The Hunt for Sonya Dufrette

by R. T. Raichev

  ‘No - no, I don’t remember.’

  ‘Perhaps the Major and I were members of some crazy neo-Nazi cult? Perhaps we were at the centre of some Herrenvolk plot to purge the world of its imbecile infants?’

  Actually that is not such a bad idea for a story, Antonia thought. It could certainly be made to work. If people could believe that Diana and Dodi were alive, having faked their deaths, they could believe anything.

  Lady Mortlock might have read her mind because she sighed and said, ‘Well, I credited you with greater intelligence than that, Antonia. I am disappointed in you.’

  15

  ‘They’

  ‘Well, Antonia - I hope you don’t mind me calling you Antonia?’ Major Payne said. ‘Miss Darcy sounds forbidding somehow, don’t you think?’

  ‘I don’t see why it should.’

  ‘Shades of Pride and Prejudice and that pompous ass Darcy, whom I never managed to like, not even after his transformation. And wasn’t there a Miss Darcy - a snobbish sister, who was even worse?’

  ‘No. That was Bingley’s sister. Miss Darcy was rather nice,’ Antonia said. ‘If I remember correctly, she is described as having “no equal for beauty, elegance and accomplishments”.’

  ‘Oh yes. And for the affection she inspires.’ He looked at her in a way which made it clear he considered that an attribute she herself possessed in abundance.

  It was half past eleven the following morning and they were in the club library, comparing notes over coffee. At least they had been comparing notes before they went off at a tangent. Antonia wasn’t sure whether she should feel annoyed or flattered by his attentions which seemed to be becoming more ardent. She blamed herself for encouraging him, by first telling him of the rather annoying phone call she had received from her former husband the night before, then teasing him about the dog Apollo and the cat Daphne. Major Payne had got hold of her hand and said he wouldn’t let go of it unless she told him how she had learnt about it.

  Antonia could have named Colonel Haslett as her informant at once, but had delayed for at least a quarter of a minute, during which time her hand had remained in his. She had made several futile attempts to pull it from his grip, which had only led to him tightening it. She hadn’t tried hard enough. She had enjoyed the experience and now had a ridiculously guilty feeling about it. That, she told herself, was not how responsible people in their fifties behaved. They had acted like silly teenagers. What would have happened if somebody had come in and seen them, engaged in a playful skirmish across her desk? Dallying in the library!

  Antonia felt hot and a little faint. She found she was panicking. She wasn’t ready for a relationship, let alone marriage. It is too soon to allow another man into my life, she thought.

  The day was warm and the library windows were open. From outside there came the smell of freshly mown grass - which, again, forcibly, reminded her of that fateful day at Twiston - also the sounds of Radio 4. The gardener was a young university student and he had his transistor radio on. As it happened, he was listening to a programme called Hopes and Desires, the first of a series of comedies about unconscious yearnings.

  ‘Well, if you are not happy with Miss Darcy, you can address me as Mrs Rushton.’ Which, Antonia pointed out with greater severity than she intended, happened to be her married name.

  He sighed. ‘I’d rather call you Antonia and I hope you will call me Hugh one day. Well, we are making progress. The moving finger,’ he went on quickly, unless that be misconstrued, ‘is now firmly fixed on Lena ... Lena didn’t really care about her daughter. Lena fed Lady Mortlock the canard about Miss Haywood’s mother being ill in hospital. Lena phoned the nanny - shortly after Sonya disappeared. She didn’t sound at all like a mother mourning the death of her child. She warned the nanny against talking. Her exact words were, You’d better keep your mouth shut, my girl, or they will kill us both. We do assume, don’t we, that Lena was part of whatever conspiracy there was? That she knew exactly what happened?’

  ‘We do.’

  ‘But we don’t believe Lady Mortlock was the mastermind behind the conspiracy?’

  ‘No. I don’t really think Lady Mortlock had anything to do with Sonya’s disappearance. The only reason she told lies was because she didn’t want it to be known that she had had an affair with Lena.’

  ‘You don’t think that she and Major Nagle -’

  ‘No. The Herrenvolk conspiracy was not meant to be taken seriously. She was making fun of me.’

  ‘Was she though?’

  ‘Of course she was.’

