The Hunt for Sonya Dufrette (16 page)

‘The obvious answer is, the mysterious and rather sinister “they”. The same person - or persons - who paid Sonya’s nanny, paid Sonya’s mother as well.’

‘A deal, eh?’

Antonia said, ‘It is Lena who holds the key to the mystery. Lena knows what happened to her daughter. Lena knows who “they” are.’

‘The Mortlocks. My money’s on the Mortlocks.’

‘We must go and talk to Lena.’

‘It shouldn’t be too difficult to track her down, should it?’

‘I already have,’ Antonia said. ‘Before I took my leave of Miss Garnett, I asked if Mrs Dufrette had left a contact number or address when she called, and it turned out that she had. Lena left both a number
and
an address.’

‘Where does she live?’

‘A hotel named the Elsnor. It’s in Bayswater. Rather a run-down sort of place.’

‘That’s appropriate. Isn’t Lena a ruin herself?’

‘Miss Garnett knows the hotel. She was taken to tea there as a girl, but the place now is apparently unrecognizable, gone to the dogs completely. Miss Garnett referred to it as a “hell-hole”.’

There was a pause. ‘I don’t think we should bother to phone. We are going to pay Lena a blitz visit,’ Major Payne said.

‘Who’s going? Me or you?’

‘This time ... I think we should go together. We can pretend to be a married couple.’

Antonia bristled. ‘I don’t see why we should want to do that.’

‘Lena would feel less threatened if she were to be approached by a nice middle-aged couple,’ Major Payne explained. ‘The idea is to stage a casual encounter, buy her a drink, set a trap and trick her into some sort of confession.’

‘Since she appears to be an alcoholic
and
penniless, it’s unlikely she’d feel threatened if a giant lizard went along and offered to buy her a drink,’ Antonia pointed out. A married couple, she thought. Really. Hugh was forgetting himself. She meant Major Payne. Earlier on he had addressed her as ‘my dear girl’ - how dared he!

‘The bar. That’s where we’ll probably find her. We must visit the Elsnor at the cocktail hour.’

‘No such thing as the “cocktail hour” any longer exists.’

‘The Elsnor, did you say? Are you sure it’s not the
Elsinore?
Would be so much more suitable a place for conjuring up ghosts from the past -’

‘Stop showing off,’ Antonia said.

16

‘She was never in the river . . .’

The Elsnor was a private hotel in Bayswater that occupied two corner houses in a noisy region east of Queen’s Road. It had been grand and ugly once, in the best manner of hotels built in the late Victorian era, but, having fallen on bad times, was merely ugly now.

‘It has the air of neglected mystery about it’ Major Payne declared.
’Sacré bleu, Prince Omelette! C‘est le spectre de ton père,’
he sang out suddenly. That, he explained, came from a particularly witless French opera based on
Hamlet,
which he had seen at Covent Garden a while ago. No, it hadn’t been a
buffo opera
- it hadn’t been
meant
to be funny.

It was seven o‘clock that same evening.

They entered the hotel through the revolving doors. An acrid smell hung on the air, suggesting some sort of conflagration had taken place. Antonia looked round nervously. A short circuit? Surely not a
gun?
Major Payne drew her attention to the fact that the two receptionists were under fire. One was being accused of having lost the passport belonging to a Japanese tourist, while the other was trying to convince a group of extremely tense-looking German tourists that no booking had been made in their name and that they had come to the wrong hotel. ‘But this is not possible,’ the leader of the group was saying. ‘I made the reservations myself. I want to see the manager at once.’ The manager, he was told, was away.

They started crossing the hall and passed by a sunken sofa. They saw a fearfully made-up girl in a miniskirt, black fishnet stockings and knee-length boots, who couldn’t have been more than fifteen, sitting on the lap of a bald stout man who looked like a commercial traveller of the more prosperous variety, gazing earnestly into his eyes. Antonia shot Major Payne an eloquent look.

‘Don’t jump to conclusions. She may be his daughter. She may be upset about something,’ Payne murmured. That was only a moment before the commercial traveller brought his face close to the girl’s and ran his tongue across her lips and chin.

Placing his hand at Antonia’s elbow in a protective manner, Payne propelled her briskly through the hall.

They were following the sign pointing in the direction of the bar. ‘I bet it leads to the saunas,’ Antonia said. ‘It seems to be that sort of place. ’

However, the arrow did not lie and soon they found themselves entering the Elsnor bar. Beside the door there stood an ancient stuffed bear with eyes of coloured glass. Its right paw was raised in greeting, the left one was missing. Inside the bar it reeked of stale smoke and some exotic, rather sickening, scent, which, Major Payne insisted, was actually formaldehyde. It was a dark cavern of a room with vaulted ceilings, empty and very quiet. They could hear water dripping dolorously somewhere.

