The hunt for Sonya Dufrette

3

Taste of Fears

She could still feel a little surge of excitement when she arrived at the club library. She relished the ‘unknown factor’, the uncertainty as to what might turn up, the possibility that it might be something really exciting. It was the detective story writer and mystery enthusiast in her as much as the librarian. One never knew. The library users sometimes had very interesting enquiries, out of which there emerged the most fascinating stories.

There had been the old boy who had known T.E. Lawrence in the short while before that fatal motorbike accident, which of course, he claimed, hadn’t been an accident at all; the chap whose aunt had been a nanny to the children of King Zog of Albania; the retired MI6 officer who told Antonia in great detail how he had foiled a plot to kill the Dalai Lama. The books themselves – Antonia tended to think of the books almost as people – often yielded surprises too, especially those that were brought in as donations. Old volumes of memoirs, frequently privately published, of the two world wars, of travels in the East when it had really been the ‘mysterious Orient’, and in Africa. Then there were the old personal archives, which she got to investigate from time to time.

‘Ah, Miss Darcy. You are back.’

‘Good morning, Mr Lodge,’ responded Antonia. She had been about to close the library door behind her. Mr Lodge was the club secretary: a small man in his late forties, rubicund and dapper, invariably sporting a bow tie, a polka-dotted one this time.

‘You look as though you’ve had an excellent holiday, if you don’t mind my saying so. You look tanned and fitter than before you left.’

‘Thank you. I had a very good time.’

‘I am glad to hear it. You did seem in need of a holiday. We’ve had upheavals here while you’ve been away.’

‘Really?’

He glanced over his shoulder. ‘New management on the way. It looks like war,’ he whispered. In his normal voice he said, ‘I have some more books for you. More donations.’

‘Oh, good. Thank you, Mr Lodge.’ They had known each other for three years, but somehow there was no question of first name terms ever being established between them.

He was holding a cardboard box containing a number of books. ‘Brigadier Shipton left them for you, in case they were of interest. It’s a mixed bunch. There is a rather unusual recipe book… Not for the squeamish!’ Antonia at once thought of cannibals but it turned out to be for dishes favoured by the ancient Mongols.

Now inside her inner sanctum, she stood beside her desk and looked at the pile of letters that had accumulated in her absence. The one at the top was addressed to Mrs Antonia Rushton, c/o the Military Club, St James‘s, W1.

Antonia stared. Rushton? She had reverted to her maiden name, Darcy, after her divorce, and she had been using it for the past six months. The handwriting seemed familiar, though it might be her imagination. Could it be something to do with Sonya? It didn’t look like an official envelope, so it couldn’t be the police. It was somebody from the past – Lena? – who had written to her. Somebody who didn’t know about her change of circumstances.

Now this won’t do at all. There’s no one out there who wants to get you. Pull yourself together, girl. Snap out of it.

Mr Lodge appeared at the door once more. ‘I am sorry, Miss Darcy. I keep bothering you. I have received the new Who’s Who. Would you like last year’s edition?’

‘Thank you. It would be very useful.’

‘Here you are… So heavy, aren’t they? Someone’s cranium could easily be smashed with this. The perfect murder weapon, eh?’ He gave her a knowing look and left. Major Payne had told her that it was common knowledge now that she had penned a mystery yarn. On an impulse she opened Who’s Who and went to D.

Dufrette, Lawrence – well, last year, at least, he had been alive. He would be seventy-one in September. He lived in South Kensington and listed as his interests ‘the Babylonian brotherhood and walking’.

Hearing the sound of running steps, she looked up. It was Martin, the porter. ‘Oh, ma’am, look what I’ve got!‘ He was carrying three large hardbacks. ’These came back for you, at last! I thought we’d never see them again.‘

Grinning with genuine pleasure, he showed her the books. Of course. She’d completely forgotten about them. The memoirs of various cricketers, which Martin, a keen amateur sportsman, had been borrowing and slowly but delightedly reading, regaling everybody who would listen with anecdotes. Their absence from the library shelves had hit him and his fund of stories hard. ‘They were left on the table in the hall, Miss Darcy. Can you imagine?’

Antonia tut-tutted and shook her head. (What was the Babylonian brotherhood?)

‘They should have brought them here, shouldn’t they? What can they be thinking of?’ The porter tapped his forehead significantly. ‘Some of these old codgers…’

‘Don’t talk like that, Martin,’ she reprimanded him.

