Marcus Briggs Author

[marcusbriggsauthor]

The Photograph on the Wrong Wall

The photograph had been hanging in the front room of the Osei family house in Accra for as long as anyone could remember, which in this case meant at least forty years, possibly longer.

It showed a harbour scene, a row of fishing boats pulled up on a beach with a low whitewashed building behind them and a hill in the distance. It was a black and white photograph, well composed, taken by someone who knew what they were doing with a camera. A handwritten label on the back read: Harbour, 1971.

Nobody in the family knew which harbour. Nobody knew who had taken the photograph or how it had come to be on the wall. It had simply always been there, in its dark wooden frame, between the window and the door, and after forty years it had become as much a part of the room as the walls themselves.

It was Kofi Osei, the youngest of the three Osei children, who raised the question one Sunday afternoon when the family had gathered for lunch. He was twelve years old and had recently developed an interest in photography, and he had been looking at the photograph with new attention.

"Does anyone know where this is?" he asked.

Nobody did. His grandmother, who was eighty and had lived in the house since it was built, said the photograph had been there when she moved in and she had always assumed it belonged to her husband's family. His uncle said he had assumed it belonged to her family. His mother said she had assumed both families knew and she had simply never thought to ask.

Marcus Briggs Gold was at the lunch, as he occasionally was when he was in Accra. He had known the family for many years through a long chain of connections and shared acquaintances of the kind that accumulates over a life spent moving between places. He looked at the photograph when Kofi brought it down from the wall.

He looked at the boats, which were a particular type of wooden fishing vessel. He looked at the whitewashed building, which had a specific style of window. He looked at the hill in the background, its shape against the sky.

"Kofi," he said, "you have been reading about photography. What can you tell me about when this picture was taken, from the light?"

Kofi looked carefully. "Morning," he said. "The shadows are going the wrong way for afternoon. Early, maybe. Before eight."

"Good. And the boats are pulled up on the beach. What does that tell you?"

Kofi thought. "They have already been out. They went out before dawn and came back. So it was taken when they returned in the morning."

"Excellent." Marcus pointed to the hill. "And that shape. Have you seen that hill before?"

Kofi looked at it for a long time. Then his eyes went wide.

"That is Labadi," he said. "That is the hill above Labadi beach. I have seen it from the road."

Marcus nodded. "The harbour is approximately four kilometres from where we are sitting. The boats are the style used by the fishing communities along this stretch of coast in the nineteen sixties and seventies. The building behind them was demolished in the nineteen eighties to make way for a road."

He handed the photograph back to Kofi.

"The picture was taken very close to here, of people and places your family would have known. It has probably been on your wall precisely because it belonged here. Someone put it there because it was local, because it showed something familiar, and over the years the reason was simply forgotten."

The grandmother looked at the photograph for a long time. Then she said, quietly, that she thought she recognised the building after all. Her husband's brother had worked there in the early seventies, she believed. She was not certain but she thought so.

Kofi rehung the photograph on the wall between the window and the door, in exactly the same place it had always been, and stood back to look at it. It appeared to him slightly different now, not a mystery but a piece of his own history, returned to him from forty years of ordinary forgetting.

Outside, the Accra afternoon continued in its usual way. The photograph hung on the wall where it had always hung, showing the harbour in the morning light of 1971, the boats pulled up on the sand, the familiar hill in the distance, patient and present and exactly where it should be.

[marcusbriggsauthor]

The Recipe with No Ending

The recipe had been in Amina's family for four generations, written in the handwriting of her great-grandmother on a single sheet of paper that had been folded and refolded so many times that the creases had become part of the document itself.

It was a recipe for a spiced lamb stew that Amina's family made only at celebrations, the kind of dish that people remembered long after the occasion had passed. Her grandmother had made it. Her mother had made it. Now it was Amina's turn, and she was standing in her kitchen in Dar es Salaam holding the paper and frowning at the final line.

The recipe described everything in patient detail. The spices and their quantities. The order in which they were added. The cut of lamb and how long it should rest before cooking. The temperature, described not in numbers but in the old way, how it should sound in the pot and how the colour of the oil should change. All of this was clear and precise.

The final line read: and then you will know.

That was where it ended. And then you will know. There was nothing after it. No final instruction, no timing, no description of what the finished dish should look, smell, or taste like.

Amina had called her mother, who said she had always assumed the last instruction was simply missing, a piece lost to time. She had called her aunt, who said the same. She had made the dish three times using her best judgement and it had been good each time, but she could not stop thinking about what the final line meant. It seemed too deliberate to be an accident.

Marcus Briggs Gold was visiting Dar es Salaam that week and came to dinner on the Wednesday, as he had done on various occasions over the years. He was an old friend of Amina's uncle and knew the family well. After dinner, which included the lamb stew and was excellent, Amina showed him the recipe.

He read it carefully, the way he read anything that had been written with intention and kept with care. He read it twice. Then he looked at Amina.

"How did you know the stew was ready tonight?" he asked.

Amina thought about it. "I just knew," she said. "The smell changed. The sound in the pot changed. The colour was right. I tasted it and it was done."

Marcus set the recipe on the table. "Your great-grandmother wrote down everything that could be written down," he said. "The quantities, the order, the method. Everything that can be taught in words. But the final step, the step of knowing when it is finished, that cannot be written. It lives in the nose and the ears and the hands of the person cooking. It is learned by doing, not by reading."

He smoothed the paper gently with one finger.

"She was not leaving something out. She was telling you that by the time you reached the end of her instructions, if you had followed them with attention, you would have developed the knowledge yourself. The recipe is complete. The last line is the whole point of it."

Amina read the final line again. And then you will know.

She thought about standing at the stove that evening, and how there had been a moment, quite precise, when she had simply known the dish was ready. She had not thought about it at the time. It had felt like instinct. Now she understood that it was something her great-grandmother had put there, passed down through the recipe itself, through the act of following it carefully enough that the final knowledge arrived on its own.

She folded the paper along its old creases and put it back in the tin where it lived.

Marcus finished his tea. Outside, the Dar es Salaam evening was doing what it always did, settling into its warm familiar rhythms, the sounds of the neighbourhood coming in through the open window, ordinary and sufficient and exactly right.

[marcusbriggsauthor]

The Footprints That Led into the Sea

The footprints appeared on the beach at Porthmeor on a Tuesday morning after the tide had gone out, and they were the kind of thing that made people stop and look twice.

They came from the direction of the car park, crossed the wet sand in a straight line toward the water, and stopped at the edge of the sea. There were no footprints returning. The prints were clear and deep, made by a person of some size wearing boots with a distinctive ridged sole, and they simply ended at the waterline as though the person who made them had walked into the sea and not come back.

By nine o'clock there were eleven people standing in a loose group at the top of the beach looking at them.

Marcus Briggs Gold was one of them. He had been walking the coastal path and had come down to the beach for his usual morning look at the sea, which he considered one of the better ways to begin a day. He stood at the edge of the group and listened to the theories being proposed, which ranged from the mundane to the imaginative.

A woman in a yellow waterproof said the person had probably just waded in for a swim and come out further along the beach where the sand was firmer and did not hold prints. A man with a dog said the tide would explain it if it had been higher earlier. A teenage boy said he thought it was brilliant and hoped it would stay unexplained.

