The hunt for Sonya Dufrette chc-1

by R. T. Raichev

  Where had Curzon, the giraffe with the bitten ear, disappeared? The answer to this one suggested itself almost at once: Sonya had missed it and Veronica had contacted Lena and asked her to send it to them, which Lena had done… So Lena did have a forwarding address

  …

  Where was it she had heard ‘Lavender’s Blue’ played? And why did she think it was extremely important that she should remember… Had it been on the radio? She felt sure she had been sitting in the library… Had Mrs Cathcart hummed it, perhaps? Unlikely. Colonel Haslett? No, she didn’t think so. Colonel Haslett often hummed but it was usually some Gilbert and Sullivan tune – or ’Colonel Bogey‘.

  Antonia shut her eyes. Watch out for that ring, Miss Pettigrew had said.

  Suddenly she sat up. She had heard the familiar cackling and shuffling noises outside the door, heralding the imminent arrival of the club committee. They didn’t come in at once, though, but started a discussion outside, over whether the sign on the door should be changed from Vacant to Meeting in Progress, or whether doing so would put off any legitimate latecomers. Eventually it was decided to change the sign, and three people entered the room.

  Mrs Compton, Mr Reece and Commander Bridges.

  They appeared greatly surprised to see Antonia and even more surprised when they heard that she had been waiting since three o‘clock. ’Oh dear. We did say half-past, didn’t we, Douglas?‘ Mrs Compton said. She was a tall willowy woman of indeterminate years, dressed elegantly in a light green suit with darker green facings, whose immaculate coiffure the unlikely colour of ’Dutch gold’ added to her height and sophistication.

  Commander Bridges, thus appealed to, went very pink. He attempted to solve the dilemma between his conscience and manners by saying that it had been half-past three to start with – and that went back at least five years – they must be living in the past! He made it sound like some sort of a joke. He tugged at his intricately tied cravat and beamed and nodded at Antonia. He was clad in a dark blazer and grey trousers. He was seventy-six but looked younger, though sitting down and getting up were a problem. Antonia saw him glance down nervously at the Louis Quinze. He hated being helped either way. Given the option, he would have remained standing.

  Mr Reece asked Commander Bridges if he knew the latest cricket score.

  ‘This room needs changing,’ Mrs Compton observed, looking around with a critical expression, holding her chin between her thumb and forefinger. ‘Don’t you think? I don’t know what it is. Something – I don’t know. Don’t you think?’

  ‘We did it only recently, Arabella,’ Mr Reece said cheerfully. He was a large, stout man in his early sixties, with a pleasant red face, wearing tweeds. He looked like a gentleman farmer but was in fact a magistrate. ‘Can’t afford to do it again. The budget -’

  ‘Ah, the budget.’ Mrs Compton sounded scornful.

  ‘Afraid so. It’s tighter than ever,’ Commander Bridges said. ‘Heaven knows how we manage.’

  ‘Refreshments coming up,’ Mr Reece announced. He rubbed his hands. ‘Jolly good.’

  A waiter had wheeled in a trolley. Commander Bridges started easing himself into the chair. They all looked away delicately. ‘Two messages,’ the waiter said. ‘One from Mr Beeson, the other from Lady Franks. Apologies, et cetera. They aren’t coming, so start without them.’

  Mrs Compton waited until he had left the room and said triumphantly, ‘This is the third time. I detest counting, but it is the third time. I do think, Douglas, you should say something. It’s not as though we have all the time in the world!’

  Commander Bridges harrumphed. ‘Yes, yes, of course, Arabella.’

  ‘Muffins. Crumpets.’ Mr Reece had started lifting lids. ‘Can I tempt you, anyone? Arabella? Antonia?’

  Antonia said she would like a cup of tea and a muffin.

  ‘It is too hot for muffins,’ Mrs Compton said.

  ‘Sausage rolls. May I tempt you? Douglas? Ladies? The sandwiches look good.’

  Mrs Compton said, ‘No, nothing to eat. Just some tea.’ She sighed. She opened her handbag in a portentous manner which suggested that some life-saving piece of equipment might be inside, but which merely resulted in her producing her reading glasses.

