The hunt for Sonya Dufrette chc-1 Read online

  ‘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 m
onth 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 having 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.

  He had been given a job at the College of Arms and might even have become Chester Herald, but, in Lady Mortlock’s words, ‘Lawrence’s absurdly haughty and cavalier attitude to his colleagues and irresponsibility over money led to his enforced resignation. He thought he was better than all of them put together. Primus inter pares. That kind of rot… He hasn’t improved with age. You should hear how he talks about his colleagues in MI5. Men of straw, operating in a blizzard of displacement activity! I don’t see how Michael puts up with it.’ At the start of his career in the Intelligence Service, he had been considered brilliant but eventually caused consternation with his erratic and unpredictable behaviour. He also developed an obsessive interest in conspiracy theories.

  The Babylonian brotherhood, Antonia suddenly remembered. What was the Babylonian brotherhood?

  Sheikh Umair had described Dufrette as ‘a clever but extremely dangerous man. Talks about flogging and hanging and bloody foreigners and niggers – equally to shock and to get a reaction, I think. He has a strong exhibitionist streak. He carries a gun. He said he needed to protect himself against his enemies. He pointed the gun at my head and made a popping sound. It is exceedingly difficult to know when he jokes and when he is serious, but then that is a very English kind of thing, isn’t it?’

  Enemies… Antonia looked up with a frown. One enemy at least… The incident at breakfast. (She had given an account of it somewhere later on.) Dufrette quarrelled with one of the other guests. Some military type. Stocky and pouchy-eyed, small trimmed moustache, great heavy hands, amazingly well-tended fingernails the colour of oysters

  … Dufrette had said something that had infuriated him… Major Nagle? Yes. ‘Tommy’ Nagle. Major Nagle had made a lot of fuss over a signet ring he had lost. He had been in a real state about it, she remembered.

  In 1954 Dufrette had married the Hon. Pamela Wigham, the ‘deb of the season’. (Antonia had since seen pictures of the two newly-weds, looking solemnly distinguished, almost regal, in an old number of Country Life.) However, the marriage had been dissolved only two years later. There had been no children. Then in 1960 Dufrette married for the second time, an exiled Russian countess, or, as Lady Mortlock had put it, ‘a woman who claimed to be one’. The new bride’s name was Lena Sugarev-Drushinski. Antonia’s subsequent research had proved that Lena’s title was genuine, albeit acquired as a result of a four-month marriage to a certain Count Poliakoff. As a matter of fact Lena had the dubious distinction of being descended from the mad Yusupovs on her mother’s side. Prince Yusupov had been heir to one of the most fabulous fortunes in pre-revolutionary Russia and, of course, he had cut out his niche in history as the man who shot Rasputin an i
nordinate number of times in the winter of 1916.

  As a young woman, Lena (born in 1938) had been a voluptuous blonde, vivacious and fun-loving – as the pictures Antonia had seen in Tatler testified – and, though greatly impoverished at the time of her marriage, she had managed to make Dufrette very happy for a couple of years. However, by 1981 the marriage gave every impression of bursting at the seams. The Dufrettes detested one another and never bothered to conceal the fact.

  When Antonia finally met her, Lena was forty-three, but she looked older, the years of excess having taken their toll. She was plump, puffy-eyed and over-painted. She clearly strove to be uncompromisingly exotic. Her eyebrows had been plucked in the style of the 1930s – thin arches high above the natural line of the brow. The effect should have been one of perpetual comic surprise but Lena’s kohl-ringed blue eyes gave her a slightly sinister appearance. She was dressed in a kaftan, sported a cornucopia of costume jewellery and had an emerald-green scarf tied round her henna-dyed hair. She was smoking through an ivory cigarette holder and drinking vermouth.

  When a grim-faced and rather pale Lady Mortlock had completed the introductions, Lena stood peering at Antonia. She said, ‘It is my life you should be writing up. I am unlike anyone you have ever met. You wouldn’t believe some of the things that have happened to me. My first marriage was a disaster. A German aunt of mine predicted this with chilling accuracy, though I never listened to her. I’ve been told that I have God in one eye and the Devil in the other.’ Cigarette smoke curled from her nostrils. Although educated at an English school, she spoke with a pronounced Russian accent. ‘There was a sign when I was born. (I was born on Bastille Day at the Paris Ritz.) That night a fiery meteor burst across the sky -’