The Hunt for Sonya Dufrette

by R. T. Raichev

  ‘Ravenscraig Road, you said, didn’t you? This address is a church.’

  ‘It can’t be.’

  But of course it was. It didn’t look like a church from the outside, though it said so above the door. Church of the Tenderness of the Mother of God. Underneath an inscription in Greek conveyed the same information. The door was open and he could smell incense.

  Greek Orthodox, not Catholic. Crucifixes as well as incense were among the trappings of both religions. He stood in the doorway somewhat disconcerted, tugging at his tie, trying to rearrange his ideas. Andrula Haywood had given this as her address, though she couldn’t live here, surely? Or could she? The church encompassed two semi-detached houses that had been knocked into one.

  He walked through the door and was at once enveloped in a mist of sorts. He felt a wave of warm air - a smell of tapers was added to the incense. His impression was that there were hundreds of little lights, flickering like fireflies; thin wax candles sticking out of candelabras that had been positioned at various points around the spacious room. There were curtains or blinds across the narrow windows, so it was difficult to see things clearly, though he did make out an iconostasis and a heavy curtain at one end, also icons in gilded frames on the walls. But for him, the place seemed to be empty.

  Then he saw her: a smallish woman dressed all in black, kneeling in front of a large icon. This showed a bearded saint who, judging by his expression, couldn’t make up his mind whether to look stern or benevolent. (I mustn’t be flippant, Payne reminded himself. Causing offence won’t open the gates of confession.)

  He stood very still, watching her profile. He rubbed his eyes, which had started smarting. Despite the inadequate lighting, he recognized her at once from Antonia’s description - the sallow complexion, the slightly crooked nose, the chunky golden crucifix on a chain around her throat. The hair was no longer blonde and done in a fringe, but dark, streaked with grey, parted in the middle and pulled back. Though she couldn’t be more than in her middle forties, she looked older, much older. The face was lined, haggard, and there were dark circles around her eyes, which were shut. Her lips were pressed tightly together. She looked at least fifty-seven or eight, if not older. She had aged prematurely, that much was clear.

  Payne stroked his jaw with a forefinger. Had her conscience been troubling her? Was that the reason for the way she looked? Worn out - with care or with guilt. She was leaning forward, her hands clasped in front of her. She hadn’t opened her eyes. Her brow was furrowed in concentration. The thin lips had parted and were moving silently. Praying. Payne wondered whether it was for the soul of little Sonya Dufrette - or for forgiveness ... He saw tears rolling down the withered cheeks.

  He stepped back quietly, waiting for her to finish. Interrupting her prayer wouldn’t do. If she was aware of his presence, she didn’t give any sign. He backed further and leant against the wall. He saw he was standing beside an icon that showed another saint, much younger and more vigorous than the one Andrula Haywood was praying to, though of a somewhat androgynous aspect. He - Major Payne was sure it was a ‘he’ - was in the process of pulling a devil from the turbulent sea with his left hand, while in his other hand he brandished a hammer.

  Eventually Andrula Haywood opened her eyes, crossed herself and started to rise. Payne made a movement towards her, but the next moment three more people entered the church. Two women and an elderly man on crutches. Andrula quickly walked up to them and kissed each one in turn, placing her hands on their shoulders. Payne remained standing beside the wall, watching them. They talked in an animated manner but their conversation was conducted in demotic Greek.

  He had done Greek at school, but that had been classical Greek. There had been no classes in colloquial Greek ... What a grammatical inferno Greek tragedy had been! As for doing Greek composition, he had thought of it as brutal bludgeoning - not so much different from the fate that awaited the devil in the icon, in fact.

  He saw the elderly man with the crutches kneel. Andrula laid her hand on his shoulder and shut her eyes once more. Her lips started moving but this time she spoke the words aloud - Greek again. She spoke with fervour. The two women who had come with the man also reached out and placed their hands on his arm and they too spoke aloud. The man bowed his head. They were praying for his healing, Payne felt sure and, though he didn’t understand a word of it, he felt touched.

  He was reminded of the words of Achilles’ ghost to Ulysses: I would rather be a slave at another’s plough, one who is poor with little means of livelihood, than rule all the dead and departed. Well, Andrula had chosen a life devoted to serving people in need ... It didn’t seem she had got married either ... Her conscience had prevented her from finding happiness of the more conventional kind.

