‘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.’
‘She’s not likely to recognize me, is she?’ Antonia sounded anxious.
‘Fear not. I am sure you haven’t changed one little bit,’ he said gallantly. ‘It’s only that she looks pickled. Observe the catatonic stare. Leave it to me. I’ll start, you follow my cues. We’ll concoct our plot as we go along.’
As they approached the curve of the bar, Lena looked up and regarded them out of puffy eyes. ‘Hello,’ she said amiably. ‘Such a hot day, isn’t it? There used to be a fan, but someone stole it.’ She no longer spoke with a Russian accent but slurred some of her words a bit. She smacked her lips. ‘Disgraceful. What would you two love birds like?’
She was wearing a faded maroon-coloured velvet gown that seemed to have seen better days and heavy costume jewellery. Her ear lobes were weighed down by enormous pendant earrings made of sparkling Swarowski crystals set in bronze frames. Her face was the shape of a full moon and plastered with pancake make-up. ‘A gin and tonic for my wife and a scotch for me, please,’ Payne ordered. ‘Neat.’
On the counter in front of her, there lay a half-eaten bar of chocolate, a lipstick, a powder compact, four large tablets with a purplish coating and a sheet of pale mauve paper – it looked like a letter, Antonia thought.
‘We don’t get many married couples here,’ Lena observed. ‘Only foreigners bring their wives.’
‘We lit on the Elsnor by a trick of fate. Charming place,’ Major Payne said. ‘Have you got Famous Grouse?’
‘Are you a soldier?’ Lena asked. She popped one of the purple pills into her mouth, washed it down with vermouth, then busied herself with bottles and glasses. She was painfully slow and clumsy. ‘You certainly have that air. My papa served with the Imperial Cossacks for a while. He was aide-de-camp to the Tsar’s brother. You are a soldier, aren’t you?’
‘Spot on, dear lady. Major Payne at your service.’ Antonia had never heard him put on this voice before. He made himself sound ridiculously Blimpish.
‘Can you read that letter?’ Antonia whispered when Lena turned round to get a bottle of tonic. ‘I think it’s a letter. It’s upside down.’
Payne rose to the challenge at once. ‘I’ll try.’ She saw him tilting his head to one side and squinting.
‘All the ice’s melted, I can’t understand why,’ Lena said. ‘There’s plenty of lemon. Have you been abroad?’ She was peering into Antonia’s face now. ‘You have a lovely tan. You look a simpatico sort of person. You’ve been abroad, haven’t you?’ Antonia’s heart missed a beat, but Lena showed no flicker of recognition.
‘Spot on again,’ Payne said. ‘Kenya, actually. Got off the plane three hours ago. We’d been visiting friends. Name of Sandys,’ he added casually and he gave Antonia a wink. Sandys, she had told him, were the couple who had bought Twiston from the Mortlocks and then sold it to Mrs Ralston-Scott before leaving for Kenya. She thought she could guess the kind of game he had started playing. He had managed to establish a connection with Twiston without arousing Lena’s suspicions. What next? she wondered, fascinated.
‘Kenya, eh? Lovely place.’ Lena nodded approvingly. ‘Or so I’ve been told. Safaris and moonlit picnics and sundowners till sunrise? Lovely place to be. No matter how much you drink, you never get drunk. It’s the air that does it, apparently. So fresh and pure. My papa got to know the White Valley. He became a tremendously popular figure at the Muthaiga Club. He got on famously with the crowd. He was in Kenya in 1940-something.’
‘That’s jolly interesting,’ Major Payne said in a hearty manner. ‘He must have been there when Lord Erroll was murdered?’
‘Yes, I believe so. Here you are, your drinkies… Prosit.’ She picked up her own glass. ‘You don’t mind if I continue?’
‘No, of course not, dear lady. Perhaps you will allow me to order you a refill when you finish?’
‘That’s all right,’ Lena said. ‘I can have as much as I want.’ She waved her hand at the range of bottles behind her. ‘I can have anything I like whenever I like. Bliss.’ She picked up her glass. ‘Your good health.’
‘Nazdarovye,’ Payne responded in part. Antonia shook her head at him frantically – they weren’t supposed to know she was Russian!
‘What I’d really like now is an Egyptian cigarette that has been dipped lightly in cognac, but I am not allowed.’ Lena sighed. ‘Doctor’s orders. The merest puff will kill me, apparently. I shall never launch merrily down the path of sin again. Doomed from here to eternity… Oh well, c’est la vie. How did you know I was Russian?‘
‘Oh – you said your papa was aide-de-camp to the Tsar’s brother. You meant the Tsar of Russia, correct?’ Payne said coolly. ‘I don’t know many other tsars. And you mentioned Cossacks.’
‘Quite the little detective, aren’t you?’ Lena laughed in a flirtatious manner.
There was a pause as they occupied themselves with their drinks. It was Antonia who broke the silence. ‘Do you know, they still talk about the Erroll murder. They keep arguing about it. I mean in Kenya. Everybody seems to be an expert on the subject.’ She laughed. ‘I adore unsolved mysteries, don’t you?’ She delivered this effusively, in her best memsahib voice, and received a nod of approval from Payne.