  ‘It might have been one of those double bluffs,’ Payne reflected. ‘Maybe there was a conspiracy but she named Major Nagle because it made it all seem so absurd? Maybe she wanted you to dismiss the idea out of hand - which you did. What if she was telling the truth? Wait. What if her real partner was somebody else - somebody who was very close to her? What if her partner was her husband - or should I say her so-called husband?’

  ‘Sir Michael?’

  ‘Sir Michael. Why did the Mortlocks stay together? From what Lady M. told you, theirs was clearly a marriage in name only - a mariage blanc. What if they were together exclusively for ideological reasons? What if they were confederates? No one would have thought it of Sir Michael, but he was actually a Freemason and apparently he belonged to a number of other esoteric societies, somebody in the department told me once.’

  ‘His obituary mentioned it too,’ she murmured, remembering.

  ‘There you are. He might have been a bad blood nut as well - he might even have been more fanatical than her!’ Payne paused. ‘Are you sure Sir Michael didn’t leave the room that morning while you were all watching the royal wedding?’

  ‘No ... Actually, he did. Yes. I forgot to mention it in my account, I know. But he wasn’t the only one. People did go out - the Falconers, Mrs Lynch-Marquis - for no more than a couple of minutes at a time and by themselves. The usual. There were two downstairs lavatories. Sir Michael couldn’t have been out for more than five minutes, I think. He went to the kitchen to have a word with the men who were providing the oak with a base. He had remembered something. It seemed to be urgent.’

  ‘How can you be sure he went to the kitchen? No, of course you aren’t sure. It’s not as though you followed him.’

  ‘Five minutes wouldn’t have been enough for him to go down to the river and drown Sonya.’

  ‘Who says Sonya drowned? He might have killed her somewhere else and hidden the body.’

  Antonia smiled. ‘I could just about get away with it if I were to put this in a book -’

  ‘All right - but, my dear girl, the fact remains that some sort of conspiracy was at work. We know for a fact that somebody - the mysterious and rather sinister “they” - did buy the nanny’s silence.’

  ‘And not only the nanny’s,‘ Antonia said, her eyes suddenly bright. She went on slowly, ’Lady Mortlock said that Lena had had a fortune, but that she had frittered it away. Lena told her about it when she went to see her.‘

  ‘Did she now? How very interesting.’ Payne stroked his jaw with a forefinger. ‘And Lena wasn’t talking about the Yusupov millions?’

  ‘No. The Yusupov millions are the stuff of legends, but they had been spent by the time Lena was born.’

  ‘It might have been a fantasy of course - a figment of Lena’s drunken dreaming.’

  ‘What if it wasn’t?’

  ‘If it wasn’t ... Well, then it would mean that in the not too distant past, say in the last twenty years, Lena had been in possession of a lot of money.’ Payne paused. ‘Where did the money come from? Who gave it to her?’

  ‘The obvious answer is, the mysterious and rather sinister “they”. The same person - or persons - who paid Sonya’s nanny, paid Sonya’s mother as well.’

  ‘A deal, eh?’

  Antonia said, ‘It is Lena who holds the key to the mystery. Lena knows what happened to her daughter. Lena knows who “they” are.’

  ‘The Mortlocks.
My money’s on the Mortlocks.’

  ‘We must go and talk to Lena.’

  ‘It shouldn’t be too difficult to track her down, should it?’

  ‘I already have,’ Antonia said. ‘Before I took my leave of Miss Garnett, I asked if Mrs Dufrette had left a contact number or address when she called, and it turned out that she had. Lena left both a number and an address.’

  ‘Where does she live?’

  ‘A hotel named the Elsnor. It’s in Bayswater. Rather a run-down sort of place.’

  ‘That’s appropriate. Isn’t Lena a ruin herself?’

  ‘Miss Garnett knows the hotel. She was taken to tea there as a girl, but the place now is apparently unrecognizable, gone to the dogs completely. Miss Garnett referred to it as a “hell-hole”.’

  There was a pause. ‘I don’t think we should bother to phone. We are going to pay Lena a blitz visit,’ Major Payne said.

  ‘Who’s going? Me or you?’

  ‘This time ... I think we should go together. We can pretend to be a married couple.’

  Antonia bristled. ‘I don’t see why we should want to do that.’

