Reaching out for the letter, he put it into his pocket. ‘My little girl. I want my little girl,’ he whispered. ‘Lena must know… A little talk, yes… No preliminaries, no deviation from the subject. Just a few straightforward questions. There’ll be no cajoling and no entreaties. If I don’t get the answers I expect -’ He broke off. ‘Look what I have here.’
He put his hand inside his jacket, paused dramatically, then produced a gun. He gave a smile, his wolfish smile.
It was a small gun, no more than five inches long, but showy, trimmed in silver and mother of pearl. Antonia supposed it had come from an antique duelling set. It seemed in excellent condition. What was it – a Derringer? (She had done research on firearms for a possible novel not such a long time ago.)
Major Payne too was looking at the gun with interest. ‘Is it loaded?’
‘Of course it is loaded.’ Lawrence Dufrette went on smiling. ‘What would be the point of carrying an empty gun?’
He put the gun back into his pocket, paid the bill and started walking towards the exit. He had a preoccupied air about him. He seemed to have forgotten all about them.
They followed him at a distance. Antonia wondered whether they should inform the police. There might be trouble. Unprepossessing as Lena was, Antonia felt it was wrong to allow Lawrence Dufrette to shoot her, which she believed he’d do if Lena refused to cooperate.
‘Lena couldn’t have recovered yet, could she?’ Antonia whispered.
‘Highly unlikely. Not even if somebody has managed to force ten Prairie Oysters and an industrial dose of Alka-Seltzer down her throat. No. She’s probably comatose. I would be, if I’d pumped so much brandy into my veins.’
‘She might be sleeping it off.’
But it was much worse than that. As they walked across to the Elsnor, they heard the siren again and saw an ambulance leave. It had been parked outside the hotel. Several moments later they made enquiries at the reception desk and were told that Madame Lena had been taken away. Madame Lena had been found unconscious, lying behind the bar in a pool of her own vomit. She wasn’t going to recover soon, no. Her condition had actually been described as ‘life-threatening’. There was the likelihood that Madame Lena might not last the night.
19
The End of the Affair?
That same evening they sat at Porter’s in Covent Garden, having a late supper. Antonia had allowed herself to be persuaded. She had felt too tired to argue or put up any opposition. Besides, she felt she owed it to Hugh. He had been a good sport. He had indulged her. He had encouraged her. Their ‘investigation’ was at an end. It was all over. She had got him involved in a wild-goose chase, a quest for a murder that never happened, but he didn’t seem to mind one little bit. He was a good sport.
‘Cheer up, Antonia,’ Major Payne said. After she gave a listless smile, he set her another puzzle. ‘A man stands beside a darkened window. He is desperately keen to open it, yet he knows that, if he did, it would kill him. Why?’
‘Um – the man suffers from a rare disease – a virtual allergy to sunlight? I believe it’s called xeroderma pigmentosum. I know it’s not that, Hugh. You might as well tell me.’
‘Well, the simple answer is that the man is claustrophobic. He is in a submarine. If he opens the window, water will rush in and he’ll drown.’
‘Why is the window darkened?’
‘That’s been put in to throw you off the scent… More wine?’ He picked up the bottle. It was an exceptionally good wine.
‘Yes please.’ She held up her glass. It was going to be her third.
He gave himself a refill too, then said, ‘Tabula rasa, eh? No murder.’ He raised his glass. ‘Let’s drink to it.’
‘Let’s.’
They drank, then Antonia began, ‘Why do I always go for the complicated? I do it every time. That’s why perhaps I can’t succeed as a crime writer. I always feel I need to go for complexity – for an abundance of red herrings – for intricate clues – for far-fetched motives – for ingenuity-gone-mad. I suppose I do it out of fear that my denouement, when it comes, would turn out to be too trite. I get myself into a state about the timing of the denouement as well. Is it too soon – too late? Oh, it’s agony. I hate myself for it. I lack confidence, that’s what it is.’
She paused and took another sip of wine. She was becoming garrulous. She was getting mixed up. Why had she started talking about her writing problems? Well, the wine was at last taking effect. Good. High time. That was better than feeling depressed and anticlimactic and empty and futile… How idiotically self-indulgent of her to be disappointed that there had been no murder, to feel ‘flat’ about the absence of a dramatic denouement, to mourn over the lack of a final twist in the tale. This is not a tale, she reminded herself.
‘Your confidence will go up with every novel you put under your belt,’ Major Payne was saying. ‘I refuse to believe your new novel is going badly.’
‘As a matter of fact it’s going nowhere.’ Antonia took another sip of wine. ‘I haven’t yet taken it out of the bottom drawer.’
‘Well, that’s because you’ve been busy, running about interviewing autocratic Lady Mortlock, exotic Lena, mad bad Lawrence Dufrette -’
‘Do they exist? Sometimes I wonder… You do make them sound like characters in a book.’ She frowned. ‘Were we really at a place called the Elsnor today?’
‘We were. Twice.’
‘True. Yes… I did imagine all sorts of deranged and awful things. I even thought Sonya might have been the victim of some sacrificial ritual performed by the Babylonian brotherhood! Do they perform sacrificial rituals?’
‘As a matter of fact they do. Young children and virgins, if Dufrette is to be believed, are in particular demand.’
Antonia shook her head. ‘All along – all along – the rather obvious solution has been staring me in the face. Neat, bloodless, convincing, not particularly original. Adoption. Pure and simple. All right, not pure and not simple, not this one, but nothing like the gothic horrors I imagined. Why didn’t I think that Sonya might have been taken, not for some hideous reason, but because she had been loved and wanted and cherished? I had at my disposal all the clues pointing in the right direction… Besides, the Vorodins weren’t there when it happened!’
‘Ah yes. That should have alerted you at once. That’s always highly suspicious, isn’t it? The perfect alibi. “Alibi”, after all, means “elsewhere”.’
‘Doing evil that good may come. That’s in the Bible, I think. That’s what Veronica must have believed she was doing… I rather liked Veronica. I thought she was genuinely caring, sweet and sensitive. Not at all spoilt by wealth. I am convinced she has been a good mother to Sonya. Better than Lena would ever have been. I hope Dufrette never finds them. He is a dangerous man. He called the Vorodins thieves. He said they stole his daughter.’
‘Which, at any rate, is not strictly true. The Vorodins didn’t steal Sonya. They paid vast sums for her,’ Payne pointed out. ‘By their own lights, they did the decent thing.’
‘Where do you think they are?’
‘In South America, somewhere, surrounded by servants and bodyguards and high-tech surveillance systems and the best resident doctors and nurses money can buy. You shouldn’t be depressed, really. This is a happy ending of sorts. There was no murder. That’s good news. Let’s drink to it.’
They drank to it. ‘What’s the matter now?’ Payne asked as Antonia sighed.
‘I’ve been leading you on a wild-goose chase -’
‘What absolute rot.’
‘Kind of you to say so, but I have wasted your time.’ Antonia vaguely wondered whether she wasn’t spouting all these negative statements so that he could contradict them and reassure her. If she had to be honest with herself, she rather enjoyed being reassured by him.