The hunt for Sonya Dufrette chc-1 Read online

  It was at that point that a ghostly tinkling sound had been heard and Sonya walked into the dining room in her somnambulist manner, carrying a doll that was almost as big as her. Both girl and doll wore similar dresses: white and gold, with tiny bells at the waist – one of Lena’s dafter ideas, Antonia imagined. Sonya reached out and took Antonia’s hand. She started pulling her towards the open french windows that led into the garden. Antonia looked at Dufrette and received an approving nod. ‘It’s a lovely day, Mrs Rushton. Go and pick some flowers, why don’t you? She likes that.’

  They walked out into the garden and Antonia made a daisy chain, which she placed on Sonya’s golden head. She pointed things out to her: a comic magpie, a busy squirrel, a strutting wood pigeon, but Sonya paid little attention – she was cooing to her doll. Happening to glance up at the house, Antonia saw Major Nagle standing stock-still at his open window, smoking. It was one of the south windows from which the garden layout of symmetrical beds, stone gate plinths and ironwork could be seen at its best, but she didn’t think Nagle was admiring the view. His eyes seemed fixed on them. Feeling somewhat disturbed, Antonia had steered the way briskly down a path leading to the river bank. Sonya had prattled the while, incomprehensible baby talk, directed exclusively at her doll. Beside the river it had felt pleasantly cool.

  Antonia raised her brow again. Could Major Nagle -? No, no guesses – too early.

  They had spent no more than a minute on the river bank, watching the dragonflies circle and the skitterbugs skate across the smoothish green surface of the river, before making their way back to the garden. There they stopped for another minute and Sonya picked some more flowers while Antonia watched the men in blue overalls pour cement into the hollow of the ancient oak. They were talking about Sir Michael’s weakness for ‘large ladies’. They had seen the Rubens in his study, apparently, and were making ribald jokes about it.

  ‘Will a cement base prevent the tree from decaying?’ she asked. The men shrugged and one of them said that the boss – he meant Sir Michael – certainly seemed to think that was the right thing to do. The man was clearly amused by Sir Michael calling the tree a ‘historical monument’ for he chuckled each time he uttered the phrase. Antonia and Sonya had then returned to the house.

  And then?

  She had let go of Sonya’s hand only when they reached the hall. That was the last time Antonia had seen Sonya. She had heard Lena say, ‘Run along, darling, Mamma’s terribly busy at the moment.’ She had not turned round to see where Sonya had gone but had walked into the sitting room in search of orange juice – she had been extremely thirsty.

  Had Sonya, left unattended, wandered out of the front door and back into the garden? The door had certainly been open. Later Lena told the police that she had no recollection, that she hadn’t seen where Sonya had gone, but she was pretty sure it hadn’t been up the great staircase.

  (Criminal negligence, Miss Pettigrew had called it.)

  In the wake of the Nagle-Dufrette contretemps, the house party had been subdued. Sir Michael tried cheering them up by playing numbers from Fred Astaire’s film Royal Wedding, with a reminder that the broadcast was about to begin in a quarter of an hour. Would they care to take their seats? Everybody – with the exception of Major Nagle – was there and they complied.

  The sitting room was the size of a barn, filled with comfortable chairs and sofas, with ancestral portraits hanging from claret-coloured ropes with tassels against beige neutral silk walls. There was a giant TV set, as well as strategically positioned small tables with plates of sandwiches, bowls of smoked almonds and peanuts and stands containing canapes of various kinds. There were bottles of gin, whisky and brandy on two side tables, old-fashioned siphons, also two coffee percolators and a tea urn. Through the window Antonia had observed the men in blue overalls walking briskly in the direction of the servants’ hall, where, she knew, there was another TV set. Sir Michael was as considerate an employer as he was gracious a host. She remembered the whirring of an ancient electric fan in one corner of the room.

  ‘One of your wives is at St Paul’s, isn’t that so, old boy?‘ Bill Kavanagh had addressed Sheikh Umair.

  ‘Indeed she is. It was Her Majesty the Queen Mother who provided the pass. The Queen Mother is a very old and valued friend. We both have a passion for horses. My wife is exceedingly fond of weddings. I am not, I must confess. You will probably argue that it has something to do with the fact that I have already attended several of my very own.’

  ‘A certain sense of ennui sets in after a while, eh?’

  Lynch-Marquis said with a sigh he knew the feeling well – though he had been married only once.

  Dufrette perched on the arm of a chair close to the television set and shook his forefinger at the festive crowds filling Ludgate Hill. ‘Look at them – just look at them! The singing, chattering fools in their ridiculous Union Jack hats! What they really should be doing on a day like this is storming the palace, like the Russkies did in

  1917.’

  And he hadn’t stopped there. It soon became apparent that Lawrence Dufrette had taken it upon himself to provide his hosts and fellow guests with a running commentary on the event. Everything he said was noted for its anti-monarchist bias. How he had transmogrified from an ardent royalist to a rabid enemy of the Crown was a mystery, though Lady Mortlock hinted that it had something to do with a snub he had received from the Duke of Kent, that mildest of royals, during a shooting party in 1969. Dufrette, it appeared, did not forgive easily.

  ‘I am no great admirer of my wife’s fellow Russkies as a rule, but I take my hat off to them for shooting the Tsar and the Tsarina and their brood like a bunch of dogs.’

  ‘Why do you always say such awful things?’ Lena had been sipping a Bloody Mary, but she put down her glass and crossed herself. ‘That was the greatest calamity to befall Russia. There is a church there now, on the very spot the Romanovs’ blood was spilled. Do you know what it is called?’ She paused significantly and looked round. ‘It is called the Church of the Spilt Blood.’

  ‘Oh, how remarkably original!’

  ‘Pilgrims trekked hundreds of miles on foot to Yekaterinburg for the consecration. They carried crosses and icons. They burnt so much incense that day, the sun disappeared in the fumes. They saw that as an omen.’

  ‘It’s been said that if people treat their royalty badly, a kind of curse is visited on them,’ Mrs Falconer – a tall woman in a tomato-coloured dress with high winged shoulders – said. ‘D’you think that’s true?‘

  ‘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 damned 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 goddess and I will personally shoot anyone who dares suggest otherwise.’

  Lena pointed to the TV screen. ‘Is the glass coach bullet-proof? Is it made of fortified glass? 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 i
nnocent. 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 glass 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 wishing 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-documented 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 glass. ‘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 God? 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 assumed 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 assumed 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?