “Nobody who’d know is still living, and nobody who’s arguing is willing to be told. Seemed simpler to leave both up and let them get on with it.”
“That seems a very long-term solution to a very small problem.”
“Round here,” Philip said, “that’s most of them.”
At the table, the matter had progressed, by means nobody present could later fully account for, to a general debate about whether Mr Coker’s father or Mrs Fewings’s father had been the more reliable witness to events neither man had lived to discuss, conducted at a volume that was drawing commentary from two entirely unrelated tables who had not, until that moment, held any opinion on the millpond wall whatsoever.
Molly, dozing under Sebastian’s stool, lifted her head briefly to establish that none of this represented food, and put it down again.
“Question twelve,” Philip called, over the top of it, with the weary patience of a man who had done this before and would, in all likelihood, do it again. “What’s the capital of Peru.”
Nobody answered. Nobody, for the moment, appeared to remember there was a quiz on at all.
Philip looked at the answer sheet, looked at the room, and set it down on the bar with the particular unhurried calm of a man who had long ago made peace with the fact that nobody in Ashcombe had ever, not once, in the whole recorded history of quiz night, actually wanted to know the answer.
“Lima,” he said, to nobody, and went to pull another pint.
