Well for starters

So far that day we'd had a home invasion false alert, two vehicle parking misdemeanors and a man who claimed that we'd left a truncheon in his trailer for him to use at his leisure and then return. My usual partner in non-crime – since we're cops – Bosisto, was on parental leave trying to settle his cerebral palsy-affected son into an accommodation center that specialised in CP care. I hadn't yet been partnered with anyone, since nothing big had come up where we needed to be out and about and scouting. So, at the boss's order, I spent my time at the station sorting out disowned and abandoned lockers and what they had in them. For a bunch of cops we sure were lax when it came to securing lockers, though of course they were only meant for temp storage of personal items – shoes, mugs, hats, bananas – things of that nature, but I have to say combination locks using dates of birth or cheap padlocks that pop open when rapped sharply on their sides are not going to protect even the freshest of bad bananas.

The desk sergeant watched me with mild interest as I gripped the second-from-last locker door and stood well back before opening it; I could smell something wafting out of the door vent even before I'd got to free whatever it was inside. The sergeant handed me a slip of paper, mumbled that a lady had just come in and handed him the same slip of paper, then took one more glance at the locker before heading back to the desk. I folded the paper and neatly slid it into one of the vent slots on the locker door. The contents of the locker were wholly unsurprising – just a stack of thumbed paperbacks and some rank deodorant that had leaked out of it's pretty packaging. After I was through with the lockers I called our local cleaning contractor and arranged for them to come over and give 'em all a spruce up.

The next morning I remembered the slip of paper that I'd slotted in the vent of the locker door and went over to grab it. The cleaners had since come and done as I'd asked – all spic and span. The slip of paper was MIA. Forty five minutes later the desk sergeant sidled up to my desk, dropped the same slip of paper on my desk, sighed and walked away. The message on the slip was short – Bakery on East and 42^nd illegally entered, please call owner.

After talking to Karen Mulcahey I arranged to meet her at her bakery a bit after 1400 hours. I went by myself because for such a simple task there didn't seem to be a whole lot more that two people could achieve than one person couldn't sort out, plus I'd have to find a Bosisto stand-in, and they weren't easy to come by. Bosisto is a special guy. Mulcahey's Bakery, proudly proclaimed the sign out front - in a grand font of yellow bordered in black - had been trading since 1880. The shop was a quirky affair, solid stone with tiny wood framed windows and set down from the pavement. The steps down to the door dipped in the middle, presumably worn away from thousands of feet trampling their way in empty-handed, and out with a piping hot loaf wedged under their arm.

“Hi, Detective Lambert,' I flipped open my ID “you left a note yesterday regarding an illegal entry. Is that for these premises, Ma'am?”

She quickly wiped her hands on a cloth hanging from her belt and neutrally smiled at me; many a loaf-lover must have received that same beige greeting. “Yes, yes it is. You're kind of late, I was hoping to talk to someone about this yesterday, fresh after the break-in.”

“My apologies, we're a bit short-staffed at the moment” which was technically true. “Can you give me a brief description of what happened here, the illegal entry?”

“Do you know anything about making bread Ms.... Detective Lambert? We do sourdough here, nothing else. It's our specialty.”

“I..... I could, can, give you the basics if that's what you mean.” I tried to figure out where Karen was headed with this. “Ma'am, if you could just tell me what happened here yesterday...”

“They forced the door. Our security, locks, aren't that good; we don't have any cameras.” This was a familiar story I thought “After all we don't keep any money in the shop, and I've got a sign in front that says exactly that.”

“Perhaps it may be time to-” I was interrupted by an old fashioned clanging - the type where hammers strike physical metal bells – to which Karen responded by walking past the ovens, opening the back door and taking receipt of bags of flour in traditional paper sacks. I watched as she neatly stacked the thirty pound sacks in a kind of herringbone pattern – something which she had clearly done many times before.

She returned, not the least bit out of breath from lugging the dead weight of sacks of flour “Yes, I agree. Better locks, alarms maybe.... if I could be bothered. But I wasn't expecting anybody to take what they took.”

