The Hunt for Sonya Dufrette Page 3

  Hearing the sound of running steps, she looked up. It was Martin, the porter. ‘Oh, ma’am, look what I’ve got!‘ He was carrying three large hardbacks. ’These came back for you, at last! I thought we’d never see them again.‘

  Grinning with genuine pleasure, he showed her the books. Of course. She’d completely forgotten about them. The memoirs of various cricketers, which Martin, a keen amateur sportsman, had been borrowing and slowly but delightedly reading, regaling everybody who would listen with anecdotes. Their absence from the library shelves had hit him and his fund of stories hard. ‘They were left on the table in the hall, Miss Darcy. Can you imagine?’

  Antonia tut-tutted and shook her head. (What was the Babylonian brotherhood?)

  ‘They should have brought them here, shouldn’t they? What can they be thinking of?’ The porter tapped his forehead significantly. ‘Some of these old codgers ...’

  ‘Don’t talk like that, Martin,’ she reprimanded him.

  On the floor beside her desk there were more books in cardboard boxes, some of them sticking out of the heap at crazy angles. More donations, left for her by various well-meaning club members while she had been away. Buchan’s Greenmantle. They Die With Their Boots Clean by Gerald Kersh. MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman. Anthony Powell’s The Military Philosophers. So far so predictable. Her brows went up. Lesbia’s Little Blunder by Frederick Warne. She picked it up. The blurb promised ‘two ripping school yarns’. The book had been published in 1934 - the picture on the cover showed two smiling girls, bursting with rude health and holding hockey sticks. She leafed through it. No, it wasn’t a spoof - it wasn’t what the title suggested either. All perfectly innocent, actually.

  Pushing the boxes out of the way, she sat down in her swivel chair. She found she was still holding the letter from the top of the pile, but postponed opening it. All around her apparent chaos ruled. In the days leading up to her holiday she had felt too unwell to do anything about it. The wooden table topped with red tooled leather on her right was covered with uncatalogued books and sprinkled with notes on little bits of paper, pens, pencils and equipment for labelling books. Another, smaller, table was stacked high with yellowing papers, most of which bore copperplate writing, apparently from another age. The shelves above contained filing boxes, heaps of typewritten paper and variegated volumes.

  Her ‘office’ was situated underneath a staircase and so the ceiling tapered down to the floor at the back. The space in which no one could stand up straight was occupied by piles of enormous ledgers, bound in red or black leather, some of them with brass corners, some ancient and mouldering, some in uniform sequences, some not. The organizing of all this material was part of her work.

  She looked down at the letter. Coming to a sudden decision, she picked up the paperknife, slit open the envelope and extracted the folded sheet.

  Antonia gave a sigh of relief, seeing it was only an invitation for a class reunion. It was thirty-five years since she had left the Sempersand School for Girls. The letter was short. It had been written by Isabel Bradley, one of her former classmates, whom Antonia did not remember. I won’t go, she thought, crumpling up the letter and dropping it into her waste paper basket. She had been to her twentieth anniversary and had hated every moment of it. This one would be worse. Women did not improve with age. A gaggle of middle-aged matrons, prying into each other’s business, complaining about indifferent, critical or wayward husbands, hinting at affairs on either side, some of them getting embarrassingly drunk and, as likely as not, making desperate passes at the waiters.

  Twenty minutes later she was sipping a cup of coffee and examining some notes she had made a fortnight before. One of the notes bore the words: A Rec. Fest. Vol.15/2. She took down from the shelves on the wall a large reference book and started flicking through the pages until she found the phone number of a nearby specialist library. Balancing the book on her lap and holding the note with her left hand, she reached for the telephone. Just as she was about to lift the receiver, it rang.

  It was a colleague from a parallel institution. He wanted to know how she was getting on with the map.

  Antonia knew at once what map he meant. (What a sad life hers was!) ‘Ah. Very well indeed,’ she said. ‘I’ve shown it to one or two of our members and they were extremely interested. I think I have made some progress in identifying a few of the buildings. Two people separately identified the same one, so that’s fairly promising, isn’t it?’

