The Hunt for Sonya Dufrette by R.T. Raichev Read Free Book Online Page A

Dilly,
Some to cut corn,
While you and I, Dilly, Dilly,
Keep ourselves warm.’
    Sonya clapped her hands. She looked delighted.
    Lawrence Dufrette was wearing a white shantung suit and a Panama hat, which he allowed Sonya to take off his head and throw down to the ground. This was repeated several times. She laughed. Her brown eyes were bright. He laughed too. I was amazed since I hadn’t thought Lawrence Dufrette capable of laughing like that. His whole face changed. He looked happy and relaxed. More importantly, it was clear to meat that moment that he loved his daughter. I said as much.
    ‘Oh yes, he loves her all right,’ Veronica said in a toneless voice. ‘Lawrence is nothing like Lena in that respect.’
    Three men wearing overalls were walking towards the ancient oak tree. Veronica asked what they were doing, did I know? I did - Sir Michael had told me. ‘The tree is something of a historical monument. It was planted by James I. They are going to provide it with a cement base in an effort to preserve it. It is entirely hollow inside. It’s starting to disintegrate.’
    ‘It looks horrid. If it were up to me, I’d have it removed. Wasn’t there a poem about a hollow? Do you know the one? It always gives me the creeps when I remember it.’
    ‘Would that be Tennyson’s Maud?’
    She looked blank. “‘I hate the dreadful hollow behind the little wood ...” How did it go on?’
    I completed it for her:
‘Its lips in the field above are dabbled with blood and heath,
The red ribb’d ledges drip with a silent horror of blood
And Echo there, whatever is ask’d her, answers “Death”.’

6
    The Royal Wedding
    The cuff links had been left on her dressing table, in a charming presentation box with an onyx lid. She had found them later that day. She gave them to David on his twenty-first birthday, though she hadn’t seen him wear them very often . . .
    How many people had there been altogether? Antonia was standing in her kitchen now, heating some excellent Marks and Spencer’s asparagus soup in a pan. Ten? Twelve? Excluding Sir Michael and Lady Mortlock, that was. She counted on her fingers. The Dufrettes, the Vorodins, Major Nagle, somebody called Bill Kavanagh, whose bald head and thick black-rimmed glasses brought to mind a bank manager, um, Sheikh Umair, several FO types and their wives. A couple called Falconer and another called Lynch-Marquis. She remembered Mrs L-M. as a large woman with a Roedean voice, wearing a long white silk robe with black stripes from the shoulders down both sides of the skirt.
    The argument. For some reason she kept thinking about the argument. It had taken place at breakfast on the morning of the 29th. Lawrence Dufrette and Major Nagle had been no strangers to one another. For a while they had worked together in the same department. Neither man could stand the other, it had soon become apparent to everyone. (Sir Michael should never have asked the two of them together. What could he have been thinking of?) The reason for the animosity? ‘Some sort of rivalry, the usual office in-fighting,’ Lady Mortlock had said dismissively. ‘That, and Lawrence’s tendency to poke his nose into other people’s affairs.’
    Nagle, it transpired, had asked to be transferred to another department because of Dufrette. It had been as bad as that. The argument had started as a result of Dufrette making some disparaging remark about the royal family and Nagle countering it. Dufrette didn’t like to be contradicted and he had said something very personal and extremely inflammatory - something about Nagle’s wife?
    After finishing her soup and feeding the cats, Antonia went back to the sitting room. Should she spend some time on her novel? Standing beside her desk, she looked down at the bottom drawer, which was now closed. She hadn’t made any progress with her novel. She did need to work out the details of the rather complicated plot; it was at a stage when everything appeared