The Bake-Off Incident

The morning the flapjack went missing, Margot was on her second coffee and her third attempt to write a lead sentence that didn’t begin with the word ‘in.’

The piece was about a planning dispute. It was not the most electrifying journalism of her career, but it was local, it was real, and the Cresthollow Bay Gazette had asked for eight hundred words by Thursday, which meant she was a journalist again in the practical sense of the word, and she was finding this, on balance, more satisfying than she’d expected.

Gerald was on the windowsill. He had been on the windowsill since six-fifteen, which was either his usual time or an indication that he had restructured his schedule to align with hers, which she chose not to examine too closely. He was looking at the garden with the focused, philosophical attention he brought to outdoor scenes, and he had expressed no opinion on the planning dispute, which made him, she felt, the ideal editorial companion.

“The problem,” she said to Gerald, “is that the lead has to make you care about a car park.”

Gerald did not respond. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other in a way that she had come to read as mild interest.

“The new car park will either ruin the character of the seafront or solve the parking problem, depending on who you ask,” she said. “Neither of those is a compelling sentence.”

Gerald looked at the sea.

“You’re right,” she said. “Let’s start with the thing everyone actually cares about, which is that the fishmonger’s delivery van has nowhere to park on Tuesdays and this is affecting the mackerel supply chain.”

She wrote this down. It was better. She’d worry about the twelve subsequent paragraphs later.

Her phone buzzed. Iris Calloway. She answered it.

“I need your eyes,” Iris said, without preamble, in the tone she used when she had already thought something through and arrived at a conclusion and was now informing Margot of the conclusion rather than inviting deliberation. Margot had come to find this approach deeply efficient. “Something has happened at the library.”

“Is it a murder?”

A pause, in which Margot could hear Iris deciding whether this question deserved a serious answer. “No,” Iris said. “It is a missing flapjack and a very upset Tuesday reading group, and I think there may be a thief, and I would like your opinion because you are good at noticing things and I am currently in the position of simultaneously suspecting three separate people and I need someone to tell me if I’m being ridiculous.”

“I’ll be there in ten minutes,” Margot said.

*   *   *

The Tuesday reading group met in the library’s corner meeting room, which had been booked every Tuesday afternoon for eleven years by a rotating cast of regulars that currently numbered seven, plus occasional guests, plus the specific phenomenon of Otto Calloway, who was not officially a member of the group but attended when the book interested him and had, over the course of eleven years, been unofficially present for approximately sixty percent of the sessions.

The meeting room smelled of tea and the particular quality of a space that had absorbed eleven years of literary opinion. On the table: a stack of paperbacks face-down so their covers wouldn’t influence the discussion, a plate with a crumb-rimmed gap where a flapjack had been, and six people arranged around the table with the specific atmospheric quality of a group that had been wronged and was waiting for acknowledgment of the fact.

The seventh member, a woman named Phyllis Drummond who was eighty-one, tiny, and had the alert, forward-leaning posture of someone who expected information to arrive at any moment and intended to be ready for it, was not at the table. She was standing by the window, looking out at the street with a focus that suggested she was either watching for someone or had recently watched someone leave.

Otto Calloway was at the table, with the comfortable, benevolent presence of a man who had arrived in the middle of something and found it interesting. He nodded at Margot when she came in. June, who was not at the table either but was making tea near the small counter in the corner with the efficient calm of a woman who had learned that many situations improved with adequate hydration, gave her the same nod.

Iris closed the door behind them.

“Thank you for coming,” she said, to the room in general. “This is Margot Finch. She is—” she paused fractionally, “she has a useful perspective on situations where something is missing.”

“She’s the journalist who moved into Margaret Finch’s cottage,” said a man at the far end of the table, who had the compact, specific-interest energy of someone who had absorbed a great deal of information about one subject and was prepared to discuss it at length. He was looking at Margot with the expression of someone assessing the quality of a source. “Margaret used to come to this group occasionally. Very good on Victorian fiction.”

“She was,” Margot agreed, feeling the small familiar lurch of her aunt being described in the past tense by someone who’d known her, and filing it in the place she filed such things. “Now. The flapjack.”

*   *   *

The situation, assembled from the account of six people who each remembered it slightly differently, was this:

June Calloway had brought flapjacks for the reading group, as she did on the third Tuesday of the month, because she had decided years ago that literary discussion was improved by adequate sugar and had never found reason to revise the position. There had been eight flapjacks on the plate at the start of the session. By the time the plate was passed around, there were seven. Nobody admitted to having taken one early. Nobody had seen anyone take one early. The plate had been on the table, unattended, for approximately eight minutes between June setting it down and the first member arriving.

“The window was open,” said Phyllis Drummond, from her position by the window, without turning around.

A silence.

“I beg your pardon?” said Iris.

“The window.” Phyllis tapped the glass. “I opened it when I arrived because the room was warm. It was open for the full eight minutes. Then I closed it when the others arrived because a gull started making a nuisance of himself.”

Another silence. Longer.

“What kind of gull?” Margot asked, in the careful tone of someone asking a question to which they already suspected the answer.