‘Doesn’t it put you in mind of the Blitz? What will you have?’ Payne asked her. His hand was still at her elbow.

‘Gin and tonic. Why are you whispering?’

‘I feel like a neat whisky ... There’s a speck of soot on your cheek. Do let me.’ He took out a starched handkerchief. Who did his ironing? Antonia wondered. ‘Don’t move ... Are your eyes actually blue? Do they change colour? Don’t move. It’s gone ... No waiters ... Why isn’t she here?’ He looked round at the empty tables.

‘She might be dead,’ Antonia suggested. ‘Alcoholics and junkies have notoriously short lifespans. They might be carrying her coffin down the back stairs at this very moment.’ Was she seeking refuge in morbid flippancy, as a form of defence against his flirtatiousness?

‘Let’s find the barman,’ he said.

But there was no barman. It was only as they approached the bar counter that they noticed the barmaid. A bull-shouldered woman with orange hair and the lurid lips of a Land Girl, who sat slumped on a stool. So focused was she on her own drink, a tall glass filled with vermouth the colour of old blood, which she was sucking through a green straw, that she took no notice of them.

They halted and Payne said, ‘Good Lord.’

‘Yes, it’s her,’ Antonia whispered. ‘It’s Lena ... In charge of the drinks.’

‘Asking Mistress Fox to feed the chickens, eh?’

‘Yes. It can only happen at a place like this.’

‘Big, loose and picturesque ... Dracula’s daughter ... The fantastical hausfrau ...’

‘She looks like an inflated Zandra Rhodes doll. She still rims her eyes with kohl.’

‘Let’s go and beard this phantom bride in her bibulous bower!’

‘Be
quiet,
Hugh.’

‘We’ll play it by ear,’ Major Payne explained
sotto voce,
privately noting with some satisfaction that she had called him Hugh. ‘The main thing is to act as though we have no idea who she is.’

‘She’s not likely to recognize me, is she?’ Antonia sounded anxious.

‘Fear not. I am sure you haven’t changed one little bit,’ he said gallantly. ‘It’s only that she looks pickled. Observe the catatonic stare. Leave it to me. I’ll start, you follow my cues. We’ll concoct our plot as we go along.’

As they approached the curve of the bar, Lena looked up and regarded them out of puffy eyes. ‘Hello,’ she said amiably. ‘Such a hot day, isn’t it? There used to be a fan, but someone stole it.’ She no longer spoke with a Russian accent but slurred some of her words a bit. She smacked her lips. ‘Disgraceful. What would you two love birds like?’

She was wearing a faded maroon-coloured velvet gown that seemed to have seen better days and heavy costume jewellery. Her ear lobes were weighed down by enormous pendant earrings made of sparkling Swarowski crystals set in bronze frames. Her face was the shape of a full moon and plastered with pancake make-up. ‘A gin and tonic for my wife and a scotch for me, please,’ Payne ordered. ‘Neat.’

On the counter in front of her, there lay a half-eaten bar of chocolate, a lipstick, a powder compact, four large tablets with a purplish coating and a sheet of pale mauve paper - it looked like a letter, Antonia thought.

‘We don’t get many married couples here,’ Lena observed. ‘Only foreigners bring their wives.’

‘We lit on the Elsnor by a trick of fate. Charming place,’ Major Payne said. ‘Have you got Famous Grouse?’

‘Are you a soldier?’ Lena asked. She popped one of the purple pills into her mouth, washed it down with vermouth, then busied herself with bottles and glasses. She was painfully slow and clumsy. ‘You certainly have that air. My papa served with the Imperial Cossacks for a while. He was aide-de-camp to the Tsar’s brother. You
are
a soldier, aren’t you?’

‘Spot on, dear lady. Major Payne at your service.’ Antonia had never heard him put on this voice before. He made himself sound ridiculously Blimpish.

‘Can you read that letter?’ Antonia whispered when Lena turned round to get a bottle of tonic. ‘I think it’s a letter.
It’s upside down.’

Payne rose to the challenge at once. ‘I’ll try.’ She saw him tilting his head to one side and squinting.

