Antonia had seen the Falconers exchange cynical looks. Dufrette stood some distance away, very still, and stared at the body in the river, his face deadly pale.
It was Antonia who said, ‘That’s not Sonya. It’s her doll. It’s only her doll.’
Lena raised her head. ‘But she couldn’t be parted from her doll! Don’t you see what happened? They both fell into the river! My kotik has drowned! She has been carried away by the current!’
Her face was dark and suffused, a mask of fury. She shook her forefinger at Antonia. ‘It was you! You showed her the way to the river! It is your fault! I saw you take my kotik down to the river. You killed her!’
At that point Lady Mortlock had gone back to the house and phoned the police.
When she went to bed that night, Antonia lay for quite a while unable to sleep, going over in her mind what she had read. Though there had been no witnesses, it was assumed that Sonya had left the house, wandered out into the garden and down to the river bank where she had slipped and tumbled into the river. The body had never been recovered but that wasn’t such an uncommon occurrence. The verdict had been one of tragic accident. It had been an open and shut case. The Dufrettes had been reprimanded for not providing their daughter with adequate care.
Reading her account had had a therapeutic effect on Antonia. It felt like a curtain lifting. She saw how preposterous it had been for her to feel guilty over Sonya’s death. Lena had been looking for scapegoats. First she had turned on Antonia, then on the Mortlocks. Lena had suggested that it had been their fault too – why hadn’t they put up any river-bank defences? Why wasn’t there protective netting? Lena had gone so far as to suggest she might take the Mortlocks to court.
Thinking about what she had written, Antonia suddenly experienced an odd feeling of dissatisfaction, a sense of there being something wrong, but by now she had started to feel sleepy.
It was interesting that it had all happened at a time when everybody had been inside – glued to the box. The whole of England, or so it had been reported in the papers. Fewer robberies had been committed that day, if statistics were anything to go by. Fewer crimes generally. It was assumed that criminals too had been watching the royal wedding. Conversely, Antonia thought, how easy it would have been to commit a crime on a day like that.
Had there been a crime at Twiston? The ring – watch out for that signet ring. That was Miss Pettigrew whispering in her ear. Antonia saw Major Nagle, taking a cigarette from his Asprey’s silver case. He said nothing but gave her a wink. A moment later a second voice spoke – it sounded like Lawrence Dufrette’s. ‘It seems to me, Mrs Rushton, that you lack the creative balance of imagination and reason. Ergo, you can never be a truly successful writer.’
Antonia knew she was dreaming now and yet she was filled with misgivings. Questions formed themselves in her mind, but they were the wrong kind of questions.
Would she ever be able to complete her novel? Would she ever be able to write again? Could she write at all?
8
Le Gout du Policier
As she arrived at the club the following morning, the reason for her dissatisfaction dawned on her. Her account of what had happened at Twiston was lively and vivid and it contained some good descriptions and entertaining dialogue. It was not her ability to write that was in question. No. There was a different reason for her dissatisfaction. Although she couldn’t put her finger on it, she knew that something was wrong – either with the way she had described one or more of the characters in the drama, or with her reporting of what they said. Some illogicality… Some discrepancy?
She was sure she wasn’t imagining it… What was it?
Not many people visited the library that morning and she received only one phone call. A good thing, for she was in such an abstracted state of mind that some club member was bound to notice and complain. She performed her chores mechanically, automaton-like, in a kind of daze. At one point she found herself lifting a pile of books from one of the donation boxes and placing them on her desk, then staring down at them in utter incomprehension. She had absolutely no idea what she should do with the books. Yes, she did. Stamp them, write down their titles, put them on the right shelves. She reached out for the library stamp. (In what way was the signet ring important?)
Eventually she heard the clock chime eleven. She took the folder out of her bag. The Drowning of Sonya Dufrette, she had written at the top. Well, she knew she wouldn’t rest until she found out what was wrong.
Martin brought her a tray with a pot of coffee, a cup and a plate of Lazzaroni biscuits. Pouring herself coffee, she started skimming through the pages once more. Was there any significance in the fact that Sonya and her doll had been dressed in identical dresses? She couldn’t see how there could be.
Sonya’s body had never been recovered. Sonya had vanished without a trace. That was one fact that was certain. Twenty years had passed but the body hadn’t turned up. If it had, she would have heard about it, she was sure. It would have been in the papers – or on TV – or someone would have mentioned it to her. People didn’t just vanish. They were either dead or assumed new identities or… or… No, there was nothing else. That was it. What would be the point of giving Sonya a new identity? But then, if she was dead, where was her body? Swallowed by some monstrous fish? Could the body have been weighed down and eased into the river? That would mean murder and there wasn’t a scrap of evidence pointing that way. On the other hand, the body might not be in the river at all. Sonya might have been killed somewhere else and the body buried.
The other night Antonia had thought in terms of violence. She had dreamt of blood. Now, why had she? She believed there was a reason for it. Something must have suggested violence to her. Something she had seen without realizing its importance at the time – something she had heard? She didn’t think the idea had come to her just like that… Once more she saw Sonya’s face, as it had been when Dufrette had played with her in the garden – shrieking with laughter, her blue eyes very bright… No, not blue – brown. Her eyes had been brown. Antonia frowned. Was that of any importance? How extremely annoying she didn’t even know what she was looking for!
‘Who lent thee, child, this meditative guise?’
She looked up and her frown disappeared. She smiled at the wiry man with the twinkling blue eyes and greying blond hair. ‘Good morning, Major Payne… Is that Matthew Arnold?’
‘Indeed it is.’
It was Tuesday of course. He always came down to London on Tuesdays. She noted with approval his bottle-green jacket, his clean shirt and highly polished dark cap-toe shoes. Did anyone ‘do’ for him, now that his wife was dead? Well, army men were perfectly capable of doing for themselves.
‘Proofreading, I see.’ He pointed to the sheets on the desk.
‘No, no such luck. Raking up the past. This is something I wrote twenty years ago.’
‘Something you might turn into a novel?’
‘No, not really. Though there’s a puzzle there all right.’
She found Major Payne – the ‘intellectual Major’, as her son had dubbed him – gazing at her with such a blend of affection and solemnity that for an absurd moment she had the notion he might propose to her. It came to her as a relief – mingled, ludicrously, with disappointment – when he said, ‘I too have a puzzle for you. Shall we swap? I’ll tell you mine, you then tell me yours. Is it a deal?’