  ‘A muffin, Robert, thank you… A cup of tea too, yes. Thank you.’

  ‘It’s too hot for muffins,’ Mrs Compton said again.

  Antonia took a covert glance at her watch.

  ‘Let’s start, shall we?’ Commander Bridges said, smiling amiably over his cup. ‘The librarian’s report… Antonia, would you like to -’

  ‘The last report was rather inconclusive, I thought,’ Mrs Compton interjected. ‘Don’t you think?’

  ‘It was the meeting that was inconclusive,’ Mr Reece said.

  ‘I don’t understand what you mean, Robert.’

  Antonia waited politely. The room was getting warmer by the minute. She could see the sun and the blue sky outside. Also the tree – an elm, not an oak. (She wished she didn’t keep seeing the oak at Twiston.) Shouldn’t they open one of the windows? Her eyes shut and opened. It wouldn’t do for her to doze off! For some reason she found herself thinking of the Vorodins and their plan. That carefully premeditated abduction. All very ingenious, but – plans sometimes went wrong, didn’t they? That was an interesting line of thought. What if the Vorodins had arrived and found that Sonya wasn’t there? Just imagine that that was what did happen. Now, where could Sonya have gone? Well, she had liked hiding -

  ‘Let’s start, shall we? Antonia, are you ready?’ Commander Bridges said.

  ‘Yes. Sorry.’

  Antonia raced through her report. Every now and then she glanced up. Commander Bridges kept beaming at her. Mrs Compton was looking round the room and shaking her head. Mr Reece was eating a sausage roll with a great deal of concentration.

  When she finished, Commander Bridges said, ‘Well done, Antonia. That was jolly thorough.’

  ‘I have a request,’ she said. ‘I do need more bookshelves and journal racks.’

  ‘How much money do you want?’ Mr Reece asked with a smile, brushing crumbs off his waistcoat with his napkin. ‘I think we could rustle up seventy or eighty pounds, can’t we, Douglas?’

  ‘Yes, yes. I think we can. Shelves are important.’

  Mrs Compton heaved another sigh but raised no objection. Antonia felt herself relax.

  The letting of the library to non-club members, to outsiders, for social functions, such as book readings and small wedding receptions, was discussed next. It was always a controversial point. The general feeling was against outsiders. Members, most of them diehard traditionalists, resented intrusions from the outside world intensely. But the fees the club charged were not to be sneezed at, Mr Reece pointed out – they provided them with a goodish income.

  As for book donations…

  ‘I am totally against book donations. Totally. They are so…’ Mrs Compton – the widow of a Whitehall official – searched for a word. ‘A bit like a jumble sale, don’t you think? A lot of the books people donate are in an appalling state. No better than second-hand junk, really.’

  ‘No, not all the books -’ Antonia began.

  ‘I’ve seen them! Then there is the kind of books some people leave. Don’t you remember when the Gloucesters came – that VE Day? When the Duke picked up a book and it turned out to be -’ Mrs Compton broke off. ‘Don’t you remember?’

  ‘Arabella, that was ages ago,’ Mr Reece said.

  ‘It was I who had to write a letter of apology afterwards.’

  The incident in question had taken place before Antonia’s time -

  Suddenly she was reminded of that other letter. The letter written in Russian and signed V.V. What had Veronica written about, on her characteristic mauve paper with gilded edges? Would they ever know? Dufrette was unlikely to call them up and tell them what was in it. Dufrette didn’t want to have anything to do with them. They shouldn’t have let him take the letter, just like that. Could they have
stopped him though? Would he have used the gun if they had tried?

  But perhaps Hugh was right. Perhaps the letter didn’t contain anything of importance.

  There, however, Antonia was wrong. The letter did contain important information.

  It explained the motive for the murder.

  21

  A Demon in My View

  It was the following Wednesday. Temperatures had been soaring since nine o‘clock in the morning, and by midday sweltering heat was coming through the open windows of the library. Air-conditioning would have made life bearable, Antonia reflected, but that had never been an option. The rather tight budget would never have allowed it. Besides, how many such days were there in an average English summer?

