Chapter Fourteen

Bundled up against the mid-November night with a cheerful red-and-black-checked scarf looped around her neck and her hands kept warm in the handmade black knitted mittens Victoria had given her for Christmas last year, Penny breathed in the fresh, cold air. She was happy to be on her way. Her short journey would take her along the bank of the River Conwy to the nursing home, where her friend Jimmy Hill had lived for several years.

The familiar smell of disinfectant and old age that greeted her as she entered the building no longer bothered her as it once had. Penny returned the receptionist’s greeting and made her way to the residents’ lounge at the rear of the building.

She found Jimmy in his wheelchair chatting with another resident. “This is Mrs. Lynch,” Jimmy said. “She’s a new girl. Only been here about a week or so.” Mrs. Lynch’s violet-blue eyes twinkled in a friendly, interested way, and her hair, framing her surprisingly unlined face in soft white waves, looked freshly washed and set. Penny’s attention drifted momentarily while she wondered about Mrs. Lynch’s skin care regime.

“Jimmy’s been telling me all about you, so he has,” Mrs. Lynch said in a soft Irish accent. “Thinks the world of you,” she added. To Penny’s ears, she pronounced “thinks” to sound like “tinks.”

“Well, I’m very fond of him, too,” Penny replied. “We’ve been pals for a long time.”

“Well, Jimmy, I’m sure you’ll be wanting some time alone with your visitor, so I’ll be off now,” said Mrs. Lynch.

“I’ll join you for a cup of cocoa later, maybe,” said Jimmy.

“Aye, that would be grand,” she replied, beaming at him. And then grasping her stick and leaning on it, she rose heavily to her feet. “It doesn’t get any easier,” she said, “this old age thing. My legs feel like they’re made of lead today. I can barely lift them.” And then, with a final nod at Jimmy, she plodded across the room, one slow step at a time, her beige stockings pooling around her ankles, in the direction of a small group of women clustered together on the other side of the room. Rather than joining them, however, she sat a little way off by herself and took out her phone.

Jimmy turned a pair of faded, watery blue eyes to Penny and held out his hand. “She’s always on that phone,” he remarked. “I don’t see what’s so smart about it. You can’t have a decent conversation with her. Always being interrupted by that phone beeping.”

“Grandchildren, perhaps,” said Penny.

“Maybe,” said Jimmy, “Anyway, what’s the craic, as Mrs. Lynch would say?”

“I wondered if you’d heard,” said Penny. “Theft up at the Hall on Saturday night.” Jimmy’s eyebrows shot up. He’d had a long career as a petty thief in the North Wales area, with occasional forays as far as Liverpool. A slow smile spread across his face as he took off his glasses, gave them a wipe on his shirt, and settled into his chair.

“No, I haven’t heard. Tell me about it. Every last detail. Don’t leave anything out.”

“I’ll start by saying the robbery was clever and seemed well planned. And the timing was no coincidence.”

“At the Hall, you said. So, posh. Jewellery, was it? I remember that time Lady What’s-Her-Name’s tiara was stolen from a country house. It was a sensation. Front-page news for days. The tiara was never seen again, of course. Would have been taken to London or Amsterdam within a day or two and broken up and the diamonds sold. The police were so desperate to recover it, they even put the word out appealing to folks in my line of work to let them know if we heard anything. Of course we never did, and if we had, whether we’d have shared that information with the rozzers, who never did much for us, is another story.”

“Well, at least the artefact stolen from the Hall won’t be broken up. At least I don’t think it would be. I certainly hope not.”

“What are we talking about? What was taken?”

“The Black Chair.”

“I’m not with you.” Because Jimmy was English, not Welsh, he did not know the history of the Black Chair. When Penny finished describing how the chair had been awarded posthumously to the poet Hedd Wyn at the 1917 Birkenhead Eisteddfod, the cultural significance of the chair to the Welsh people, and how it had come to be at the Hall on its way back from refurbishment, he let out a long, low groan, mixed with a resigned sigh.

“Oh, no,” said Penny. “That doesn’t sound good.”

“No,” said Jimmy. “It isn’t. It could have been taken to be held for ransom, or even to raise money for terrorists, but I think it was most likely stolen to order for a private collector.”