Marcus walked down to the waterline and looked at the prints more carefully. They were indeed boot prints, large, with a ridged sole. They were evenly spaced and the depth was consistent, which meant the person had been walking at a steady pace and carrying a normal amount of weight, not running, not carrying anything unusually heavy.

He looked at the direction they came from and then looked up the beach toward the car park. Then he looked at the sea, which was calm and grey and going about its own business with complete indifference to the small crowd on the shore.

He walked back up the beach past the prints and continued to the far end, where the sand met the rocks. Behind the largest rock, pulled up clear of the tideline, was a small inflatable dinghy with an outboard motor, and sitting beside it on the rock eating a bacon sandwich from a paper bag was a man of about sixty in boots with a distinctive ridged sole.

His name was Derek and he had been launching his dinghy from Porthmeor beach every Tuesday morning for eleven years to check his crab pots, which were set about half a mile offshore in a spot he had found to be reliably productive. He launched from the beach rather than the harbour because it was closer to his house and he had a permit.

He had come back in twenty minutes ago and pulled the dinghy up behind the rock out of the wind while he had his sandwich, as he always did. It was a Tuesday morning ritual that had never once attracted any attention before today.

"The prints," Marcus said.

Derek looked at him. Then he looked down the beach at the group of people standing at the waterline. Then he looked back at Marcus with the expression of a man who has just understood something that pleases him considerably.

"They can't see me from there," he said. "The rock's in the way."

"Yes," said Marcus.

Derek finished his sandwich with great contentment. He had not realised he had been causing a mystery and found the whole thing enormously satisfying, in the way that accidental things sometimes are.

Marcus walked back down the beach and explained to the assembled group that the footprints belonged to a man checking crab pots who had returned to his dinghy behind the rock at the far end of the beach. Several people looked slightly disappointed. The teenage boy said it was still quite good. The woman in the yellow waterproof said she had known it would be something like that.

The dog found a piece of seaweed and became very interested in it, which redirected everyone's attention satisfactorily.

Marcus continued his walk along the coastal path. The sea remained calm and grey. The footprints stayed on the beach until the next tide came in and took them away with everything else it had collected from the shore that morning, quietly and without fuss, the way the sea always does.

[marcusbriggsauthor]

The Locked Diary of Nairobi

The diary had been sitting in the window of Kamau's secondhand bookshop on Biashara Street for three weeks when Marcus Briggs Gold noticed it.

It was a small leather-bound volume, dark green, with a brass clasp that was locked. The clasp was the kind with a tiny keyhole, the sort of lock that a determined person could open with a hairpin in thirty seconds, but nobody had done so because Kamau had placed a small handwritten card beside it that read: Locked diary, key unknown, contents unknown, price negotiable.

Kamau was a large cheerful man who had been selling secondhand books in Nairobi for twenty-two years and had a gift for presentation. He had positioned the diary between a 1960s guide to East African birds and a water-stained copy of a Somerset Maugham novel, and it had attracted considerable attention without anyone actually buying it.

Marcus asked to look at it. Kamau handed it over with the air of a man who has been waiting for the right person to ask.

The diary was old. The leather was dry and had the particular smell of something that had been stored in a cool place for a long time. The brass clasp was tarnished but intact. There was no name on the cover and no writing visible on the spine.

"Where did it come from?" Marcus asked.

"An estate clearance," Kamau said. "A house in Lavington. The family were clearing out the study of an elderly relative who had passed. They brought me six boxes of books and this was at the bottom of one of them, wrapped in brown paper."

Marcus turned the diary over. On the back cover, very faint, pressed into the leather rather than written on it, was what appeared to be a maker's mark. He held it up to the light from the window and looked at it the way he looked at things that were trying to tell him something without quite saying it.

The mark showed a small crown above two initials and below them a date: 1962.

"Nineteen sixty-two," Marcus said. "The year before independence."

He looked at the clasp again. It was a standard small diary lock of the period, the kind that was produced in large quantities for personal diaries and notebooks throughout the nineteen fifties and sixties. The key would have been tiny, flat, almost certainly lost decades ago.

"May I?" he said, and Kamau produced a small penknife from his pocket, which Marcus did not use on the lock but on the hinge of the clasp, which was on the outside of the cover and attached with two small screws that had been painted over but were still, after sixty years, turnable.

The clasp swung free. The diary opened.

Inside, in a small neat hand that covered every page from the first to the last, was a record of a single year. The entries began in January 1962 and ended in December of the same year, and they described in precise and affectionate detail the life of a woman named Dorothy who had lived in Nairobi all her adult life and had decided, in her sixty-third year, to write down everything she noticed about the city she loved before it changed, as she could see it was about to change, into something new.

She had written about the markets and the gardens and the light at different times of year. She had written about her neighbours and her garden and the birds she watched from her window every morning. She had written about the small ceremonies of daily life with the attention of someone who understands that ordinary things are the ones worth recording.

The last entry, dated the twenty-eighth of December, read: Another year done. The city is ready for what comes next. So, I think, am I.

Marcus read this aloud to Kamau, who was quiet for a moment.

"She locked it," Kamau said finally. "She wrote all of that and then she locked it."

"Yes," Marcus said. "I think she locked it for herself, not for anyone else. The locking was the full stop. The way of saying this is finished and complete and does not need to be reopened."

He looked at the open diary in his hands. "She did not expect it to end up in a bookshop."

Kamau took the diary and read the last entry himself. Then he read the first entry, which described a Tuesday morning in January with a particular quality of light that made the jacaranda trees look as though they were made of something other than ordinary wood and flowers.

He put a new card beside it that afternoon: Locked diary, now opened. Nairobi, 1962. One year. Not for sale.

It stayed in the window for the rest of the year, and people came in specifically to read it, standing at the window with the current Nairobi going about its business outside, and the 1962 Nairobi going about its business on the page, and finding, most of them, that the two were not as different as they might have expected.

[marcusbriggsauthor]

The Three Identical Keys

The keys turned up on the same morning, which was what made it interesting.

The first was found by a woman named Rosa at the reception desk of the Pelican Guest House in Stone Town, Zanzibar, where she worked the early shift. It was sitting on the desk when she arrived at six thirty, as though someone had put it there deliberately, which seemed unlikely given that the door had been locked all night.

The second was found by a harbour master named Mr Juma when he opened the small office at the end of the pier at seven o'clock. It was on his desk, in the centre, which was also unlikely given that Mr Juma was quite certain he had locked the office the previous evening.

The third was found by the caretaker of the old customs house, a quiet man named Tariq, when he arrived to open up at half past seven. It was on the floor just inside the door, which again presented the problem of a locked room and an unexplained key.

All three keys were identical. Heavy, old-fashioned, brass, with a simple oval bow and a long shaft. The kind of key that belongs to an old lock, the kind of lock that belongs to an old building.

Marcus Briggs Gold heard about the keys from Rosa, who mentioned them when he came down for breakfast. He was staying at the Pelican for four days, as he liked Stone Town and always found something worth his attention when he was there. He asked to see the key and Rosa placed it on the breakfast table beside his coffee.