“A herring gull. Large. Very confident about it.” Phyllis turned from the window. “He was on the ledge outside when I came in. I had to shoo him before I could get the window open properly. He went away for a bit and I thought no more of it, and then when the flapjacks were counted he was back on the ledge and he had—” she paused, “a very specific look about him. That’s all I’m prepared to say.”

“Could you describe the gull?” Margot asked.

Phyllis described the gull.

The description was accurate, detailed, and entirely consistent with Gerald.

“I see,” said Margot.

“Is the gull known to you?” Otto asked, from the table, with the transparent delight of a man following proceedings he had not expected to find this engaging.

“We’re acquainted,” Margot said.

“Fascinating,” said Otto. “Continue.”

*   *   *

The evidence, such as it was, was as follows:

Phyllis had opened the window at twelve fifty-three. She was certain of the time because she had checked her watch — she was the group’s timekeeper, a role she took seriously. She had observed a large herring gull on the ledge and shooed it, which had caused it to relocate to the roof of the pharmacy across the street, from which it had observed proceedings with, in Phyllis’s assessment, professional detachment. At some point during the following eight minutes, while Phyllis had been rearranging the chairs, the gull had apparently returned. When the plate was counted at five past one, one flapjack was absent and a gull was on the pharmacy roof eating something that Phyllis described as having ‘a golden colour and a certain structural density.’

“In fairness,” said the man at the far end of the table, “many things are golden and structurally dense.”

“This is true,” Margot agreed. “But not many of them are flapjack-sized, flapjack-shaped, and being consumed by a gull outside a window that was open for eight minutes directly adjacent to an unattended plate of flapjacks.”

A pause.

“Circumstantial,” said the man.

“Circumstantial is the correct word,” Margot said. “There’s no direct evidence. We didn’t see the act.”

“But you have a suspect,” said Otto, with transparent delight.

“I have a— yes. I have a suspect.”

*   *   *

She walked home via the pharmacy.

Gerald was not on the pharmacy roof. He was, when she turned into Peel Lane, on the cottage windowsill in his usual position, with the settled, unhurried air of a creature that had been there all morning and had no particular account of his whereabouts to provide.

She stood at the garden gate and looked at him.

He looked at her.

“The thing is,” she said, coming up the path, “that I can’t prove anything. I want to be very clear about that. There’s no direct evidence. The flapjack is gone. The window was open. The timeline is suggestive. But suggestive is not conclusive, and I’ve been wrong about suggestive before.”

Gerald’s expression, if it could be called an expression, had the quality of patient, equanimous endurance.

“Phyllis Drummond,” Margot continued, “described you as having ‘professional detachment,’ which I think is both accurate and the most generous possible framing. I’m not going to put this in the planning article. I’m not going to mention it to Constable Suggs.”

A gull, presumably a different one, went past overhead with the confident trajectory of a creature that had somewhere to be.

“I do,” Margot said, “want you to know that June Calloway’s flapjacks are considered by several people I respect to be the single best thing produced in Cresthollow Bay in any given month, and that taking one without invitation is—” she paused, “completely consistent with your established character, actually.”

Gerald shifted his weight. He looked at the sea. He had the expression he always had, which was the expression of a creature that had assessed the situation and found it, on balance, adequately managed.

Margot unlocked the door. She went inside. She put the kettle on.

“For the record,” she said, while the kettle boiled, “I’m not angry. I’m documenting. There’s a difference.”

She made her tea. She sat at the desk. She looked at her planning dispute article, which was still waiting for its lead sentence about the mackerel supply chain, and she wrote it, and it was good, and she sent it before lunch.

Iris texted at half past two: June is making a new batch. The reading group has formally requested the window stays closed on flapjack Tuesdays. Will pass this on to relevant parties.

Margot read this twice. She looked at Gerald, who was still on the windowsill.

“Relevant parties,” she said.

Gerald looked at the sea. He had, she felt, no particular comment.

She texted back: Noted. Will brief accordingly.

She returned to the desk. She opened her notebook and added a new entry at the bottom of the current page:

Gerald. The flapjack. Circumstantial. No direct evidence. Case closed.

(Though if it happens again in April I am absolutely telling Suggs.)

She looked at this for a moment. Then she drew a small star next to it and closed the notebook.

Outside, the March light was doing its best with the available material, which was more than could be said for November but less than it would eventually manage by June. The sea was the particular shade of pewter that meant the weather had made a decision and was sticking to it. Cresthollow Bay went about its business: the fishmonger’s sign was up, the bakery’s queue was visible from the window, and at the top of the high street the horse chestnuts were just beginning to think about spring.

Not there yet. But thinking about it.

Gerald watched. The sea was very present. And at the Cresthollow Bay Public Library, in the Tuesday meeting room next to the face-down paperbacks and the empty plate, Iris Calloway had placed a small handwritten card that said: Window policy — closed during refreshments (effective immediately). Please see Margot Finch with any queries.

Margot had not been consulted about this.

She suspected this was, on balance, correct.