The Hunt for Sonya Dufrette Read online

  It was fair, Antonia supposed, to give the Gresham papers out for assessment. It wasn’t strictly a library matter. The boxes had been found in the club smoking room, of all places, when the building was renovated a couple of years back, and so the librarian had been asked to take care of them. A proper archivist could do a better job in all probability. It was just that it had been very interesting, to read the sort of letters people wrote then, in that more leisured age, in their beautiful copperplate handwriting, and using elaborately correct grammar and punctuation.

  Antonia picked up the letters from the side table and began to place them carefully inside one of the boxes. She looked towards Major Payne and saw him produce a pen and draw a vertical line on the page he had been reading. Had he found something? She couldn’t tell from his inscrutable expression though she thought he gave a very slight nod over his coffee cup, denoting satisfaction. (Major Nagle - she couldn’t get Major Nagle out of her mind now, for some reason - that still, menacing figure at the window.) Discovering she still held one of the letters, she took it out of its envelope and glanced down at it absently.

  My dear Gresham, the letter began. What followed was some not particularly amusing anecdote, told in meticulous detail, about a social evening the writer had spent with some acquaintances known also to the letter’s recipient. There was the mention of somebody called Holling- bourne and of a Mrs Duppa, who told fortunes ‘rather inaccurately’. Vague scandals were referred to. At one point the writer enquired after the health of Lady Gresham, who, it appeared, had been indisposed for quite a while, and expressed optimism about the invalid’s progress. There were bits that were unintentionally funny, Antonia reflected, in a Diary of a Nobody kind of way.

  As she replaced the letter inside its envelope and back in the box, her mind registered the word ‘Nepal’. It had been written in pencil across another envelope in big block capitals. NEPAL. It didn’t seem likely that the letters contained correspondence from Nepal, though perhaps someone had travelled there and written to Gresham about it. I’ll just have a quick look, Antonia thought. It might contain some interesting traveller’s story, and she could tell her last enquirer about it, the old boy who had reminded her of Lawrence Dufrette, if he put in another appearance, that was.

  She opened the envelope.

  My dear Gresham, the letter began as before. This time the writing was in pencil, and seemed less assured somehow. I have something to tell you, which I believe to be of great importance, but I hardly know where to commence ...

  No, no more mysteries. I have enough on my plate already, she thought decisively and, resisting her curiosity, put the letter back into the envelope and replaced it in the box.

  ‘Well, I believe I’ve got it,’ she heard Major Payne say. She turned round. He had left the armchair and was walking towards her. ‘You are absolutely right,’ he went on. ‘There’s something, or rather two things that are wrong.’

  Antonia felt her pulse quicken. ‘What things?’

  He leant across the desk towards her, his hand lightly touching hers. She smelled his aftershave, a blend of citrus, cedar wood and tobacco, but the latter could be coming from his pipe. Funny that she had objected strongly to her former husband smoking cigarettes, but she didn’t mind a pipe one bit.

  ‘When you first hear of Lena Dufrette, it is from Lady Mortlock. This is what you say.’ He cleared his throat. ‘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”. This rather suggests, doesn’t it, that Lady Mortlock only met Lena after she married Lawrence Dufrette? She talked of Lena as of a stranger, right?’

  ‘Yes. That was the impression she gave. I remember our conversation very well.’

  ‘Indeed. Yet you, clearly without realizing it, also provide unequivocal evidence to the contrary, namely that Lady Mortlock had known Lena before her marriage to Dufrette. This is what Lena tells you when the two of you meet in the garden. I have been bad, oh so bad, you can’t imagine how bad. Ask Hermione Mortlock. She knows me well - better than anybody. She will tell you. She has no illusions about me.’

  ‘Better than anybody . . .’

  ‘She might have been lying, mind - or imagining things, if she had been “cranked up”, as Veronica Vorodin suggested.’