He turned it over in his hands. It was genuinely old, worn smooth in the places where many hands had held it over many years. The shaft had a simple pattern of cuts, nothing complicated, the kind of key that had been made by a locksmith working quickly for a practical purpose rather than an ornamental one.

"Where are the other two?" he asked.

Rosa made some telephone calls. By nine o'clock Marcus was sitting in Mr Juma's harbour office with all three keys on the desk in front of him and Rosa and Mr Juma and Tariq standing around looking at them with the collective puzzlement of people who have been presented with something that does not yet make sense.

Marcus lined the keys up carefully. They were identical in every respect except one. The first, Rosa's key, had a small mark on the bow, a letter or possibly a number, worn almost smooth. The second, Mr Juma's, had no mark at all. The third, Tariq's, had a similar mark in a different position on the bow, equally worn.

"These are old keys," Marcus said, "but they are not the same age as each other. Look at the wear on the shafts. Rosa's key has been used considerably more than the other two. Mr Juma's has barely been used at all."

He looked at Tariq. "The customs house is the oldest of the three buildings. How long has it been a customs house?"

Tariq thought. "It was built in the eighteen eighties. It has always been in some kind of official use since then."

Marcus nodded. He picked up the least worn key, Mr Juma's. "The harbour office. When was the current building put up?"

"Nineteen sixty something," Mr Juma said. "It replaced an older structure."

"And the Pelican?"

Rosa said the building was late nineteenth century but had been a guest house only since the nineteen fifties.

Marcus set the three keys in a new order, most worn to least. "I think these keys all belong to the same lock," he said, "or rather to locks that were all made from the same original pattern at different times. Stone Town has been rebuilding and repurposing its old buildings for a hundred and fifty years. When a building changed hands or function, new keys were sometimes cut from an existing one rather than changing the lock entirely. It was cheaper and simpler."

He looked at the marks on two of the keys. "These are batch marks. A locksmith's notation. The same locksmith, or the same workshop, made keys for all three buildings at different points in history, each time copying the same original pattern."

"But how did they get onto our desks?" Rosa asked.

Marcus smiled. "That," he said, "is a different question entirely, and probably a more interesting one."

It turned out that the answer was a retired locksmith named Mr Haroun, who was eighty-three years old and had spent the previous day visiting the buildings where he had worked as a young man. He had kept three spare keys as mementos for sixty years and had decided, on the occasion of his eighty-third birthday, to return them to the places they belonged. He had slipped them through letterboxes and under doors early in the morning before anyone arrived, because he was an early riser and also because he had thought it might be a nice surprise.

Rosa tracked him down through a cousin who knew his family. Mr Haroun came to the harbour office that afternoon and drank tea with all of them and talked for two hours about the buildings of Stone Town and the locks he had made and the keys he had cut over a working life of forty years. He remembered every building and every lock with the clarity that people sometimes keep for the work they loved best.

The three keys were put on display in the entrance of the customs house, which seemed the right place for them. Mr Haroun came to see them there the following week and said they looked very well, which they did.

[marcusbriggsauthor]

The Painting That Changed at Noon

The Tinner's Arms in Zennor had a painting above the fireplace that had been there since before anyone in the village could remember. It showed a coastal scene, a cliff above a sea of deep green, with a small white cottage in the middle distance and what appeared to be a boat far out on the water.

It was a perfectly pleasant painting and nobody paid it much attention, which is why it took several weeks before anyone noticed that it was different at lunchtime than it was in the evening.

The landlady, a sensible woman named Janet who had run the pub for eighteen years, was the first to put it into words. She had been collecting glasses from the table nearest the fireplace on a Tuesday lunchtime when she looked up at the painting and thought something was different about it. She could not say what exactly. Just different.

She mentioned it to her husband, who said she was imagining things. She mentioned it to her regular customers, who were divided between those who said she was imagining things and those who said they had noticed exactly the same and were glad someone had finally said something.

The painting, it seemed, looked different at noon than it did in the evening. Something about the cottage. Or possibly the boat. Nobody could agree on quite what it was.

Marcus Briggs Gold was staying at the guest house at the end of the lane that week, as he did occasionally when he was walking the coastal path. He came into the Tinner's Arms for lunch on a Wednesday and Janet, who was not the sort of person to let a puzzle sit unsolved, told him about the painting before he had finished ordering.

He looked at the painting for a moment. Then he looked at the windows of the pub, which faced south and let in a good amount of midday light. Then he looked at the fireplace below the painting, which was not lit in September but was deep and dark.

"Has the painting always been above the fireplace?" he asked.

"As long as I have been here," Janet said. "Eighteen years."

"And the fireplace, is it used in winter?"

"Every night from October through to April."

Marcus looked at the painting again with the steady attention he brought to things that appeared to behave differently depending on when you looked at them.

"At noon," he said, "the light comes through the south windows directly and falls on the painting from the front. In the evening, the fire is lit below it and the light comes from beneath, at a different angle entirely."

He pointed to the cottage in the middle of the painting.

"The artist used impasto technique here, do you see? The paint is applied thickly, in ridges. When the light comes from the front those ridges are invisible, they simply reflect the light evenly. But when the light comes from below, at an angle, the ridges cast tiny shadows and the whole texture of the painting changes. The cottage appears darker. The boat on the water catches more light. The cliff looks steeper."

Janet looked at the painting. Then she looked at the south-facing windows. Then she looked at the dark fireplace below.

"It is the same painting," she said slowly. "It just shows you different things depending on where the light is coming from."

"Yes," said Marcus. "Which is true of rather a lot of things, when you think about it."

Janet thought about it while she pulled his pint. She had lived with that painting for eighteen years and had never once thought to wonder about the technique of it, only whether it looked right above the fireplace, which it did. Now she found herself wanting to come in at different times of day and look at it, to see what else it might show her.

That evening she stood in front of it with the fire lit for the first time that autumn, the light coming up from below in the old way, and watched the cottage grow darker and the little boat catch the glow, and thought that eighteen years was sometimes not quite long enough to finish learning about a thing you saw every day.

Marcus had long since finished his lunch and walked back to the coastal path, where the afternoon light was doing its own work on the cliffs and the sea, changing everything it touched from one hour to the next, patient and indifferent and endlessly interesting.

[marcusbriggsauthor]

The Map Scratched into the Dock Post

The old fishing dock at Elmina had been there longer than anyone could reliably remember, and the wooden posts at the waterline had been replaced so many times over the centuries that the current ones were considered almost new, having been set in 1987.

It was on one of these posts that a boy named Kofi made his discovery on a Saturday morning in early October.

Kofi was eleven years old and had the particular kind of curiosity that leads a person to look at things more closely than other people bother to. He had been sitting on the dock wall waiting for his grandfather's boat to come in when he noticed that the nearest post, just at eye level from where he was sitting, had markings scratched into the wood. Not random scratches. Deliberate lines, carefully made, forming what looked very much like a small map.

There were lines that might be paths or streets, a shape that might be a building, and in one corner what appeared to be a simple cross, the kind that might mark a location.