  Glancing at his watch, he saw that nearly twenty-five minutes had passed since he had arrived. He remembered his grandfather saying that a true gentleman’s concerns weren’t supposed to include the passage of time. He must have been no more than eleven or twelve at the time. Funny, how some memories stuck in the mind -

  He caught a movement. The tableau had broken up and the man, supported by the two women, went to light candles. Andrula Haywood turned round and seemed to notice him for the first time. ‘Oh, hello,’ she said, smiling, and crossed through the swirls of incense, proffering both her hands. ‘Welcome. I have never seen you here before, but I hope you will find what you are looking for.’ She spoke with a slight Greek accent. Her eyes were kind, but full of pain. (He was sure he wasn’t imagining it.)

  ‘As a matter of fact I was looking for you, Miss Haywood. Could I have a word?’

  There was a pause. He hoped he didn’t sound too intimidating - like a plain clothes policeman.

  ‘You want to talk to me? Of course. Let us go to my office. There will be a baptism here soon and we will be in the way.’

  As though on cue, there entered a tall priest. He was youngish, in his thirties, with a trimmed dark beard and wearing a festive black cassock and the tall cylindrical black hat that went with it. ‘Sister Andrula,’ he said in English.

  She bowed down and kissed his hand. ‘Father,’ she said.

  ‘God is good. Is everything ready?’

  ‘Yes, Father,’ she answered and pointed her hand towards a screen, which presumably concealed the baptismal font.

  ‘I am a little early but I want to pray.’ He had given Payne an amiable nod.

  ‘Yes, Father. I won’t be long. This gentleman has come to see me.’ She then led the way across the room, past the iconostasis, which she described as ‘one of the finest products of the nineteenth-century School of Debar’, whatever that was. ‘I had it sent from Smyrna, my home town. That’s where I spent my childhood. It was a lovely place in the mid-fifties. I understand it’s somewhat spoilt now. Through here ...’

  She pulled aside a heavy brocade curtain, pushed open a door and they entered a small, cell-like room with plain walls. There wasn’t much in it, apart from a small bookcase, a metal safe, a desk with a computer on it and two. wooden chairs. ‘Please, sit down,’ she said. ‘I’m not offering you coffee because I’m in a hurry. I am a bit worried about the baptism.’ She took the seat on the other side of the desk.

  He cast a glance round. ‘Do you live here?’

  ‘Yes. I have two rooms and a shower at the back.’ She pointed towards a second door in the wall behind him. ‘That’s all I need.’

  ‘And you - you actually run this church?’

  ‘I run it, yes. I am the owner as well as the manager. Or do you say “proprietor”? It’s not that difficult, if one has faith. I get a lot of help from my brothers and sisters - there are fifty-three of us.’

  She must mean that in a spiritual rather than filial sense, Payne reflected. ‘It doesn’t look like a church from the outside - no cupola, no dome.’

  Suddenly, something she had just said jarred. The mid-fifties? He must have misheard ...

  ‘No. It used to be my old house. My neighbours hap
pened to be moving out, so I bought their house as well. What’s your interest in the church? You aren’t thinking of making me an offer, are you?’ She smiled.

  It was then that Payne had his happy inspiration. He cleared his throat. ‘You had the church built twenty years ago, didn’t you?’

  She looked at him with a little frown. ‘That’s correct.’

  He leant slightly forward. ‘You had a windfall. A big sum of money, but you weren’t happy because of the way the money had been acquired.’ His eyes never for a moment left her face. ‘So, to appease your conscience, you built a church. It was a form of - atonement.’

  There was a pause. Her face had gone pale, the lines running down from her nostrils to the ends of her mouth deepened, but she remained composed. ‘As a matter of fact you are right, in every detail. How do you know all this? Have you come here to tell me my fortune? This is remarkable, but you must know that I do not approve of fortune-telling.’ Her dark eyes fixed on his regimental tie and she smiled once more, a faint smile. ‘You don’t look like a fortune-teller. Who are you?’

  ‘You don’t know me. My name is Payne.’

  She drew in her breath. ‘Pain? Well, if you must know, that’s what I’ve been feeling all these years - here.’ She touched her heart. Her eyes filled with tears. ‘Pain. That’s what I’ve had to live with. Sorry ...’ She shook her head and wiped her eyes.

