Mabel Fenwick

Mabel Fenwick is 54 and has pushed the tea trolley at the lens factory for nineteen years. She was born in the village itself, the daughter of a washerwoman and a brewery worker, and started working at fourteen, peeling potatoes in the canteen. She married a bus conductor who died of pneumonia, raised two children alone and says life taught her that almost everything can be settled with a hot cup and a kind word. She calls everyone love, the director included.

She lives in a little red brick house two blocks from the factory, with a front garden where dahlias grow and a white fence she repaints every spring. The kitchen is small and warm, with a kettle that never cools, a brown clay teapot and a shelf of ceramic knickknacks given by children and grandchildren. On Sundays she goes to church, comes back with a fruit cake and leaves slices at the neighbors' doors without telling them. The arthritis in her hands worsens in winter, and she doesn't complain.

She has curly gray hair tied in a pale blue scarf, a round, rosy face and thin-framed glasses that slip down her nose when she laughs. She wears a flowered apron over a brown dress, her hands swollen with rheumatism, and a white mug she almost never parts with. She talks nonstop, breaks off to ask after the children of whoever passes by, and knows each person's tea in the factory the way one knows a surname.

About the routine she commands, her account runs like a clock: at 10 and at 3, rain or shine, she fills the trolley in the corridor and each section comes to fetch its own. She says tea, deep down, is milk and sugar and nothing else passes through that trolley. About the man who died, what she remembers is that he quarreled with the screw supplier and with his football team, and that everyone in here liked him, even those he scolded.

Mabel knows that whoever serves the tea is closest to everything that passes through each person's mouth, and that, in a place where everyone is falling ill, this weighs in others' eyes. When the detective asks if she put something in the tea, the laughter disappears, her hands close on her apron and the answer comes short. It may be the hurt of a motherly woman called a murderess by those she helped raise. It may be someone who repeats what works to say. The detective will have to decide which.