Free The Hunt for Sonya Dufrette by R.T. Raichev Page B

it, so that the contents could clearly be seen and assessed, and anything of importance noted. Then they could decide what to do with it. Except now it was Mrs Cathcart who was going to decide.
    It was fair, Antonia supposed, to give the Gresham papers out for assessment. It wasn’t strictly a library matter. The boxes had been found in the club smoking room, of all places, when the building was renovated a couple of years back, and so the librarian had been asked to take care of them. A proper archivist could do a better job in all probability. It was just that it had been very interesting, to read the sort of letters people wrote then, in that more leisured age, in their beautiful copperplate handwriting, and using elaborately correct grammar and punctuation.
    Antonia picked up the letters from the side table and began to place them carefully inside one of the boxes. She looked towards Major Payne and saw him produce a pen and draw a vertical line on the page he had been reading. Had he found something? She couldn’t tell from his inscrutable expression though she thought he gave a very slight nod over his coffee cup, denoting satisfaction. (Major Nagle - she couldn’t get Major Nagle out of her mind now, for some reason - that still, menacing figure at the window.) Discovering she still held one of the letters, she took it out of its envelope and glanced down at it absently.
    My dear Gresham, the letter began. What followed was some not particularly amusing anecdote, told in meticulous detail, about a social evening the writer had spent with some acquaintances known also to the letter’s recipient. There was the mention of somebody called Holling- bourne and of a Mrs Duppa, who told fortunes ‘rather inaccurately’. Vague scandals were referred to. At one point the writer enquired after the health of Lady Gresham, who, it appeared, had been indisposed for quite a while, and expressed optimism about the invalid’s progress. There were bits that were unintentionally funny, Antonia reflected, in a Diary of a Nobody kind of way.
    As she replaced the letter inside its envelope and back in the box, her mind registered the word ‘Nepal’. It had been written in pencil across another envelope in big block capitals. NEPAL. It didn’t seem likely that the letters contained correspondence from Nepal, though perhaps someone had travelled there and written to Gresham about it. I’ll just have a quick look, Antonia thought. It might contain some interesting traveller’s story, and she could tell her last enquirer about it, the old boy who had reminded her of Lawrence Dufrette, if he put in another appearance, that was.
    She opened the envelope.
    My dear Gresham, the letter began as before. This time the writing was in pencil, and seemed less assured somehow. I have something to tell you, which I believe to be of great importance, but I hardly know where to commence ...
    No, no more mysteries. I have enough on my plate already, she thought decisively and, resisting her curiosity, put the letter back into the envelope and replaced it in the box.
    ‘Well, I believe I’ve got it,’ she heard Major Payne say. She turned round. He had left the armchair and was walking towards her. ‘You are absolutely right,’ he went on. ‘There’s something, or rather two things that are wrong.’
    Antonia felt her pulse quicken. ‘What things?’
    He leant across the desk towards her, his hand lightly touching hers. She smelled his aftershave, a blend of citrus, cedar wood and tobacco, but the latter could be coming from his pipe. Funny that she had objected strongly to her former husband smoking cigarettes, but she didn’t mind a pipe one bit.
    ‘When you first hear of Lena Dufrette, it is from Lady Mortlock. This is what you say.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Then in 1960 Dufrette married for the second time, an exiled Russian countess or, as Lady Mortlock had put it, “a woman who claimed to be one”. This rather suggests,