  She drifted drowsily about the library, fanning herself with an ancient gold-edged dinner-party menu she had found inside a dog-eared copy of Thesiger’s Marsh Arabs, assembling a pile of stray magazines. Her feet felt heavy as lead. The usual racing papers. Country Life, National Geographic, Spectator. The Salisbury Review, inside which she had found the latest issue of Playboy. Antonia smiled. Well, she had found worse…

  She remembered the luncheon menu they had had the day Sonya disappeared. Orange cocktails, iced, from a jug. Gulls’ eggs (two each). Fried salmon with rich sauce. Poussin with red wine. Charlotte russe. Coffee. Lady Mortlock had seen no reason why luncheon shouldn’t have been served. Only Lawrence Dufrette had refused to eat. Lena had got drunk. Major Nagle had had a tray sent up to his room…

  The gardener’s radio was on once more. It was so loud, it might have been in the room, and she had no other choice but listen to it as she went about her job. She didn’t mind. She didn’t have the energy to mind anything in this heat.

  Two o‘clock. The news. She squinted down at her watch. The hottest day on record. Just hearing the weather report made her sweat more. Was it as hot as in the marshes of Arabia?

  Thesiger had been to the club once. She had seen him: very tall and unbent despite his great age, with a hawk-like nose, wearing his OE tie, a tweed jacket and twill trousers. Afterwards a club member had come up to her. It transpired he had been to prep school with Thesiger. ‘He was an odd fellow. We were nine or ten and awfully keen on Prester John. We were all identifying with David Crawford, the hero, you know. Only Thesiger identified with Laputa, the Zulu chief. An odd fellow. Wasn’t a bit surprised when I heard he had made his home at Maralai and become known to the locals as “Mzee Julu”.’

  She didn’t fancy the idea of life at Maralai at all. Too hot. How I’d like to go north, to the Faroe islands, mist-laden Atlantic wonders, Antonia murmured dreamily. It stays cool up there. What had put the Faroe islands in her head? The National Geographic – the picture on the cover. There was an explanation for most things.

  Various tasks kept presenting themselves. The cataloguing of the biographies section. An assessment as to what needed purchasing from Hatchards. She needed to phone the book binders as well. However, none of these tasks seemed very important or worthwhile in this weather. She decided to reduce her movements to a minimum and execute only very light chores, of the kind that didn’t involve any degree of physical exertion. That morning she had put on a short-sleeved cotton dress, though it didn’t seem to help much. It was a certain cool shade of blue, that was why she had chosen it – no, it was not lavender blue.

  She considered again the matter of the obituary – what Hugh had told her on the phone earlier on. Anatole Vorodin, it transpired, had died back in 1988. Hugh had found his obituary.

  No children.

  It was suggestive, certainly. It had given them food for thought. Hugh had said that it might only mean that the Times obituary writer hadn’t done his research properly – or it might mean that the widow had suppressed certain facts… Yes, that was more likely. Cunning vixen, V. V!

  How hot it was. Antonia wished she could concentrate better.

  With the exception of Playboy, which she intended to dispose of discreetly later on, she laid the magazines out on the mahogany table in the middle of the room, taking great care to line them up neatly.

  She watered the wilting aspidistras and rubber plants, then stood beside the window, looking out. Everything was very still. Not a whiff of wind. No birdsong. No buzzing of insects. The sky was a fierce, burning white, the trees ferocious shades of rusty red and sulphur yellow. A mist of sorts hung on the air – a greyish gauze through which there shone the merciless golden globe of the sun. It hurt her eyes to look at it. At the far end of the garden, the student gardener was deadheading the roses. He was in his shirtsleeves, wearing a straw hat and dark glasses and appeared quite unperturbed. He looked up and waved at her. She waved back. Everything seemed to be happening in slow motion. The gardener’s transistor radio was on a trestle table underneath the window, which explained why she could hear the transmission so loud and clear.

  ‘No children,’ she said aloud. ‘They had no children. His wife survives him but they had no children.’

  Hugh’s phone call had come an hour or so before. He had been on the internet, apparently, looking up entries under ‘Vorodin’, ‘Vorodins’, ‘Veronica Vorodin’ and ’Anatole Vorodin‘. There were several entries, he said, but each time he clicked on them, he got a notice saying, ’This file no longer exists,‘ or ’The page cannot be found.‘ Or ’The page you are looking for might have been removed, had its name changed or be temporarily unavailable.‘

  The only exception had been an obituary from The Times, announcing the death on 2nd March 1988 in a paragliding accident in the Bahamas of Anatole Vorodin, Veronica’s husband.

