‘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.
16
‘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.