The Jigsaw Puzzle

by Jan Jones

  THE JIGSAW PUZZLE

  The Penny Plain Mysteries: Book

  One

  JAN JONES

  Penny Plain’s odd jigsaw puzzle doesn’t baffle only her. New journalist in town Leo Williams is strangely interested in it too. Like the jigsaw itself, there is more to Leo than meets the eye, but it takes a mystery at an Art Deco gallery to fit the pieces of his riddle together.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter One

  Penny Plain tugged the last dusty box out of her mother’s built-in wardrobe and watched as a spider dropped off the corner before scurrying back inside to rebuild its web. It certainly had plenty of room to do so; Penny had never seen the space so empty. This was positively the worst job, this sifting through someone else’s memories, deciding what to keep, what to donate to the charity shop, and what was junk.

  ‘All of it,’ said her daughter Lucinda without hesitation. ‘It’s all junk. I’m certainly never going to want any of it.’

  Penny sat back on her heels. Lucinda was perched at the dressing table, fussily sifting through her grandmother’s jewellery box, selecting which pieces she’d like as keepsakes. Penny didn’t quite know where she’d gone wrong with her oldest daughter. There had never been an ounce of sentiment in Lucinda. She was twenty-four now, but even as a child she’d been minimalistic and ruthless regarding possessions. Penny had the lowering feeling that whatever was chosen from the jewellery box would find its way onto eBay by the end of the week.

  ‘What about Bobby?’ Penny asked. ‘Wouldn’t he like some of Granny’s toys? You used to love coming up here and playing with them.’

  Lucinda shuddered. ‘Mother, they probably haven’t been sterilised for years! I’m not letting Bobby play with those.’ Her face grew pensive. ‘Unless the clockwork trains are still in the loft.’

  That was more like it! Penny’s grandson was only two. She could see him having hours of fun with those old trains. ‘They might be,’ she said eagerly. ‘Oh, he’ll love them.’

  ‘Not for him,’ said Lucinda. ‘Original boxed Hornby trains fetch a good price. We can use the money to buy Bobby a nice new wooden set.’ She stood up. ‘Time to pick him up from nursery. If you need any more help cleaning this place, just ask.’

  That was rich, considering Lucinda hadn’t done anything during the last hour bar reading the washing labels on the curtains and pointing out areas of dust on the carpets. ‘Thank you,’ said Penny drily.

  Her daughter paused in the doorway, half impatient, half trying to be kind. ‘I know it’s sad about Granny, but it’s been six weeks since she died and we’ve known she was ill for ages. And just think – it’ll be much easier for you to babysit Bobby now you haven’t got to be on call for her all the time. Bye.’

  And the worst of it was, she meant it.

  Penny took a controlled breath and turned back to her task. She made up her mind that if the Hornby set was still in the loft, Noel could have it instead. Her middle child might be twenty-one and in his final year doing Maths at university, but at least he’d enjoy the trains properly!

  Penny looked around the bedroom again, at the sacks of clothes and the boxes of knick-knacks waiting to be shifted out of the way. She’d left this room until last because it was where Mum had spent most of her time these final months. It had held too many memories to be tackled straight off. Should she really get rid of all Mum’s bits and pieces? She knew exactly what her youngest daughter Frances would want, being as how she could rarely be induced to think of anything other than clothes and her Textiles A-level. But what about the generations still to come? They might be outraged if she threw away the ordinary stuff of Great-granny’s life that they might find fascinating later.

  Penny sighed. Speculation wouldn’t get the job done. She lifted the lid of this last box – and had to bite her lips together hard so as not to cry. Inside were games she’d played with as a child. Some were games her mother had played with even earlier than that. All carefully packed away and saved. Coppit. Tangrams. Scrabble. A rush of sadness caught Penny by the throat as she realised she’d never battle Mum to the triple-word score again. She gave a mighty sniff and eased out a package wedged into one corner.

