‘The Excitements’ Chapters 31-36

They were married at the Chelsea Register Office and held their reception in the garden at the Chelsea Arts Club. They were neither of them artists, but several of the members frequented the poker games Connor held in his tumble-down South Kensington house and thus he’d become an honorary member. They were toasted from “lunchtime till Christmas” as Connor described it. A couple of quite notable painters staged a sort of duel, scribbling portraits of the bride and groom. The wedding photographs were taken by a society snapper who’d come straight from photographing The Beatles.

“My beautiful wife,” Connor began his speech. He looked at Penny with such softness in his eyes then that those guests in attendance who had been running a book on how long the marriage would last—“Six months tops”—began to revise their estimates upwards. Love really was a mysterious thing.

“Why him?” Josephine had asked, quite reasonably, the evening before the wedding. “Why now?” Josephine had been married since 1950, when she finally accepted Gerald Naiswell’s proposal, but Penny had always insisted that she did not need a man in her life. Josephine didn’t know about Frank because then she would have to know about everything else. At least, that was how Penny saw it. Instead Penny said she was happy to earn her own way and live according to her own rules. She’d never had any desire to have children, saying that the children she’d cared for in her role as a social worker had scratched that itch for good. Especially after what happened with Jinx. After everything she had done for her that girl had broken Penny’s heart. She didn’t have to be a parent to understand King Lear’s complaint, “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is, to have a thankless child.”

“Connor and I understand each other,” said Penny.

It seemed a good enough answer. And seeing Connor’s smile as he looked at Penny’s face, anyone might have believed it.

WITH AN HOUR to go before dinner at the hotel, Penny found herself in front of the mirror, wondering what to wear.

“Pink or blue,” she asked her husband.

“You’ll look great in either one,” he assured her without looking up.

Penny didn’t expect that kind of attention from her husband. She chose the blue. When Connor went into the safe to get some cash for the evening, he brought out her jewellery box at the same time, knowing she would want to accessorise. She might not be able to compete with the young Mrs. Declerc when it came to the dewy sheen of youth, but she could give her a run for her money when it came to her rocks.

Connor nodded in approval as Penny took off the sapphire and instead slid a diamond solitaire onto her ring finger, to nestle perfectly against the thick gold wedding band she’d bought for herself. He fastened a thick diamond rivière around her neck and pulled up the last inch of her zip, taking care not to touch her skin as he did so.

“Perfect.”

Connor offered Penny his arm as they walked into the hotel bar. She shot him a smile which he returned with something approaching appreciation. Yes, they made a good team.

WHILE GETTING TO know Veronique, Penny kept one ear on the men’s conversation. Gilbert was telling Connor that though he’d trained as a lawyer, he was in property these days. He’d recently bought a faded old hotel in Juan-les-Pins and intended to turn it into the chicest pension on the Riviera. There was a great deal of money to be made in hospitality.

Veronique grew more beautiful as the evening progressed and the champagne turned her peachy cheeks pinker. Penny found she liked the younger woman despite herself. It was easy to see why Gilbert had fallen in love with her. But why had she reciprocated?

“He was friends with my father,” Veronique explained. “I thought perhaps he was too old for me but he is, how you say, young inside.”

Penny had not asked Veronique how old she was but she estimated that she was not more than twenty-two. Her manner was occasionally younger.

“Gilbert makes me very happy. How did you meet your husband, Penny?”

Whenever Penny answered this question, she did not describe the very first time she met Connor, in the back room of a bookies in Willesden with Frank, but instead described what was actually the second time, when they found themselves at the same party in Chelsea, a month after Penny broke it off with Frank, and Connor sought her out.

“I’ve been thinking about you,” he said. “Wondering what you’ve been up to.”

“Keeping busy,” Penny told him.

“Perhaps you and I ought to get out of here and go to supper some place.”

Penny told Veronique the official version of the story. “We went to a tiny restaurant in Soho, all lit by candles. We ate steak and drank the most marvellous wine. Connor knows a lot about wine. And by the end of the evening, I had agreed to go with him to Deauville. We drove there in his sports car, taking the crossing from Dover to Calais. It was the craziest thing I ever agreed to do—go to France for the weekend with a man I’d only just met—but I suppose I knew at once that I could trust him. We had the most wonderful time, eating seafood, drinking champagne, and walking on the beach. And now here we are, happily married.”

Veronique thought the story was wonderful. So romantic, so daring to take a chance on love like that. Veronique was so swept up by the thrill of it all that Penny was almost swept up too. She could very nearly picture herself, walking on the sand with her handsome Irish beau, letting him feed her oysters before retiring to their separate rooms (of course), and thinking about him all night, falling desperately in love.

The reality of that weekend was altogether different. There were oysters, but there were no separate rooms, because that weekend in the Deauville was the first Penny and Connor spent as a “married couple.”

“Mr. and Mrs. Dillon Corry” was how they signed the hotel register. For various reasons it was best not to use their real names, though they wouldn’t be coming back. Not until everyone had forgotten their faces.

Penny changed the subject back to this “real” honeymoon.

“This is our last stop,” she said. “We ’ve been on a European tour of sorts. We started out in Amsterdam, then took the train to Vienna, then onwards to Rome ...”

“Oh, I’ve always wanted to go to Rome,” said Veronique. “I’ve heard it’s such a beautiful city.”

“It is,” agreed Penny. “One could spend a lifetime exploring Rome. It’s a shame that we had just a day.”

The next night, the two honeymooning couples dined together again. Different dresses for the ladies, different jewellery. Penny wore gold earrings and a matching ring by Andrew Grima. His brutal, almost architectural style was shockingly, thrillingly new. Veronique wore a pair of classical diamond chandelier earrings that lent a halo effect to her face which, Penny thought a little wistfully, hardly needed the help.

“Gilbert has very good taste in jewellery,” Connor told Veronique approvingly. “Though I’ve the feeling I could make a ring out of a sweetie wrapper and you would make it look like it was worth a fortune.”

It was true, thought Penny. Some women had the ability to make a chip of glass look like a million dollars while there were others—including several of the women in the restaurant that night—who could make a million-dollar diamond look cheap. Veronique Declerc was one of the former.

By the time dessert was served, a third night as a foursome had been proposed.

“Do we have to?” Penny asked when she and Connor got back to their room.

“Gilbert has some interesting deals going on,” Connor said. “And they’re going back to Paris the next morning. Who knows when you might see your old friend again?”

The truth was, Penny didn’t mind spending time with Veronique. She was young but she wasn’t uninteresting. She asked intelligent questions and listened attentively to the answers. Penny wanted to hug the girl when she admitted that she had not been able to get the kind of education she would have liked but was determined things would be different for any daughter she might bring into the world.

“Did you never want to have children, Penny?” she asked.

Penny’s mind flickered briefly to her last meeting with Jinx.

“You’re lecturing me about dishonesty, Penny? You taught me everything I know ...”

“I don’t think I’d have made a very good mother,” Penny told Veronique.

FOR THE THIRD, Penny pulled out a choker by Bulgari. Or should she say by someone who was very good at faking Bulgari. She wasn’t sure it was entirely flattering but it was fashionable. She’d had her hair done at the hotel’s salon. Really, all this dressing up was tiring. It gave her some sympathy for Sophia Loren, whom she’d once met at a party at Elstree Studios. The Italian screen goddess had been quite charming. A woman’s woman, Penny decided, the sort who was so comfortable in her own skin that she was happy to be surrounded by other women, not feeling the need to compete. Sophia had had some serious jewellery. Penny remembered the impressive weight of the diamond necklace that disappeared in an infamous robbery a few nights after the party. Sophia had gone on television to appeal for her jewellery’s return.

“Fat chance,” Frank had muttered as he and Penny watched the appeal from a hotel bed.

Connor fastened the choker around Penny’s neck.

“I like your hair like that,” he said. “You could blend in anywhere with that do. Frank was right about that. You’re a chameleon.”

“Let’s not talk about Frank,” said Penny.

VERONIQUE AND GILBERT were waiting in the bar. Veronique wore a shimmering silver lamé mini-dress and matching pointed shoes. From her ears dangled a pair of emerald drops. And on her left hand ... on her left hand ...

An emerald as big as a Fox’s Glacier Mint, surrounded by a glittering sunray skirt of smaller baguette-cut diamonds. A “ballerina mount,” as it was called. The setting was different but surely there weren’t many emeralds that big in that particular cut. In a lifetime of being interested in jewellery, Penny had only seen one other.

“It belonged to Gilbert’s paternal great-grandmother,” Veronique said, when she noticed Penny staring. “Isn’t it just magnifique?”

In an instant, Penny knew the truth about the Declerc family’s surprise inheritance. And at the same time she also knew with horrifying clarity that, on a lazy afternoon in the summer of 1939, it was she who had unwittingly signed Leah and Lily Samuel’s death warrant.

Chapter Thirty-Three

Paris, July 1939

It was a Thursday. Josephine and August had given Penny a handful of centimes to look after August’s little sister Lily so they could spend the afternoon holding hands and talking about untranslatable things in the Tuileries without interruption. Lily was much more excited at the prospect of the hours ahead than Penny was.

“We ’re going to have such a good time,” she said with determination. “I’ve made a shop. Come and look.”

Lily took Penny by the hand and pulled her into the bedroom where she had arrayed all her toys in a queue to visit a boutique run by her favourite doll.

Penny was minded to suggest, “Why don’t you play shops while I read,” but Lily’s enthusiasm made her heart squeeze, reminding her as it did of the disappointment she herself had so often felt as a child upon hearing that the person she had earmarked as a playmate—usually Josephine—had better things to do.

“I’d be delighted to play shops with you,” Penny told her little friend.

She was rewarded with a beaming smile.

“You are by far my favourite,” Lily said then, which was gratifying. “Do you think your sister will marry my brother?”

“Would you like that?” Penny asked.

Lily shrugged. “I suppose then you and I shall be sort of sisters too,” she said. “I’d like that. Alors, I think to begin with I should be the shopkeeper and you can be my customer. I haven’t got a bell but you can make the noise when you come through the door.”

Penny stepped back out onto the landing and re-entered in the character of “Madame De La Plume De Ma Tante.”

Lily too stepped into her role, showing Madame De La Plume the latest fashions.

“This would suit you beautifully,” she said, as she invited Penny to feel the quality of one of Madame Samuel’s old housecoats.

“Oh my!” said Penny, getting into the spirit of the game by trying the housecoat on. “This is fabulous but it’s so very expensive. I can’t afford it. Could I pay you in instalments?”

“Certainly not,” said Lily. “No credit here.”

While Lily rearranged her store, Penny looked out of the window into the courtyard.

“Shall we ask Gilbert to play with us too?” Penny asked, seeing him down there on the bench. He was probably reading Baudelaire.

“Yes!” Lily was enthusiastic. “He can be the policeman, who comes to arrest you for stealing the dress.”

Penny whistled to catch his attention. It was a loud, unladylike whistle that would have got her a telling off at home, but Gilbert was impressed.

The trio played shops for another hour, until even Lily was bored. When Gilbert suggested a game of hide and seek, Lily clapped her hands together.

“That is the best idea!”

She wanted to hide first.

“You two must wait in the bathroom until you have counted to a hundred,” she said. “Then you can both come and look for me.”

Penny and Gilbert sat side by side on the edge of the bath, the edges of their hands just touching.

“Are you counting? Or am I?” Penny asked.

“You.”

Penny tailed off after she got to twenty. They could hear Lily shrieking and giggling to herself as she looked for a hiding place elsewhere in the apartment. It sounded as though she would need longer than a hundred.

“Want to see something you shouldn’t?” Penny asked.

“Are you going to take your dress off?” Gilbert asked.

“What? I am not. It’s this.”

Penny rolled back the bathmat and found the loose floorboard. As she tried to prise it up, the board kept escaping her grasp. Had August used something to get it open? She couldn’t remember. Either way, she couldn’t persuade the floorboard to give way.

“Underneath here is the Samuel family safe,” Penny whispered.

“How do you know?” Gilbert asked.

“August showed me and Josephine the other day. There’s half the jewels of Austria in there. Diamonds, sapphires, emeralds. The lot. You’ve never seen anything like it.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“You don’t have to,” said Penny. “Help me get this board up and you’ll see for yourself.”

“No,” said Gilbert firmly. “No. You shouldn’t have told me. And August shouldn’t have shown you. Put the mat back and never mention it to anyone again. It’s the Samuel family’s private property.”

“You’re such a goody-goody,” said Penny.

“It’s about trust,” Gilbert said. “August is my friend.”

Then Lily called out. “I’m ready!”

Gilbert and Penny carefully replaced the bathmat and went in search of their little charge, pretending for a good five minutes that they couldn’t see her feet in their red velvet slippers poking out from beneath the curtains in the sitting room.

NEARLY THIRTY YEARS later, the memory of that afternoon made Penny’s head swim. Lily was so sweet and so trusting. She’d thrown her arms around Gilbert’s waist when he walked into the apartment and he had seemed enchanted by her in return. He’d made such an effort to play the policeman with sufficient gravitas and Lily had been thrilled. Penny and Gilbert were, Lily said, so much more fun than Josephine and August, who wanted to do nothing but kiss. And how excited Lily had been to play hide and seek even though she was so very bad at hiding.

While Connor and Gilbert discussed the wine list and Veronique chattered about a shopping trip to Cannes, Penny couldn’t bat away the memory of Lily’s tiny feet poking out from beneath the curtains. She imagined the young girl hiding for real when the French policemen came to take her away at the behest of the Nazis. Had Madame Samuel tried to keep her little chatterbox quiet when they hammered on the door? Had she pretended they were playing a game or had she let her daughter know that, this time, they were hiding in deadly, deadly earnest?

How could anyone ever want to hurt such a beautiful, innocent child? What did it take to make someone think that handing over a young girl to the Nazis was the right thing to do? Penny knew what it took. There were psychopaths out there. There were people too who had believed everything Hitler said. There were as well a great many cowards. Penny understood that most of the people who had collaborated with the Nazis had done so only to save their own skins. And then there were the people who perhaps thought they might benefit from their neighbours’ distress.

How long had the Declercs waited before they let themselves into the Samuel family’s flat and lifted the floorboards in the bathroom?

Illustration by Agata Nowicka

Chapter Thirty-Four

Antibes, 1966

Penny did not confront Gilbert about the ring, though many years later she might wish she had. But if she’d asked him to tell her the truth as they sat opposite one another at the dining table that night, what difference would it have made to hear it? Instead, she told Connor and the Declercs that she was suddenly feeling unwell. It must have been the fish she’d eaten for lunch. Gilbert suggested they ask the hotel to call a doctor. And if it was the fish, he would help her sue the restaurant. He evinced genuine concern. Penny assured him, “I’m sure I’ll be fine.” When she left the table, Connor stayed. It was Gilbert’s turn to pay.

The following day, Penny stayed hidden in her hotel room until she was sure the Declercs had left to catch their flight. She didn’t want to bump into them. When she thought they must be gone, she went down to the bar to read that day’s newspapers. The leading story in that morning’s edition of the Paris Herald Tribune was about the criminal gang targeting tourists up and down the Côte. Naturally, the local police had decided the gang wasn’t French but more likely Italian, coming over the border to make their attacks before disappearing into the mountains where they divided their bounty with their mafioso friends.

Italy had its own crime wave. A smaller story on page three described how a high-end jewellery store in Rome had been hit by a daring thief who simply walked out with a fistful of diamonds. She was described as a woman in her thirties, five feet two, slim, blonde hair, her accent indefinable but possibly American. The store owner said, “She was very delicate,” which was why he could hardly believe that she had managed to walk away with diamonds worth many, many hundreds of thousands of dollars. It wasn’t worth trying to calculate the total in lire. There weren’t enough noughts in the world.

“Jinx.”

It had to be. The description certainly fit. Penny shook her head, half in admiration, half in exasperation at her former protégée. No wonder the jewellers in Rome were being frustratingly careful when Penny passed through a few days later.

The newspaper article went on, “The theft in Rome bore many similarities to recent thefts in Amsterdam, Monaco, and Vienna, leading police to believe that a serial jewel thief may be at work. In each case, a woman worked alone.” She’d told the store owner in Amsterdam she was from Kentucky. She’d told the store owner in Monaco she was from California. The target of the Vienna theft, however, was convinced that the jewel thief who’d targeted his shop was French.

Penny re-read the scant information about the perpetrator of Viennese hit.

“ ... definitely French, not at all beautiful, and middle-aged,” the jeweller there thought.

“Perhaps there’s more than one thief at work,” the reporter concluded.

Not at all beautiful? And what counted as middle-aged, Penny mused as she folded the paper shut. Was that how she appeared to people now? She supposed she must be middle-aged. She was in her forties. If she lived only as long as her own mother, who had died the previous year, then she was well past the middle already. It was a sobering thought that had Penny summoning the waiter to bring her a whiskey and soda with her coffee. As she sipped it, she consoled herself that she had at least passed as French.

But the saga of the well-dressed female jewel thief (or thieves) was far from the biggest news at the hotel that morning.

Another tourist couple had been attacked by the modern highwaymen on their way to the airport. Despite trying to give the impression that she was busy reading by quickly snatching up her paper again, Penny found herself cornered by an American woman she’d seen around the hotel all week. The woman’s diamond earrings—so big they looked fake, though they definitely weren’t—jiggled along with her dowager duchess jowls as she relayed the story of the robbery with the demeanour of a chicken still clucking wildly hours after a fox has passed the hen house.

“It’s no coincidence, is it? That this keeps happening to people who’ve stayed in this hotel? The taxi drivers must be in on it. Or somebody who works here.”

“I’m sure it’s random,” said Penny. “This isn’t the only hotel on the Côte D’Azur.”

“But Des Anges is the best. They must be scoping us out. Well, I am very glad we have our own driver. We have given him instructions that when we leave to fly home tomorrow morning, he is not to stop anywhere between here and the airport. Not even if someone is lying bleeding in the middle of the road. They do that, you know, fake an accident so you stop to help. Next thing you know.” She mimed pulling a knife across her throat and shuddered.

“Gosh,” said Penny.

“I don’t know how you can be so calm about it,” the American woman said.

AT LUNCH IN the hotel restaurant, the latest highway robbery was on everybody’s lips. As the story passed from table to table, it gathered detail. Someone had worked out that the victims must have been “that nice French couple. The handsome man with the much younger wife.” They’d been ambushed within a mile of the hotel gates. The robbers had engineered a crash. The couple’s car was a write off. Of course they had to get out before it exploded. There’d been a struggle. The robbers were armed with knives. And guns! Don’t forget the guns! By the time the police got to the scene, the young wife had all but bled to death. She was rushed to hospital. She was not expected to survive.

While the restaurant echoed with barely muted gasps of horror from the guests, the waiting staff continued their serene progress about the room, as if deaf to anything but direct instructions. A young man appeared at Penny and Connor’s table to take their drinks order.

“Champagne to toast my clever bride,” said Connor.

Connor had been out all morning. He’d already had a drink. Penny could tell by the colour in his cheeks.

“Did you hear about the robbery on the road into town?” Penny asked.

Connor nodded.

“I heard someone had to be taken to hospital.” Connor shrugged.

“I didn’t know about that.” “Where have you been all morning?”

“Here, there, everywhere. Went to see a man about a horse.”

Penny snorted. Connor wouldn’t be drawn but instead started telling her how the hotel concierge had suggested they take a trip from Cannes out to the Île Sainte-Marguerite. “I’ll hire a boat. We ’ll take a picnic.”

“The weather’s supposed to be bad tomorrow,” Penny observed. “It might be dangerous.”

“I never had you down for a scaredy-cat.”

The champagne arrived. Once the waiter stepped away, Connor reached into the inside pocket of his linen jacket and pulled out a bright white handkerchief, bundled into a ball. He tossed it into Penny’s lap. She opened it with an odd feeling of trepidation. Wrapped in the soft cotton was a ring.

“Happy three-week anniversary,” Connor said.

He tilted his champagne glass towards Penny in a toast while she stared at the ring in her lap as though Connor had presented her with a dead spider.

A moment later, the American woman burst into the dining room, exclaiming as she did so, “She’s dead!”

LATER THAT AFTERNOON, Penny walked out through the hotel gates, ignoring various hotel staff who asked if they could call her a taxi. She walked down into the town, hoping that if she went far enough, the ghosts would give up their pursuit.

Lily Samuel and her family were dead because of Penny. Now Veronique too?

The American woman was right. There was someone at the hotel who had connections with the criminal gangs that were menacing holidaymakers on the road between Antibes and Juan-les-Pins. But it wasn’t a member of the hotel staff. That someone was Penny’s own husband.

That ring. That bloody ring. Why had she even mentioned it to him? It must have sealed Veronique’s fate. As she marched along, her eyes cloudy with tears, Penny cursed her bastard spouse. He’d broken his promise. They’d had a deal. From the day they got together, they’d had an understanding. They stole from stores and from companies, not from individuals. Nobody ever got hurt.

At the first church she came to, Penny stopped and went inside. Might this be the moment to make her first confession? Where to start?

By the time Penny got back to the hotel, the ring was gone and Connor’s body was almost cold.

Chapter Thirty-Five

Paris, 2022

There’s a degree of simple genetic luck involved in living to a grand old age but there’s also a question of having sufficient motivation to push on through the years when your bones ache and your eyes have dimmed and the soundtrack to your day-to-day life is the whine of a faulty hearing aid. Of course someone who loves their life and all the people in it wants to hang around for as long as they possibly can. But there are other reasons for clinging on too: pig-headedness, unfinished business, the prospect of glorious revenge.

Thinking about Lily again made Penny feel unsteady as she walked across the room. Gathering herself, she put the young girl from her mind in order to focus on the plan at hand. She could think about Lily afterwards, when she was using the proceeds from that blasted ring to build a new girls’ school in the DRC in Lily’s honour. If she was ever going to steal the ring back, she had to do it now.

Penny had chosen her moment, now she had to choose the right assistant. There were three assistants at the table where the emerald ring was being displayed: two men and a woman. Having studied them carefully, Penny picked the woman as her mark. It wasn’t always the case that the woman was the best assistant to go to when there was a choice; over the years Penny had found that men were usually less observant of what was going on right under their noses—at least that had been the case when she was younger and could still be bothered to flirt up a storm—but in this situation, the woman was obviously distracted by Malcolm, who was evidently well-known from French TV. Her eyes were following him around the room. Every time he looked in her general direction, still chewing his stupid straw, she would give a slight pout and flick out the ends of her long blonde hair.

Good luck, sweetheart, Penny thought.

It took the assistant a moment or two to notice that Penny was even standing in front of her. Snapping to attention, she bestowed upon Penny a smile that Penny had come to know well over the past couple of decades. She’d first started to see it when she hit her seventies. It was a smile that suggested the assistant was expecting a question regarding the whereabouts of the nearest loo. Penny was neither incontinent nor incompetent but of course she played up to it. If this vain dimwit wanted a sweet little old lady, then that was what she would get.

“Oh, hello dear,” said Penny. “Don’t mind me. I just wanted to get a closer look at the rings.”

“Of course.”

“They’re very beautiful. Is that a sapphire?” Penny pointed out lot number eleven.

“It is.” The assistant trotted out the statistics in a bored sort of way. The weight of the stone. The provenance—it was one of the items belonging to the famous actress whose fabulous collection was anchoring the sale. The guide price. Her eyes kept drifting back towards Malcolm as she spoke.

“I don’t suppose it would be possible for me to try it on?” Penny said in perfectly composed but such appallingly-accented French that it hurt her own ears.

“Hmmm?” said the assistant.

“Try it on? I’d like to try on the sapphire, please. If I may?”

The assistant glanced at her more senior colleague but he was busy helping another guest.

“I don’t see why not,” the assistant said after a moment’s hesitation. She fetched out a velvet-lined tray from beneath the table and reached into the cabinet for the ring with white-gloved hands. She gave the stone a quick rub with her thumb before she lay the ring on the tray.

Penny picked it up and slipped it onto her right ring finger. She gave it an experimental twiddle. It spun around her finger freely. There would be no need for butter and ice to get this ring off again as had happened one disastrous afternoon in Asprey many years ago. First rule of sleight of hand, make sure you have slight-enough hands.

“Well, it is very lovely,” Penny said. “But I’m not sure it looks quite right on this old finger.”

“It’s like a beautiful blossom on a wizened old tree,” said the auction assistant. She probably meant to be charming but it just made Penny feel less bad for what she was about to do. Patronising young fool.

Penny handed the sapphire back. She then asked to try on a yellow diamond solitaire.

“Not my colour.” The ruby.

“Oh dear. Really not me.”

The emerald?

“I’ll need to ask my superior,” the assistant said. The emerald was in a locked box within the case, as befitted its significance and value. The assistant’s colleague duly appeared with the key. He looked at Penny quizzically but, seeing that she had already asked to try on three other rings, seemed convinced it might be worth accommodating Penny’s request. Everyone at the reception that evening was a specially invited guest and they wouldn’t have been invited if there weren’t a chance they might make a credible bid in the auction later that week ...

“Wizened old tree,” Penny muttered under her breath as she slid the emerald onto her finger and turned her hand this way and that.

The assistant recounted the story of the ring’s origins. The stone was Colombian but the cut suggested the emerald itself had first been set as jewellery in Russia. The identity of its original owner was unknown.

“How did it come to be in Paris?” Penny asked.

“Since the late nineteenth century, it has belonged to an important wine family in Bordeaux. It was passed down through the generations, ending up with its current owners at the end of the Second World War ...”

It was the story Madame Declerc must have told her new daughter-in-law all those years ago. Penny nodded along, adding the occasional “how interesting.”

“It is the finest piece in the Declerc collection.”

“I’m sure it is.”

Still wearing the ring, Penny sneezed. Over the years, she had perfected the art of the small, elegant sneeze, which nonetheless gave her an excuse to delve straight into her handbag for a handkerchief. And no one would find it odd that a little old lady would take a while to find her handkerchief in a capacious, old-fashioned handbag full of goodness only knew what. To add a little authenticity, Penny took out some of the rubbish she kept in her bag for exactly such an occasion and placed it on the display table, almost entirely covering the black velvet tray which still held the last ring Penny had tried on—the ugly ruby.

The assistant smiled tightly but nonetheless she still smiled, which was a good sign. And, of course, she was distracted by the mess Penny was making on the table. While Penny went back to rummaging in her bag, the assistant was transfixed by the half-finished packet of cough sweets, the battered glasses case and the well-thumbed copy of Fifty Shades of Grey that Penny had given her to look at. Penny knew that the assistant would be thinking of the ruby that lay concealed beneath those salacious pages.

Assured that no eyes were really upon her for the moment, Penny slipped the emerald ring off, letting it fall to the bottom of the bag. Then she fished the fake ring out of the bag’s key pocket, sliding it into place as she did so. When it didn’t quite work first time, Penny faked a fumble and said, “Goodness me! The ring fell off! I almost lost it. Now wouldn’t that have been a disaster?” When she pulled her hand out of her bag, she was holding the fake between thumb and forefinger. She passed it to the assistant who took it from her with unseemly haste.

“And I still haven’t found my handkerchief,” Penny said.

The assistant passed her a tissue from a box beneath the table. Thank goodness she hadn’t thought of that before.

After blowing her nose theatrically, Penny repacked her fluffy cough sweets, her glasses case, and the book while the assistant sprayed cleaner onto the ring Penny had given her and polished it up for the next punter.

“Thank you for letting me try all those rings on, dear,” said Penny. “When you get to my age, there really isn’t much to look forward to. No excitements.”

The assistant said, “Avec plaisir,” with a tight smile but her attention was already on a much more likely customer. Dragomir Georgiev pointed at the emerald ring and grunted. The assistant translated that to mean that the model draped around his shoulders would like to try the ring on. Except he didn’t mean that. He wanted to try the ring on himself. He jammed the fake onto his little finger, where it looked reassuringly ridiculous. Penny would be very happy indeed if that man in particular paid a small fortune for the replica ring she’d had made by her dodgy jeweller in Hatton Garden back in 1967. Penny knew exactly how Georgiev had made his money. Though he didn’t seem to remember her, they had old friends in common. He sold arms. Yes, of course he sold arms: to the good guys, to the bad guys, to anyone who wanted them.

“It suits you,” she told him and he looked at her quizzically. “I really hope you end up with it.”

THE WHOLE THING had gone like a dream. Though she had not lifted anything of particular value in a great many years, the past few weeks of intense practice had paid off and all of Penny’s old skills and talent had come back to her.

Now all there was left to do was to get out of there, get back to the hotel and find a secure hiding place for the ring until they left for London, where Penny would have it broken up and sold. It wouldn’t be worth as much broken down as it was in one piece but it would still be worth enough to fund all manner of exciting things that would make a real difference to people who deserved a little luck.

The world was a ridiculous place, where a stone such as the one she now had in her handbag could cause people to lose their minds, to hand over hundreds of thousands of euros, to steal and to kill. Yes, of course, she was in the process of stealing the damn thing herself but what she was doing was different. She had a higher purpose. The ring would be taken apart, some useful idiot would buy the stones and she would use the money raised to fund the Foundation and build schools, build clinics, help families stay together ... The emerald was just a rock—a beautiful rock but a rock nonetheless—thrown up by geological quirks of a planet that was entirely indifferent to the perfection of its colour and the astonishment of its size.

Penny was determined that this piece of lucky dust would never again be the cause of someone’s death. It was going to change lives for the better.

She paused by Archie to tell him, “I’m going back to the hotel.”

“On your own? You can’t, Auntie Penny. What if something happens to you?”

“I am nearly a hundred years old, Archie. Every day I long for something to happen to me.”

“Auntie Penny,” Archie said in a scolding tone. “Be careful what you wish for. Give me a moment to gather up Auntie Josephine and we’ll come with you. There’s not much point in hanging around here. Not now,” he added ruefully. On the other side of the room, Malcolm laughed out loud as if on cue.

“I don’t think I have ever seen anyone open their mouth that wide,” Penny observed. “One could get lost in there.”

“Tell me about it,” said Archie. “Wait here. I’ll fetch Auntie Josephine and we’ll blow this joint. Perhaps we could stop and have a bite to eat at Willi’s Wine Bar.”

“On the Rue des Petits Champs? Oh yes. I do like Willi’s.”

“Me too,” said Archie.

Archie left Penny standing close to the door, while he went to find her sister. This exit was taking rather longer than Penny had hoped but when she glanced back in the direction of the table where the ring had been on display, nothing yet seemed amiss. The assistant had obviously been fooled by the replica Penny left behind and had put it into the cabinet in the original’s place.

All the same, Penny thought it wise to make another plan. What would she do if someone wanted to check her handbag on the way out? That hadn’t happened on the way in but there seemed to be more security guards on the door now. Would their having nothing much to do for the moment mean they were more or less keen to do a thorough search? On the pretence of getting another tissue out of her bag, Penny transferred the ring from her bag to the palm of her hand and thence to her mouth. They wouldn’t look in there. She lodged the ring between her gum and her cheek. Once upon a time she’d have swallowed it to make absolutely sure it wouldn’t be found until she wanted it to be—with practice, she’d got very good at swallowing gems without so much as a sip of water—but that was when her digestive system was somewhat more reliable.

Where was Archie and why was he taking so long?

Ah, she could see him now, leading Josephine through the crowd towards her. Was he carrying a half-finished plate of canapés?

“I just need to find someone who can put these in a box,” he told Penny. “For Auntie Josephine.”

“I thought we were going to Willi’s.”

“They might have shut the kitchen by the time we get there,” said Josephine. “Waste not, want not.”

“You’re moving your mouth a little strangely,” Archie observed to Penny.

“Dentures,” she said, before he could start worrying about a stroke. “Well, we’ll get them looked at as soon as we’re back in London.” Archie went in search of a member of catering staff. While he was gone, another waiter carrying a tray full of champagne glasses tried to get by. Josephine helped herself to another glass of fizz.

“You can never have too much champagne,” she said, taking one for Penny too. Josephine was well on her way to being hammered.

Penny discretely spat the ring back out into her handkerchief and held it balled in her fist.

“We ’re supposed to be leaving.”

“What’s the hurry?”

Penny huffed. She must be the only master criminal in the world in danger of being foiled by her sister’s devotion to the doctrine of “waste not, want not.” She should have just walked out the moment she had the ring in her possession. She could have got the staff at The Maritime to call Archie and tell him she was safely back at the hotel. Now she was stuck. This was why it was always better to work alone.

“I don’t think Archie is having a very good time,” Penny said. “He’s only staying here for us and we only came here for him.”

And now Penny could see that there was some kind of commotion around the table where up until ten minutes ago a priceless emerald had been on display. If they didn’t go in the next thirty seconds ...

“Penny Williamson!”

Penny froze, not wanting to turn and find out who had identified her; as if there was still a chance she could blend into the crowd and slip away as she had once been trained to do.

“It is you!”

“You’re not dead,” said Penny, recognising at once the pretty brown eyes in the leathery old face.

“And neither are you,” Veronique Declerc observed.

Chapter Thirty-Six

“Well, isn’t this the most wonderful surprise,” said Veronique. “To meet again after all these years. When Stéphane told me that his friends, two British veterans, would be at the party this evening, I had no idea that one of them would be you.”

Archie had rejoined the sisters now and looked with interest between his great-aunt Penny and the tiny French woman in the wheelchair in the hope that someone would fill him in on the connection.

“I’m Veronique Declerc.” She offered Archie her tiny hand which, Penny noted, sported only a very plain wedding ring. No glittering solitaire. No watch. No sparkling bracelets. “And Penny is your grandmother?”

“My great-aunt ...”

“How lovely. Your great-aunt and I met many years ago in the South of France. I’ve never forgotten it. We were both on honeymoon.”

“Oh, with Uncle Connor!” Archie exclaimed. Then, “Sorry, Auntie Penny. You probably don’t want to be reminded.”

Veronique tilted her head, curious to know why.

“Your uncle Connor and my husband, Gilbert, got along very well. Gilbert hoped they might even be able to do business together but . . . but you didn’t get in touch,” she admonished Penny.

“Connor died the day you left the hotel,” Penny said matter-of-factly. “Heart attack.”

“What? But he was so fit. So young.”

He wasn’t that young, thought Penny. It wasn’t until after Connor died that she got a proper look at his real passport. To think he’d had the cheek to refer to her as his “old bird.”

“But you should have told us, Penny.”

“I didn’t know how to find you,” said Penny. She didn’t add, “Neither did I think there would be any point trying. Given you were supposed to have died in a robbery on the road to Nice airport.” Penny had never looked for the news reports, not even all these years later when you could find anything on the internet. Convinced that she had catalysed Veronique’s death, she could not bear to see the murder confirmed and risk seeing a photograph of the young woman innocent and happy.

“Well, this is terrible news. We had all been having such a lovely time,” Veronique explained to Archie. “Your auntie Penny and my husband, Gilbert, knew each other as children. Which must mean he knew you too?” Veronique turned to Josephine.

“Yes,” she said.

“You’re Josephine? He talked of you often.”

Penny noticed the past tense.