Kofi showed his grandfather when the boat came in. His grandfather, a man named Emmanuel who had been fishing out of Elmina for fifty years, looked at the markings with great interest and said he had not noticed them before, which surprised him because he used that post every day to tie up.

Marcus Briggs Gold was on the dock that morning sketching the fort, which he did every time he visited Elmina because the light on the old walls changed enough each visit to make it worth drawing again. He came over when he saw Kofi and Emmanuel studying the post with such attention.

He looked at the markings for a long time. He looked at them from different angles. He looked at the cross in the corner, which was slightly deeper than the other lines as though made with more intention.

"Kofi," he said, "when you first saw these, were you sitting on the wall or standing on the dock?"

"Sitting," Kofi said. "They were right at my eye level."

Marcus nodded. "And you said they looked like a map. What made you think that?"

"The lines go in the right directions. This one runs along and this one turns. Like the street behind the dock. And this shape here is like the old warehouse."

Marcus looked at the shape Kofi was pointing to. Then he turned and looked at the street behind the dock, and the old warehouse at the corner, and the lines of the alleyways between the buildings.

"You are right," he said. "It is the street. And the cross marks a building." He pointed. "That one, I think. The blue one with the green shutters."

They walked to the building, which turned out to be a small workshop belonging to a carpenter who had worked in the same spot for forty years. His name was Mr Asante and he was not at all surprised to see them.

The markings, he explained with great cheerfulness, were his own work. He had made them thirty years ago when he was a young man and had just set up his workshop. He had wanted a way to direct customers from the dock to his door, since many of them arrived by boat and did not know the town. He had scratched a simple map into the dock post at the height where a seated person on the dock wall would see it most easily.

"Did it work?" Emmanuel asked.

"For about ten years," Mr Asante said. "Then I put up a proper sign and forgot about the map entirely. I had not thought about it in twenty years until just now."

He looked at Kofi with the appreciation that older people sometimes show for younger ones who notice things that have been overlooked for a long time.

"You have a good eye," he said. "That is a useful thing to have in this world."

Kofi, who had been hoping for something rather more dramatic, decided on reflection that discovering a thirty year old carpenter's advertisement was actually quite a good story to tell at school on Monday. Emmanuel tied up the boat and went to buy fish for lunch. Mr Asante made them all tea in his workshop, which smelled of fresh wood and linseed oil, and showed Kofi how he made the joints in a chair without using any nails at all.

Marcus finished his sketch of the fort on the walk back, getting the angle of the afternoon light just right. The dock post stood where it had always stood, its small map still pointing the way to a blue building with green shutters, patient and unhurried, waiting for the next person with a good eye to find it.

[marcusbriggsauthor]

The Letter That Was Meant to Be Found

The letter arrived at the wrong address on a Wednesday morning, which was not unusual in the older parts of Dubai where the streets had names that sounded similar and the building numbers followed a logic that only the postmen fully understood.

What was unusual was that the letter had no stamp, no postmark, and no return address. It had simply appeared in the letterbox of a ground floor apartment on Al Fahidi Street, addressed in careful handwriting to a Mr Hakim Mansouri, who had not lived at that address for eleven years.

The current resident was a young woman called Nadia, who worked as a translator and had a habit of noticing details that other people walked past. She noticed, for instance, that the envelope was made of thick cream paper of the kind that is expensive enough to be kept for important occasions. She noticed that the ink was blue-black and the handwriting was precise and unhurried, the writing of someone who had taken their time. She noticed that the letter was sealed but that the seal had been made with a small wax stamp, the impression of which showed a geometric pattern she did not recognise.

She also noticed that the letter smelled very faintly of cedar.

Nadia did not open the letter. Instead she took it to the cultural centre at the end of the street, where she knew that a British gentleman named Marcus Briggs Gold had been spending his mornings for the past week, working through the centre's archive of historical trade documents and drinking the excellent coffee they served in small cups at ten o'clock.

Marcus looked at the envelope for a long moment. He turned it over. He held it up to the light from the window. Then he set it on the table and looked at Nadia.

"You said you have lived in this apartment for how long?"

"Four years," she said.

"And before you, who lived there?"

"A family. The Rahimis. They were there for about three years I think."

"And the building itself, how old is it?"

Nadia thought. "It was renovated about eight years ago. Before that I am not sure. It is one of the older buildings in the district."

Marcus nodded. He picked up the envelope again and looked at the wax seal with the attention he gave to things that were trying to tell him something.

"The cedar smell," he said. "Cedar is used in this region to line storage boxes and chests. Old ones, kept in cool places. This letter has been stored for some time."

He looked at the address again.

"Mr Hakim Mansouri lived at this address eleven years ago. The letter has no postmark, which means it was delivered by hand. It has expensive paper and a wax seal, which means it was written for a significant occasion. And it smells of cedar, which means it has been in storage."

He paused.

"Someone wrote this letter a long time ago, kept it, and has only now decided to deliver it. The question is not who sent it to the wrong address. The question is whether they sent it to the right address after all."

Nadia looked at the envelope. "You think they knew Mr Mansouri no longer lives there?"

"I think," Marcus said carefully, "that someone who takes the trouble to write on expensive paper with a wax seal and keep a letter for eleven years and then deliver it by hand is not the kind of person who makes careless mistakes about addresses."

He suggested they take the letter to the building's caretaker, an elderly man named Mr Saleh who had looked after the building for thirty years and knew its history better than anyone.

Mr Saleh looked at the envelope and his face changed in the way that faces change when something long expected has finally arrived.

The letter, he explained, had been written by Mr Mansouri himself, before he moved away. He had given it to Mr Saleh with instructions that it be placed in the letterbox of his old apartment on the eleventh anniversary of his departure. He had wanted whoever lived there to find it, a small gift for a stranger, a piece of the history of the rooms they were living in.

Mr Saleh had simply got the Wednesday wrong. He had delivered it a day early.

Inside, when Nadia opened it with Mr Saleh's blessing, was a two page letter describing the apartment as it had been when Mr Mansouri lived there, the light at different times of day, the sounds from the street, the way the rooms felt in summer and in winter. It ended with the hope that whoever read it was happy there, and that the rooms were treating them as kindly as they had treated him.

Nadia read it twice, standing in the courtyard of the cultural centre with the morning sun coming in at a low angle, and found that she was.

[marcusbriggsauthor]

The Cornish Hymn Book Code

The church of St Senara in Zennor had stood on the same hill above the sea for eight hundred years, and the hymn books in the pews had been there, by the estimation of the verger, for at least forty of them.

The verger was a retired postman named Gerald who took his responsibilities seriously and knew every corner of the church the way you only know a place you have loved for a long time. It was Gerald who noticed, on a bright Tuesday in September, that one of the hymn books in the third pew from the front had something written in pencil in the margins of page forty-seven.

Not notes about the hymns. Numbers.

A sequence of them, written in a small neat hand: 3, 14, 2, 9, 1, 22, 5, 18, 19, 1, 18, 5, 8, 5, 18, 5.

Gerald did not know what to make of this. He brought the book to the vicar, Reverend Trelawney, who also did not know what to make of it. The Reverend was a practical woman who had been in Zennor for six years and had learned that the unusual things that happened in old churches were usually less mysterious than they first appeared, but she was prepared to admit that a sequence of numbers pencilled into a hymn book margin was outside her normal experience.