  Unrolled, it proved to be a stout brown envelope, large and old-fashioned. A cream label with a faded red border was gummed squarely in the centre. League of Red Cross Societies it said, also in red, and it was addressed to Home Welfare Section (Salthaven). Penny was bewildered. Why would her mother have a Home Welfare envelope in her games box? There was a Swiss stamp in the corner, a Geneva postmark – and a thickly-printed date which, when peered at closely, looked as if it might read 1943.

  Penny sat down on the bed. Inside the envelope were wooden jigsaw pieces. She shook them into a heap on the duvet. They were hand-cut and wiggly. The facing picture on the jigsaw looked to be an old colour photograph. Now she was even more bewildered. She didn’t remember ever having seen this before.

  If Penny had one besetting sin, it was that she had never been able to resist a mystery. Ignoring the curtains finishing their washing cycle and needing to be hung back up, ignoring hoovering and dusting to be done before the letting agent arrived for a preliminary viewing of the bungalow, she slid down to the floor and started to make the jigsaw right there on the carpet.

  She was used to regular, machine-made puzzles, so she found the pieces fiddly and weird to begin with. And it was very difficult without a reference picture. The edges of the jigsaw went reasonably well: blue was obviously sky, green feathery bits were trees. The photographer’s name was down in the bottom corner. That edge-piece though … Penny’s heart gave an unpleasant lurch as she realised what she was seeing. That was a bit of face! Two eyes and a cut-out hole where the nose and mouth should go. Ugh! She pushed it to one side.

  All of a sudden she wished Lucinda hadn’t gone. Unsympathetic as she was, at least she wasn’t fanciful. Penny snorted, picturing her eldest daughter’s incredulous face if she were to see Penny right at this moment.

  She looked down again. Some of the middle pieces were a nice, dusky pink. That was better. She’d had a patchwork apron when she was a little girl with dusky pink lozenges on it. She remembered sitting in Grandma Astley’s garden, counting the pink patches while everyone else picked apples. Goodness, that was a long time ago. Grandma Astley would have been horrified by Lucinda’s attitude of sell-and-buy-new. She’d been a terror for reusing stuff. Modern-day recycling centres had nothing on her generation. Penny fitted two of the pink jigsaw sections together. She spread out the tiles, looking for more. And shrieked, dropping the piece she’d reached for. Yes, it had a blob of pink. But above a white collar there was clearly part of a child’s face. An eye, a nose and a solemn mouth. Penny hurriedly connected the girl to her dress, hoping it would lessen the impact. It didn’t. The unfinished face stared at her as if it was trying to tell her something. Where was the other eye, for goodness’ sake? Was that it? No, it wasn’t. It was yet another child. A merry, grinning one, this. And there was another bit of face! And another, and another.

  Penny scrambled quickly to her feet and fetched the curtains. It was soothing re-hanging them, turning the bungalow into a potential home again rather than an empty shell missing one vital component. She stuffed the abandoned jigsaw pieces into the envelope and hefted the box to the boot of her car along with everything else. It meant nothing. Just a jigsaw her mother happened to have. She’d probably bought it from the white elephant stall at the hospital bazaar.

  But even with the vacuum cleaner gobbling noisily at stray dust in the carpets, Penny couldn’t get the intent young girl in the pink dress out of her mi
nd. She began to think she knew her. She’d seen that expression before. And the edge piece child that she’d pushed aside – something about the barely-registered uneven fringe was spookily familiar. Almost – although Penny told herself the idea was ridiculous – it was almost like a photo of her own fringe as it had been some forty years ago.

  The letting agent arrived, sympathetic and friendly. She noted down details, talked knowledgeably about what was and wasn’t required for holiday lets or long-term rental, was encouraging about nicely-furnished property in Salthaven being very much sought after, and left Penny with an even longer To Do list than the one she’d started the day with.

  And yet at home again, the first thing Penny did was to set her teeth and tip the jigsaw pieces onto the kitchen table, overriding the way her stomach crawled and squirmed as she fitted together bits of faces she nearly knew on all the little blobs and curves.

