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straw, operating in a blizzard of displacement activity! I don’t see how Michael puts up with it.’ At the start of his career in the Intelligence Service, he had been considered brilliant but eventually caused consternation with his erratic and unpredictable behaviour. He also developed an obsessive interest in conspiracy theories.
    The Babylonian brotherhood, Antonia suddenly remembered. What was the Babylonian brotherhood?
    Sheikh Umair had described Dufrette as ‘a clever but extremely dangerous man. Talks about flogging and hanging and bloody foreigners and niggers — equally to shock and to get a reaction, I think. He has a strong exhibitionist streak. He carries a gun. He said he needed to protect himself against his enemies. He pointed the gun at my head and made a popping sound. It is exceedingly difficult to know when he jokes and when he is serious, but then that is a very English kind of thing, isn’t it?’
    Enemies ... Antonia looked up with a frown. One enemy at least ... The incident at breakfast. (She had given an account of it somewhere later on.) Dufrette quarrelled with one of the other guests. Some military type. Stocky and pouchy-eyed, small trimmed moustache, great heavy hands, amazingly well-tended fingernails the colour of oysters ... Dufrette had said something that had infuriated him ... Major Nagle? Yes. ‘Tommy’ Nagle. Major Nagle had made a lot of fuss over a signet ring he had lost. He had been in a real state about it, she remembered.
    In 1954 Dufrette had married the Hon. Pamela Wigham, the ‘deb of the season’. (Antonia had since seen pictures of the two newly-weds, looking solemnly distinguished, almost regal, in an old number of Country Life.) However, the marriage had been dissolved only two years later. There had been no children. 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’. The new bride’s name was Lena Sugarev-Drushinski. Antonia’s subsequent research had proved that Lena’s title was genuine, albeit acquired as a result of a four-month marriage to a certain Count Poliakoff. As a matter of fact Lena had the dubious distinction of being descended from the mad Yusupovs on her mother’s side. Prince Yusupov had been heir to one of the most fabulous fortunes in pre-revolutionary Russia and, of course, he had cut out his niche in history as the man who shot Rasputin an inordinate number of times in the winter of 1916.
    As a young woman, Lena (born in 1938) had been a voluptuous blonde, vivacious and fun-loving - as the pictures Antonia had seen in Tatler testified - and, though greatly impoverished at the time of her marriage, she had managed to make Dufrette very happy for a couple of years. However, by 1981 the marriage gave every impression of bursting at the seams. The Dufrettes detested one another and never bothered to conceal the fact.
    When Antonia finally met her, Lena was forty-three, but she looked older, the years of excess having taken their toll. She was plump, puffy-eyed and over-painted. She clearly strove to be uncompromisingly exotic. Her eyebrows had been plucked in the style of the 1930s — thin arches high above the natural line of the brow. The effect should have been one of perpetual comic surprise but Lena’s kohl-ringed blue eyes gave her a slightly sinister appearance. She was dressed in a kaftan, sported a cornucopia of costume jewellery and had an emerald-green scarf tied round her henna-dyed hair. She was smoking through an ivory cigarette holder and drinking vermouth.
    When a grim-faced and rather pale Lady Mortlock had completed the introductions, Lena stood peering at Antonia. She said, ‘It is my life you should be writing up. I am unlike anyone you have ever met. You wouldn’t believe some of the things that have happened to me. My first marriage was a disaster. A German aunt of mine predicted this with chilling accuracy, though I