  ‘No, she didn’t lie.’ Antonia’s eyes were suddenly very bright. ‘Something else happened. I never wrote it down, but I’ve suddenly remembered. Soon after the Dufrettes arrived on the 28th, we had tea in the drawing room, and somebody mentioned a play they had seen. Lena started giggling and she turned to Lady Mortlock and said, ’Do you remember when we went to see the first night of -‘ She mentioned some title, which no one seemed to have heard of - can’t remember what it was, but Lena’s tone suggested that it had been something . . . I don’t know. She gave a quick lift of her eyebrows -’

  ‘Outré? Naughty? Scandalous?’

  ‘That was what I thought, yes. To which Lady Mortlock replied rather crossly that she didn’t know what Lena was talking about. She then said, “I’m sure you are mistaken. The play we went to see was The Reluctant Debutante.”’

  Major Payne cocked an eyebrow. ‘A perfectly innocent drawing-room comedy by William Douglas-Home. One of the big West End hits of the mid-fifties . . . First night, eh?’

  ‘Yes. I didn’t notice the implications at the time, but it does indicate that Lady Mortlock had known Lena in the mid-fifties - well before her marriage to Lawrence Dufrette in 1960. They went to see a play together. Lady Mortlock did give herself away . . . Now let me see. In the mid-fifties Lena was a young girl of seventeen or eighteen . . . How curious. I wonder if -’

  ‘I suggest we don’t delve too deeply into that one yet. Let’s look at contradiction number two. It’s to do with Miss Haywood, the Dufrette nanny, and, again, as it happens, with Lady Mortlock. This is what you wrote on first meeting the nanny on 28th July. Miss Haywood struck me as extremely tense and preoccupied-looking. Lady Mortlock later told me that her mother was gravely ill, in hospital. Lady Mortlock said she had great admiration for the poor girl, whom she described as “having the patience of a saint - wonderfully suited to the care of a backward child.”

  ‘However!’ Major Payne put up his forefinger. ‘Only a few pages later you report the servant who brought you your early morning tea on the 29th as telling you that Miss Haywood’s mother had been rushed to the hospital with suspected kidney failure and what a shock it had been to the poor girl. They phoned her from the hospital. Came as a shock to the poor girl. Apparently her mother was fit as a fiddle the last time she saw her. Today of all days. Terrible!’

  Antonia drew in her breath. ‘The two don’t tally. Of course. Stupid of me not to notice. Either the mother was gravely ill, as Lady Mortlock had said, and Miss Haywood was worried about her, or the mother’s sudden hospitalization came as a shock . . . So the mother’s illness was fabricated?’

  ‘I do believe it was, yes, but the conspirators didn’t do the job properly. They didn’t think it through. It wasn’t sufficiently rehearsed - or else there were two different versions and they thought they had agreed which one they were doing, only the nanny got it wrong - or the other party got it wrong. Does that make sense?’

  ‘Yes. The nanny was got out of the way on the morning on which Sonya Dufrette disappeared.’

  ‘That’s what the evidence suggests. Yes. The nanny was got out of the way and Sonya allowed to go into the garden unattended -’

  ‘Lena. Lena was there, in the hall, when I brought Sonya back to the house.’

  ‘If Miss Haywood had stayed and her charge had disappeared, she’d have got the blame for it. It seems to me,’ Major Payne said thoughtfully, ‘that someone was showing great consideration for the nanny. I also suspect that the day itself was chosen very carefully - whoever’s behind this outrage knew that there’d be no witnesses since everybody would be indoors watching the royal wedding on the box.’

 
‘That’s what I thought . . . My God. The cold calculation of it.’

  ‘You say the nanny looked tense and anxious the day before the disappearance. She was clearly playing a part - the loving daughter worried to death about her mother and so on. On the other hand, the anxiety might have been genuine. Perhaps Miss H. had had second thoughts about what she had agreed to and was getting cold feet, but was nevertheless going along with it. Which suggests that money was probably involved.’

  Antonia shook her head. ‘I can’t believe it. What did they want with an autistic child? What did they do to Sonya? She’s dead - must be. We are dealing with a monster. What kind of monster though? Child killer - somebody who gets kicks out of it? Paedophile? Or did they want her for her blood and organs? No - that’s too far-fetched.’

  Payne stroked his jaw with his forefinger. ‘It might have been more complicated than that.’