  ‘Marvellous!’ What her fellow librarian then suggested was a meeting in the near future when they could actually look at the map properly, to which Antonia agreed with great alacrity.

  A couple of minutes later she finished with the reference book on her lap and replaced it on the shelf.

  ‘Excuse me, are you the librarian?’

  An elderly gentleman of imposing height stood before her. He had a mane of silver-white hair, carefully brushed back. He was dressed in a dark pinstriped suit. He had taken off his black Homburg. In his other hand he held a shabby Gladstone bag and a rolled-up umbrella.

  Lawrence Dufrette? No, it couldn’t be ...

  As she continued staring at him, he said impatiently, ‘Are you the librarian or an owl?’ He didn’t seem to be in a very good mood. He had a Duke of Wellington nose, a mean choleric mouth and a ruddy complexion. He rapped his knuckles against the desk.

  ‘Sorry. I am the librarian, yes. What can I do for you?’

  ‘Have you got any books on the Himalayas?’

  ‘We do have a section on Geography and Travel, not a very large one, I am afraid. It contains memoirs of mountaineers and explorers.’ Her voice sounded odd, Antonia knew. ‘Amongst the regimental histories you will find quite a few about the Ghurkas, which describe their background in Nepal. There are also atlases. Let me show you.’

  She led the way to the appropriate section, telling herself that this wasn’t Lawrence Dufrette. Of course it wasn’t him, though it did look like him. How could she be certain either way though, after twenty years? Was her mind playing her tricks? That was what happened, they said, when you had somebody on your mind - you kept seeing them. Was the old boy the same one she had observed entering White’s earlier that morning? One could never tell with a certain type of Englishman - they looked so similar.

  From the corner of her eye she watched him as he lingered beside her desk, muttering to himself, shaking his head, poking among the books inside one of the boxes, opening and closing his bag. He wasn’t stealing her books, was he? When he joined her, she managed to ask whether his interest was theoretical or practical.

  He said, ‘My nephew’s going trekking in the Himalayas next month. The book’s for him. My trekking days are over. Thank you very much indeed. I’ll take a look.’ He turned his back on her.

  He did sound like Lawrence Dufrette ... Was the alpinist nephew an invention? She remembered Lady Mortlock telling her that Lawrence Dufrette had quarrelled with all his relatives. That was twenty years ago. He hadn’t shown a flicker of recognition, but he might be pretending. She didn’t think she had changed so much ... Perhaps it wasn’t Lawrence Dufrette after all.

  Suddenly she stood very still. She had actually written a detailed account of the tragedy, she remembered. She had done it first by hand, then she had typed it up. She had covered a great number of pages, which she had put inside a folder. Every year at the end of July she started looking for the folder, but never managed to find it, after which she forgot about it. (Was that deliberate? Talking about self-imposed amnesia!) It was somewhere at home, she knew, in some drawer. She determined to do her very best this time, dig up her account without fail and read it. She felt she had to. She knew she would have another bad night if she didn’t.

  Twenty years. She owed it to Sonya.

  An hour later she heard a familiar booming voice outside the library door. ‘Scrambled duck egg with smoked eel - not bad at all. Bloody good in fact. You must try it, Wake-field. Be adventurous, that’s my motto. What? Splendid
idea, yes. Haven’t told her yet. I’ll tell her now. No better time than the present.’ The door opened. ‘Miss Darcy! Miss Darcy! Are you in there?’

  Antonia rose. ‘Good morning, Colonel Haslett,’ she greeted her boss brightly. Despite his advanced years Colonel Haslett OBE, DSO dealt with every matter at top speed before passing on to the next item on his always-extensive list. In his wake he left ripples, which tended to develop later into a large backwash of things to do.

  ‘Ah, Miss D., you are back. Good, excellent. How have you been getting on with the Gresham papers?’ Colonel Haslett was leaning heavily on his silver-topped cane and craning his head forward, half-moon glasses at the tip of his nose, his hand cupping his right ear. At his neck he had a starched damask napkin; it was clear he had had a late breakfast in the club’s dining room. He frequently forgot to remove his napkin. It was Colonel Haslett’s record with the Number One Commandos on the French coast early in the war and in North Africa and Burma that had won him a reputation for outstanding leadership. He had been nicknamed ‘Junior’ because another Haslett, a first cousin of his, had been a commanding officer.