  ‘Lena would feel less threatened if she were to be approached by a nice middle-aged couple,’ Major Payne explained. ‘The idea is to stage a casual encounter, buy her a drink, set a trap and trick her into some sort of confession.’

  ‘Since she appears to be an alcoholic and penniless, it’s unlikely she’d feel threatened if a giant lizard went along and offered to buy her a drink,’ Antonia pointed out. A married couple, she thought. Really. Hugh was forgetting himself. She meant Major Payne. Earlier on he had addressed her as ‘my dear girl’ - how dared he!

  ‘The bar. That’s where we’ll probably find her. We must visit the Elsnor at the cocktail hour.’

  ‘No such thing as the “cocktail hour” any longer exists.’

  ‘The Elsnor, did you say? Are you sure it’s not the Elsinore? Would be so much more suitable a place for conjuring up ghosts from the past -’

  ‘Stop showing off,’ Antonia said.

  16

  ‘She was never in the river . . .’

  The Elsnor was a private hotel in Bayswater that occupied two corner houses in a noisy region east of Queen’s Road. It had been grand and ugly once, in the best manner of hotels built in the late Victorian era, but, having fallen on bad times, was merely ugly now.

  ‘It has the air of neglected mystery about it’ Major Payne declared. ’Sacré bleu, Prince Omelette! C‘est le spectre de ton père,’ he sang out suddenly. That, he explained, came from a particularly witless French opera based on Hamlet, which he had seen at Covent Garden a while ago. No, it hadn’t been a buffo opera - it hadn’t been meant to be funny.

  It was seven o‘clock that same evening.

  They entered the hotel through the revolving doors. An acrid smell hung on the air, suggesting some sort of conflagration had taken place. Antonia looked round nervously. A short circuit? Surely not a gun? Major Payne drew her attention to the fact that the two receptionists were under fire. One was being accused of having lost the passport belonging to a Japanese tourist, while the other was trying to convince a group of extremely tense-looking German tourists that no booking had been made in their name and that they had come to the wrong hotel. ‘But this is not possible,’ the leader of the group was saying. ‘I made the reservations myself. I want to see the manager at once.’ The manager, he was told, was away.

  They started crossing the hall and passed by a sunken sofa. They saw a fearfully made-up girl in a miniskirt, black fishnet stockings and knee-length boots, who couldn’t have been more than fifteen, sitting on the lap of a bald stout man who looked like a commercial traveller of the more prosperous variety, gazing earnestly into his eyes. Antonia shot Major Payne an eloquent look.

  ‘Don’t jump to conclusions. She may be his daughter. She may be upset about something,’ Payne murmured. That was only a moment before the commercial traveller brought his face close to the girl’s and ran his tongue across her lips and chin.

  Placing his hand at Antonia’s elbow in a protective manner, Payne propelled her briskly through the hall.

  They were following the sign pointing in the direction of the bar. ‘I bet it leads to the saunas,’ Antonia said. ‘It seems to be that sort of place. ’

  However, the arrow did not lie and soon they found themselves entering the Elsnor bar. Beside the door there stood an ancient stuffed bear with eyes of coloured glass. Its right paw was raised in greeting, the left one was missing. Inside the bar it reeked of stale smoke and some exotic, rather sickening, scent, which, Major Payne insisted, was actually formaldehyde. It was a dark cavern of a room with vaulted ceilings, empty and very quiet. They could hear water dripping dolorously somewhere.

  ‘Doesn’t it put you in mind of the Blitz? What will you have?’ Payne asked her. His hand was still at her elbow.

  ‘Gin and tonic. Why are you whispering?’

  ‘I feel like a neat whisky ... There’s a speck of soot on your cheek. Do let me.’ He took out a starched handkerchief. Who did his ironing? Antonia wondered. ‘Don’t move ... Are your eyes actually blue? Do they change colour? Don’t move. It’s gone ... No waiters ... Why isn’t she here?’ He looked round at the empty tables.

  ‘She might be dead,’ Antonia suggested. ‘Alcoholics and junkies have notoriously short lifespans. They might be carrying her coffin down the back stairs at this very moment.’ Was she seeking refuge in morbid flippancy, as a form of defence against his flirtatiousness?

