‘They’
‘Well, Antonia – I hope you don’t mind me calling you Antonia?’ Major Payne said. ‘Miss Darcy sounds forbidding somehow, don’t you think?’
‘I don’t see why it should.’
‘Shades of Pride and Prejudice and that pompous ass Darcy, whom I never managed to like, not even after his transformation. And wasn’t there a Miss Darcy – a snobbish sister, who was even worse?’
‘No. That was Bingley’s sister. Miss Darcy was rather nice,’ Antonia said. ‘If I remember correctly, she is described as having “no equal for beauty, elegance and accomplishments”.’
‘Oh yes. And for the affection she inspires.’ He looked at her in a way which made it clear he considered that an attribute she herself possessed in abundance.
It was half past eleven the following morning and they were in the club library, comparing notes over coffee. At least they had been comparing notes before they went off at a tangent. Antonia wasn’t sure whether she should feel annoyed or flattered by his attentions which seemed to be becoming more ardent. She blamed herself for encouraging him, by first telling him of the rather annoying phone call she had received from her former husband the night before, then teasing him about the dog Apollo and the cat Daphne. Major Payne had got hold of her hand and said he wouldn’t let go of it unless she told him how she had learnt about it.
Antonia could have named Colonel Haslett as her informant at once, but had delayed for at least a quarter of a minute, during which time her hand had remained in his. She had made several futile attempts to pull it from his grip, which had only led to him tightening it. She hadn’t tried hard enough. She had enjoyed the experience and now had a ridiculously guilty feeling about it. That, she told herself, was not how responsible people in their fifties behaved. They had acted like silly teenagers. What would have happened if somebody had come in and seen them, engaged in a playful skirmish across her desk? Dallying in the library!
Antonia felt hot and a little faint. She found she was panicking. She wasn’t ready for a relationship, let alone marriage. It is too soon to allow another man into my life, she thought.
The day was warm and the library windows were open. From outside there came the smell of freshly mown grass – which, again, forcibly, reminded her of that fateful day at Twiston – also the sounds of Radio 4. The gardener was a young university student and he had his transistor radio on. As it happened, he was listening to a programme called Hopes and Desires, the first of a series of comedies about unconscious yearnings.
‘Well, if you are not happy with Miss Darcy, you can address me as Mrs Rushton.’ Which, Antonia pointed out with greater severity than she intended, happened to be her married name.
He sighed. ‘I’d rather call you Antonia and I hope you will call me Hugh one day. Well, we are making progress. The moving finger,’ he went on quickly, unless that be misconstrued, ‘is now firmly fixed on Lena… Lena didn’t really care about her daughter. Lena fed Lady Mortlock the canard about Miss Haywood’s mother being ill in hospital. Lena phoned the nanny – shortly after Sonya disappeared. She didn’t sound at all like a mother mourning the death of her child. She warned the nanny against talking. Her exact words were, You’d better keep your mouth shut, my girl, or they will kill us both. We do assume, don’t we, that Lena was part of whatever conspiracy there was? That she knew exactly what happened?’
‘We do.’
‘But we don’t believe Lady Mortlock was the mastermind behind the conspiracy?’
‘No. I don’t really think Lady Mortlock had anything to do with Sonya’s disappearance. The only reason she told lies was because she didn’t want it to be known that she had had an affair with Lena.’
‘You don’t think that she and Major Nagle -’
‘No. The Herrenvolk conspiracy was not meant to be taken seriously. She was making fun of me.’
‘Was she though?’
‘Of course she was.’
‘It might have been one of those double bluffs,’ Payne reflected. ‘Maybe there was a conspiracy but she named Major Nagle because it made it all seem so absurd? Maybe she wanted you to dismiss the idea out of hand – which you did. What if she was telling the truth? Wait. What if her real partner was somebody else – somebody who was very close to her? What if her partner was her husband – or should I say her so-called husband?’
‘Sir Michael?’
‘Sir Michael. Why did the Mortlocks stay together? From what Lady M. told you, theirs was clearly a marriage in name only – a mariage blanc. What if they were together exclusively for ideological reasons? What if they were confederates? No one would have thought it of Sir Michael, but he was actually a Freemason and apparently he belonged to a number of other esoteric societies, somebody in the department told me once.’
‘His obituary mentioned it too,’ she murmured, remembering.
‘There you are. He might have been a bad blood nut as well – he might even have been more fanatical than her!’ Payne paused. ‘Are you sure Sir Michael didn’t leave the room that morning while you were all watching the royal wedding?’
‘No… Actually, he did. Yes. I forgot to mention it in my account, I know. But he wasn’t the only one. People did go out – the Falconers, Mrs Lynch-Marquis – for no more than a couple of minutes at a time and by themselves. The usual. There were two downstairs lavatories. Sir Michael couldn’t have been out for more than five minutes, I think. He went to the kitchen to have a word with the men who were providing the oak with a base. He had remembered something. It seemed to be urgent.’
‘How can you be sure he went to the kitchen? No, of course you aren’t sure. It’s not as though you followed him.’
‘Five minutes wouldn’t have been enough for him to go down to the river and drown Sonya.’
‘Who says Sonya drowned? He might have killed her somewhere else and hidden the body.’
Antonia smiled. ‘I could just about get away with it if I were to put this in a book -’
‘All right – but, my dear girl, the fact remains that some sort of conspiracy was at work. We know for a fact that somebody – the mysterious and rather sinister “they” – did buy the nanny’s silence.’
‘And not only the nanny’s,‘ Antonia said, her eyes suddenly bright. She went on slowly, ’Lady Mortlock said that Lena had had a fortune, but that she had frittered it away. Lena told her about it when she went to see her.‘
‘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.