  When she’d finished, she stood back and looked at the completed picture. She had to laugh at herself. After all that, it wasn’t anything sinister, just a group of kids and their mothers photographed on a day out in Salthaven Municipal Gardens. Penny could tell it was the Gardens because of the corner of the boating lake and the wrought iron of the flagpole. Those hadn’t changed since Queen Victoria’s day when the Mayor and Corporation had decided Salthaven needed more amenities than just a bustling market and bracing seaside air to attract newly-affluent holiday-makers. This was a very early colour photograph, judging by the hair styles and the fashion and the way the colour of the clothes stood out against the monochrome skin tones. 1930s probably, when colour photos would have been quite a rarity.

  Why would anyone take an expensive memento and turn it into a jigsaw? With a niggle of unease, Penny contemplated the posed children. She didn’t have the satisfaction she normally got from completing a puzzle. Rather, she felt as if there was still something to solve. Who were these people? Why did she think she ought to know them? She looked again at the brown envelope with its red printed label. What was Home Welfare? Why a Geneva postmark? Vague recollections of Red Cross wartime work flitted across her mind. Food parcels. Comforts for the troops. Displaced Persons agency. None of it made sense.

  The girl in the pink dress looked straight out of the puzzle at her. Go on, then, she seemed to say. Find out. I dare you.

  The jigsaw stayed on the kitchen table all afternoon. It was still there when Frances came home – ravenous after a hard day texting her friends and yawning through lessons – to greedily gather up Mum’s velvets, silks, and an ancient taffeta ball gown. The everyday clothes would go to a charity shop, but these special ones would reappear in the fullness of time made into something quite different. Frances was aiming to do fashion and design at university next year. It showed.

  ‘Family photo?’ asked Frances, glancing with interest at the jigsaw.

  ‘I found it at the bungalow. I don’t know who the people are.’

  ‘That woman at the back looks a bit like Granny.’

  ‘She does not! Granny never looked like that.’ But now Penny came to think of it, the woman did have a faintly alarming resemblance to Lucinda.

  ‘The buttons on her blouse are the ones in Granny’s box.’

  Penny’s mouth dropped open. It didn’t occur to her to doubt her daughter. Frances had been going up to Mum’s for years now whenever she wanted something to set her clothes apart from other people’s. She’d inherited the button box as a matter of right. ‘But it can’t be,’ she protested. ‘This photo must have been taken in the thirties. Look at the hairstyles and the dresses. Granny would have been a child.’

  And then it hit her. The little girl with the uneven fringe. The one whose hair looked like an old photo of Penny’s as an infant. She was her mother.

  ‘You all right, Ma?’ Frances sounded quite concerned. Also quite a long way off.

  ‘Yes. Um. Yes, I just need a cup of tea, that’s all.’ She stared at the jigsaw again. How could she not have seen it? It was so obvious now. The little girl was Mum. The woman with the garish blouse was Grandma Astley. Which made the older girl in the dusky pink dress … ‘Aunt Bridget,’ she said aloud.

  Frances reappeared with a handful of lime-green and acid-yellow buttons and a told you so expression. ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Granny, Grandma Astley, Aunt Bridget,’ said Penny, pointing to each one in turn. Of course it was them. How many times had she seen just that look of intent interest on Mum’s older sister’s face, most recently when she’d quizzed Penny on what she was going to do with her life now the kids were grown and Mum gone? She couldn’t believe she hadn’t recognised them before. She supposed it must be because the normal old family photographs were in black and white. She wasn’t used to seeing them in colour. How silly. Penny dismantled the jigsaw feeling anti-climactic and a little foolish. But as she opened the flap of the envelope to sweep the tiles inside, her heart skipped a beat.

  Written on the inside of the envelope itself – in old, brown fountain-pen ink about halfway down – was a message. ‘Yours, old man. Just the job. Many thanks for the loan.’

  Penny stared at it, all her doubts returning. What could that possibly mean?

