Why Maggie?

A short mystery. The way to the answer runs through a puzzle.

Swipe.

Maggie

Every morning Bert brings the crates to the theatre bar. Twenty-two winters, the same round, the same trolley, the same sentence: morning, Maggie, where do you want them?

Mrs Pike is not called Maggie. She never has been.

Bert isn't joking, and it isn't a one-off. Every morning, with the same calm kindness.

Mrs Pike corrected him the first time. And the second. The third time she just nodded.

Between seven and ten that morning, seven people passed along the corridor. Mrs Pike kept an eye on four of them.

Alex, the lighting technician, who came to check the bulbs above the bar, and who asked Mrs Pike whether she'd fancy a walk round Kew Gardens with him one day – there's a café there too, only she wouldn't have to stand behind it. Every bulb, it turned out, was working.

Bert, the storeman, who brings the crates, who says good morning to everyone, and who calls the stage manager Ken and the dresser Pam – but calls the young stagehand only "young man".

Edna, the usher, who has been at the cloakroom since early morning. She knows exactly what everyone in the theatre is called, because she's been there forty years.

Mr Kemp, the sound engineer, who calls nobody anything, just nods, because he always has his headphones on.

Mrs Pike didn't ask Bert who he was mixing her up with. She just watched him. And after a while she noticed that Bert doesn't call everyone by name.

Fill in the sudoku

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.

Maggie – continued

Bert doesn't remember names. For twenty-two years he has simply read them. There's a nameplate on the stage manager's booth, a card on the dressing-room door, a rota by the cloakroom. The young stagehand's name isn't written anywhere – so he's "young man".

And above the bar hangs a wooden nameplate, slightly crooked, the way it always has. Mrs Pike hasn't looked up at it in twenty-two years. She never needed to: she knows who she is.

Maggie retired twenty-three years ago. Mrs Pike took over the following winter. Bert never met Maggie – only her nameplate.

That afternoon Mrs Pike had a word with the caretaker. Next morning Bert came in with his trolley, looked up, and said: morning, Mrs Pike, where do you want them?

Mrs Pike caught herself missing Maggie, just a little.

Alex took from all this only that Mrs Pike was very pretty. Mrs Pike took from it only that she hadn't looked up in twenty-two years.

The next mystery arrives next week.