The Peculiar Freshness of Mrs. Alderton’s Bread
The bread arrived at half past seven, as it always did. Agnes Peel heard the van before she saw it, the groan and shudder of Bernard Alderton’s old diesel engine pulling into the square at Wychford St. Mary, the tyres crunching over the frost-stiffened gravel. She was already at her kitchen window, both hands wrapped around her tea, watching the world arrange itself for the day.
Bernard unloaded his trays with the quiet efficiency of a man who had done the same thing six hundred Saturdays running. Sourdough. Cottage loaves. The seeded rye that sold out by nine. Agnes counted them from her window, a habit she could not have explained to anyone who asked.
The market began to fill. She dressed, found her basket, and walked down.
She was examining a bunch of parsnips when she heard the commotion near the bakery stall. Bernard’s wife, Pauline, was speaking to Constable Drew in a low, rapid voice, her hands pressed flat against her apron as though steadying herself.
“The tin was right there,” Pauline said. “I left it to mind the stall while Bernard nipped to the van for the second tray. Five minutes, no more. I turned round and it was gone.”
The tin in question was the old green cash box where the Aldertons kept the morning’s float. Forty pounds, Pauline said. Maybe a little more.
Constable Drew wrote something in his notebook and looked around the square with the expression of a man who already knew he was unlikely to find anything useful.
Agnes bought her parsnips and drifted, very gently, closer.
“Did anyone stop at the stall while you were alone?” Drew asked.
“Two women I didn’t recognise. A man in a green wax jacket. And young Gary Trench, but Gary wouldn’t, he’s always perfectly—”
“Of course,” Drew said quickly.
Agnes looked at the stall. The trays of bread. The paper bags. The small chalkboard that listed prices in Pauline’s rounded letters.
She looked at the sourdough.
She picked up a loaf, turned it over, and pressed the base with two fingers. It gave slightly, but not the way sourdough ought to. The crust had that particular pale gold that meant it had been baked yesterday, not this morning. She held it close to her face and breathed in. Faintly sour, yes, but something missing. The warm mineral smell that lingered in a fresh loaf was absent.
She set it down and looked at the seeded rye. Then the cottage loaves.
Two of the trays were yesterday’s bread. She was certain of it.
“Pauline,” she said, when the constable had moved away to make a telephone call, “did Bernard bake through the night, as usual?”
Pauline’s hands pressed harder against her apron. “He was up at three, same as always.”
“And he brought everything in from the van himself?”
A pause. Small, but there.
“He loaded it,” Pauline said. “I brought the second tray across.”
Agnes bought a cottage loaf she did not need and walked, at no particular speed, to where Bernard’s van was still parked at the edge of the square. The back doors were closed but not latched. She could see, through the gap, two empty trays slid into the rack and, on the floor of the van, a folded green wax jacket.
The man Pauline had mentioned.
Agnes went home, put the kettle on, and telephoned her neighbour Ros, who was on the parish council and knew everything about everyone in Wychford.
“Green wax jacket,” Agnes said. “New to the village, perhaps. Probably not a regular.”
“That sounds like the fellow renting Marsh Cottage,” Ros said immediately. “Arrived three weeks ago. Keeps odd hours. Someone on the council mentioned he’d had a county court judgment against him, though I couldn’t possibly say who told me.”
Agnes thanked her and rang off.
She presented herself at the police station at half past eleven with a cottage loaf, her notes written on the back of a seed catalogue, and a very clear account of what she believed had happened.
The tin, she suggested, had not been taken from the stall during the five minutes Pauline minded it alone. It had been taken from the unlocked van earlier, before the market opened, by someone who had also helped himself to two trays of yesterday’s unsold bread, swapping them onto the display to disguise the fact that he had been in the vehicle at all. Bernard, tired from his early start, had not noticed the substitution. Pauline had carried the second tray across without looking closely.
The man in the green wax jacket, it turned out, had a key to Marsh Cottage that he had obtained under a false name, and a history in two other counties that made Constable Drew’s eyebrows travel quite some distance up his forehead.
The cash box was found behind the cottage’s water butt the following morning.
Agnes was back at her window by seven-thirty on the Sunday, both hands around her tea, watching Bernard’s van turn into the square. The bread, she noted with satisfaction as he unloaded it, smelled exactly as it should. Warm. Yeasty. Unmistakably new.
She went down and bought a sourdough, and this time she ate it.
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