The hunt for Sonya Dufrette chc-1

by R. T. Raichev

  ‘What are you talking about? You couldn’t have. Nagle’s gone. He’s disappeared completely. Abroad, I expect. Lying low in some obscure location. A guesthouse in Gstaad – a pension in Pons?’ Dufrette giggled. ‘Small surprise. His name was mud after I had finished with him. I met several fellows who said they’d been trying to get on to his spoor but failed. No one knows where he is. I’d have been the first to hear if he was back. I have my spies, you know.’

  ‘I thought it was he who killed Sonya.’

  Dufrette lowered the gun further. He stared at her. ‘You thought Nagle killed Sonya? You are a fool, Antonia. A greater fool than I imagined.’ He paused. ‘Sonya, if you must know, is alive, though she seems to be far from well. Actually, I am dreadfully worried about her. I don’t quite know what to do.’ He was still holding the gun in his right hand, but he pushed his left hand inside his jacket and produced a folded sheet of paper. Pale mauve with gilded edges. She recognized it at once. He frowned down at it thoughtfully.

  ‘The letter,’ she said. ‘Veronica Vorodin’s letter.’

  ‘Yes, the letter. How uncommonly perspicacious of you.’

  ‘Did you have it translated?’

  ‘As a matter of fact I did. This morning. I wanted it done sooner but the fellow was away. It’s somebody I was at school with. He read Russian at Cambridge. Was Burgess’s facile princeps catamite for a while, though that’s neither here nor there. Name of Rose. You wouldn’t know him.’

  ‘What’s in the letter?’

  ‘Ah, wouldn’t you like to know!’ Dufrette put the letter back into his pocket. His eyes flashed angrily and he waved the gun. ‘You love asking questions, don’t you? Who do you think you are? Oedipus come to consult the Oracle? What’s in the letter indeed! Well, none of your bloody business. This is a very private matter. Can’t you get it into your thick head? Can’t you understand?’ He raised his voice once again. ‘What kind of an impertinent nosy parker are you?’

  ‘I – I am sorry,’ she stammered. ‘I am afraid I’ve been obsessed with the mystery of Sonya’s disappearance…’

  She saw him examine the gun and wondered whether he would use it on her. He might – he was mad.

  In something of a panic, not knowing what else to say, she blurted out, ‘Why did you kill her?’

  She immediately wished she hadn‘t, but the question, rather than send him into a renewed paroxysm of fury, seemed only to puzzle him. ’Kill – who?‘ His eyes strayed down to the body on the ground. ’Her? You think I killed her? Well, I didn’t.‘

  ‘Who is she?’

  Dufrette said, ‘My good woman, I haven’t got the slightest idea. I was taking a short cut, you see. I was on my way to the house. Didn’t look where I was going. Plenty on my mind, I must admit.’ Suddenly he sounded extremely amiable. ‘I stumbled on her, literally. Nearly fell over. Saw she was dead at once. She hadn’t been dead long, mind. I checked. She was still warm. I turned her over. That’s when I got blood on my hand, I expect.’ He took out his handkerchief and wiped his fingers. ‘You thought I shot her?’

  Antonia pointed to the wound on the woman’s temple. ‘How – how did she get that?’

  ‘That’s not a shot wound,’ he said.

  It dawned on her then that, incredible as it might appear, he was telling the truth after all. If he had fired his gun, she would have heard it, she reflected. She had been in the garden for at least fifteen minutes. The gun had no silencer. She would certainly have heard a shot. She felt herself relaxing a bit. ‘Why did you bring your gun?’

  ‘What a silly question. I always have my gun with me, didn’t you know? Your next question no doubt will be, why I am holding my gun in my hand?’ She nodded. ‘Well, I took my gun out of my pocket as soon as I saw the body. I imagined that I might be next, you see.’

  ‘Next?’

  ‘Yes, next. I thought there was someone with a gun lurking in the shrubbery. I thought I heard them. For a fraction of a second I too thought she had been shot… This is a dangerous place… People with guilty secrets, you know… I was wrong of course. I saw it the moment I turned her over… She hasn’t been shot.’

  Antonia had crossed to the body and was standing beside it. ‘All that blood… How did she die?’