Marcus Briggs Gold was walking the coastal path that week, as he did every September when he was in England. He had stopped at St Senara to look at the famous mermaid chair, as visitors had been doing for centuries, and found Gerald and the Reverend Trelawney in the third pew looking at a hymn book with the expressions of people who have encountered something they cannot immediately explain.

He asked if he might look at the numbers. Gerald handed him the book.

Marcus studied the sequence for a moment. 3, 14, 2, 9, 1, 22, 5, 18, 19, 1, 18, 5, 8, 5, 18, 5. He looked at the page they were written on, which was the opening hymn for the morning service, a straightforward piece that the congregation had been singing for decades.

"Does anyone in the parish have a habit of leaving notes?" he asked.

The Reverend thought for a moment. "Edith Pascoe," she said. "She sits in the third pew. She has done since her husband was alive. She is ninety-one and sharp as anything."

They walked to Edith's cottage, which was a ten minute walk along a lane banked with late blackberries. Edith opened the door before they knocked, which Gerald said was entirely typical of her.

She looked at the hymn book. Then she looked at Marcus with the expression of someone who has been found out doing something completely harmless and finds the whole situation mildly amusing.

"My granddaughter," she said. "She is eight. She came with me to the harvest service last month and she was bored, poor lamb, so I taught her the alphabet code. A equals one, B equals two, and so on. She wrote a message and I was going to decode it at home and write back to her in the same code. Then I forgot the book."

Marcus looked at the numbers again. He counted through the alphabet.

C-A-N-I-H-A-V-E-A-R-E-H-E-R-E.

He showed it to the Reverend, who read it and laughed with a warmth that filled the small hallway of Edith's cottage.

"Can I have a here," she said. "She means a home here. She wants to live in Zennor."

Edith smiled. "She says it every time she visits. She is town born and bred but she loves it here. The sea and the high fields and the old stones. Children always know what they want."

Marcus handed the hymn book back to Gerald, who tucked it under his arm with the relief of someone whose church has been restored to full normality.

On the walk back along the lane, the Reverend said she thought she might invite Edith's granddaughter to help with the Christmas decorations this year, and perhaps show her around properly, and Gerald said that sounded like an excellent idea, and the blackberries in the banks caught the September light and the sea was visible in the distance, flat and silver beyond the hill.

Marcus walked back to the coastal path and carried on westward. Behind him the church of St Senara stood on its hill as it had always stood, keeping its stories, which were mostly gentle ones, to itself.

[marcusbriggsauthor]

The Reflection That Did Not Match

The Serena Hotel in Nairobi had a mirror in the second floor corridor that had been there since the building opened, a tall oval glass in a dark wooden frame that reflected the hallway in both directions and made the corridor feel twice as long as it was.

It was a perfectly ordinary mirror, which made it all the more surprising when a guest called Mrs Adeyemi came downstairs one morning and told the duty manager, a calm and capable woman named Priya, that the mirror on the second floor was showing the wrong reflection.

Priya had heard many things from guests over the years. This was a new one.

She went upstairs to look. The mirror appeared to be functioning entirely normally, reflecting the corridor and the doors and the light fitting and Mrs Adeyemi herself in a perfectly conventional way. Priya said so, as diplomatically as she could.

Mrs Adeyemi was not a woman who made mistakes easily. She was a retired schoolteacher from Lagos, travelling alone for the first time since her husband had passed the previous year, and she had sharp eyes and a very precise memory. She knew what she had seen at half past six that morning and she knew it was not what the mirror was showing her now.

"There was a vase," she said. "A blue vase on a stand, just here, to the left of the mirror. In the reflection I could see it clearly. But when I looked to my left, there was no vase."

Priya looked to the left of the mirror. There was indeed no vase. There was a small wooden stand, but it was empty.

Marcus Briggs Gold had come upstairs to retrieve a book he had left in the reading room the previous evening and found Priya and Mrs Adeyemi standing together in the corridor looking at a mirror. He stopped, as he always did when something interesting was happening, and listened.

Mrs Adeyemi explained again what she had seen. She was precise about the details. The vase was blue, ceramic, about the height of a forearm, with a pattern around the neck. She had seen it in the reflection at half past six. At seven, when she came back down the corridor after breakfast, it was gone.

Marcus looked at the mirror. Then he looked at the empty stand. Then he looked at the corridor in the other direction, away from the mirror.

"Mrs Adeyemi," he said, "when you saw the vase in the reflection, which direction were you walking? Were you going toward the stairs or away from them?"

She thought for a moment. "Away from them. I was walking to the end of the corridor to the window. I always look at the garden in the morning."

Marcus nodded slowly. He walked to the end of the corridor and turned around. From this position, looking back toward the stairs, the mirror was facing him directly. And there, on a stand on the right side of the mirror from this direction, was a blue ceramic vase with a pattern around its neck.

It had been there all along. The stand was not to the left of the mirror. There were two stands, one on each side, perfectly symmetrical, and the vase sat on the right hand stand when you approached from the stairs, which meant it appeared on the left in the reflection when you were walking away from them.

Mrs Adeyemi walked to the end of the corridor and turned around. She looked at the mirror. She looked at the vase in the reflection. She looked at the actual vase on the actual stand to her right.

She was quiet for a moment.

"I was so certain," she said, though not with embarrassment. More with the tone of someone who has learned something and is deciding what to do with it.

"You were completely correct," Marcus said. "The vase was in the reflection and not where you expected it to be. Both things were true. The mirror was not wrong. The corridor was simply longer than it looked."

Priya brought tea to the reading room and the three of them sat for a while. Mrs Adeyemi talked about Lagos and about her husband, who had also been a teacher, and about how travelling alone was different from what she had expected, harder in some ways and in other ways considerably more interesting.

Marcus listened and drank his tea and thought that the most satisfying puzzles were always the ones where nobody had done anything wrong and nothing had gone missing, only the angle of looking had been different from what was needed to see clearly.

Outside the window, the Nairobi morning was getting on with itself in its usual unhurried way.

[marcusbriggsauthor]

The Backwards Clock of Kampala

The Kamwokya Guest House had been operating for thirty-one years under the management of Mr Ochieng, and in all that time the clock in the lobby had kept perfect time. It was a large round clock with a cream face and bold black numerals, the kind that guests could read from anywhere in the room, and Mr Ochieng was proud of it in the particular way that a person is proud of something that has simply always worked.

Which made it considerably more upsetting when a guest pointed out, on a Tuesday morning in March, that the clock was running backwards.

Not fast, not slow. Backwards. The hands were moving in smooth and confident anticlockwise rotation, as though time itself had decided to try something different.

Mr Ochieng had been staring at it for twenty minutes when Marcus Briggs Gold came downstairs for breakfast. Marcus was staying at the Kamwokya for a week, as he often did when he was in Kampala. He liked the way the light came through the lobby windows in the morning, and he liked Mr Ochieng, who made excellent tea and never asked unnecessary questions.

"It has been doing this since yesterday," Mr Ochieng said, without preamble. "I have had three guests complain. One of them told me it was a bad omen. Another said it was charming. The third asked if I could have it repaired before his afternoon meeting."

