The Jigsaw Puzzle (9 page)

‘He must have stored the original paintings at his own house while the exhibition was on,' said Penny, working it out aloud. ‘Then returned home after being demobbed to find his copies returned to the artists by mistake.'

‘He's not the sort to chase trouble, so he sits tight and waits for people to notice. And if they don't, the real paintings stay in his loft gathering dust. A charming time bomb for his descendants.'

Penny stared at Leo, light dawning at last. ‘That's it,' she said softly. ‘Alice has been
putting the paintings back.
'

They sat in the cabin with a pot of tea and thrashed it out. Once you accepted that the paintings now in the gallery were the originals, everything fitted. Alice's paranoia about collecting the canvases herself. Nothing showing up on the CCTV on the nights of the break-ins – because, of course, she knew where the cameras were.

‘Her bonfires!' cried Penny. ‘It wasn't a sudden interest in gardening at all! The weeds were camouflage for the destruction of the copies. Thank goodness for that. I was really struggling with her being a garden goddess as well as every other sort.'

‘Why go to all that bother?'

‘Oh come on, Leo, you're the journalist! In case the fakes were ever proved, of course. You heard her polishing up Greville's memory last night. Now, no one can smear her about him. Alice is going to be the most squeakily-clean politician in history.'

Penny sat back in her chair with a lovely sense of satisfaction at having solved the puzzle. Greville had made each copy with a deliberate error, so Alice had simply been tidying up. Doing what should have been done sixty years before. She looked across at Leo, expecting him to share the triumph.

 Instead he was frowning. ‘Salthaven must be getting to me,' he said ruefully. ‘I can't write this story.'

Penny's heart missed a beat. Of course! She'd forgotten. Leo hadn't just been solving a puzzle like her. He was looking for copy. ‘We don't have any actual evidence,' she began hastily.

‘It's not that. I could find that.' Leo made a frustrated gesture. ‘It's Alice herself. This is an annoyingly efficient woman who gets real results for her local community. All she's been doing is putting things right without telling anyone. How can I expose that?'

Penny let out her breath in a whoosh. ‘If you mean it, then I'm glad. Because I honestly do want Alice to be selected for this seat. I want her to win the election and go to Westminster and take Julian with her, even if it's only temporarily.' As she said it, she experienced a surprising revelation of her own. ‘I need to move on.'

Leo sat up. ‘Move on? Now? But I've only just got here.'

Penny felt a tiny frisson. ‘You mean you're staying?'

‘Salthaven is as fine a place as any for a fresh start.'

‘It's a long way from London.'

He looked pensive for a moment. ‘That's not necessarily a bad thing.'

‘There are ruts.'

‘Not when I'm around,' he said firmly, then smiled. ‘Come on, I promised you some lunch.'

‘Are you sure? Oh, wait, this is going on expenses, right?'

He got up. ‘Absolutely not. Not if I can't use the story.'

‘Good heavens. Morals!'

He put on an offended look. Then, ‘Seafood do you? The Crown & Anchor owes me a favour.'

Penny grinned. Moving on might not be so painful after all.

Next in the Penny Plain Mysteries
Just Desserts

A pub with an odd menu, a missing 1950s test plane, the Salthaven WI Village Show, unlikely development on the Enterprise Park and Penny's eldest daughter behaving out of character. It can only be a Penny Plain Mystery.

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Copyright © Jan Jones 2013

The right of Jan Jones to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

ISBN 9781783751037

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the publishers: Accent Press Ltd, Ty Cynon House, Navigation Park, Abercynon, CF45 4SN

The stories contained within this book are works of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the authors' imaginations and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental