Puzzle piece outline with script quote on upper back

The big top came down on Tuesday and the rain has not let up since, so I have had nothing to do but sit in the caravan sorting prize boxes. You will laugh, but I found the missing piece from the puzzle stall rolled up in the bottom of the cash tin. Mr Abernethy swears it is the last one from the warped jigsaw of the Thames at Richmond, the one with the swans nobody ever finished. Eleven hundred pieces, and one gone since Margate.

I sat with it on the folding table for an hour. It is a plain thing, grey card with a knob on one side and a hollow on the other, and it fits nothing I own. You remember the girl who ran the candyfloss, how she turned up in March with a suitcase and a cough and nobody asked where she came from. She always said she was only passing through. Then she stayed four seasons, and when she left she did not take her good scissors or her wages, only the blue scarf she had knitted for the dog.

So I have decided to post the piece to Richmond with a note. On the back I wrote, in my worst handwriting, because I knew you, the rest is yours to finish. It is a daft thing to send a stranger. Mr Abernethy says the address is a bed and breakfast with a landlady who keeps swans in her head the way other people keep recipes.

Write when you reach Hastings. Tell me if the rain stops there.

Yours, Frank