  ‘Let’s find the barman,’ he said.

  But there was no barman. It was only as they approached the bar counter that they noticed the barmaid. A bull-shouldered woman with orange hair and the lurid lips of a Land Girl, who sat slumped on a stool. So focused was she on her own drink, a tall glass filled with vermouth the colour of old blood, which she was sucking through a green straw, that she took no notice of them.

  They halted and Payne said, ‘Good Lord.’

  ‘Yes, it’s her,’ Antonia whispered. ‘It’s Lena ... In charge of the drinks.’

  ‘Asking Mistress Fox to feed the chickens, eh?’

  ‘Yes. It can only happen at a place like this.’

  ‘Big, loose and picturesque ... Dracula’s daughter ... The fantastical hausfrau ...’

  ‘She looks like an inflated Zandra Rhodes doll. She still rims her eyes with kohl.’

  ‘Let’s go and beard this phantom bride in her bibulous bower!’

  ‘Be quiet, Hugh.’

  ‘We’ll play it by ear,’ Major Payne explained sotto voce, privately noting with some satisfaction that she had called him Hugh. ‘The main thing is to act as though we have no idea who she is.’

  ‘She’s not likely to recognize me, is she?’ Antonia sounded anxious.

  ‘Fear not. I am sure you haven’t changed one little bit,’ he said gallantly. ‘It’s only that she looks pickled. Observe the catatonic stare. Leave it to me. I’ll start, you follow my cues. We’ll concoct our plot as we go along.’

  As they approached the curve of the bar, Lena looked up and regarded them out of puffy eyes. ‘Hello,’ she said amiably. ‘Such a hot day, isn’t it? There used to be a fan, but someone stole it.’ She no longer spoke with a Russian accent but slurred some of her words a bit. She smacked her lips. ‘Disgraceful. What would you two love birds like?’

  She was wearing a faded maroon-coloured velvet gown that seemed to have seen better days and heavy costume jewellery. Her ear lobes were weighed down by enormous pendant earrings made of sparkling Swarowski crystals set in bronze frames. Her face was the shape of a full moon and plastered with pancake make-up. ‘A gin and tonic for my wife and a scotch for me, please,’ Payne ordered. ‘Neat.’

  On the counter in front of her, there lay a half-eaten bar of chocolate, a lipstick, a powder compact, four large tablets with a purplish coating and a sheet of pale mauve paper - it looked like a letter, Antonia thought.

  ‘We
don’t get many married couples here,’ Lena observed. ‘Only foreigners bring their wives.’

  ‘We lit on the Elsnor by a trick of fate. Charming place,’ Major Payne said. ‘Have you got Famous Grouse?’

  ‘Are you a soldier?’ Lena asked. She popped one of the purple pills into her mouth, washed it down with vermouth, then busied herself with bottles and glasses. She was painfully slow and clumsy. ‘You certainly have that air. My papa served with the Imperial Cossacks for a while. He was aide-de-camp to the Tsar’s brother. You are a soldier, aren’t you?’

  ‘Spot on, dear lady. Major Payne at your service.’ Antonia had never heard him put on this voice before. He made himself sound ridiculously Blimpish.

  ‘Can you read that letter?’ Antonia whispered when Lena turned round to get a bottle of tonic. ‘I think it’s a letter. It’s upside down.’

  Payne rose to the challenge at once. ‘I’ll try.’ She saw him tilting his head to one side and squinting.

  ‘All the ice’s melted, I can’t understand why,’ Lena said. ‘There’s plenty of lemon. Have you been abroad?’ She was peering into Antonia’s face now. ‘You have a lovely tan. You look a simpatico sort of person. You’ve been abroad, haven’t you?’ Antonia’s heart missed a beat, but Lena showed no flicker of recognition.

  ‘Spot on again,’ Payne said. ‘Kenya, actually. Got off the plane three hours ago. We’d been visiting friends. Name of Sandys,’ he added casually and he gave Antonia a wink. Sandys, she had told him, were the couple who had bought Twiston from the Mortlocks and then sold it to Mrs Ralston-Scott before leaving for Kenya. She thought she could guess the kind of game he had started playing. He had managed to establish a connection with Twiston without arousing Lena’s suspicions. What next? she wondered, fascinated.