  ‘Well, Colonel Haslett, the Gresham papers are proving a bit — ’

  ‘The reason I ask is that we may have a contact at the Historical Manuscripts Commission. A friend of m’wife‘s, actually. A Miss ... um ... Can’t remember her name, but she is the right person for this kind of job. She’s been highly recommended. On the highest authority. She could help us with them, you know. I mean, take the Gresham papers off your hands, Miss D. Good idea, what? I can see you have lots to do, lots to do.’ He was peering round her office, at the heaps of unprocessed books and mounds of paper. ‘Not to worry.’

  ‘Well, I suppose it would make sense to -’

  ‘Good, excellent. She’ll be round quite soon, tomorrow as likely as not. She’s that sort of woman. Damned efficient. Puts us all to shame, what? Cathcart, that’s it. Her name’s Cathcart. Miss - or Mrs Cathcart. Don’t know which. Actually she comes round our place occasionally and we play bridge together. You know her?’

  ‘I’m afraid not -’

  ‘You haven’t got very far with the Gresham papers, have you? Been an arduous task, I imagine.’

  ‘Well, actually -’

  ‘Never mind, never mind. I can see how much there is to do here. You’d better get on with it. Get cracking.’

  He patted her arm bracingly and, despite his stick and gammy leg, marched swiftly out of the room with amazing agility.

  I was quite enjoying the job, Antonia finished the sentence to herself. Looking down at the box filled with books that stood beside her desk, she noticed that the one at the top bore the title, The Greatest Secret. It had been placed on top of Greenmantle. Had it been there earlier on? She had the feeling that it hadn’t. Underneath the main title was written, No one who reads this book will ever be the same again.

  4

  Six Characters in Search of an Author

  There are some events, Antonia reflected, of which each circumstance and surrounding detail seem to stay with us for the rest of our lives, even though we may have convinced ourselves we have forgotten all about them — and so it was with the drowning of little Sonya Dufrette. As she started leafing through her twenty-year-old account that evening, everything came back to her with stark clarity, in vivid Technicolor, as though it had all happened only yesterday. (She had found the folder containing it at the back of the bottom drawer as she had known she would. It was something else, some other papers, that had caused the jamming — not that that changed anything.)

  What she had written was more than a mere account. Some of it read like a diary, some like a story. She leafed through the pages. She had actually researched the main protagonists’ backgrounds, she saw with surprise. Twiston, she had made clear, had once belonged to the Jourdains, who were Lady Mortlock’s ancestors, not Sir Michael’s. She had recorded her thoughts and feelings on various subjects. She had described the river, the oak tree, the hideous hollow and the outfits worn by Lena and Veronica. She had mentioned the fact that Major Nagle smoked Egyptian cigarettes out of a monogrammed Asprey’s slide-action silver case. She had told how Sonya loved ‘Lavender’s Blue’ to be sung to her. She had even quoted Tennyson. It was curious how many details had managed to impress themselves on her mind, but then, she supposed, she must already have decided that she wanted to be a writer.

  It had been the month and the year of the royal wedding. July 1981. Antonia had been married for eight years - happily, or so she had believed. Her son David had been six and a half and she had intended to take him with her to Twiston, Sir Michael and Lady Mortlock’s country house outside Richmond-on-Thames. Lady Mortlock had assured her it would be perfectly all right as there was going to be another child there. A little girl who was the same age as David. However, at the eleventh hour she had decided to leave David with her mother in Hatfield. She had persuaded herself that she needed a proper break.

  Things might have been different if David had been able to go with her. David had been extremely mature for his age. He would never have allowed Sonya to walk down to the river by herself - never. He’d have been aware that there was something wrong with Sonya, that she was not like other children. He would have been very protective of her, Antonia felt sure. Richard too had been invited and Antonia had dearly wanted him to be there, but he had had to go to France on a business trip. (It was only later, much later, that she learnt the truth, namely that he had been at a hotel in Reading with his mistress of the moment.)

