The Hunt for Sonya Dufrette (23 page)

Not even in her wildest imagination had she seen herself in a situation like that. The driver stared at her. ‘He is my husband - would you please hurry up?’ She didn’t quite know why she said it was her husband - maybe because it was preferable to saying, ‘He is a murderer.’

‘Where are we going?’ the driver asked.

‘Richmond, I think,’ Antonia said. Her voice sounded harsh. ‘Richmond-on-Thames.’

‘You
think?’

‘Richmond, yes. I am pretty sure he’s going to Richmond. Place called Twiston. It’s a big house outside Richmond. I’ll tell you how to get there.’

‘I don’t want any trouble,’ the driver said, starting the engine. He clearly regarded her as a jealous, possibly vengeful, wife in pursuit of her flighty husband. His eyes raked her up and down as though to make absolutely certain she didn’t have a gun or any other weapon on her person.

Antonia remained silent. Trouble. Would there be trouble? What was Major Nagle planning to do exactly? Well, drive his car to Twiston - sneak into the garden and make an attempt to get his ring back ... But that would be impossible, surely? He would have to cut the tree first - the ancient oak. Then there was the twenty-year-old cement base - he would have to smash his way through the cement first. He wouldn’t be able to do it. The idea was absurd.

On the other hand, why not? He was a powerfully built man. He might have a tool box in the boot of his car. A hammer. He would need a big hammer, or something equally heavy. Could he do it with a spanner? He would need an axe first and foremost! What about the noise? He couldn’t start hacking at the oak or hammering away without being heard. There were dogs at the house - Mrs Ralston-Scott’s spaniels. Could he pretend to be a tree surgeon? Could he get away with it? Well, Mrs Ralston-Scott couldn’t have left London yet - she was probably still in the radio studio. That was probably his chance - tell whoever was at the house, the secretary Laura or any servants, that he had been hired to saw down the tree. But he didn’t look like a tree surgeon!

It was evident to her that Major Nagle was acting on a wild impulse. Well, he was a desperate man. He hadn’t been able to give the matter any coherent thought. He had looked apoplectic. He knew he was facing exposure — trial - social ruin - years in prison ... Perhaps he would park his car outside the gates and sit inside and wait until dark? Would that help though? The noise would be much more conspicuous at night.

Antonia glanced at her watch. Three o‘clock. They were stopping at traffic lights. In her mind she went back to the fatal day. So what happened after Nagle immured Sonya inside the tree? Well, he went up to the house and returned to his room. He hadn’t been seen. Soon after, the Vorodins arrived, as arranged. Maybe he watched them from his window, which overlooked that part of the garden. The Vorodins didn’t see Sonya but assumed she would appear at any moment. They found her doll, daisy chain and bracelet and laid the false trail to the river, suggesting she had drowned. Unwittingly they had helped Nagle! They had drawn attention away from the tree and focused it on the river. Antonia imagined Nagle nodding approvingly from behind the window curtain. Then the Vorodins waited a bit longer, but still Sonya did not appear. Eventually they went away, afraid that they might be seen. They were, after all, supposed to be on a plane bound for the USA. They must have suspected there was something wrong. Then of course they saw the news on the TV or read about Sonya’s disappearance and presumed drowning in the papers. What did they feel? Shock — regret - great sadness - guilt - remorse? That they were good and decent people Antonia had no doubt. They must have let Lena and the nanny keep the money ...

So
They had no children
in Anatole Vorodin’s obituary meant precisely that. The Vorodins had never had any children, natural or adopted.

What about Veronica’s letter to Lena then? Well, it might have nothing to do with Sonya. They might have simply kept in touch, the way cousins did —

‘I lost him,’ she heard the driver say. ‘Your husband. I don’t know where he went.’

‘Never mind, drive to Richmond,’ Antonia said. He would be there. Perhaps he had gone to buy a hammer - or an axe. She was certain he would wind up at Twiston.

They arrived at Richmond some minutes before five o‘clock. Antonia was amazed at herself for remembering the way to Twiston so well after twenty years. She told the driver to stop outside the wrought-iron gates. She realized then that she didn’t have any money on her. She had left her handbag in the library. She felt the merciless sun rays upon her and was aware of the rivulets of sweat coursing down her face. She didn’t even have a handkerchief to wipe her face!