  Dufrette’s eyebrows went up. ‘Can’t you see? And you call yourself a detective! A child of five would be able to tell you how she died. No, a child of three,’ he added improbably. Antonia didn’t mind his unsubtle sarcasm. He had put the gun back into his pocket and that was what mattered. He went on, ‘Let the lesson start. Observe that sundial closely. Notice anything unusual?’

  It was only then she saw that the sundial was stained red and glistening in the sun. Blood. She nodded. ‘That,’ he went on, ‘is where the wretched creature fell and hit her head. She landed on her temple. I don’t know whether that was what killed her though… That’s a nasty bruise. Wonder what caused it.’ He pointed his long pale forefinger towards the woman’s forehead. ‘She seems to have been accident-prone. There’s a cut above the left eye. That’s not so fresh. It’s been treated. It’s been stitched up. Must have been really bad

  …’

  ‘She is bruised all over,’ Antonia whispered. ‘Her arms and legs. Look. Bruises – lesions… Her thighs too. Her wrists. My God. She seems to have been kept bound. Some of the bruises are quite old!’

  ‘Indeed. How curious. So you are not entirely devoid of observational skills.’

  ‘Has she – has she been tortured?’

  ‘Tortured? She does appear to have been kept bound, as you say, but actually some of the bruises on her arms are injection marks. She is covered in injection marks.’

  Antonia gasped. ‘Yes… She must have been given innumerable injections.’

  ‘Innumerable’s the word,’ he agreed. He then looked up and pointed. ‘She must have come through there. See how the shrubbery’s been disturbed? That thicket over there. There are scratches on her face and arms – and legs. I imagine she barged through, not looking where she was going, as though she was being pursued by furies,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘That’s where the house is. She came from the house, that much is clear.’

  ‘Was she – was she trying to run away?’

  ‘That’s a possibility… Why is she so pale? It’s the kind of pallor that results when someone’s been incarcerated. Evidently she’s been kept indoors – ’ He broke off as the sound of twigs snapping was heard.

  ‘What was that? Someone’s been there all this time!’ Antonia cried, pulling at Dufrette’s sleeve. ‘Somebody’s been watching us – eavesdropping.’

  But Lawrence Dufrette failed to react. He was standing very still, staring before him. He had a stunned look on his face – as though he had suddenly had a startling revelation. Several moments passed. He then bowed his head – it was a gesture of resignation, of accepting defeat, Antonia reflected. Disconcertingly, his lips quivered and tears started rolling down his pale cheeks.

  ‘What – what’s the matter?’ Antonia said.

  There was another pause. He dabbed at his eyes with his handkerchief. Shaking his head, he said, ‘I don’t think I’d have been up to it. I can see they did their best. I wouldn’t have been able to cope with any of it. I am terribly squeamish. If truth be told, I am an egoist. The effort, should I have made it, would have exacerbated my temper. I would have started hating her and that, inevitably, would have led to me hating myself.’ He was talking to himself rather than to her. ‘I had no idea things were so bad. If I had had any notion, I wouldn’t have come.’ Pulling out the letter from his pocket, he handed it to Antonia.

  ‘You might as well read it. The English translation follows the Russian text. Rose writes a beautiful hand,’ said this unpredictable man. ‘It might be worth your while to go to the house and tell them that she is here, though I expect they know it already. There’d be no point in me going… I am sure they’d have a perfectly satisfactory explanation for the police.’

  ‘The pol
ice?’ Antonia echoed.

  But Lawrence Dufrette turned round and, without another glance at Antonia or the woman’s body on the ground, began to walk rapidly across the lawn away from the house in the direction of the gates. Suddenly he gave what to her sounded like a sob. ‘Twice!’ she heard him call out. She expected he had parked his car somewhere outside.

  She looked down at the body, at the injection marks on the woman’s arms. What did he mean by ‘twice’? Then, suddenly, it all came to her in a flash, and she knew with absolute certainty what had happened.

  What really happened.

  Slowly, clutching the folded letter in her hand, Antonia made her way towards the house.