“Gilbert died last year. Just before our fifty-fifth wedding anniversary. What a lucky woman I am to have spent so many years with such a wonderful man.”

“And now you’re selling the family jewels,” said Penny.

“Yes,” said Veronique brightly. “Just the last few things now. What use does an old lady like me have for diamonds and pearls? Sadly, we didn’t have any children to pass them on to. But the money? Oh, there’s plenty I could do with that. Gilbert and I have been supporting a couple of girls’ schools in Bangladesh since the 1970s. Whatever Stéphane and his team manage to raise for my old baubles will go towards building another.”

“What a noble idea,” said Archie.

Stéphane, who had come over to greet this very important client, agreed.

“Everyone at Brice-Petitjean is honoured you’ve chosen to let us help you achieve your ambitions, Madame Declerc.”

“Isn’t it a good idea, Auntie Penny? A school. You should talk to Veronique about your trust.”

“It is a very good idea,” said Penny. “How generous of you and Gilbert to think of such a thing.”

“You know, for all these years, I’ve remembered that conversation you and I had over dinner in the Hôtel des Anges, Penny, about how important it is for women to be educated. How the education of girls is the very basis of a happy society, improving the lot of every generation that follows. You inspired me that night. That was the ethos behind our first school. I’m lucky that Gilbert agreed with the idea.”

“Well, yes,” Penny snapped. “I’m sure it must have salved his conscience somewhat.”

An expression of confusion flickered across Veronique’s face. “His conscience?”

“I’m sure you know what I mean.”

Veronique tilted her head. She turned to Stéphane. “Stéphane, my dear, I wonder if I might try on my emerald ring one last time. That ring was very special to me. I always thought it brought me luck. You know, I actually lost it on my honeymoon. Gilbert had only just given it to me, as a wedding present, but it was too big for my hand and it must have slipped off. I thought it would be lost forever. It might have fallen off anywhere—in the hotel, in a shop, on the beach. The last time I remember seeing it was when we had that final dinner together, Penny, when you were taken ill. The following morning, I couldn’t find it anywhere but three days after we got back to Paris, the newspapers reported that a priest in Antibes had found a priceless emerald in the offertory box at his church. It wasn’t quite priceless, of course, but poor Gilbert had to make quite the offering in order to get it back. After that, I called it my lucky ring, though Gilbert always said that it brought us nowhere near as much luck as it should have done for the price.”

“What a story,” said Archie.

“I’ve often wondered who took the ring to the church. Such a kind thing to do. Though Gilbert said a truly honest person would have taken the ring straight to the police. He maintains it was stolen from our hotel room and the thief got cold feet when they realised it would be too difficult to sell on. There was a criminal gang operating on the Côte at that time. Several people from our hotel were robbed. But you, Penny. You lost the most precious thing. Poor Connor. He was so full of life. I am so sorry.”

“It was a long time ago now,” said Penny.

“But the loss of true love never gets any less painful, I think.” Veronique reached out to Penny. “Come with me to see my lucky ring.”

The ring that Connor must have taken straight from her hand without her noticing, Penny realised now. He could do that. It was his party piece. He’d hold your hands while looking deep into your eyes and the next thing you knew, he’d be showing you your own wedding ring in the palm of his hand and you would have no idea how he’d done it.

“Actually, I have to spend a penny.”

“Spend a penny! I do love that phrase. Gilbert used to say it. He told me he learned it from you sisters.”

Penny was already on her way to the door, moving surprisingly fast. “Auntie Penny!” Archie called after her. “The powder room is over here.”

Penny did not stop. She was fuelled by fury; fury that Gilbert Declerc might yet manage to turn his crime into a cause for beatification. God, how sick he must have felt to have to pay for the ring he and his mother had stolen from the Samuels when it reappeared at the church. Penny had never been able to work out for sure how it ended up in that offertory box. The last time Penny saw that ring, it was on the floor in the hotel room where she’d flung it in disgust as she and Connor argued. The only explanation was that the chambermaid who found Connor dead in bed a couple of hours later must have taken the emerald then thought better of it when the police arrived to investigate Connor’s death.

And so it had ended up back with the Declercs, who were obviously not the newly-married couple car-jacked on the way to the airport. That damn American woman and her gossip. If Penny hadn’t thought that Connor had arranged a hit on the Declercs, she would not have had to walk away from him that day. If she hadn’t left him alone, he might have survived the heart attack that killed him. Though she’d never quite believed it was a heart attack ... He was as fit as one of his horses.

As well as fury, Penny was also moved by fear now. Surely when Veronique saw the ring in the cabinet, she would know at once that it wasn’t the same ring she had given to Brice-Petitjean for the sale. The fake was good but not that good. If Veronique didn’t realise it, then Stéphane surely would. It was time for a fast exit.

With the real ring back between her teeth, Penny made for the door onto the street. She was about to walk through when she became aware of some sort of kerfuffle. The security guards scattered as three people in masks pushed their way in. In her dash for the exit, Penny collided with the first masked man’s chest.

“Get back inside,” he said in French. “You aren’t going anywhere.” In her surprise, Penny swallowed the emerald in one big gulp.

From THE EXCITEMENTS by CJ Wray. Copyright © 2024 by C J Wray. Reprinted by permission of William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.