‘I am sorry. Please, come to the club tomorrow morning,’ she said. ‘I’ll pay you then.’

She must have presented a pathetic sight for the driver did not make a scene. He looked at her, shook his head and handed her a bundle of tissues. He then started the engine. Antonia stood watching the phantom of her distorted reflection receding in the curve of the dark glass, and as the cab disappeared in the distance, she dabbed at her brow and cheeks. Her nostrils caught a faint tang of wood smoke. She walked up to the gates and found them locked, but there was a smaller door further down the wall, which was open.

She went in.

23

The Edwardian Game Larder

Crunch-crunch,
went the gravel under her feet, astonish ingly loud, as she walked along the avenue in the ever-scorching sun. She hoped she wouldn’t encounter any of Mrs Ralston-Scott’s gardeners or dogs.

A sound that conveys ownership and ease. The words of Sir Michael Mortlock came back to her incongruously. Sir Michael, it occurred to her, had been the sanest person at Twiston on that fatal day, also the nicest. He hadn’t contributed to any of the gossip-mongering. He had tried to pour oil on troubled waters. He had done his best to keep everybody happy. She thought she could smell his cigar — Partagas, that was the Cuban brand he had smoked. (The silly things one remembered!) She expected to see him sitting on the rustic seat under the oak, clad in a light flannel suit and sporting a straw boater with a pink ribbon, engrossed in Geoffrey Household’s
Rogue Male,
which he must be reading for the tenth time. He would look up from the book at her approach, rise to his feet and take off his hat with old-fashioned courtesy, his pink wrinkled face creasing into a smile, his faded brown eyes twinkling. ‘Ah, Antonia. It was so much better in those days, when you knew who your enemy was, don’t you think?’ She then remembered that Sir Michael was long gone, dead — had been dead for nearly twenty years.

She recalled reading Sir Michael’s obituary in
The Times.
It had come to her as a great surprise that he had been a Freemason as well as a member of various other esoteric-sounding societies. No one would have associated him with that sort of thing. Sir Michael had always struck her as the most down-to-earth of men, unaffected, placid, amiable and more than a little vague - not at all the kind that would go in for dressing up in strange robes and executing equally strange handshakes with his fellow Masons.

Hugh had suggested that Sir Michael might have been a member of some kind of
Herrenvolk
cult. Impossible - ridiculous. What next? A member of the Babylonian brotherhood? There had been a chapter in Dufrette’s book entitled ‘Knights of the Dark Sun’. The Dark Knights practised the sacrifice of children and virgins, or so Dufrette had claimed. Sir Michael had been seen outside Twiston with his hands covered in blood. He had been holding a knife. Well, he had been cutting the liver out of a young boar. No - that was a dream Lady Mortlock had had. But didn’t dreams reflect reality in a distorted kind of way?

Antonia rubbed her temples.
Could
one discipline one’s thoughts? Although the proximity of the river and the trees in the garden made the atmosphere here less sultry, she continued to feel rather light-headed. Every now and then luminous spots that were dark around the edges flashed before her eyes.

Sir Michael was the only person who had been nice to Lena ... He had
liked
Lena, Dufrette had said. Sir Michael had had a penchant for large ladies ... He had kept inviting the Dufrettes to Twiston despite his wife’s disapproval of them ... Antonia saw him once more, this time beside the river, putting an arm around Lena ... No one else had tried to comfort Lena ... Sir Michael had disappeared at weekends - Lady Mortlock said so ... He had said he was going bird-watching ...

Crunch-crunch.
Antonia’s progress was slow, deliberately so. She had to be careful ... An adagio prelude to a furious overture? She hoped not. She walked with her head bowed, straining her ears for the sounds of a hammer striking against cement, though she knew that would be unlikely. Other noises kept coming to her ears: rustling of leaves, whispering, distant footfalls, dogs’ muffled barking, the splashing of the river, even the sweet old- fashioned sounds of ‘Lavender’s Blue’! She couldn’t be sure about any of them. For one thing the river couldn’t be heard from here. On a quiet day like this, there wasn’t likely to be a single ripple on it. She was imagining things. If she didn’t get a grip on herself, she’d be seeing Sonya’s ghost coming from the direction of the river next! The thought sent a slight shiver down her spine.