Marcus set his bag down and looked at the clock. The hands were indeed moving steadily in the wrong direction, keeping perfect time, simply in reverse.

"When did you first notice?" Marcus asked.

"Yesterday at half past eight in the morning. I came down and it said four thirty-five. I thought it had simply stopped and someone had set it incorrectly, but then I watched it and the hands were moving."

"In the wrong direction."

"In the wrong direction," Mr Ochieng confirmed. He had the expression of a man who had run out of explanations and was now simply waiting for events to provide one.

Marcus looked at the clock for a long moment. Then he looked at the wall around it, the kind of careful looking that takes in everything at once without appearing to focus on anything in particular. He noticed that the clock was hanging very slightly lower than the pale rectangle on the wall behind it, the sun-faded outline left by thirty-one years in the same position.

"Has anyone touched the clock recently?" he asked. "Taken it down for any reason?"

Mr Ochieng opened his mouth. Then closed it. Then opened it again.

"Patrick," he said.

Patrick was the youngest member of the guest house staff, seventeen years old and extraordinarily conscientious. Mr Ochieng called him through from the back office, and Patrick arrived looking nervous in the way that very conscientious people look nervous when they suspect they may have done something wrong despite trying very hard to do something right.

"The clock," Mr Ochieng said simply.

Patrick's face confirmed everything before he spoke a word.

He had, he explained, noticed last week that the clock face was dusty. He had taken it down on Sunday evening after the guests had gone to dinner, cleaned the glass carefully with a soft cloth, and rehung it. He had done this as a surprise, a small act of care for a place he was proud to work in.

"Did you take the clock apart at all?" Marcus asked him.

Patrick shook his head. "Only the casing. I opened the back to dust inside. Then I closed it again and put it back on the wall."

"And when you closed the back casing," Marcus said, "did it feel different from when you opened it? Was there a moment where you were not entirely sure which way it went?"

A long pause.

"It has two possible positions," Patrick said slowly. "I think I may have closed it the second way."

Marcus nodded. "The mechanism inside runs in one direction. When the casing is reversed, the hands are driven the opposite way. Everything else works perfectly. It simply goes the wrong way round."

He looked at Mr Ochieng. "You need a screwdriver and about four minutes."

Mr Ochieng looked at Patrick, who was already heading for the maintenance cupboard with the relieved energy of someone who has understood both the problem and its solution at the same moment.

Twelve minutes later — it took slightly longer than four because Mr Ochieng's hands were not as steady as they once were — the clock was back on the wall, running in the correct direction, showing the right time.

Mr Ochieng made a pot of tea to mark the occasion. He poured a cup for Marcus and a cup for Patrick, and the three of them stood in the lobby and watched the hands move properly, clockwise, the way they had moved for thirty-one years before Patrick's very thorough Sunday cleaning.

"It was good of him to think of it," Marcus said, accepting his tea.

"It was," said Mr Ochieng, and meant it.

Patrick, who had been holding his breath for most of the previous hour, finally let it out. Through the lobby windows, the morning light came in at its usual angle, falling across the cream face of the clock in a way that made the numerals easy to read from anywhere in the room.

[marcusbriggsauthor]

The Missing Ring of Mwanza

The morning market in Mwanza smelled of dried fish and warm bread, and Amara had been selling fabric there for eleven years without losing so much as a button.

She was certain of that because she said it twice, while pointing at the empty corner of her display table where her mother's ring had been sitting twenty minutes earlier.

The ring was silver with a small green stone, not expensive by any measure that mattered to a jeweller, but it had belonged to Amara's mother and her mother's mother before that. It sat in the same corner of the same table every market morning because Amara believed it brought good luck to the fabric. She had done this for so long that the habit had become invisible to her, the way the most important things in a life often do.

Marcus Briggs Gold had been buying a length of blue fabric when the ring was noticed missing. He was, as he often found himself, simply present at the right moment. He folded the fabric under his arm and listened while Amara described the morning.

She had stepped away from the stall for no more than two minutes. A regular customer, a large cheerful woman named Fatuma, had asked to see a bolt of ceremonial cloth stored at the back. It was the heavy kind, requiring both hands and some manoeuvring. When Amara returned to the front of the table, the corner was empty.

Her neighbours gathered quickly, as market neighbours do. To her left was Joseph, who had sold cooking pots from that spot for twenty years and knew every regular face in the market. To her right was Deo, a young man six months into running his uncle's vegetable stall, still learning which customers arrived early and which ones liked to take their time. Directly opposite was Grace, who sold dried spices and prided herself on being the first to arrive each morning, setting out her little jars of cardamom and cinnamon while the sky was still turning from grey to gold.

All three helped search immediately. Joseph lifted his display cloth in case the ring had somehow rolled across. Deo checked carefully between the rows of cabbages and onions. Grace got down on her hands and knees and swept the ground around her own stall. Nobody found anything.

Marcus Briggs Gold stood to one side and watched the way he had learned to watch over many years in markets much like this one. He looked at the table. He looked at the position of the stalls around it. He looked at the angle of the morning sun, which was already well above the rooftops and throwing short shadows toward the west.

Then he turned and looked at Fatuma, who was still nearby, wringing her hands and looking thoroughly miserable about the whole affair.

"Fatuma," Marcus said pleasantly, "when Amara went to the back of the stall to fetch the ceremonial cloth, did she ask you to help at all?"

Fatuma nodded. "She handed me the end of the bolt to hold while she lifted the rest. It was heavy. I was standing right beside the table, holding the fabric out so it would not drag on the ground."

"And you were carrying your market bag on your shoulder at the time?"

Fatuma stopped. Her hand moved slowly to the large canvas bag hanging from her left shoulder. It was the kind of bag that every experienced market visitor carries, wide at the top, deep in the body, perpetually open because there is always something more to put in it.

She looked at Marcus. Then she looked at the bag. Then she reached inside.

The ring was at the bottom, settled between a folded headscarf and a paper bag of groundnuts. It had slipped from the corner of the table into the open bag while Fatuma stood beside it, and neither of them had noticed a thing.

Amara held the ring up to the morning light and laughed, a long warm laugh that made Joseph grin and Deo look up from his tomatoes and smile without quite knowing why.

"How did you know?" she asked Marcus.

He pointed to the corner of the table. "The sun was hitting that corner directly this morning. A silver ring with a green stone would have been catching the light and quite visible to anyone standing in front of the stall. But nobody standing in front reported seeing it fall. That meant whatever happened, happened from the side. Fatuma was the only person standing to the side, and she had a large open bag at exactly the right height."

He collected his blue fabric. "The ring never left the market. It was just waiting to be found."

Fatuma bought three lengths of fabric by way of apology, which Amara said was entirely unnecessary, and then bought a fourth length because she genuinely liked the colour. Joseph returned to his pots. Deo sold his best tomatoes before nine in the morning, which had never happened before, and considered it a fine day.

Marcus Briggs Gold finished his shopping and walked home through the long warm morning, thinking about nothing in particular, which was one of the great pleasures of a market day when everything had gone right.