  She had been included in the weekend party at Twiston as a matter of course. She had already been spending time there helping write Lady Mortlock’s family history. She saw she had described Twiston as the best sort of doll’s house come to life — a masterpiece of Jacobean exuberance, all mellow red brickwork, elaborate chimneys, extravagant gables, fantastical griffins and gargoyles.

  She had become very fond of both the house and its owners, Sir Michael and Lady Mortlock, then in their late sixties. Tall, imperious, austere, Lady Mortlock looked like the headmistress of a girls’ public school and indeed had been one until some six years earlier. She was always impeccably turned out - she had worn a very desirable silk dress on the day of the royal wedding - and was noted for her acerbic wit. Her father, Frederick Jourdain, had been a famous if controversial consultant who specialized in rare blood diseases. In the 1930s he had become a dedicated believer in the ‘German miracle’ and he had managed to infuse (some said ’infect‘) his daughter with some of his pet theories. It wasn’t a subject Lady Mortlock was ever willing to discuss, though Antonia had seen books on eugenics and euthanasia on her study bookshelves, even one favourable account of the Final Solution. Lady Mortlock had also been extremely interested in the welfare of the several girls who came to clean the house and had tried to help them in various ways, but had not met with any great success. Antonia had observed the girls put their heads together, whisper and giggle. Not a very happy woman, Antonia had decided.

  Sir Michael had retired from his top MI5 job only the year before, but was already showing signs of mental and physical decline; the once keen intelligence was no longer in evidence and he had turned into an amiable old buffer who pottered about his house and garden dressed in shabby country tweeds, cigar in hand, and liked nothing better than to sit reading P.G. Wodehouse or simply dozing in the sun, like an ancient lizard.

  It was Sir Michael who had invited the Dufrettes, a decison which had angered Lady Mortlock so much that, in a rare outburst, she had referred to it as ‘extremely ill-judged, bordering on the feeble-minded’. Lawrence Dufrette had been working in MI5, in what, prior to his retirement, had been Sir Michael’s department.

  Antonia had never met the Dufrettes before, but they already held a fascination for her. (The allure of the freak show?) Lady Mortlock had warned her to expect the worst. Lawrence she had described as ‘cranky and cantankerous’ while she had been positively horrified at the prospect of havi
ng Lena stay at Twiston. A previous visit had been termed a ’disaster‘. Apparently Lena had smoked between courses and had nearly started a fire by dropping her cigarette amongst the sofa cushions and leaving it there. She was fat and slovenly, far from bright, indiscreet. The derogatory epithets had rolled off Lady Mortlock’s tongue. Lena and Lawrence had little regard for anyone and invariably conducted their rows in the most public manner imaginable. The LL double act, somebody had called it.

  Lawrence Dufrette had already carved a reputation for himself as a maverick and something of a loose cannon - by all accounts a picaresque and eccentric figure on the fringes of the Old Establishment. From Burke’s Landed Gentry Antonia had discovered that Dufrette was born in 1930, the elder son of Jasper Dufrette, a landowner and high court judge in Malaya, and Millicent Herbert. He had been educated at Harrow and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he read history. He served as a lieutenant in the Intelligence Corps in 1951 and was stationed for a while in post-war Berlin. His extensive knowledge of heraldry had led to his appointment as Bluemantle Pursuivant of Arms and, consequently, he played an important role in many great state occasions. At the Coronation in 1953 he had been standing near the Throne - ‘closer than all but the great officers of state’, as Harold Nicolson had put it in his diary.

  Another diarist, society photographer Cecil Beaton, had described young Lawrence Dufrette’s appearance in some detail. ‘With his light blue eyes, sand-coloured hair, quartered tunic of scarlet, blue and gold and sombre stockings, holding the two Sceptres in his pale ivory hands, he was the perfect work of art. He has a long, pale, lovelorn face. He seems to be burnt with some romantic passion.’ Dufrette had been the Earl Marshal’s press secretary throughout Coronation year.