  ‘I can’t believe Lady Mortlock’s got anything to do with it. I can’t!‘

  ‘I know we mustn’t jump to conclusions, but it does seem that Lady Mortlock is indicated. She is the common factor in the two discrepancies in your account. She lied not only once but twice. And she had a great admiration for the nanny. From what you have written, Lady Mortlock strikes me as the kind of woman who would lie only if she had a very good reason for it ... Is she still alive, do you know?’

  10

  Sleuths on the Scent

  About an hour and a half later they were sitting at a table inside the club dining room. Major Payne had insisted that they continue over lunch. Antonia rarely had lunch at the club. She usually went to a café in Piccadilly.

  For a while they found it impossible to talk. The place was full. Quite a few of the club members seemed to be entertaining visitors. There were at least six women wearing smart hats and laughing a lot. The table next to theirs was occupied by two extremely distinguished-looking elderly gentlemen, one sporting a white carnation in his buttonhole, both rather portly and flushed with the wine they had been drinking, also rather deaf, for they were talking at the tops of their voices.

  ‘Suez did destroy his health, you are absolutely right,’ one was saying as Antonia and Major Payne sat down. ‘That and his amorous indiscretions.’ He winked at Antonia and nodded at Payne conspiratorially.

  ‘He was never the same man after Suez. I was with him when he went on that cruise, you know.’

  ‘Really? Part of Eden’s entourage, eh? When was that? ’56?‘

  “57. As a matter of fact I was one of his secretaries. We sailed to New Zealand. The RMS Rangitata. Lady Eden’s idea. It was meant to be recuperative, though Eden found the heat hard to bear. He kept getting these terrible giddy spells.‘

  Soon after they finished their lunch and left, allowing Payne and Antonia to resume their conversation.

  ‘Is your Egg Florentine all right?’ Major Payne asked, pausing with his spoon filled with carrot-and-ginger soup in mid-air. ‘I can eat eggs only for breakfast . . . You sure you don’t want any wine? We could have a bottle between us -’

  ‘Yes, quite sure, thank you. I’ve got things to do in the afternoon.’

  ‘Keep forgetting you are still at work. Sorry. Won’t do for old Haslett to smell wine on your breath. Better keep our heads clear anyhow. So you say you haven’t seen Lady Mortlock since 1981?’

  ‘That’s right. I did ring her up a couple of days later, at the beginning of August, and she sounded polite, but extremely distant. She had suddenly turned into a stranger. She said Sir Michael was not at all well and that they’d probably be leaving for Malta quite soon. They had a holiday villa there. I hadn’t completed the job I had been doing for her - the Jourdain family history - so I asked when we were going to resume it. She said she feared the family history would have to be put on hold for a while. There were more important things than one’s family history. She sounded extremely tight-lipped. She’d contact me when they came back, she said. Well, she never did contact me.’

  ‘Why was that, do you think?’

  ‘I thought at the time that it was because she didn’t want any reminders of what had happened. I believed she wanted to isolate the whole distressing event in her mind and avoid anything - anyone - that might recall it. I then realized that I’d left some things at Twiston - an attaché case, a portable typewriter, some books - which I needed. When I phoned again only a couple of days later, the Mortlocks had gone. It was a Mrs Linley, the housekeeper, who answered the phone. We arranged a date for me to go and collect my stuff, but then David was ill, and I rang again to make another arrangement, but nobody answered the phone. I tried several more times, but it wasn’t till mid-September that I managed to speak to somebody. As it happened, it was Mrs Maloney, the servant who had informed me about Miss Haywood’s departure. She told me that the Mortlocks were still in Malta, but I was welcome to go to Twiston, I only had to say when - she’d be there.’

  ‘You went?’

  ‘Yes. The gardens had been tended beautifully. I didn’t care much for the oak. It was the colour of mud. It looked mummified. I suddenly saw it the way Lena had. From a distance it did look like a hideous face distorted in rage.’ Antonia smiled and shook her head. ‘For some reason it made me think of Major Nagle . . . I bumped into a gardener. I congratulated him on the state of the gardens and he said he was receiving instructions from the Mortlocks’ son, who had come back from America.’

  ‘I thought the Mortlocks were childless.’

