A short mystery. The way to the answer runs through a puzzle.
Swipe.
Mrs Pike works at the theatre in winter, once the river boat closes for the season. She's the one who carries the tea round to the dressing rooms. Always has. The counter sits empty most mornings, and the extra hours come in handy.
Irene, the celebrated actress, has dressed in the same room for thirty-two years. This morning the top edge of the mirror doesn't reach her forehead anymore – only her eyebrows.
"Mrs Pike," she said, pointing at the mirror, the cup trembling in her hand. "Someone's lowered it."
The mirror is screwed to the wall. Four screws, last tightened the year Irene moved into this room. The screws are all still in place, there's no new hole in the wall, and the paint is undisturbed.
Four people had been in the dressing room that morning.
Alex, the lighting technician, who was changing the bulbs around the mirror, and who asked Mrs Pike, in the middle of it, whether she'd fancy the choir's Christmas concert with him some time – there's a buffet table there too, only this time she wouldn't have to stand behind it.
Pam, the dresser, who brought in the costume for the second act, though there was plenty of time for that still, and who announced to Irene, out of nowhere, that this room could easily fit two pianos.
Ken, the stage manager, who does the rounds of the dressing rooms every morning, and who never greets anyone, because his head is always buried in his clipboard.
The hairdresser, who carried the wig stand out, and who told someone in the corridor that she didn't understand it – that door had never stuck before.
Mrs Pike didn't call the caretaker. She stood in the doorway and thought it through. The mirror couldn't have moved on its own. A mirror doesn't sink by itself. Which meant something else had risen.
Tap an empty square first, then tap a number.
Nine squares in the grid are grey. The numbers in them turn into letters using the table below, read top to bottom, left to right across each row. As soon as a grey square gets the right number, its letter appears by itself in the nine empty boxes under the table. If no letter appears, the number is wrong.
The dressing room's burgundy carpet had gone off to be cleaned on Monday, and a replacement had come up from storage. The same burgundy – just thicker, and firmer underfoot. Nobody mentioned it, because a carpet isn't news.
Irene now sits two centimetres higher than she has for thirty-two years. Which is exactly how much lower the mirror looks.
And it's exactly enough to make the door catch, too – a door that hadn't caught once in thirty-two years.
Irene drank her tea and said that after thirty-two years, she could finally see something above her forehead too.
Alex took from this only that Mrs Pike was very pretty. Mrs Pike took from it only that in a theatre, everyone watches the stage, and nothing else.
The next mystery arrives next week.
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