‘All the ice’s melted, I can’t understand why,’ Lena said. ‘There’s plenty of lemon. Have you been abroad?’ She was peering into Antonia’s face now. ‘You have a lovely tan. You look a simpatico sort of person. You’ve been abroad, haven’t you?’ Antonia’s heart missed a beat, but Lena showed no flicker of recognition.

‘Spot on again,’ Payne said. ‘Kenya, actually. Got off the plane three hours ago. We’d been visiting friends. Name of Sandys,’ he added casually and he gave Antonia a wink. Sandys, she had told him, were the couple who had bought Twiston from the Mortlocks and then sold it to Mrs Ralston-Scott before leaving for Kenya. She thought she could guess the kind of game he had started playing. He had managed to establish a connection with Twiston without arousing Lena’s suspicions. What next? she wondered, fascinated.

‘Kenya, eh? Lovely place.’ Lena nodded approvingly. ‘Or so I’ve been told. Safaris and moonlit picnics and sundowners till sunrise? Lovely place to be. No matter how much you drink, you never get drunk. It’s the air that does it, apparently. So fresh and pure. My papa got to know the White Valley. He became a tremendously popular figure at the Muthaiga Club. He got on famously with the crowd. He was in Kenya in 1940-something.’

‘That’s jolly interesting,’ Major Payne said in a hearty manner. ‘He must have been there when Lord Erroll was murdered?’

‘Yes, I believe so. Here you are, your drinkies ... Prosit.’ She picked up her own glass. ‘You don’t mind if I continue?’

‘No, of course not, dear lady. Perhaps you will allow me to order you a refill when you finish?’

‘That’s all right,’ Lena said. ‘I can have as much as I want.’ She waved her hand at the range of bottles behind her. ‘I can have anything I like whenever I like. Bliss.’ She picked up her glass. ‘Your good health.’

‘Nazdarovye,’
Payne responded in part. Antonia shook her head at him frantically - they weren’t supposed to know she was Russian!

‘What I’d really like now is an Egyptian cigarette that has been dipped lightly in cognac, but I am not allowed.’ Lena sighed. ‘Doctor’s orders. The merest puff will kill me, apparently. I shall never launch merrily down the path of sin again. Doomed from here to eternity ... Oh well,
c’est
la
vie.
How did you know I was Russian?‘

‘Oh - you said your papa was aide-de-camp to the Tsar’s brother. You meant the Tsar of Russia, correct?’ Payne said coolly. ‘I don’t know many other tsars.
And
you mentioned Cossacks.’

‘Quite the little detective, aren’t you?’ Lena laughed in a flirtatious manner.

There was a pause as they occupied themselves with their drinks. It was Antonia who broke the silence. ‘Do you know, they still talk about the Erroll murder. They keep arguing about it. I mean in Kenya. Everybody seems to be an expert on the subject.’ She laughed. ‘I
adore
unsolved mysteries, don’t you?’ She delivered this effusively, in her best memsahib voice, and received a nod of approval from Payne.

For a moment Lena said nothing. She went on sucking vermouth through her straw. She appeared not to have heard. Then she said, ‘They wrote a book about it, didn’t they? They thought it was the husband who did it.’

‘Sir Jock Delves Broughton. That’s still open to debate,’ Payne said. ‘As so often happens with such cases. I find they never die down, not quite. Old Sandys told me about another one. Murder that took place twenty years ago - at the very house he bought! Pile of a place on the river. Outside Richmond.’ He paused, but there was no reaction from Lena. ‘Called - what was it, my love?’ He turned towards Antonia.

‘Twiston. We are thinking of paying it a visit, actually,’ Antonia said. ‘There’s always an -
atmosphere -
at places like that. And this place, it seems, is really special.’

They were looking at Lena, but she hadn’t stirred. She was staring down into her drink, her podgy hands clutching at the glass as though she feared somebody might snatch it away from her.

‘Twiston, that’s correct.’ Payne slapped his forehead with the palm of his hand. ‘The old cerebellum’s not functioning properly. Jetlag. Forget my own name next. Never been good on planes. Murder happened at the time of the previous owners. Couple called Mortlock. It was a young girl who got killed. Terrible tragedy.’ He was gratified to see Lena look up slowly.

Antonia said in a low voice, ‘The funny thing is - now you wouldn’t believe this, but the place seems to be haunted!’ It was Hugh’s reference to Elsinore that had given her the idea.

‘What d’you mean - haunted?‘ Lena ran her tongue across her lips.

‘It’s the ghost of the little girl that got murdered. She appears in the garden.’ Major Payne took out his pipe. ‘Always from the direction of the river.’