“Why do you think that?”

“You could never sell something like that, even on the black market. Way too hot. And the market for it, just as a chair, would be small. Not worth the effort on that account. No, its value lies in its history, its association. The story behind it, if you like. It’s not like Lady What’s-Her-Name’s tiara.”

In response to Penny’s puzzled frown, he continued, “Well, they’re diamonds, aren’t they? They have value in their own right, just because they’re, well, diamonds. And if there’s a historical association with them, all the better.”

“So what do you think is happening to the chair right now?”

“Every antiques expert in the country will have been made aware of the theft and asked to be on the lookout for it. There could even be a global watch on it. Art and antiquities is the third-most profitable criminal enterprise in the world, behind drugs and arms dealing. Very unsavoury people, let me tell you. And here’s what the black market in looted antiquities looks like. They disappear, smuggled out of the source country, and then, eventually, miraculously reappear, sometimes many years later, in the market country. By then, of course, they’ve acquired a bunch of phony papers designed to make it look like they’ve got a legitimate provenance. And they pass through a lot of hands before they reach their new owners, who are willing to pay a lot of money for them. And these new owners aren’t fussy about how the antiquities were obtained or how much they cost. But that won’t be the case for something as well known and documented as this chair.

“No, I’d wager that this particular chair was stolen to order for a private collector.”

“But if that’s the case, it may turn up eventually,” said Penny. “That’s happened with art plundered by the Nazis, which is gradually being recovered, and some is even being returned to its rightful owners, the families that owned it before the war.”

“True. But that’s taken over seventy years.”

“We can’t wait that long. We’ve got to get it back, because it’s part of an exhibit that the Prince of Wales is coming to open in about three weeks.” They sat for a moment in a defeated silence, and then Penny said, “How do you think the thieves pulled it off? Will the next words I hear be ‘inside job’?”

“Inside job.”

“How inside are we talking?”

“Deep inside. First, someone had to know the chair was going to be at the Hall. Then, they had to know exactly whereabouts in the Hall it was going to be. You can’t have thieves wandering around asking staff, ‘Excuse me, we’re here to nick the Black Chair; can you tell us where we might find it?’ and third, there’s the access issue. In the event the back door was locked, you need someone to open it, or better yet, to make for easier timing, make sure it will be left unlocked. And in this case, because the item being stolen is substantial in size—unlike, say, Lady What’s-Her-Name’s tiara—there has to be enough people actually inside the building to carry it out quietly, and without damaging it. This is important. Someone was willing to pay a lot of money to have a lot of people go to a lot of trouble, and they wouldn’t have coughed up all that money unless they were sure they were going to get what they were after, and in perfect condition. They wouldn’t settle for damaged goods.”

Penny clasped her hands together and leaned forward. “Okay. That’s a lot of information for me to process. Let’s take all this one step at a time. You said someone had to know the chair was going to be at the Hall. Who had to know? Who is that someone?”

“It could be one of two people. Either the person who wanted the chair knew it would be there and arranged to have it stolen, or that person asked someone else to arrange for it to be stolen. Are you with me? Or the theft started at the other end, with the person who arranged for it to be stolen knowing it would be there, and he had a buyer, or figured he could find someone who would want to buy it once he had it in his possession, so the theft started with him. Lots of ways it could happen.”

“Let’s come back to the second person, the person who knew it was going to be there and thought he could find a buyer after he’d stolen it. Now, as far as I know, there was nothing in the papers or any publicity about the chair going to be there.”

“I should hope not.”

“So let’s think about who might have known that the chair would be at Ty Brith Hall that night.”

“Did the people at the dinner party know they were going to see it?”

“Yes,” said Penny, starting to understand what Jimmy was getting at. “I’m afraid they did.”

“Well, that’s all it would take. Remember during the war there were those posters ‘Loose lips sink ships’? A guest could have mentioned to a friend that the Black Chair was going to be there, and that friend told another friend, and so on. Word gets around, and really quickly, too.”

Penny’s heart sank. Mrs. Lloyd. From the moment she heard the Black Chair was going to be on view, she would have told anyone and everyone about the dinner. “And knowing which room in the Hall where the chair was?”