  It was all very well Aunt Bridget’s image egging Penny on to find out about the jigsaw puzzle, but she had too much to do already. Too much and strangely not enough. She’d been caring for Mum for nearly two years. It was oddly wearing, filling her days with the aftermath of her death. Routine would return in the fullness of time, but meanwhile St Mary’s church fete was the ideal place to unload a number of her mother’s ornaments. She left them at the bric-a-brac stall and was making a quick tour of the room (being seen to buy as well as bring was very important in Salthaven), when she spotted a familiar-looking bundle on the games table. Hardly even realising she was moving, Penny was across the room in a moment and closing her hand on a stout brown Red Cross envelope. Her gasp as she pulled off the elastic band and peered inside drew the attention of a tall man sifting through bags of normal puzzles.

  ‘Something good?’ he said, looking across with a pleasant smile.

  It was completely stupid, but Penny could feel her heart banging. Not because of the strange man, but because of her find. Inside the envelope were wooden jigsaw pieces with a similarly wiggly, uneven cut to the one at home. And this had been made from a photograph too – the same colour quality as hers. She turned to the man, registering that he had shortish dark hair brushed up at the front and that he was slightly younger than her. ‘Just an old jigsaw,’ she said. She bundled it back up and thrust fifty pence at the stall-holder.

  ‘Can I see?’ asked the man. ‘I collect them. In a small way.’

  Penny hesitated. His accent wasn’t local and his attitude was just a tiny bit too eager.

  He gestured to the side room where the refreshments were served. ‘Over tea and a piece of cake, perhaps?’

  Truth to tell, Penny badly needed to sit down. And she desperately wanted to look at the jigsaw. Quite why, she didn’t know. ‘I – yes, all right.’

  He grinned. ‘I promise not to mug you if it turns out to be valuable. My name is Leo Williams, by the way.’

  Him giving his name was insidiously comforting. ‘I’m Penny. Penny Plain.’

  He chuckled. He had nice crinkles round his eyes. ‘You must be married. No parent would voluntarily come up with that combination for their child.’

  Penny laughed. ‘Divorced.’

  ‘That makes two of us. What happened in your case?’

  She noticed he walked with a limp, so she slowed her normal pace, hoping he wouldn’t realise and get embarrassed. ‘Rose-coloured spectacles on my part,’ she said ruefully. ‘Julian was twenty-five, completely charming, and engagingly ambitious when I married him. Three grown-up children later he is still twenty-five, still completely charming, and still ambitious. Also extremely high maintenance. It took me a while, but eventually I realised he genuinely couldn’t understand me devoting time to the kids instead of to him
, and he honestly didn’t see that I needed any space for myself. I stuck with him for the children’s sake, but just as it got to the point where I couldn’t cope with him any more, he told me he’d already found someone else who could. So we parted. How about you?’

  She only asked out of politeness. Leo might be a nice-looking chap, but Penny wasn’t aiming to change her single state any time soon. After Julian, it was sheer luxury to have her life to herself.

  Leo’s face twisted. ‘My wife said I was married to my job. She was probably right, but we’d been together for a couple of years before the wedding so she knew what she was taking on and she’d never complained about it before. Apparently being married is different and Kayleigh thought I ought to have known that. After several epic arguments on the subject she went home to Mummy and Daddy, taking our son with her. Just like that, while I was at work. In the goodbye note there was a list of betting odds on the length of time before I noticed they’d gone.’

  ‘That was a bit uncalled for,’ said Penny awkwardly.

  ‘I thought so. Possibly I should have waited to cool down before I phoned to tell her. It, er, didn’t help the reconciliation process.’ He took a deep breath. ‘Enough of that. Tea or coffee? And which cake would you like? I’ll have a slice of date and walnut.’

  Penny smiled at the woman behind the table. ‘One of your cream scones, please, Mrs Beattie.’

  Leo flicked a shrewd glance at her as she took an empty chair. ‘You’re local, then?’

  She was momentarily startled at the quickness of the deduction. Not that there was any reason for her to hide the fact. It was just strange that he seemed keen to know. ‘Yes, I’ve lived in Salthaven all my life.’

  ‘I used to come here for the holidays when I was young. My mother’s uncle lived in one of the big houses up on the cliff. He was an inventor, so his place was paradise for an active boy like me. I moved back here after …’