The Jigsaw Puzzle (4 page)

‘Like Q's workshop in the Bond films?'

‘Exactly like that. Do you know what clinched it? It was Rose talking about picnics. I suddenly remembered a jigsaw of a picnic that I used to play with when I stayed here. It fascinated me because it was so extraordinary. Grown-ups in their best clothes with a tablecloth on the grass outside and everything arranged properly on plates, with knives and forks. In a batty way it fitted the whole batty house. Let me see your envelope again.'

There were benches placed at intervals so people could sit and watch the river. Penny sat down and rummaged in her bag. ‘I forgot to say – there's a thank you note written on the inside of the envelope. Saving paper in wartime, I suppose. Here you are.'

He squinted to read it. She saw a shock of recognition in his eyes. ‘Another clincher,' he said. ‘Penny, I think this is Uncle Charles's writing.'

Penny gazed through the Victorian wrought-iron railings at the river. Sun sparkled on the water. Boats bobbed gently at their moorings. The tang of salt air came up from the sea, mixing with the familiar, ever-present smell of barley from the Seagull brewery. It was ridiculous to feel down. ‘Then it's easy,' she said briskly. ‘You can get the whole story straight from the horse's mouth. End of puzzle.' The odd feeling must be the effect of a glass of wine with lunch, she decided, and had a sudden huge thirst for tea.

‘You'll have to come too,' said Leo.

Penny was startled right out of her doldrums. ‘What? Why?'

‘Oh come on, Penny! I can't sit down for a whisky and soda with my great-uncle and ask him if he happened to be involved in WW2 espionage.'

‘You big wuss.'

‘Got it in one. Would you like a cup of tea?'

Penny stared at him. Did he read minds as well? ‘I'd kill for one.' She scanned the shops lining the road. ‘There's a café across there if it's not full of tourists.'

Leo grinned and climbed over the railing. ‘Who needs a café?'

Penny's eyes widened. Leo had stepped aboard a neat blue-hulled cruiser and was fitting a key into the hatch lock. ‘What are you doing?' she shrieked.

‘Putting the kettle on.'

She darted through the nearest gap in the railings. ‘Leo, whose boat is this?'

‘Mine. I live on it.'

‘With your leg?'

‘Well no, obviously, I take that off and leave it on the bank.'

‘Sorry.'

‘I'm not a cripple, Penny.'

She'd offended him. She hastily followed him on board. ‘Sorry. You said you'd broken your leg in four places – I assumed a boat would be hard work, physically.'

‘I manage.'

Oh dear, she really had offended him. She cast around for something to make amends. ‘I'll come and see your uncle with you if you really want me to.'

Leo disappeared down the cabin steps. She heard him strike a match, heard him set a kettle on the hob. ‘Sure?'

‘Yes.'

‘OK.' He came back up to the cockpit. His sudden change to cheerfulness suggested she'd been had. ‘Have a look around if you like.'

Penny couldn't resist the invitation. She'd been on boats before – living in Salthaven it was difficult not to – but there was something endlessly fascinating in seeing how everything was arranged to make the maximum use of the space.

She wasn't sure what she'd expected, but as soon as she descended the steps she realised that the boat felt like Leo. The saloon was neat and tidy, not in a minimalistic way, but because everything had a place. And all those places were used to capacity. Frances would love this, thought Penny as she lifted a seat cover to reveal a cubby hole stuffed with books. On the shelf above the seat was a photo of a small dark-haired boy, one of those endearing first school photos taken before the child has quite grown into his new uniform. There was no photo of the boy's mother. The kettle was boiling. Penny turned off the gas, only to realise that the engine had started. What's more, the boat was moving!

She shot up the steps. ‘Leo! I said a cup of tea – not a cruise!'

‘We're going to visit Great-uncle Charles.'

They were what?
‘I can't!' she said in consternation. ‘I've got things to do. I have to be back when Frances gets home.'

‘Text her. She's got a key, hasn't she? Penny, if I don't do this now, I'll start thinking about it and then I won't do it at all.'

Madness. Penny
always
thought about things first. ‘Why by boat?' she said helplessly.

‘I don't have a car.'

‘Why not? Motability do adapted ones if your leg is a problem.'

