The Hunt For Sonya Dufrette Part 3

'True enough about the Russians.' Lynch-Marquis nodded. 'The French too. They guillotined the King and Queen and tortured the Dauphin, and look at them - not a single decent government since!'

'Serves them jolly well right,' Bill Kavanagh said. 'Let's drink to it.'

Mrs Lynch-Marquis said tentatively, 'We killed our King too . . .'

'Ah, Charles the Cavalier, with his zeal for his creed, his expensive demands and silk underwear!' Dufrette croaked. 'Cromwell did a d.a.m.ned good job.'

'Have we got a decent government?' Mrs Falconer asked.

The night before, Antonia had heard Dufrette refer to the 'Grafin of Grantham', or it might have been the 'Griffon of Grantham', or even the 'Gryphon of Grantham', so she expected another disparaging comment, but what this perverse person said now was, 'Of course we have. Ma Thatcher is a G.o.ddess and I will personally shoot anyone who dares suggest otherwise.'

Lena pointed to the TV screen. 'Is the gla.s.s coach bullet-proof? Is it made of fortified gla.s.s? What if somebody decides to shoot at dear sweet Diana? There might be a sniper hiding somewhere! The IRA -'

'That would be the day!'

'So young, so fresh, so beautiful.' Lena dabbed at her eyes with her handkerchief. 'So innocent-looking. Do you know who Diana reminds me of? She reminds me of me.'

Dufrette said with a smile that she must be thinking of somebody else. She had never been innocent. Young and beautiful yes, about two hundred and fifty-five years ago. Innocent - never. 'Shall I remind you what one of your party tricks used to be? Better not - we are after all in polite society.'

'Do you know what I want to do, Lawrence? I want to throw my gla.s.s at you and smash your face,' Lena slurred.

'You are most likely to miss, my sweet, but do you know what will happen if you do a crazy thing like that? I will strangle you with the curtain cord.'

Sheikh Umair had been looking immensely bored, but at this last lively exchange he perked up. Antonia saw his hooded eyes fix speculatively on the window curtains. The rest of them, being terribly English and well bred, pretended nothing untoward had happened.

'Drink, anyone?' Sir Michael called out. Antonia saw his faded brown eyes fix anxiously on Lena. He seemed to be the only one who took her seriously.

'When you die, Lawrence, I shall dance on your grave,' Lena declared. 'Then I shall dig you up and feed you to the dogs.'

Antonia remembered thinking that it all put Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in the shade.

'Poor Johnny looks dreadful,' Sir Michael had said as a beaming, if painfully slow Earl Spencer led his daughter up the steps of St Paul's and along the aisle.

'Go back, you slippered pantaloon! Shoo! Shoo! Go back before it is too late! You don't know what you are letting your daughter in for! Go back, I say!' Dufrette flapped his hands. He could be very funny, Antonia had to admit, though his particular brand of humour wasn't to everybody's taste - if Lady Mortlock's face was anything to go by.

'That silly goose. Just look at her. Observe how she simpers in her doomed glory. She has no idea. The Wind sors will eat her alive. Shoo! Back! Back, I say!'

'Why don't you have a drink, Dufrette?' Sir Michael suggested in a mild attempt at deflection.

'Ivory silk . . . That's so beautiful.' Lena brushed away a tear.

Bill Kavanagh said, 'I used to know Raine Spencer very well at one time - before she married Johnny. When she was married to Dartmouth. Remarkable woman. Shame the Spencer children never got to appreciate her properly.'

'Just imagine . . .' Lawrence Dufrette raised his voice. 'Just imagine that instead of landing two earls, Raine had married and divorced the following: Lord Rayne, Prince Georg of Saxe-Gotha, the King of Spain, Baron Kommer, Dr Johnny Gaynor, Tommy Nutter and Sir Robin Day, she'd have been called - now you need to pay very close attention - Raine Rayne Gotha Spain Kommer Gaynor Nutter Day. . .'

That was met with some appreciative laughter, Only Lady Mortlock's expression remained morose while Sheikh Umair merely looked puzzled.

How long had it taken him to work that one out? Antonia wondered. It wasn't exactly spur-of-the-moment wit. He must have prepared it well in advance.

'What a drip Charlie boy looks.' Dufrette had spoken again. 'And there's Mrs P-B. How she must be wis.h.i.+ng it was her walking up the aisle!'

'That was never terribly likely, was it?' Mrs Lynch-Marquis said.

