R Raichev - The hunt for Sonya Dufrette

‘Did she now? How very interesting.’ Payne stroked his jaw with a forefinger. ‘And Lena wasn’t talking about the Yusupov millions?’

‘No. The Yusupov millions are the stuff of legends, but they had been spent by the time Lena was born.’

‘It might have been a fantasy of course – a figment of Lena’s drunken dreaming.’

‘What if it wasn’t?’

‘If it wasn’t… Well, then it would mean that in the not too distant past, say in the last twenty years, Lena had been in possession of a lot of money.’ Payne paused. ‘Where did the money come from? Who gave it to her?’

‘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.

‘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. ’Sacre bleu, Prince Omelette! C‘est le spectre de ton pere,’ 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.’