His voice flattened. ‘It's not that. Leave it, Penny.'

A tiny shock rooted her to the deck. She had been thinking of Leo as a pleasant opportunist, but all of a sudden he'd shown a streak of granite. She looked at his set face, thinking she might have to reassess him.

‘Anyway,' he continued, still staring ahead at the rippled water as he steered to one side of a line of half-grown ducks. ‘This is quicker than going by road. Thwaite Hall is only fifteen minutes down the river.'

His great-uncle lived at Thwaite Hall? That was a very posh retirement home indeed. It had been a proper manor house until the family had run out of money and were forced to sell. And Leo had retreated somewhere inside himself. Penny went below and made the tea with a great deal of unnecessary noise. When she brought the mugs up to the cockpit, they'd left Salthaven behind and were heading upriver. Woodland had taken the place of roads and houses. It was nice, but Penny still felt perturbed. ‘Handy,' she said, ‘your uncle being close.'

He grinned. ‘It's the only thing that reconciled my mother to my absconding from the family home without so much as a walking stick. She thought I'd have to be sensible if he was nearby. I don't follow her logic myself.'

Leo had a mother? Of course he had a mother. Everyone had a mother. Everyone except her. ‘I expect she cares about you,' she said, her voice too loud.

She felt his eyes on her. ‘Drink your nice tea and relax.'

‘You realise this is kidnap?'

He sighed. ‘Do you never do anything spontaneous?'

‘Never.' And heard Aunt Bridget's voice, clear as day.
‘I worry about you, Penny. You're in a rut.'
It was a nice rut, she thought rebelliously. You knew where you were in a rut.

The grounds at Thwaite Hall sloped down to the river. Leo tied up at a jetty and gave Penny a helping hand out of the boat. As they walked across the springy lawn towards the fine Georgian facade of the house, Penny felt more and more out of her depth. Great-uncle Charles was discovered on the terrace with other residents, compiling a crossword in the late sunshine.

‘You'll never guess what I've been doing,' said Leo. ‘For the past few days I've been chasing a story in ever decreasing circles – and it's led me to you!'

The elderly eyes were a near-transparent grey. ‘Good afternoon, my dear,' he said to Penny. ‘Do forgive my nephew's execrable manners.'

Leo fetched a couple of wooden chairs. ‘This is Penny, Uncle Charles. She's an Astley. Lives in Salthaven. I think you may have known her grandfather. She'd like to know about her jigsaw. Do you recognise the cut at all?'

Leo's great-uncle filled in another word on his grid. ‘I'm more of a crossword chap myself.'

‘You're anything you put your mind to, you old fraud. The Salthaven puzzles. What were they for? The war is long over now. You can tell.'

He got an unexpectedly beady look in return. ‘That's what they all say, lad. Got your memory back, have you?'

‘No. Don't try and distract me.'

‘What's wrong with your memory?' said Penny.

Leo glanced at her in exasperation. ‘It's nothing to do with this.'

‘I'd like to know, though.'

Leo spoke rapidly. ‘I can't remember anything at all about the week leading up to the crash. I woke up in hospital with seven or eight days missing from my life. I'm not happy about it and I don't want to talk about it.' He turned to his uncle. ‘But I
do
want to talk about the jigsaws.'

‘Jigsaws?'

Leo swallowed an imprecation. ‘If the one I'm thinking of isn't still in your room I'll turn in my NUJ card!' He strode into the house.

‘Always was impetuous,' murmured the old man.

When Leo came back he had a bag of jigsaw pieces and two trays. ‘Told you,' he said and gave a tray to Penny. ‘Fancy a race?'

Penny put her family jigsaw together again and watched Leo until he placed the last tile in a photograph of a pre-war picnic. ‘I see what it is now,' he said quietly. ‘It's the lawn at Outlook House.' He tapped his thumb on a willowy young man seated on a rug handing a plate to a beautiful, dark-haired young woman. Both of them were smiling at the camera as if they hadn't a care in the world. ‘And that's you, Uncle Charles. So what's the story?'

The old man's see-through gaze rested on the jigsaw. The pen was slack in his hand. The deliberate devilment that had been in evidence when he was crossing swords with his nephew was gone. ‘They don't make summers like they used to,' he said, and sighed. ‘I think I'd like to go inside.'

