Читать книгу The Pilot Who Wore a Dress: And Other Dastardly Lateral Thinking Mysteries - Tom Cutler, Tom Cutler - Страница 12

The mystery

On the western outskirts of Plymouth lies the little seaside town of St Havet. It has a striped lighthouse, a rocky foreshore and a few red cliffs, which fossil-hunters say are a goldmine of echinoids and ammonites.

The town’s pretty high street has the tang of salt in its nostrils, and several old-fashioned shops line the cobbled roadway: a haberdashery, a fishmonger’s where the gulls circle, and a greengrocer’s. There is a friendly pub, The Lion and Lobster, and a charming tearoom – Marianne’s – famous for its homemade clotted cream and giant scones. The tearoom boasts lace tablecloths, an excitement of doilies, and those things that look like three flying saucers on a stick, which they put cakes on at teatime. On the walls hang faded photographs of the skiffs of Worlock’s Hole.

One afternoon, not long ago, the bell on the door of Marianne’s tearoom tinkled brightly. A young man walked in and sat down in the sunshine by the window. He was the only customer. Daisy, the waitress, daughter of the late Marianne, and now sole owner of the establishment, greeted him with a warm smile.

After consulting the dainty menu for a minute the man caught her eye again. She approached the table and asked him what he would like. ‘One of your famous cream teas, please,’ he said.

Daisy wrote this down carefully in her notebook and bustled off to the kitchen, emerging in due course with a steaming brown teapot, and a blue cup and saucer from a different tea service. She handed her customer his pot of tea and retired again to the kitchen. After a minute she was back, staggering under a tray laden with two scones the size of half-bricks, half a pint of strawberry jam in a pretty bowl with a silver spoon, and a saucer piled high with yellow clotted cream.

With an air of great deliberation, the man removed the scones from the plate and, using the spoon, distributed exactly twelve dollops of cream around the circumference of the plate. He carefully placed a dollop of jam between each blob of cream. In the centre of the plate he placed a scone, which he carefully cut into four pieces, before slicing the second scone in half and putting it on the plate. He poured himself a cup of tea and painstakingly dunked the small pieces of quartered scone in the tea before eating them, one after the other. He dipped the two halves of the remaining scone in the jam, and then in the cream, going around the plate like a clock face, but he took care not to dunk them in his tea.

Daisy had been watching the man carefully and she approached the table. ‘So, Sir,’ she said, ‘I see you are a sailor.’

The problem

How did Daisy know that her customer with the curious eating habits was a sailor?

Tap here for the solution.