  ‘They were. George Mortlock is Sir Michael’s son from a previous marriage. He is Lady Mortlock’s stepson.’

  ‘Did you get to meet him?’

  ‘No. He hadn’t moved into the house or anything like that. He lived somewhere else, not far, and only came twice a week, to make sure the housekeeper and the servants kept everything in order.’ She paused. ‘It was a warm day, the day I went. The house was very quiet. It looked serene. There was nothing to suggest a tragedy had taken place there so recently. The windows had been left open and the curtains were blowing in the wind. I had the oddest feeling that - that Sonya was there, inside the house.’ Antonia frowned. ‘That she would suddenly appear from behind some curtain and cry, “Boo!” Somehow, at that moment, I felt absolutely sure she wasn’t dead. I remember standing in the middle of the hall - listening, waiting. I convinced myself I heard a child’s laughter but I am sure that was only my imagination. When a door opened, I jumped. Only it was Mrs Maloney. The spell was broken. She gave me a cup of tea. She was very friendly. She chatted away. She told me that the Mortlocks had no immediate intention of coming back to England. Sir Michael was still rather poorly. It was his nerves, she said. That’s what she had heard from the son.’

  ‘Nervous breakdown?’

  ‘That was the impression I got. Yes. He was extremely upset when Sonya disappeared. More than I thought possible. I saw him dabbing at his eyes. He was the only one who went up to Lena and put his arm around her shoulders. I remember wondering whether he might not have been in love with her.’

  Payne smiled. ‘He might have been. He was known for his penchant for “chubby chicks”. That’s how somebody in the department put it.’

  ‘He had a Rubens in his study . . . Well, Sir Michael died the following year - or was it the year after?’

  ‘He died in 1982,’ Major Payne said. ‘I remember reading his obituary and talking to someone in the department who had known him well. It was exactly thirty years since he had started working at MI5.’

  ‘I too read his obituary . . . There was something funny in it - something I thought odd. What was it? Can’t remember now. I did write to Lady Mortlock expressing my condolences. She never wrote back. She sold Twiston a few years later. In 1987, I think. There was an article about it in one of the papers. With pictures.’

  ‘Who bought it? The National Trust?’

  ‘A private buyer, I think.’

  Major Payne observed that it must have cost a packet.

  ‘A couple of million or so. A fortune in the
eighties . . . Where Lady Mortlock went to live after that, I have no idea, but it shouldn’t be too hard to find out.’ Antonia paused. ‘I suppose I could phone Twiston and ask if they have a contact number or address.’

  ‘You’ve written the number here,’ Major Payne said, tapping the last page of Antonia’s typescript.

  ‘So I have. Twiston 207452. They may have changed it of course. I’ll check. Lady Mortlock may still be abroad. That would complicate matters.’

  ‘How old did you say she was? Eighty-seven? You sure she is still alive?’

  ‘I’d have heard if she’d died. There’d have been obituaries, even if she’d died abroad . . . I wonder if she’d agree to see me. Or if she did, whether she’d be willing to talk about the past,’ Antonia said thoughtfully.

  ‘She might not be, if she had something to hide,’ Payne pointed out.

  Antonia shook her head. ‘I can’t believe Lady Mortlock had anything to do with Sonya’s disappearance. I can’t. It makes no sense . . . Even if she did hate the idea of a mentally deficient child being under her roof, she wouldn’t kill her. The idea’s absurd. Unless she was mad - which I don’t think she was.’

  Payne leant across the table. ‘She told lies twice. Of course the lies might be unrelated to the disappearance. Still, it’s strange, you must admit.’

  ‘Oh it is strange. I won’t rest until I know the reason. I must see her.’

  ‘That’s where we start then.’

  There was a pause, then Antonia said, ‘She never left the drawing room that morning. She couldn’t have done anything to Sonya. She couldn’t have phoned the nanny either.’

  ‘Why not? She could have done it from some extension. Don’t tell me there were no extensions at Twiston.’

  ‘Well, there were. But Lady Mortlock’s voice would have been instantly recognized by the servant who took the call - Mrs Maloney - even if she had tried to disguise it.’