Penny followed behind with the jigsaw trays as Leo helped his uncle up the ramp and across a thickly-carpeted drawing room towards the lift. Residents murmured. Staff were in discreet attendance. Penny felt her eyebrows soar into her hairline. This place cost a
lot
of money.

Uncle Charles's room was large and cluttered. Books, papers, and photos were strewn around over handsome furniture that went with an earlier age. While Leo settled his uncle in a chair, pulled up a side table and mixed drinks from the cabinet, Penny's eyes ranged over the photographs. There was one of a young Leo with a woman who must be his mother. There was one of Leo older, a smart blonde attached to his arm and the small boy she recognised from the boat photo leaning against their legs. There was a crowd of young men in flannels and blazers in front of Outlook House, a school group, a rowing eight … and a studio portrait of a beautiful dark-haired woman.

Penny turned her head. ‘What was her name?' she asked.

The grey eyes met hers. Great-uncle Charles's faded charm was still there, along with heartbreak and loss. ‘Arlette,' he said. ‘So bright, she was. So clever. Like a skylark, flying high and beautiful. She wasn't just academic, she was artistic too. Other girls embroidered for recreation. Arlette made patterns in wood. I said once that it looked as though she was cutting runes. She laughed and replied that it would have to be a binary code, then, there not being scope for much more. So very clever, we were. So privileged. We thought our way of life would last for ever.'

He stared into his drink. Beside him, Leo was watchful. ‘What happened?'

‘In those days young people followed their parents' wishes. None of us really thought there would be a war. Arlette's parents wanted her home for a while, so she went. It wouldn't have been for long. She was coming back.' He turned his head to gaze at her photograph. ‘But the Germans arrived first.'

 Penny glanced at Leo. He was sitting quite still, all his attention on his uncle. How could he be so detached? Penny's heart was tearing up, listening to the halting narrative.

‘It wasn't in Arlette to stand idly by,' continued Uncle Charles. ‘She had contacts everywhere and she made more. She ran an escape route for refugees and prisoners of war from Lyons to Geneva, right under the Germans' noses. She collected information from her sources about strategic sites and passed it back to us by radio. Then the local operative was caught and tortured, and after that Arlette wouldn't risk more lives. After a couple of weeks of silence, I received an envelope, purportedly from the Red Cross, containing that jigsaw. No note. No explanation. It took me a day to work out the code.'

‘What did it say?' asked Penny.

‘
I love you. Send me more. Plus safe address.'

‘So you advertised in the
Messenger
.'

‘I sent her photos, prints, anything. She sent grid references and defences.'

‘How?' asked Leo, frowning.

The old man in the chair smiled. He traced the cuts as Frances had done. ‘An upwards loop for a ‘one' and a downwards loop for a ‘zero'. A gentle wave for a space. If you express numbers in binary that's all you need.'

‘I'm sorry,' said Penny apologetically. ‘I don't quite understand.'

She saw him consider how best to explain and got an inkling of the intelligence still there in his mind. ‘In our decimal system of counting we have units, tens, hundreds, so as soon as you reach nine, you add one to the ‘tens' column and start again from zero on the units. Binary is to the base two. There are only the figures zero and one. Each new column is a power of two: units, twos, fours, sixteens, and so on. So in Arlette's jigsaws one up-loop and two down-loops, for instance, equals one ‘four' plus no ‘twos' plus no ‘ones'. Four in total. Three up-loops would equal four plus two plus one – making seven. Letters A to Z are numbers one to twenty-six. Arlette gave grid references for bridges, factories, camps – anything she thought the Allies might find useful. They were followed by codes indicating how heavily defended the places were. If a jigsaw fell into the wrong hands, it would simply look like some poor chap's memento of home. That's why I preferred to use photographs. I borrowed them from everyone I knew, your grandfather amongst them. The adverts were boxed up to make them appear as if they were toys to sell. I suppose Arlette smuggled everything across the boundary the same as she did her airmen.'

‘You suppose?'

Another brief silence. ‘She fell ill. Worked herself too hard. There wasn't enough food. She didn't have the reserves to fight. I never saw her again.'