'Not terribly likely, no,' Mrs Falconer agreed.

'If he had lived in my country,' Sheikh Umair pointed out, 'the Prince of Wales would have been able to marry them both. There would have been no problem at all.'

'I always understood Camilla was a cracking bird,' Mr Lynch-Marquis said. 'Parker-Bowles is a lucky fellow.'

'The question is, does she curtsey before she jumps into bed? Does she call him "sir"? It's a well-doc.u.mented fact that her great-grandmama did.' Dufrette gave a histrionic little cough. 'Of course, as the redoubtable Mrs Keppel herself put it, things were done so much better in her day.'

7.

Death by Drowning It was about an hour and a half later, when the broadcast was over, that they had become aware of Sonya's absence. As it happened, it was Antonia who raised the question and subsequently the alarm. 'Oh, she loves to hide, the naughty kotik,' Lena said dismissively, at first quite unperturbed. She continued sipping from her gla.s.s. 'She's got herself into a cupboard somewhere, or under a bed, or behind a curtain. It is an annoying habit she has.'

So they looked inside all the cupboards and under all the beds and behind all the curtains, then everywhere else around the house. They checked all the rooms. Everybody - hosts, guests, servants, workmen - took part in the search, the only exception being Major Nagle.

Major Nagle remained in his room. He hadn't left it for a moment, or so he said. When they knocked on his door, he was looking for his signet ring. His face was very red. He seemed more concerned about the loss of his ring than about the little girl who had vanished. Then they searched the garden. They walked around, calling out Sonya's name . . .

Antonia looked up. She was remembering the sick feeling at the pit of her stomach, the convulsive pounding of her heart against her ribs, the ringing sound in her ears, the dizziness, the sudden dryness in her throat, the nausea . . .

Sonya's bracelet was discovered on the path leading down to the river, her daisy chain on a bush. It had come to Antonia as something of a shock to see the river. Only two hours earlier it had been smooth and calm and golden - now it was darker, olive-green and turbulent. The banks leading down to the water were rather steep, she had noticed for the first time, and they were overhung by trees, silver birches, a box elder, a copper beech. She looked across at the armies of reeds and rushes, sword-shaped and yellow-green in colour. She felt the cool rising off the water - also a 'green' smell, like moss. She shuddered.

'Kotik! Kotik! Where are you? Mamma loves you so much. Mamma can't live without her kotik!' Lena lurched about on her high heels, wailing piteously. 'Where are you? Come out - speak to Mamma!' The next instant she screamed and pointed.

The small body was floating on the river surface, face up. It had got entangled in some tree roots that crept into the river across the bank. Lena, her red hair wild in the wind, the mascara running down her cheeks, collapsed in a heap on the ground. She beat her fists against the river bank, rattling her bracelets. She shook her head and rocked her body forward and backward, wailing, 'Kotik, kotik!' Then, casting her face heavenwards, she threw up her arms and cried, 'Why, oh G.o.d? Why? Why? Why deprive me of the one thing I loved best in this world?'

Antonia had seen the Falconers exchange cynical looks. Dufrette stood some distance away, very still, and stared at the body in the river, his face deadly pale.

It was Antonia who said, 'That's not Sonya. It's her doll. It's only her doll.'

Lena raised her head. 'But she couldn't be parted from her doll! Don't you see what happened? They both fell into the river! My kotik has drowned! She has been carried away by the current!'

Her face was dark and suffused, a mask of fury. She shook her forefinger at Antonia. 'It was you! You showed her the way to the river! It is your fault! I saw you take my kotik down to the river. You killed her!'

At that point Lady Mortlock had gone back to the house and phoned the police.

When she went to bed that night, Antonia lay for quite a while unable to sleep, going over in her mind what she had read. Though there had been no witnesses, it was a.s.sumed that Sonya had left the house, wandered out into the garden and down to the river bank where she had slipped and tumbled into the river. The body had never been recovered but that wasn't such an uncommon occurrence. The verdict had been one of tragic accident. It had been an open and shut case. The Dufrettes had been reprimanded for not providing their daughter with adequate care.

Reading her account had had a therapeutic effect on Antonia. It felt like a curtain lifting. She saw how preposterous it had been for her to feel guilty over Sonya's death. Lena had been looking for scapegoats. First she had turned on Antonia, then on the Mortlocks. Lena had suggested that it had been their fault too - why hadn't they put up any river-bank defences? Why wasn't there protective netting? Lena had gone so far as to suggest she might take the Mortlocks to court.

