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

had passed but the body hadn’t turned up. If it had, she would have heard about it, she was sure. It would have been in the papers - or on TV - or someone would have mentioned it to her. People didn’t just vanish. They were either dead or assumed new identities or ... or ... No, there was nothing else. That was it. What would be the point of giving Sonya a new identity? But then, if she was dead, where was her body? Swallowed by some monstrous fish? Could the body have been weighed down and eased into the river? That would mean murder and there wasn’t a scrap of evidence pointing that way. On the other hand, the body might not be in the river at all. Sonya might have been killed somewhere else and the body buried.
    The other night Antonia had thought in terms of violence. She had dreamt of blood. Now, why had she? She believed there was a reason for it. Something must have suggested violence to her. Something she had seen without realizing its importance at the time - something she had heard? She didn’t think the idea had come to her just like that . . . Once more she saw Sonya’s face, as it had been when Dufrette had played with her in the garden - shrieking with laughter, her blue eyes very bright . . . No, not blue - brown. Her eyes had been brown. Antonia frowned. Was that of any importance? How extremely annoying she didn’t even know what she was looking for!
    ‘Who lent thee, child, this meditative guise?’
    She looked up and her frown disappeared. She smiled at the wiry man with the twinkling blue eyes and greying blond hair. ‘Good morning, Major Payne . . . Is that Matthew Arnold?’
    ‘Indeed it is.’
    It was Tuesday of course. He always came down to London on Tuesdays. She noted with approval his bottle-green jacket, his clean shirt and highly polished dark cap-toe shoes. Did anyone ‘do’ for him, now that his wife was dead? Well, army men were perfectly capable of doing for themselves.
    ‘Proofreading, I see.’ He pointed to the sheets on the desk.
    ‘No, no such luck. Raking up the past. This is something I wrote twenty years ago.’
    ‘Something you might turn into a novel?’
    ‘No, not really. Though there’s a puzzle there all right.’
    She found Major Payne - the ‘intellectual Major’, as her son had dubbed him - gazing at her with such a blend of affection and solemnity that for an absurd moment she had the notion he might propose to her. It came to her as a relief - mingled, ludicrously, with disappointment - when he said, ‘I too have a puzzle for you. Shall we swap? I’ll tell you mine, you then tell me yours. Is it a deal?’
    ‘It’s a deal.’ She felt foolish, but what else could she have said? He could be so disarming.
    ‘Here goes. A man dies on 23rd January, yet is buried on 22nd January. How is that possible?’
    ‘Well . . .’ Antonia scowled. ‘If the man died in Fiji and the body was flown to Western Samoa for burial, the flight would cross the International Date Line from west to east, wouldn’t it, so the date would go back one day?’
    ‘Makes perfect sense,’ Major Payne said magnanimously. ‘This is a trick question, actually, so the simple answer is that he died at sea on the 23rd but his mortal remains weren’t recovered until a year later - next January, in fact. That’s when he was buried, on the 22nd. I told it to my aunt and she loved it.’
    Antonia sighed. ‘I always go for the complicated.’
    ‘Well, your novel manages to combine both, a complicated plot and a trick that is wonderfully simple. It was such fun to read. Few people write stories like yours nowadays.’
    ‘Thank you for saying so, but I am sure you are wrong. Lots of people write better than me.’
    ‘I am not wrong. I am fed up with pretentious bores. Baronesses with missions who shall remain nameless.’
    Antonia didn’t think it right to ask him to elaborate. How he managed to read so much she had no idea. She had imagined that all his energies would be channelled