The cafeteria was noisy, with several groups of students clustered around tables, a couple of lone students in the corners, and a few of the younger professors dining by the windows. The food that glided past on steam-driven conveyor belts looked cheap and filling. The tables were crowded together. In short, the kind of cheap, crowded place you would expect to find students gathered at. The first thing I did was look for a place to hang my coat.
It was easy enough to find. There was a freestanding hat rack piled high with coats near the low wall that separated the eating area from the entrance. Student coats, I decided, particularly since half of them were in danger of falling on the floor and only the solitary students in the corners ever looked at them. There was a second coat rack, this one a board with pegs for the coats nailed to the wall. The coats there were older but had been taken care of, probably the coats of professors who weren't well paid and were trying to make them last. That was the rack to watch. But what was I watching for?
I collected a cheese sandwich and cup of tea from the conveyor belts, paid at the till, and found a small table where I could watch the coat-racks. Everyone was too busy with their own concerns to notice me, so I was able to stare with minimal worries about being noticed. As students came and went, I realized it would be easy enough to walk off with someone else's coat. No one paid much attention, and no one would really notice if the miscreant acted like it was what he intended to do all along. Really, even someone nervous would probably be ignored, or nerves would be put down to an upcoming meeting or lecture, or some kind of prank. If it was a student, of course. A professor might have a harder time getting away with that, but they could always rely on not being seen, which was a very real possibility.
At least half the cricket team came in and piled their coats on top of the ones already precariously hanging on the hat rack, confirming my student coat theory, not that that helped much. Mr. Combe and Mr. Keller from the library came in and tossed their coats in the general direction of the same rack. Both managed to miss completely and left their coats sprawled on the floor like a pair of lifeless, headless bodies. Again, very little information, other than confirming that I spent far too much time around murder. I had almost finished my sandwich when one of the professors whom I didn't know by sight grabbed a coat from the pegboard and walked out. Two more students I recognized from the library came in, saw Mr. Combe's and Mr. Keller's coats, and tossed theirs on top. The professor returned, glanced furtively around, then returned the coat he'd taken and grabbed another one. So confusion with the coats was not unusual. Unfortunately, nothing more interesting happened and eventually I gave in to the pointed stares of the wait staff, and left.