Thinking about what she had written, Antonia suddenly experienced an odd feeling of dissatisfaction, a sense of there being something wrong, but by now she had started to feel sleepy.

It was interesting that it had all happened at a time when everybody had been inside - glued to the box. The whole of England, or so it had been reported in the papers. Fewer robberies had been committed that day, if statistics were anything to go by. Fewer crimes generally. It was a.s.sumed that criminals too had been watching the royal wedding. Conversely, Antonia thought, how easy it would have been to commit a crime on a day like that.

Had there been a crime at Twiston? The ring - watch out for that signet ring. That was Miss Pettigrew whispering in her ear. Antonia saw Major Nagle, taking a cigarette from his Asprey's silver case. He said nothing but gave her a wink. A moment later a second voice spoke - it sounded like Lawrence Dufrette's. 'It seems to me, Mrs Rushton, that you lack the creative balance of imagination and reason. Ergo, you can never be a truly successful writer.'

Antonia knew she was dreaming now and yet she was filled with misgivings. Questions formed themselves in her mind, but they were the wrong kind of questions.

Would she ever be able to complete her novel? Would she ever be able to write again? Could she write at all?

8.

Le Gout du Policier As she arrived at the club the following morning, the reason for her dissatisfaction dawned on her. Her account of what had happened at Twiston was lively and vivid and it contained some good descriptions and entertaining dialogue. It was not her ability to write that was in question. No. There was a different reason for her dissatisfaction. Although she couldn't put her finger on it, she knew that something was wrong - either with the way she had described one or more of the characters in the drama, or with her reporting of what they said. Some illogicality . . . Some discrepancy?

She was sure she wasn't imagining it ... What was it?

Not many people visited the library that morning and she received only one phone call. A good thing, for she was in such an abstracted state of mind that some club member was bound to notice and complain. She performed her ch.o.r.es mechanically, automaton-like, in a kind of daze. At one point she found herself lifting a pile of books from one of the donation boxes and placing them on her desk, then staring down at them in utter incomprehension. She had absolutely no idea what she should do with the books. Yes, she did. Stamp them, write down their t.i.tles, put them on the right shelves. She reached out for the library stamp. (In what way was the signet ring important?) Eventually she heard the clock chime eleven. She took the folder out of her bag. The Drowning of Sonya Dufrette, she had written at the top. Well, she knew she wouldn't rest until she found out what was wrong.

Martin brought her a tray with a pot of coffee, a cup and a plate of Lazzaroni biscuits. Pouring herself coffee, she started skimming through the pages once more. Was there any significance in the fact that Sonya and her doll had been dressed in identical dresses? She couldn't see how there could be.

Sonya's body had never been recovered. Sonya had vanished without a trace. That was one fact that was certain. Twenty years had pa.s.sed but the body hadn't turned up. If it had, she would have heard about it, she was sure. It would have been in the papers - or on TV - or someone would have mentioned it to her. People didn't just vanish. They were either dead or a.s.sumed new ident.i.ties or ... or ... No, there was nothing else. That was it. What would be the point of giving Sonya a new ident.i.ty? But then, if she was dead, where was her body? Swallowed by some monstrous fish? Could the body have been weighed down and eased into the river? That would mean murder and there wasn't a sc.r.a.p of evidence pointing that way. On the other hand, the body might not be in the river at all. Sonya might have been killed somewhere else and the body buried.

The other night Antonia had thought in terms of violence. She had dreamt of blood. Now, why had she? She believed there was a reason for it. Something must have suggested violence to her. Something she had seen without realizing its importance at the time - something she had heard? She didn't think the idea had come to her just like that . . . Once more she saw Sonya's face, as it had been when Dufrette had played with her in the garden - shrieking with laughter, her blue eyes very bright . . . No, not blue - brown. Her eyes had been brown. Antonia frowned. Was that of any importance? How extremely annoying she didn't even know what she was looking for!

'Who lent thee, child, this meditative guise?'

She looked up and her frown disappeared. She smiled at the wiry man with the twinkling blue eyes and greying blond hair. 'Good morning, Major Payne . . . Is that Matthew Arnold?'

'Indeed it is.'

It was Tuesday of course. He always came down to London on Tuesdays. She noted with approval his bottle-green jacket, his clean s.h.i.+rt and highly polished dark cap-toe shoes. Did anyone 'do' for him, now that his wife was dead? Well, army men were perfectly capable of doing for themselves.