  ‘I’d like to know what exactly happened on 29th July 1981.’ Major Payne delivered this boldly, in measured tones, watching for her reaction. He felt sorry for her but he didn’t want to lose the momentum. ‘Who was it that paid you to pretend your mother was ill and leave Twiston in the morning? Who telephoned you?’

  ‘Twiston?’ She frowned, a look of utter incomprehension on her face. ‘What is Twiston?’

  (Was she pretending? She must be.)

  ‘What did they do with little Sonya Dufrette?’

  ‘Sonya -?’ She broke off and he saw her expression start changing. It was very peculiar. Her mouth opened slightly. Her eyes stared back at him. She looked startled - shocked. She looked as though she had had some sort of revelation, one that had confirmed her worst fears, that was how Payne was to describe it later to Antonia. He couldn’t understand.

  She whispered, ‘Is - is that what happened? Someone phoned her in the morning and - and said I was ill? Is that what happened?’

  What was the woman playing at? ‘Miss Haywood, it was you somebody phoned -’

  This time she corrected him. ‘Mrs Haywood.’

  It was only then that realization dawned on him. Smyrna in the mid-fifties - the accent - her age. (She looked in her early sixties because, well, because she was in her early sixties.) It all made perfect sense now. He had been an ass.

  ‘Good Lord,’ Major Payne said. ‘What an absurd misunderstanding. You are her mother.’

  13

  Mothers and Daughters

  Reaching the end of Elizabeth Street, the main shopping quarter of Belgravia, Antonia stopped and took stock of her surroundings. The blocks of mansion flats off Eaton Square were solid in nature, giving evidence of having been built to last, though their Georgian façades were extremely pleasing to the eye too. Wasn’t it somewhere here that Lord Lucan had had a flat? Antonia found Coburg Court Mansions soon enough and she entered a rather magnificent hall with a mosaic floor, potted palms, geometrical lights and sun-ray pattern mirrors on the walls. A man who looked like a Field Marshal, but who was actually a commissionaire, greeted her portentously. ‘Lady Mortlock? Third floor, flat number five. Does Miss Garnett know you are paying them a visit? She does?’ He opened the lift door for her with a dignified gesture.

  Antonia navigated a maze of carpeted corridors, went up a flight of stairs, before she eventually stood uncertainly outside Lady Mortlock’s flat.

  Her heart thumped in her chest. She didn’t know quite what to expect. When she rang to arrange the visit, the telephone had been answered by an energetic voice, a Miss Garnett, the companion, as it became clear. Emboldened by her amiable tone, Antonia explained that she had been a good friend of the Mortlocks once, adding for good measure that she had been writing Lady Mortlock’s family history.

  ‘But of course,’ Miss Garnett breathed. ‘The Jourdains of Twiston. I have read it, all one hundred and five pages. Wonderful stuff. Pity you never managed to complete it. I’d be delighted to meet you. I love chronicles of old dynastic families. I’ve just finished reading Knole and the Sackvilles.’

  Antonia murmured humbly, something to the effect that her book could hardly be compared to Vita Sackville-West‘s, but Miss Garnett would have none of it. Antonia, she said, wrote superbly. The Sackville-Wests, she went on in vehement tones, didn’t really deserve a book - they were mediocre spendthrifts and selfish incompetents while the Jourdains were a highly talented clan who had given the world inventors, thinkers, polymaths, intellectuals and educationalists. Pausing, Miss Garnett continued on a more mundane note, ’Hermione seems to be in tolerably good spirits today, and she’s been quite alert. She may even recognize you, though there’s no guarantee. She’s taking a bath at the moment, but if you could come at four, or four thirty, I’d be happy to give you tea. One more thing - isn’t your name Rushton?‘

  ‘It was. That’s my husband’s name,’ explained Antonia. ‘I am divorced now.’

  ‘That accounts for it,’ said Miss Garnett cheerfully.

  Replaying the conversation in her head, Antonia decided she rather liked the sound of Miss Garnett and that she had nothing to fear. The front door was made of solid mahogany and it bore the old-fashioned notice Please Knock and Ring. Antonia did both and as she rang the bell, a light came on over the door. Nothing happened though. Several moments passed and she rang again. What was keeping Miss Garnett from opening the door? Antonia suddenly panicked. Why had she come? What was she hoping to find out? Lady Mortlock was a very old woman, bedridden and incapacitated, whose once first-class brain had all but gone. Did she really believe she could expose Lady Mortlock as a liar, as the mastermind behind the abduction and killing of a child?