“Easy. Someone on the inside just has to find out where it is and then text someone in the gang, preferably well before the event to make planning easier, but if needs be, even while the gang is waiting outside to go in and get it.”

“So a waiter, maybe?”

Jimmy nodded. “Someone like that. A waiter would be good cover.” Penny remembered Gwennie having to tell a waiter to switch off his phone. Of course, he could have been texting anyone, letting his girlfriend know what time he expected to finish, say, but still …

“Let’s talk about what kind of collector would be interested in an artefact like the Black Chair,” said Penny. “Someone with a keen interest in the First World War, or twentieth-century Welsh literature, maybe.”

“Someone with deep pockets. Operations like this don’t come cheap.”

“And do you think the Black Chair is still in the country?”

Jimmy inhaled sharply. “Hard to say. No, make that impossible to say. But it could be. There’s a chance that it is, because of its size. It would be difficult to smuggle across a border because of its size, unless it could be taken apart. And it would need extensive paperwork that it may not have. I hope it is still in the country, because the chance of recovering it is much greater if it’s still here in the U.K.”

After a moment, he added, “But there is something else that might happen to it. The worst-case scenario.”

“Oh, no.”

“Yes. It could be destroyed.”

“Destroyed?”

“You see, while the collectors place a high value on the work and are desperate to own it, the people who are hired to steal artwork or artefacts, they don’t actually give a toss about it. They don’t care about beauty, or cultural or historical value. They aren’t bothered about whether or not it’s exposed to the wrong temperatures or high humidity. To them, it’s just an object and the only value it has is what they can get for it. And if things get too hot, if the police are getting close, for example, before they can deliver it to the new owner, they have no problem getting rid of it so they don’t get caught with it.”

“Getting rid of it. You mean …”

“Your chair could end up at the bottom of a lake. Or cut up for firewood.”

Penny groaned. “Oh, God, I hope not. I can’t bear to think of something awful like that happening to it.”

“I know you’re always interested in crime, but you seem to be taking a special interest in this. Why is that?”

“Two reasons. First, because I was the one looking after the dinner party. Emyr asked me to organize it.”

“So you feel you’re somehow responsible for this, because it happened on your watch?”

Penny lowered her eyes and mumbled, “Something like that.”

“Well, let me disabuse of you that notion, my dear. This heist was weeks in the planning, and there’s nothing you or anyone else could have done to prevent it. The house would have been thoroughly checked out in advance. They would have been familiar with the routine of everyone in the house, and known the location of every motion-sensitive light, every security camera …”

“There weren’t any,” said Penny.

“You must be joking,” said Jimmy. “In this day and age? I’m really shocked. So making off with that chair was taking candy from a baby. Well, there you go. Once the thieves knew there was no security, there would have been no deterrent, no reason for them not to go ahead. So as for you thinking you could have done something to prevent the theft, I rest my case.”

“Emyr’s having security lights and cameras installed this week, or so I understand.”

“Horse. Barn door,” scoffed Jimmy. “You’d think he would have known better, a beautiful house like that. But nevertheless, the police will be doing everything they can to recover it. They’ll pull out all the stops for a national treasure.”

“Well, the thing is, there’s more to the story. I haven’t got to the worst bit yet. A young man who was working as a waiter at the event died, but I don’t have all the details yet.” Penny described how she had found Rhodri Phillips, barely clinging to life, behind the house. “Sadly, he died even before they could get him to hospital, and it turned out that he’s the nephew of our receptionist at the Spa. The family’s terribly upset, as you can imagine.”

“Oh, of course they would be. I’m so sorry to hear this.”

“So you see, the two crimes seem to be connected—the robbery, and the death of Rhodri Phillips. At least they happened at the same place, at the same time. I’m convinced that finding the chair will lead us to the murderer. But Emyr’s afraid that the murder will get more attention from the police. You know how they’re always going on about how limited their resources are.”

Jimmy smiled. “I wish they’d been a bit more limited in my day. The police always seemed to have plenty of time and all the resources they needed back then, at least as far as me and my mates were concerned.”