'Proofreading, I see.' He pointed to the sheets on the desk.

'No, no such luck. Raking up the past. This is something I wrote twenty years ago.'

'Something you might turn into a novel?'

'No, not really. Though there's a puzzle there all right.'

She found Major Payne - the 'intellectual Major', as her son had dubbed him - gazing at her with such a blend of affection and solemnity that for an absurd moment she had the notion he might propose to her. It came to her as a relief - mingled, ludicrously, with disappointment - when he said, 'I too have a puzzle for you. Shall we swap? I'll tell you mine, you then tell me yours. Is it a deal?'

'It's a deal.' She felt foolish, but what else could she have said? He could be so disarming.

'Here goes. A man dies on 23rd January, yet is buried on 22nd January. How is that possible?'

'Well . . .' Antonia scowled. 'If the man died in Fiji and the body was flown to Western Samoa for burial, the flight would cross the International Date Line from west to east, wouldn't it, so the date would go back one day?'

'Makes perfect sense,' Major Payne said magnanimously. 'This is a trick question, actually, so the simple answer is that he died at sea on the 23rd but his mortal remains weren't recovered until a year later - next January, in fact. That's when he was buried, on the 22nd. I told it to my aunt and she loved it.'

Antonia sighed. 'I always go for the complicated.'

'Well, your novel manages to combine both, a complicated plot and a trick that is wonderfully simple. It was such fun to read. Few people write stories like yours nowadays.'

'Thank you for saying so, but I am sure you are wrong. Lots of people write better than me.'

'I am not wrong. I am fed up with pretentious bores. Baronesses with missions who shall remain nameless.'

Antonia didn't think it right to ask him to elaborate. How he managed to read so much she had no idea. She had imagined that all his energies would be channelled into the management of his Suffolk farm and the indoor cricket school he had established, which, he had told her, attracted teams from all over England to its six-a-side tournaments and other events. Besides, there were the social dos - dinner parties, polo tournaments - she imagined he'd be in great demand - amazing he hadn't been snapped up yet - what had his late wife been like?

He was talking. '. . . and, really, your sentences are a joy to read.'

'Don't be idiotic.'

'Do you know who said, "I like sentences that don't budge though armies cross them"?'

Antonia was aware that he was looking down at her hands and she put them on her lap. 'Monty?' she suggested flippantly.

'Virginia Woolf actually . . . So what's your puzzle about?' Major Payne twisted his head slightly to one side and screwed up his eyes at one of the sheets on the desk. 'Lawrence Dufrette has the reputation of a maverick and is considered something of a loose cannon. I can read upside down, you see,' he explained. 'They taught us how to do it in the Secret Service. That was a longish while ago, but I haven't yet lost the knack. Wait a minute.' He tapped the sheet with a forefinger. 'I used to know a Lawrence Dufrette. Must be the same chap. Name like that. Tall and stately - beak of a nose - wild glare. Like Wellington on amphetamines - or Heseltine, sans le nez, on speed?'

'Yes.' Antonia laughed.

'Fancy. It's a small world. Well, he's written a book that's totally bizarre. Under a pen name. I read the review in Fortean Times first - I do read an awful lot of tosh, mind. The reviewer gave away Dufrette's real name, so I went and got hold of the book. I was curious. Needless to say it wasn't reviewed anywhere else.'

'Why not?'

'Because it is too bizarre.'

'In what way bizarre? What is it about?'

Major Payne stroked his jaw with a forefinger. 'Well, his theory is that the same interconnected bloodlines - the so-called Babylonian brotherhood - have controlled and dominated our planet for thousands of years. The President of the United States and members of the British royal family are part of it - many other world leaders as well. Mind-controlled human robots are used to pa.s.s messages between people outside the normal channels. The communications are dictated under a form of hypnosis brought about by means of a high voltage gun, which lowers blood sugar levels and makes the person more open to suggestion. It isn't science fiction, but the history of the world according to Lawrence Dufrette. He claims in the introduction that he has researched the subject extensively.'

'I wonder if he became completely deranged after Sonya's death,' Antonia said thoughtfully The next moment she cried, 'Oh - he does list the Babylonian brotherhood in Who's Who as one of his interests!'

'That was his daughter, wasn't it? Sonya. There was something wrong with her, correct?'

'Yes. They thought she was autistic.'

'She drowned, didn't she?'

'That was the verdict.'