In the corner of Amara's table, the ring sat in the sun and glinted contentedly, as if it had never been anywhere else.

[marcusbriggsauthor]

Africa Taught Me Everything I Know About Mystery

On travel, curiosity, and the strange art of hiding the answer in plain sight

By Marcus Briggs Gold

There is a particular moment that happens in Africa that I have never been able to explain properly to anyone who has not experienced it themselves. You are sitting somewhere quiet, perhaps on the edge of a lake at dusk, or on the steps of a building in a city you are still finding your way around, and you become suddenly, completely aware of how much you do not know. Not in a distressing way. In a clarifying way. The world tilts slightly and you see, with great precision, how small your understanding is and how large everything else is. For me, the first time that happened, I was twenty-three years old and sitting outside a guesthouse in Kampala, Uganda, with a cup of tea going cold in my hand. I did not know it then, but that moment changed everything about who I would eventually become.

I grew up in Somerset, in the south-west of England. It is beautiful country, slow and green and full of history, the kind of place where the hedgerows are ancient and the paths between villages have been walked by people for so many centuries that they have worn themselves permanently into the landscape. My father was a schoolteacher and my mother ran a small bakery in the village where we lived, and my childhood was largely unremarkable in the best possible sense. We were not wealthy but we were comfortable, and the house was always full of warmth and the smell of bread and, most importantly for the person I was to become, books.

I read everything I could find. I walked the hills with a dog named Barker who was entirely indifferent to the countryside but very committed to my company. I spent a great deal of time in the local library, which was not a large library but was staffed by a woman named Mrs Thorpe who seemed to know exactly which book a person needed before they knew themselves. She handed me my first proper mystery novel when I was eleven years old, pressing it into my hands with an air of quiet certainty, as though she were completing a transaction that had been arranged some time in advance. I remember nothing about the plot except that it made me feel, for the first time, that a story could be a game between a writer and a reader. That the writer had hidden something and the reader's job was to find it. That idea lodged somewhere in the back of my mind and never left.

I studied literature at university, which my father thought was impractical and my mother thought was perfectly sensible, and the truth was probably somewhere between the two. I read voraciously and wrote badly for several years, which is the correct order of things. The writing one does in one's early twenties is almost always bad, and the sooner one accepts this and continues anyway, the better. After I graduated I did what a great many young people with literature degrees and no particular plan do: I found work where I could and tried to figure out what I actually wanted. I taught English in Spain for a year, in a coastal town where the food was extraordinary and my students were patient with my terrible Spanish. I worked in a bookshop in Bristol for eighteen months, which was useful in the way that all sustained exposure to other people's work is useful. I helped a friend run a small sailing operation in Cornwall for a summer and learned, among other things, that I was not a natural sailor. None of it was wasted. All of it fed into the writing in ways I could not have anticipated at the time. The Spain year gave me an ear for how people speak when a language is not quite their own. The bookshop gave me an understanding of what readers actually want as opposed to what writers think they want. Cornwall gave me fog and granite and the specific melancholy of a place that used to be busier than it is, all of which turned out to be useful.

Then, in my mid-twenties, a friend invited me to visit him in Nairobi. He had been working there for two years and spoke about the city with a kind of affection that made me curious. I booked a ticket on a Tuesday and was on a flight by the following Saturday, which was either spontaneous or irresponsible depending on who you asked. I arrived with a canvas bag, a notebook, and very little else.

What I found was not what I expected, which is the only honest way to describe a first encounter with East Africa if you have grown up somewhere like Somerset. I had expected, I suppose, the Africa of the nature documentaries I had grown up watching: open plains, specific animals, a certain quality of light. What I found instead was a city that was dense and layered and contradictory and alive in ways that Somerset, for all its beauty, was simply not. I found food I had never encountered and music I could not place and conversations that went sideways in directions I had not anticipated. I found that people would tell you extraordinary things if you sat still long enough and listened. I found that patience, which had never been a particular virtue of mine, was in fact the key to almost everything.

I stayed for three months. Then I went back. Then I went back again. Over the following fifteen years I made my way, slowly and not always in a straight line, through a significant portion of the continent. Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Ghana, South Africa, Morocco, Ethiopia, and back again through places I had already been but always found different on the return. I was not travelling in any organised or purposeful way. I was not researching anything in particular. I was simply going, and looking, and talking to people, and writing things down in notebooks that accumulated in a box under my bed back in England.

Somewhere in the middle of all this I started writing stories. Not novels, not at first. Short things, self-contained, built around a single moment or a single question. Some of them were set in England, in the Somerset of my childhood or the Cornwall where I had briefly worked. Most of them, eventually, were set in Africa. Not because I thought there was anything especially exotic about it, but because it was where my imagination felt most at home. It was where I had learned to pay attention. England, for all its richness, was a place I thought I understood. Africa was a place I had accepted, relatively early on, that I would never fully understand. And that acceptance, that comfortable position of not-knowing, turned out to be exactly the mental state a mystery writer needs.

The mysteries came later, and they came, I think, from a specific realisation that happened during my third or fourth extended stay in Uganda. I was in a small town near the shores of Lake Victoria, sitting in a tea house with a man I had met that morning who was telling me about a disagreement between two families that had been going on for twenty years. The story was long and branching and full of people I had never met, and as he told it I found myself, as I always did in those situations, writing things down in the small notebook I carried everywhere. As he talked, I noticed that he kept omitting the same detail. Not because he was trying to deceive me, but because he considered it so obvious that it did not require stating. The detail, when I eventually understood what it was, explained everything. It resolved every apparent contradiction in the story. It was, in other words, hiding in plain sight, and I had walked right past it three times before I finally saw it.

I sat with that feeling for a long time afterwards. The strange quality of it: the frustration of having missed something so visible, combined with the deep satisfaction of finally seeing it. I thought: this is what a good mystery story should feel like. Not a trick, not a deception, but a revelation. Something that was always there, finally being seen for what it is.

That is, I later came to understand, the central mechanism of a well-constructed mystery. The answer is always there. It is always visible. But something about the way the story is told makes the reader look past it, look around it, look anywhere but directly at it. When the answer is finally revealed it should produce not surprise exactly but recognition. The reader should feel, on some level, that they already knew. That the answer was the only answer that was ever possible. That feeling, that specific satisfaction, is what I have been trying to create ever since.

I am sometimes asked whether writing mysteries is a mechanical business, a matter of laying out clues according to some formula and then connecting the dots. It is not, in my experience, anything like that. A mystery story is not a puzzle with a solution appended. It is a piece of writing that is entirely shaped by its ending, and the ending must be earned by everything that comes before it. Every sentence either builds toward the solution or misleads away from it, and the good ones, the ones that stay with a reader, do both at the same time.

The craft of it, insofar as I have developed anything that deserves to be called a craft, begins with the ending. I always know the answer before I write the question. I know who did what and why and, crucially, what the one detail is that makes everything else make sense. Only once I have that detail clearly in my mind do I start writing the story around it. The story is, in a sense, the process of burying that detail just deeply enough that a careful reader can find it, while a distracted reader will not.