  25

  A Mansion and Its Murder

  She hadn’t noticed the gargoyles before, or had forgotten all about them. They were looking down from the crenellations, leering at her unpleasantly, as though in triumphant mockery. Antonia pursed her lips. She felt a bit miffed that Dufrette had beaten her to it, that he had managed to get to the truth first. Three of the gargoyles had parts of their faces missing, either nose or ear or chin, but two looked as good as new, giving the impression they had been sculpted and mounted only recently. Twiston, it became clear to her, was undergoing renovation of some sort. To one side the stucco was so new that, she imagined, a few hundred tubs of yoghurt might have to be rubbed into it to develop some patina. But from the other two-thirds plants were protruding, gargoyles and griffins were disintegrating and streaks of damp ran down the walls.

  The kind of place exiles think of when they dream of home.

  It was she of course who had said that, on the day before Sonya disappeared, as it happened. She had spoken these words to Mrs Vorodin in this very garden.

  Still, she didn’t start reading the letter. She wanted to work out every detail by herself, unaided.

  She realized she was approaching the house from the back. She smelled the sweet aroma of honeysuckle. She went up the stone steps that led to the deserted sunlit terrace. She saw a round marble-topped table and a deck-chair under a striped umbrella. A tray with a silver coffee pot, a bone-china coffee cup, a plate containing a half-eaten wedge of Sachertorte, the chocolate glistening as it melted away in the sun. A starched napkin of gleaming whiteness. A small silver ashtray containing the stub of a purple-filtered Balkan Sobranie cigarette. A book lying face down on the chair. Antonia looked at the title. French. Un Autre Moi-Meme. Mrs Ralston-Scott clearly had Continental tastes of the refined kind, acquired, Antonia supposed, in the course of her cruise down the Mediterranean. What had she said? Sailing all the way from Monte Carlo to the Greek islands.

  Un Autre Moi-Meme… How did that translate? Another Self? James Lees-Milne? Antonia frowned. How curious that Mrs Ralston-Scott should be reading James Lees-Milne in French, but then, Antonia decided, she was a very curious lady.

  Antonia stood with her hand on the back of the chair. One couldn’t have conceived of a more innocent spectacle, nor of a more reassuring one, and yet she found the sheer civilized normality of it all a bit sinister. There was a hush. She was aware of an air of expectancy.

  The french windows were wide open. Although there was no one in sight, she did believe secret eyes were following her every move from inside the house, wondering what was to be done about her. Would they attempt to – No. She considered that unlikely. If they did, they’d be left with two bodies to account for. Still, whatever plans had been made, she and Dufrette must have upset them. She looked round. Which way had the person gone? The person who had spied on them? She didn’t think they had come this way. Some side door, she imagined.

  Antonia went in through the french windows and found herself inside the drawing room, as she had known she would. Most of it struck her as unchanged. There was something about its raw authenticity – floorboards so worn that they had the texture of driftwood, panes of wobbly seventeenth-century glass and 300-year-old paint which looked as though it might have been applied last week – that left her feeling disoriented. There were bowls of flowers everywhere, just as there had been on that fatal morning twenty years ago.

  The cuffed leather armchair the colour of overdone veal – Sir Michael’s favourite seat – and the fender stool were as she remembered them. So, for that matter, was the black Chinese screen patterned with the figures of female samurai warriors fighting dragons, which had been bought by Lady Mortlock. (Was there an encoded message? Were the dragons symbols of sexual prejudice? Not too fanciful?) On the other hand, the French nineteenth-century sofa with the woven cotton Zoffany upholstery and striped taffeta curtains were brand new. Both sofa and curtains were the colour of seashells. Some of the ancient floorboards, she noticed, had been replaced with French oak in a soft colour, in what must have been an attempt to lighten the room. The process of renovation would be resumed at some future date – if Mrs Ralston-Scott was to survive the cataclysm.

  (Antonia had a good idea now how Mrs Ralston-Scott fitted into the picture.)

  On the floor beside the sofa she saw a stuffed toy. She went and picked it up. A giraffe, one of whose ears bore teeth marks. It had a rather supercilious expression on its long face. Sonya’s favourite toy. Curzon? Yes. Though it also brought to mind Lawrence Dufrette.

