Joe Bennett: The mystery of the bowls shoe and the money (who doesn’t love a mystery?)

The game of bowls requires a little stooping, some gentle walking and a lot of standing around, so why one needs a special shoe to do it in, I cannot tell you.

OPINION

I have a mystery for you, and who doesn’t love a mystery? Furthermore the mystery involves a fat sum of money, and who doesn’t love a fat sum of money? It also involves a bowls shoe.

The game of bowls requires a little stooping, some gentle walking and a lot of standing around, so why one needs a special shoe to do it in, I cannot tell you. Perhaps it has something to do with the young people who have now hijacked the game and turned it into a professional sport. Before they arrived, bowls was merely the sport you played when you were too old to play a sport. (One of our local clubs is sponsored by a firm of funeral directors.)

When I was a kid, the village bowling green lay just beyond the boundary of the cricket field, and formed a tempting target for big hitters. When a six landed amidst them, the old bowls players would fall to the floor in concentric circles like those pine trees in Siberia when the meteorite struck. But they never seemed to resent the bombardment, perhaps because they too had once been cricketers, and they saw it as turn and turn about, part of the natural order of things.

Anyway, the mystery features a character whom I shall call Dave. Dave worked in a sports shop. One afternoon a customer came in asking after - have you guessed it? - a pair of bowls shoes. “Why yes, of course,” said Dave, and he invited the gentleman to sit while Dave measured his stockinged foot with one of those things like a metal snow shoe. This was a proper shop.

(The customer’s foot, by the way, was wearing a sock, but stockinged is always the way such a foot is described. A further mystery to ponder when you have time.)

Dave went to the shelves where shoes were stacked in boxes, fetched the only pair of bowling shoes of the appropriate size, sat again at the feet of the customer, took a shoe from the box, loosened the laces, reached into the shoe to extract the bundled tissue paper that serves to keep the shoe in shape, and pulled out a wad of dollars. American dollars.

The customer seemed not to have noticed. Dave put the money in his pocket. Then he slid the shoe onto the customer’s foot, tightened the laces, tied the bow, prodded the toe end for space and asked the customer how the shoe felt for width, all of which he did on autopilot because, just as you and I are doing now, he was puzzling over the money.

As he discovered a little later in the privacy of the back room, the wad consisted of $900 in a mixture of $50 and $100 bills. Whose was the money? And what was it doing in a bowls shoe?

Clearly it had not got there by accident. Money doesn’t tumble unnoticed into shoes in boxes. So it had to have been put there. But why? There, ladies and gentlemen, is your mystery and both Dave and I have a possible solution.

Dave’s runs thus: no one who was hiding a stash of money with a view to coming back for it later would put it in a shoe that might be sold at any moment. Therefore the money must have been put in the shoe before it reached the shop.

The shoes were made in China. The only people who would have access to them would be factory workers. Why would a Chinese factory worker have US$900? Dave reckoned he must have stolen it and hidden it hurriedly. Then either the shoe had been exported before he had the chance to recover it, or else he had forgotten which of the million shoe boxes he’d put it in.

I acknowledged this was possible but for me it brought in too many additional elements. Occam urged us never to multiply essences unnecessarily.

“How about,” I said, “it was the customer that planted the money on an earlier occasion. He then returned knowing that there was only the one pair of bowls shoes in his size, and so you were sure to find the money.”

“But why would he do that?” said Dave.

“Perhaps,” I said, “you have a secret admirer. And he liked the way you held his stockinged foot.”

Dave snorted. But either way, it was finders keepers. Dave blew most of the money on a weekend away with his girlfriend. And soon afterwards they were married.

World, said Louis MacNeice, is more of it than we think.