There was no sign of Major Nagle. He hadn’t arrived yet, or could he be approaching the oak by a different route?

A rogue male. Was he dangerous? Was he likely to turn nasty? Well, yes. If he saw that she suspected — nay,
knew
what he had done. He would have brought a hammer with him. All he needed to do was raise the hammer in his ham-like hand and bring it down on her head. Would he dare? The odd thing was that she didn’t feel in the least afraid. She had been brought to Twiston by a twist of fate, by a strange concatenation of chance and circumstance. She was on the track of a child-killer. She didn’t feel anxious, excited or thrilled either. This, Antonia thought, is something I’ve got to do. This is journey’s end. The denouement. No - the final action-filled sequence
before
the denouement. The chapter she would call ‘Rogue Male’. The denouement of course was going to take place in the library at Twiston -

She shook her head. She was mixing fact and fiction again! She was overheated, probably dangerously so.

She imagined her face taking on the characteristics of a hunting creature: brows drawn together, lips pursed tight, nostrils dilating as those of a dog on the scent ... Shouldn’t she have called the police and informed them of her findings? It was only now that the thought occurred to her and she frowned. Well, yes - this
was
a matter for the police. Only, she felt sure, they wouldn’t take any of it seriously. They would consider her unhinged - the dehydrated victim of sunstroke. Or - or they might think it was a publicity stunt, that she was doing it to increase the sales of her one detective novel.

What was that, madam? A sadistic Major? A doll-like child immured inside the hollow of a Jacobean oak? A signet ring embedded in the cement? Revelations brought about by
Gardeners’ Question Time?
Even if they had been prepared to listen to her story, even if they gave her the benefit of the doubt and accepted that there might be something in it, they wouldn’t have rushed to Twiston in hot pursuit of Major Nagle. By the time they did decide to interview Nagle, it would be too late. He would have been able to remove the body and his ring several times over.

Though would he? The whole idea seemed fantastic.

How she needed Hugh’s advice! If only he had been with her now.

She had come upon the old-fashioned garden thermometer that marked the highest and lowest temperatures of the day. It was attached to the wall of an octagonal structure with small round windows whose panes were of butter-scotch yellow and a pointed chocolate-coloured roof ending in what looked like a giant humbug, situated under a birch tree. She remembered both, the thermometer and the building, very well indeed. The thermometer, she discovered, stood at eighty-four and a half.

The building had held her entranced when she had first laid eyes on it. It was at once whimsical and vaguely menacing. It had something of the fairy-tale about it (shades of
Hansel and Gretel?),
though it had been a mere game larder in Edwardian times, placed under the birch tree for coolness’ sake, and by the time she had first seen it, no longer in use. As far as she could recall, it was only Sir Michael who had come to it to examine the thermometer. Sir Michael had considered converting the larder to a storage place of some kind, she couldn’t think exactly for what. As a matter of fact she had observed him carry an ancient lacquered toy-box through the garden and place it inside the larder. It had been - why, it was the day of her departure from Twiston! The day after the tragedy ...

Her eye fell on an object on the ground. Something that had gleamed in the sun. She picked it up. A metal button, from a man’s blazer. Her heart missed a beat. Could Major Nagle be taking cover inside the game larder? The place was large enough - just about. No - the button was quite old, she could see now. It had been on the ground for some time, years maybe. Major Nagle was wearing a hacking jacket which had a completely different set of buttons. Besides, the door was padlocked and rusty and overgrown with some white flowering creeper that seemed quite undisturbed. What was it called?
Polygonum
...? One of the experts on the
Gardeners’ Question Time
panel would know. The plant, she imagined, was of the kind that grew quickly, smotheringly, and was a menace to anything else that wanted to grow.

Suddenly Antonia had a strange feeling, she couldn’t quite explain, and she stood frowning at the small white flowers that covered the larder door. Like a shrine, she thought. She tried to peer inside through one of the small yellow-panelled windows, but could see nothing. Sir Michael had had a nervous breakdown in the wake of Sonya’s disappearance and died soon after. That toy-box — like a child’s coffin. What if ... No.
No.