  The sense of urgency had abandoned Antonia. She looked at her reflection in the oval mirror above the fireplace. She wasn’t surprised to see she had a dazed air about her. There was a cigarette case on the mantelpiece. An Asprey’s slide-action, engine-turned silver cigarette case. A gentleman’s case. She opened it. Empty. Then she noticed the monogram on the lid: T.N. For some reason she felt disturbed. She looked down at the blazer button in her hand. Replacing the case on the mantelpiece, she turned round and sat down in the veal-coloured winged chair. She put her feet on the stool. She thought she heard muffled barking coming from another part of the house. Mrs Ralston-Scott’s spaniels.

  The kind of place exiles think of… Her own words, she realized, had been quoted back to her from the radio. On top of all my problems, Mrs Ralston-Scott had said next. She had meant Sonya of course. And she had meant Sonya again, not her dog, when she had asked her secretary to play the record that ‘calmed’ her. The sweet old-fashioned tune of course was ’Lavender’s Blue‘. That whimpering sound – Antonia shuddered. That too had been Sonya, not a dog. Mrs Ralston-Scott had been cautious. Extremely cautious. She had recognized Antonia’s name. She had feared that Antonia might remember.

  Antonia opened the letter. As Dufrette had said, the English translation followed the Russian text. She read it through.

  I don’t think it would be at all a good idea for you to come to Twiston.

  That was what Veronica Vorodin had written to Lena. Antonia nodded to herself. Well, that explained Dufrette’s presence at Twiston. That was how he had known where to find them.

  Somewhere a grandfather clock chimed the half-hour. The next moment she heard a composed voice ask, ‘Excuse me, what are you doing here? Who are you?’

  She hadn’t been recognized, clearly. Well, it was twenty years. Furthermore, as the mirror had shown her, she looked a sight. Grimy-faced, badly sunburnt, sweaty and dishevelled. She couldn’t have presented a greater contrast to the woman who was standing beside the door, looking across the room at her.

  It was a young woman with short glossy chestnut hair and glasses, wearing a caramel-coloured blouse, a heather skirt, pale silk stockings and shoes the colour of molasses that were as polished and shiny as conkers. She was the epitome of cool competence and might as well have been wearing a badge saying Superior Secretary pinned to her virginal bosom. Antonia saw her cast a quick glance round the room, as though expecting to see someone else. She clearly suspected Lawrence Dufrette might have managed to sneak in too.

  Was that the secretary she had spoken to on the phone? What was her name? Laura?

  Not leaving her seat, Antonia said, ‘I came to report a body. There is a dead body outside. The body of a woman.’

  The secretary gave a
little controlled gasp. ‘A dead body?’

  Curious to see how this would develop, Antonia said, ‘Yes. A middle-aged woman. Rather big. Long grey hair.’

  The secretary was staring back at her, her lips slightly parted. ‘How terrible… Where is she? I mean the body?’

  ‘There is a clearing – a small lawn with a sundial… Do you mean you don’t know who the woman is?’ Antonia asked.

  ‘No, of course I don’t. How could I? No such woman lives here.’ She was playing the part of mystification very plausibly.

  So that was going to be their line. Blank stares and blunt denials. The Lady Vanishes.

  ‘She couldn’t have come from anywhere else,’ Antonia said. ‘She is wearing a nightdress. Her arms and legs are covered in injection marks.’

  ‘I must call the police,’ the secretary went on, though she made no movement. ‘Oh!’ She seemed to have suddenly been visited by an idea. ‘Needle marks, did you say? I wonder if she’s one of the patients at the psychiatric hospital. There is a psychiatric hospital a couple of miles from here. She – this woman – may have run away – must have!’ The secretary spoke with a sense of shocked discovery. ‘I can easily get their number and ask.’

  Had they come to an arrangement with somebody from the psychiatric hospital? One of the doctors? Somebody high-up? Well, everybody had a price, or so they said. How much did a death certificate cost? Was it more expensive than, say, a fake passport? Or was all this being said only to put her off the scent?

  Seized by a sense of outrage, Antonia said, ‘Could I speak to Mrs Ralston-Scott?’

  ‘I am afraid Mrs Ralston-Scott isn’t here. She has gone abroad until the work on the house is completed. I don’t know when exactly she is coming back. Next month, I imagine – or the month after.’ The secretary continued standing by the doorway. Her hands were clasped before her, her head tilted slightly to one side. Was there anyone there, pulling the strings, providing instructions, prompting?