“Look at you now. As respectable as they come. And they say leopards don’t change their spots.” She stirred in her chair. “It’s getting late and I haven’t had my dinner yet, and I need to get home to feed Harrison. He doesn’t like when I’m late. Doesn’t speak to me for the rest of the evening.”

She reached over and kissed Jimmy on his papery cheek. As her lips grazed his skin, he reached up and clung to her arm.

“Come and see me again soon,” he said. “Keep me informed. Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help.”

“I’m surprised the police haven’t been round to talk to you.”

“The police? Talk to me? Why would the police want to talk to me? They know what they’re doing. They don’t need any help from an old codger like me. What use am I to anyone stuck in here? I didn’t see anything. I don’t know anything.”

“Oh, yes, you do. You’re a wonderful local resource. I’ve learned a lot, and the police might, too, if they took the time to talk to you. And I’m sure you’d love helping the police with their enquiries.”

Jimmy grinned.

“And yes, I will come and see you soon. As soon as I learn more.” She buttoned up her coat and wrapped the scarf around her neck. “Well, enjoy your cocoa with Mrs. Lynch. It seems you’ve got a new lady friend every time I come to see you.”

“That’s because there’s a high turnover in here, Penny. No one stays very long.”

Penny had stayed longer at the nursing home than she’d planned to, and the reception desk was unattended when she left. She paused at the visitors’ book to sign out but discovered she’d forgotten to sign in, so she completed both entries. As she was about to set off for home, she realised how hungry she was. She thought about what she had at home to eat, and knowing her fridge was practically empty, and since the Co-op wasn’t much out of her way, she decided to pop in and pick up a few fruits and vegetables and perhaps a piece of salmon so she could prepare a decent dinner.

She entered the welcome warmth of the supermarket and strolled up and down the aisles, filling her basket, and was soon on her way. But instead of taking the usual way home, along the river, the detour to the supermarket meant she’d have to take the slightly longer route through the town. Carrying a reusable cloth tote bag in each hand, she set off at a brisk pace, passing darkened shops, some closed for the night and a few boarded up with TO LET signs. While she’d been in the supermarket, it had started to rain, and now, with both hands full, she’d have to set the bags down on the wet, dirty pavement to put up her hood. She chose to make the best of it, to just keep walking and get home as quickly as she could.

Although she was used to it by now, when she’d started living in Llanelen she’d been surprised by how quickly town turned into country. The houses just came to an abrupt stop and fields took over. There was the last house and beside it, a field. Soon the pavement below her feet disappeared, replaced by a well-trodden dirt path that ran along the roadside. Streetlights, spaced further apart here than they had been a few minutes earlier, were the only source of light. Droplets of rain slanted in their arcs of yellow light, making a light, swooshing sound. Black tree branches waving at the side of the road cast shadows, which Penny’s active imagination saw as figures dancing.

She picked up the pace, hearing and seeing no one, until she reached the fields close to her home. Normally, they were empty except for grazing sheep that came and went with the seasons, and in late summer they were filled with the sights, sounds, and smells of the annual agricultural show. The fields had been empty when she’d passed by on her walk to work this morning, but now they were buzzing with activity.

In the jerry-rigged lighting that had been erected at the far end of the field, she could make out camper vans, trucks, cars, and caravans, some distance away from the road, filling the fields. Dogs barked, and men called out to each other.

She slowed down long enough to take it all in, then hurried the rest of the way home, and a few minutes later let herself into her cottage.

She set down the rain-soaked bags and took off her wet boots, leaving them to one side to dry. She shrugged out of her coat, glistening with rainwater, and ran her fingers over her damp hair to see if it was wet enough to need a toweling. Deciding it would dry quickly enough, she ducked into the sitting room, switched on a couple of lamps, and drew the curtains against the darkness outside. She leaned over to pat Harrison curled up on the end of the sofa and switched on the gas fire. The fire sprang to life, and with the closed curtains and the soft warmth of the lamps, the room became instantly cozy and comforting.

She picked up the shopping bags and carried them along with her wet coat into the kitchen. After draping the coat over the back of a chair to dry, she switched on the radio to listen to the news, set the oven to preheat, and began unpacking the shopping. As she placed the salmon and broccoli on the work top, a beep from her coat pocket signalled an incoming text.

LOCK YOUR DOORS.