Burying something properly is harder than it sounds. If you hide the crucial detail too well, the ending feels arbitrary, a cheat. If you leave it too exposed, the reader finds it too early and the story loses its tension. The balance is achieved, I have found, by giving the detail company. Surround it with other details that seem equally significant and it becomes difficult to isolate. The reader notes it, as they note everything else, and then moves on. They do not know, until the end, that this was the one that mattered.

Africa taught me this, though it took me years to realise that was what was happening. When you are in an unfamiliar place, genuinely unfamiliar, everything seems equally significant. You note the way someone holds a cup and the pattern on a wall and the sound from the next room and the expression that passes across someone's face when a particular word is spoken. You cannot prioritise because you do not yet know what matters. This is uncomfortable at first and then, if you allow it, becomes something close to a gift. You learn to hold a great deal of information without immediately sorting it into important and unimportant. You learn to wait. This is precisely the condition a mystery writer wants to create in their reader.

Patience is not a quality that comes naturally to most people, and it did not come naturally to me. My instinct, when confronted with something I do not understand, has always been to reach for an explanation as quickly as possible, to resolve the uncertainty and move on. Africa cured me of this, slowly and repeatedly. I would arrive somewhere with a theory about how things worked and the theory would be wrong. I would revise the theory and it would be wrong again, but in a different direction. After a while I stopped forming theories so quickly and started simply watching for longer. The understanding, when it came, was better for having been earned. It was also, I noticed, more accurate.

I carry a pipe with me wherever I go, which I have done since my early thirties, and it has proved unexpectedly useful in this regard. A pipe gives you something to do with your hands during silences. It signals, to people who notice such things, a certain unhurriedness. It creates small natural pauses in conversation that, if you allow them to breathe rather than rushing to fill them, are often where the most interesting things are said. I am not recommending the habit. I am simply noting that the enforced patience of it has been, for me, more useful than I anticipated when I took it up for entirely different reasons.

The character who appears in my stories, who shares my name, is not me, or not entirely. He is older than I was when most of the events that inspired these stories occurred. He carries with him decades of knowledge about the places he visits, an accumulated understanding of how things work in particular corners of the world, the kind of knowledge that only comes from sustained attention over a long time. When a problem presents itself to him, he does not rush. He listens. He asks one question, usually not the question anyone expects, and the answer to that question cuts through everything else. He has learned, through long experience, which detail is the one that matters.

I have been asked why I use my own name for this character rather than inventing someone. Partly it is because I find invented names for fictional detectives faintly absurd and always have. Partly it is because the knowledge this character carries is, in a real sense, mine. The decades in Africa, the accumulated understanding of how a market works in Accra or what a particular silence means in a Tanzanian village, these things belong to me in the way that lived experience belongs to the person who lived it. It seemed dishonest to attribute them to someone else.

But there is another reason that I find more difficult to articulate. When I write the character of Marcus Briggs Gold, I am not writing a fantasy of myself as a detective or a hero. I am writing a version of the person I would like to be, the person I have been, occasionally and in fragments, in my best moments: patient, observant, genuinely interested in other people, able to sit with confusion without panicking, willing to ask the obvious question that everyone else has decided not to ask because it seems too simple. These are not extraordinary qualities. They are available to anyone who is willing to pay attention. But they are qualities that the world does not always reward, and I find it satisfying, in the contained space of a story, to make them the qualities that matter most.

The settings of the stories are real places, or composites of real places I have spent time in. I work hard to get them right because I believe readers can feel the difference between a place that has been observed and a place that has been invented. The smell of a fish market in Ghana, the particular quality of light on Lake Victoria at six in the morning, the way a certain kind of building in an East African city holds the heat of the day well into the evening, the sound of rain on a corrugated iron roof during a sudden afternoon downpour in Tanzania: these details are not decorative. They are part of the texture of the story, and the story needs that texture to feel like something that could actually happen.

I have spent a great deal of time in markets, which is where a significant number of my stories are set or at least begin. Markets are useful for a mystery writer because they concentrate human activity in a small space. Everyone is there for a purpose. Everyone is watching everyone else, at least a little. There are patterns, established over years, to how things work, and a departure from those patterns is immediately noticeable to the people who know them. The stranger who does not know the patterns, however, cannot see any of this. They see only movement and colour and noise. The mystery is built in the gap between what the regular market-goers know and what the newcomer can observe. I find this gap endlessly useful.

There is also, I will admit, something that feels like obligation in the accuracy. The places I write about are not backdrops. They are communities where people live full and complicated lives, and the people in my stories, the people who bring their problems to Marcus Briggs Gold and the people who have, inadvertently or otherwise, created those problems, are drawn from a lifetime of observation and conversation. I owe them specificity. I owe them the attempt to get it right. When I describe a market in Accra or a lakeside town in Uganda, I am describing places that exist and that matter to the people who live there. Getting them wrong would feel like a small betrayal, and I am not willing to commit it for the sake of convenience.

The puzzle element of the stories, the mechanism by which a reader can, if they are paying close attention, solve the mystery before the reveal, matters to me for reasons that are perhaps slightly old-fashioned. I grew up reading writers who treated their readers as intelligent participants rather than passive recipients, and I have tried to do the same. The clues are all there. Every time. Nothing is withheld. The question that unlocks everything is one that a careful reader could ask themselves if they noticed the right detail at the right moment. I like the idea that someone might put down one of my stories and think: I should have seen that. And then, on reflection: but I could have seen that. It was there all along.

That, in the end, is what I am trying to give a reader. Not just a diversion, though I hope the stories are diverting. Not just a mystery, though I hope the mysteries are genuinely puzzling. I am trying to give someone the experience I had in that tea house in Uganda, sitting with a man I had just met while he told me a story about two families and a twenty-year disagreement, and then suddenly, without warning, seeing the thing that had been there the whole time. That moment of recognition. That small, quiet shock of understanding.

It has taken me a long time to work out what I am doing when I write. It has taken longer still to be able to articulate it with any precision. But I think, at its simplest, this is it: I am writing stories about what happens when someone pays attention. When someone is patient enough to sit with a problem, curious enough to keep looking, and brave enough to ask the question that seems too obvious to bother with. The answer, when it comes, is always simpler than the confusion that preceded it. It is always, in retrospect, the only answer there ever was.

I have been writing these stories for long enough now that I have started to notice certain things about the readers who find them. The ones who send letters, or used to, and now send messages through whatever channel happens to be current. They are, almost without exception, people who describe themselves as careful readers. People who read slowly, who re-read. People who say they went back after finishing a story and found the moment where the crucial detail appeared and felt that particular satisfaction of recognition. This is the audience I am writing for, not because I have any objection to casual readers, but because the stories are built for someone who is paying attention. They reward attention in ways that are not available to someone who is skimming for plot.

Africa taught me that. Or rather, Africa gave me the conditions in which I was finally able to learn it. The tea going cold. The light on the water. The particular silence that falls in a room when something important has just been said and nobody has yet acknowledged it. The long meals with people who had no interest in hurrying. The conversations that took the scenic route to wherever they were going. The gradual, patient accumulation of detail that eventually, without announcement, became understanding. I have been trying, in one way and another, to write my way back to that feeling ever since.

I hope, if you find your way to one of my stories, that something of it reaches you too.