“Oh, ok.” I turned to look over the ovens and utensils, counter and cabinets “So something was taken then?”

“The starter.” Karen looked directly at me.

“The starter? It's.... the, the thing.... which?”

“That's why I asked you if you'd baked bread before detective.” Now the smile was genuine.

“I have, yes, but just the type you put in a breadmak-”

“No,” she laughed, starting to enjoy the moment in which the reveal would become apparent “that's not proper breadmaking, it's just going through the motions for people who think they are getting back to basics. They aren't. Not in the slightest. It's mock hardship for those who want to experience the good old days but don't want the dirt, or sweat. Or failure.” This was getting oddly offbeat, I thought.

“I seem to recall....” I started slowly “using yeast, from a packet.”

“Ah, you nearly have it Ms Lambert. Or should I call you Detective?”

“Either, or.”

“The yeast is only part of the equation. Breadmaking, although it may not seem it, requires some innate skills and a feeling for the dough, something that can't really be taught; a natural affinity if you will. Or at least making the good stuff is. We.... Mulcahey's that is, have a large following. When we run at full steam we can make as much as $3500 in a week.”

“Man, that's quite a slab of money-”

“Yes, yes it is. And the reason they come here is because our sourdough is distinctive.”

“And this starter - the thing that was taken – is what exactly? Yeast, I'm assuming?”

“Partly yes, but also a whole lot more. It's our heritage.” Karen walked towards a nearby fridge, opened the door a crack and held the back of her hand there, testing the temperature. She kept talking. “Back in the 1880s, Nell, my great great grandmother, convinced that her sourdough could hold its own started up a bakery. She obtained a batch of yeast, mixed in a sprinkling of water and flour and let it work it's magic, kick-starting the fermentation process by warming the mixture next to a wood stove. Once at critical temperature - where the moist yeast reacts with the natural sugars in the flour, and the oxygen in the air – an irreversible bacterial process begins.”

Her enthusiasm for the stuff seemed unnatural, but I suppose getting up at four in the morning ad-infinitum needs such people.

“So how does something, this microbial process, that happened one hundred forty-odd years ago have any bearing on the break-in Ma'am?”

Karen chewed on her lower lip “The starter made by my great great grandmother is what was stolen.”

“I don't quite see..... How could something survive for that amount of time? And wouldn't it have been all used up long ago?”

“No.”

“No?”

“Because the starter contains bacteria – a living organism – all it needs is the right conditions: flour, moisture, oxygen and warmth and it will ferment endlessly. Mulcaheys have always kept Nell's starter, here in the bakery, stored away carefully. We've always used the same flour – those sacks you saw me stacking – so we just kept feeding Nell's starter. It's the golden goose if you will; or it was.”

“I see. An heirloom that turns a profit.” Not really knowing how I could help – how in hell could I track down a container of 140 year old frothing spawn - I grasped at straws “Can't you get some yeast from a specialty shop and-”

“No Detective, because we don't know where Nell got that original yeast from. It was the link to my ancestors and defines us as Mulcaheys; sourdough made with any other starter won't taste like Mulcahey's sourdough. Nell could have got that yeast from any number of brewers or, I believe that the Fleischmann brothers had begun commercial yeast production at about that time, but there's no way to confirm any of this.”

“Right.”

Karen leant against an oven that should have been hot, but was sitting idle “Did you know that a pizza shop in New York paid more than $2500 for a starter that was supposedly created in the 17^th century?”

“There's a market for this kind of thing? No Ma'am I didn't.”

“It gave their business instant credibility, they're famous now.”

I needed to help this woman somehow, even if the investigation failed to come up with anything tangible. “Ma'am, I think I'll see if there are any security cameras which look out from other shops nearby, or on the street. We may get lucky with a sighting, and possible leads. If you can think of anything else that may help us....”

Karen looked at me earnestly “Well, for starters......”