  Born 1943, in Geneva. Of Russian-French extraction. The son of Vladislav Vorodin and Marie-Josephe de Roustang. (Of the de Roustang dentistry equipment dynasty.) Educated privately, at the Sorbonne and Yale. In 1961 produced a single entitled ‘Rich Rovers in Rio’, now largely forgotten. Played the piano at the Algonquin in New York, and at some Paris jazz clubs, but his musical career never took off. Got a bit part in Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, but never made it as an actor either. Renowned for his and his wife’s philanthropic work and children’s charities. Hobbies included paragliding, yachting and collecting first editions of Flash Gordon comics. It was the obit’s last line, Hugh said, that was of possible interest.

  He is survived by his wife Veronica. They had no children.

  The erasure of Sonya. That was how Hugh had put it. What did Antonia make of it? Well, Veronica could easily have managed to provide imprecise information. She had done it out of caution. She had been afraid she might be discovered, so she had made a decision. Sonya – even if her name had been changed to something else – would receive no mention as their daughter. Had Veronica made sure that every file that mentioned the Vorodin name was removed from the net? Antonia believed it could be done. Still, she felt somewhat disconcerted by the news.

  She sat down at her desk. Her swivel chair felt extremely comfortable. Should she ring Martin and ask him to bring her a cup of coffee or a glass of icy lemonade? No. Too much effort. Her hand felt numb. The Radio 4 news bulletin was over and some lively debate about oleanders was now taking place. Oleanders? Had she heard correctly? ‘Can you advise me how to make them flower? I’ve tried everything – even crushed snails, which, we were told, make a wonderful fertilizer.’

  How did these people find the energy to muster up so much enthusiasm about crushed snails? ‘Oleanders,’ the voice went on, ‘are like children. They need very special care. Keep them indoors longer in spring…’

  Like children… The silly things people said. Children were much more special, much more precious than oleanders. Even children like Sonya, whom Lady Mortlock had described as ‘damaged goods’… Sonya should have been kept indoors. Nothing would have happened if she had been kept indoors. Antonia flexed her hand gently, trying to get rid of the pins and needles. Her eyes opened and closed again.

  No children… Was the selling and subsequent abduction of Sonya Dufrette the onl
y theory that fitted the facts? Well, yes – it was. What other reason could there have been for such large sums of money to be handed out to Lena Dufrette and the nanny? There were also the initials at the bottom of that letter. V.V. Lawrence Dufrette was sure that Veronica had masterminded the taking of Sonya.

  No – there was no doubt that Sonya was spirited away from Twiston and adopted by the Vorodins. She was given a new name and a new identity. She was passed off as the Vorodins’ daughter and they went to live at some place where no one knew them – the Bahamas, maybe, where Anatole Vorodin was eventually to die in a paragliding accident.

  Still, let’s assume, Antonia reasoned in her dreamlike state, that ‘no children’ meant precisely that. That the ultimate happy ending wasn’t a happy ending after all. It was possible, wasn’t it, that, at some point between the royal wedding on 29th July 1981 and Anatole Vorodin’s death on 2nd March 1988, Sonya Dufrette herself died – either as a result of an accident or through illness. But wouldn’t the obituary then have said, ’His daughter predeceased him‘? Well, not necessarily – not if Veronica Vorodin had withheld the information that there was a daughter in the first place.

  Antonia heard the door open and somebody enter the library. A heavy, lumbering tread. Opening her eyes a fraction she saw the stocky figure of a man in a checked hacking jacket. She watched him take The Times and the racing paper from the mahogany table and ease himself into an armchair. Mid-sixties? Sandy hair sleeked back, jowly square face with bulldog features, brick-coloured, a reddish nose, a drinker’s nose, she imagined; a small moustache, extremely pouchy eyes of the ‘fried-egg’ variety. He kept mopping his brow with a large handkerchief. What big hands he had! Enormous pink hands, like hams -