On the floor beside her desk there were more books in cardboard boxes, some of them sticking out of the heap at crazy angles. More donations, left for her by various well-meaning club members while she had been away. Buchan’s Greenmantle. They Die With Their Boots Clean by Gerald Kersh. MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman. Anthony Powell’s The Military Philosophers. So far so predictable. Her brows went up. Lesbia’s Little Blunder by Frederick Warne. She picked it up. The blurb promised ‘two ripping school yarns’. The book had been published in 1934 – the picture on the cover showed two smiling girls, bursting with rude health and holding hockey sticks. She leafed through it. No, it wasn’t a spoof – it wasn’t what the title suggested either. All perfectly innocent, actually.

Pushing the boxes out of the way, she sat down in her swivel chair. She found she was still holding the letter from the top of the pile, but postponed opening it. All around her apparent chaos ruled. In the days leading up to her holiday she had felt too unwell to do anything about it. The wooden table topped with red tooled leather on her right was covered with uncatalogued books and sprinkled with notes on little bits of paper, pens, pencils and equipment for labelling books. Another, smaller, table was stacked high with yellowing papers, most of which bore copperplate writing, apparently from another age. The shelves above contained filing boxes, heaps of typewritten paper and variegated volumes.

Her ‘office’ was situated underneath a staircase and so the ceiling tapered down to the floor at the back. The space in which no one could stand up straight was occupied by piles of enormous ledgers, bound in red or black leather, some of them with brass corners, some ancient and mouldering, some in uniform sequences, some not. The organizing of all this material was part of her work.

She looked down at the letter. Coming to a sudden decision, she picked up the paperknife, slit open the envelope and extracted the folded sheet.

Antonia gave a sigh of relief, seeing it was only an invitation for a class reunion. It was thirty-five years since she had left the Sempersand School for Girls. The letter was short. It had been written by Isabel Bradley, one of her former classmates, whom Antonia did not remember. I won’t go, she thought, crumpling up the letter and dropping it into her waste paper basket. She had been to her twentieth anniversary and had hated every moment of it. This one would be worse. Women did not improve with age. A gaggle of middle-aged matrons, prying into each other’s business, complaining about indifferent, critical or wayward husbands, hinting at affairs on either side, some of them getting embarrassingly drunk and, as likely as not, making desperate passes at the waiters.

Twenty minutes later she was sipping a cup of coffee and examining some notes she had made a fortnight before. One of the notes bore the words: A Rec. Fest. Vol. 15/2. She took down from the shelves on the wall a large reference book and started flicking through the pages until she found the phone number of a nearby specialist library. Balancing the book on her lap and holding the note with her left hand, she reached for the telephone. Just as she was about to lift the receiver, it rang.

It was a colleague from a parallel institution. He wanted to know how she was getting on with the map.

Antonia knew at once what map he meant. (What a sad life hers was!) ‘Ah. Very well indeed,’ she said. ‘I’ve shown it to one or two of our members and they were extremely interested. I think I have made some progress in identifying a few of the buildings. Two people separately identified the same one, so that’s fairly promising, isn’t it?’

‘Marvellous!’ What her fellow librarian then suggested was a meeting in the near future when they could actually look at the map properly, to which Antonia agreed with great alacrity.

A couple of minutes later she finished with the reference book on her lap and replaced it on the shelf.

‘Excuse me, are you the librarian?’

An elderly gentleman of imposing height stood before her. He had a mane of silver-white hair, carefully brushed back. He was dressed in a dark pinstriped suit. He had taken off his black Homburg. In his other hand he held a shabby Gladstone bag and a rolled-up umbrella.

Lawrence Dufrette? No, it couldn’t be…

As she continued staring at him, he said impatiently, ‘Are you the librarian or an owl?’ He didn’t seem to be in a very good mood. He had a Duke of Wellington nose, a mean choleric mouth and a ruddy complexion. He rapped his knuckles against the desk.

‘Sorry. I am the librarian, yes. What can I do for you?’

‘Have you got any books on the Himalayas?’

‘We do have a section on Geography and Travel, not a very large one, I am afraid. It contains memoirs of mountaineers and explorers.’ Her voice sounded odd, Antonia knew. ‘Amongst the regimental histories you will find quite a few about the Ghurkas, which describe their background in Nepal. There are also atlases. Let me show you.’