  Antonia took a step backwards and was on the point of turning round and leaving when she heard a flurry of footsteps followed by a rattling of a door-chain and locks. The door opened.

  ‘Miss Darcy? So sorry to keep you waiting! I am Bea Garnett. How do you do?’ Lady Mortlock’s companion sounded a bit out of breath, but she held out her hand and shook Antonia’s vigorously.

  ‘How do you do,’ Antonia said.

  Early sixties, stoutish, a round, remarkably smooth face, apple cheeks, at the moment extremely flushed, horn-rimmed glasses halfway down her nose, grey hair done up in a neat bun, pearl earrings and two strings of pearls around her neck. She wore a crepe de Chine dress of floral pattern.

  ‘Do come in. We’ve had a bit of a - I suppose you’d call it a rumpus.’ Miss Garnett was looking down at her left hand. She had a handkerchief wrapped around it.

  ‘Is everything all right?’ Antonia saw that the handkerchief was stained deep red.

  ‘I’ve cut myself. It’s nothing. Just a scratch. Some damned piece of glass. So treacherous. We’ve had a bit of an upset, that’s all. Norah’s got it all well under control now. I wouldn’t have been able to cope on my own. Too old. I suppose I am a bit shaken up ... Don’t you believe it if somebody told you octogenarian ladies are frail and gentle. This one’s a devil.’ Miss Garnett gave a mirthless laugh and pushed the glasses up her nose.

  ‘Do you mean Lady Mortlock?’

  ‘Who else? I don’t know what’s got into her, I really don’t. She was perfectly calm only a few minutes ago.’ They were standing in the hall and she turned to Antonia. ‘I wonder if she heard me speaking to you on the phone, whether it had something to do with you? Sometimes Hermione gets agitated about the oddest things. I have given up trying to fathom out the way her mind works, what’s left of it. Do let me take you to the sitting room. You must pretend not to see the mess. This way. As I said, s
he was perfectly fine, calm and sensible. She was telling me about a dream she had had last night ...’

  The sitting room was light and spacious, but overheated and in a state of some disarray.

  ‘It was something about going down in a sinking ship. A ship that had been torpedoed - sometimes Hermione comes up with the most extraordinary details. She saw herself shut inside a small compartment behind a watertight door, slowly being overcome by a high-pressure gush through a shell-hole.’

  ‘How terrible,’ Antonia said.

  ‘I suppose it is. She dreams a lot. She can’t sleep at all well, but when she does, dreams a lot. Nightmares, mainly, poor soul. Sometimes she wakes up screaming ... Look at the mess, just look at it. She does have tantrums, mind - fits of rage - but never before on such a scale. I can’t think what -’ Miss Garnett broke off again. ‘I’m not dripping blood, am I? No. Good. That’s Norah,’ she said as a voice was heard somewhere in the background. Although the words were blurred and indistinct, the voice sounded as though it were addressing a child.

  Antonia smiled. ‘She sounds extremely competent.’

  Miss Garnett’s lips tightened slightly. ‘Norah can be trying sometimes. She does take liberties, but, yes, I must say she is fully qualified to deal with difficult cases. She has worked both at an old people’s home and at a psychiatric hospital. Hermione attacked her the other day - scratched her arm badly - reminded me her nails needed trimming. We hardly get any visitors these days, and I am not really surprised. Hermione is so unpredictable. Most of her friends are dead anyhow. Do sit down.’ Miss Garnett motioned Antonia towards a high primrose-yellow leather-upholstered sofa. ‘Hermione’s in bed now. She isn’t normally, not at this hour, but that’s where we take her when she’s been a bad girl. Teach her a lesson. She needs to understand that’s not the way to behave.’

  ‘Plato and Nietzsche.’ Antonia picked up two books from the floor.

  ‘She aimed them at Norah’s head but missed,’ Miss Garnett explained. ‘No one would have thought she used to read Plato’s Dialogues, if they’d been able to see her earlier on! Nor Thus Spake Zarathustra ... She read them in Greek and in German, respectively, you know. Oh, if you had seen her earlier on - clawing and hissing and kicking and scratching! A proper beldame straight out of Macbeth! Knocking things over - throwing them around. Anything she could lay her hands on ...’