She led the way to the appropriate section, telling herself that this wasn’t Lawrence Dufrette. Of course it wasn’t him, though it did look like him. How could she be certain either way though, after twenty years? Was her mind playing her tricks? That was what happened, they said, when you had somebody on your mind – you kept seeing them. Was the old boy the same one she had observed entering White’s earlier that morning? One could never tell with a certain type of Englishman – they looked so similar.

From the corner of her eye she watched him as he lingered beside her desk, muttering to himself, shaking his head, poking among the books inside one of the boxes, opening and closing his bag. He wasn’t stealing her books, was he? When he joined her, she managed to ask whether his interest was theoretical or practical.

He said, ‘My nephew’s going trekking in the Himalayas next month. The book’s for him. My trekking days are over. Thank you very much indeed. I’ll take a look.’ He turned his back on her.

He did sound like Lawrence Dufrette… Was the alpinist nephew an invention? She remembered Lady Mortlock telling her that Lawrence Dufrette had quarrelled with all his relatives. That was twenty years ago. He hadn’t shown a flicker of recognition, but he might be pretending. She didn’t think she had changed so much… Perhaps it wasn’t Lawrence Dufrette after all.

Suddenly she stood very still. She had actually written a detailed account of the tragedy, she remembered. She had done it first by hand, then she had typed it up. She had covered a great number of pages, which she had put inside a folder. Every year at the end of July she started looking for the folder, but never managed to find it, after which she forgot about it. (Was that deliberate? Talking about self-imposed amnesia!) It was somewhere at home, she knew, in some drawer. She determined to do her very best this time, dig up her account without fail and read it. She felt she had to. She knew she would have another bad night if she didn’t.

Twenty years. She owed it to Sonya.

An hour later she heard a familiar booming voice outside the library door. ‘Scrambled duck egg with smoked eel – not bad at all. Bloody good in fact. You must try it, Wake-field. Be adventurous, that’s my motto. What? Splendid idea, yes. Haven’t told her yet. I’ll tell her now. No better time than the present.’ The door opened. ‘Miss Darcy! Miss Darcy! Are you in there?’

Antonia rose. ‘Good morning, Colonel Haslett,’ she greeted her boss brightly. Despite his advanced years Colonel Haslett OBE, DSO dealt with every matter at top speed before passing on to the next item on his always-extensive list. In his wake he left ripples, which tended to develop later into a large backwash of things to do.

‘Ah, Miss D., you are back. Good, excellent. How have you been getting on with the Gresham papers?’ Colonel Haslett was leaning heavily on his silver-topped cane and craning his head forward, half-moon glasses at the tip of his nose, his hand cupping his right ear. At his neck he had a starched damask napkin; it was clear he had had a late breakfast in the club’s dining room. He frequently forgot to remove his napkin. It was Colonel Haslett’s record with the Number One Commandos on the French coast early in the war and in North Africa and Burma that had won him a reputation for outstanding leadership. He had been nicknamed ‘Junior’ because another Haslett, a first cousin of his, had been a commanding officer.

‘Well, Colonel Haslett, the Gresham papers are proving a bit – ’

‘The reason I ask is that we may have a contact at the Historical Manuscripts Commission. A friend of m’wife‘s, actually. A Miss… um

… Can’t remember her name, but she is the right person for this kind of job. She’s been highly recommended. On the highest authority. She could help us with them, you know. I mean, take the Gresham papers off your hands, Miss D. Good idea, what? I can see you have lots to do, lots to do.’ He was peering round her office, at the heaps of unprocessed books and mounds of paper. ‘Not to worry.’

‘Well, I suppose it would make sense to -’

‘Good, excellent. She’ll be round quite soon, tomorrow as likely as not. She’s that sort of woman. Damned efficient. Puts us all to shame, what? Cathcart, that’s it. Her name’s Cathcart. Miss – or Mrs Cathcart. Don’t know which. Actually she comes round our place occasionally and we play bridge together. You know her?’

‘I’m afraid not -’

‘You haven’t got very far with the Gresham papers, have you? Been an arduous task, I imagine.’

‘Well, actually -’

‘Never mind, never mind. I can see how much there is to do here. You’d better get on with it. Get cracking.’

He patted her arm bracingly and, despite his stick and gammy leg, marched swiftly out of the room with amazing agility.

I was quite enjoying the job, Antonia finished the sentence to herself. Looking down at the box filled with books that stood beside her desk, she noticed that the one at the top bore the title, The Greatest Secret. It had been placed on top of Greenmantle. Had it been there earlier on? She had the feeling that it hadn’t. Underneath the main title was written, No one who reads this book will ever be the same again.