The Mysterious Affair at Castaway House (20 page)

In such a way my thoughts revolved and repeated one another. It was only as I was climbing up the cliff towards the house that I remembered what the girl had said about Alec and the scandal. I should have asked her for more information, I thought, but it was all too late now. I
climbed the steps to the door of the house, pushed at it and realized that it was shut tight.

I closed my eyes and rested my forehead against the wood. After a while I leaned back and looked up at the front of the building, but I knew immediately that there was no way in without knocking. Why hadn’t Alec asked for it to be left on the latch? Of course, he must have a key. I had never been back later than the servants’ bedtime before.

I sat on the front step and stared at the black night above me. Alec would be home … well, he would be home at some point, surely. Or I could knock, but I shuddered at the thought of Scone opening the door to me in my dishevelled state.

To my left were the area steps, bordered with sharp black spikes. I peered through them; it was ridiculous to think that they would have left the basement door unlocked, but I thought I might as well try.

I climbed back to the ground, went around to the little gate, and took the stone stairs down. I rattled the door handle, but it was of course locked fast. The area was dank and chilly, but perhaps, I thought, I could rest here, at least until Alec came home. However, I was just curling my lip at the thought of it when I heard the shaking of bolts and the door opened.

I was too late to run up the steps, so I stayed to await my fate. A pale face peered out from a crack in the door, and a small voice said, ‘Was you wanting to come in this way, sir?’

It was Agnes. She opened the door further, and I had no choice but to enter the long dark passageway. ‘I was in
the servants’ hall,’ she said, ‘and I sees you coming down the steps, and I thought,
Of course, but you don’t have a key, do you?
’

To my left an open doorway led into the servants’ hall. I caught a glimpse of a long table and a few chairs and lamps. ‘Thank you,’ I said, and then, curiosity getting the better of me, ‘You’re not working now, are you?’

She shook her head. She was wraith-like in the dim light coming from the room. ‘Oh no, sir. I’m too scared to sleep in my room, so I comes down here.’

‘In the servants’ hall?’ I pointed, my hand accidentally pushing the door further open. As it swung back, I saw that two of the chairs had been placed together with a blanket on top. ‘You can’t sleep in here, Agnes.’

‘I can.’ Her lip trembled. ‘And you ain’t going to tell no one on me, sir. Not after I let you in. You can’t. It’s not fair.’

‘Shush,’ I said. ‘I’m not going to tell anyone. But you’re shaking, look at you.’

‘Just a bit cold, that’s all. Nothing I can’t get used to.’

I held a finger. ‘Wait there,’ I said, and was rewarded with a shiver instead of a nod. I headed down the stone-flagged passageway under the length of the building, lit by the dim bulb of an electric lamp in the wall. I had never been down here before; it smelled of damp and must, and the walls had been painted a cheap-looking brown up to the halfway mark, with a green-tinged distemper on the rest.

I resisted the urge to snoop into Mrs Pennyworth’s kitchen, and instead continued past the row of bells set into the top of the wall, spotting my own (‘top back bedroom’),
and climbed the linoleum-lined stairs up to the warmth of the ground floor.

The lacquered cabinet in the dining room revealed a quarter remaining of Alec’s good cognac. I poured a largish amount into one of the tumblers that lined the glass shelf above, thinking it a pretty poor substitute for a warm bed, but it was the only comfort I could conceive of that would not involve a hue and cry the next day.

When I returned, she was no longer in the passageway but had retreated to the servants’ hall, where she had tucked herself into a rocking chair in the corner and was wringing her hands. I hesitated, aware of the questions that would arise were anybody to find out, but feeling that I had behaved so immorally tonight, one more transgression would hardly make a difference. Besides, it was Agnes that was running the risk, although I felt that the girl was so at the end of her tether she no longer cared about propriety.

Inside the room, a small fire was still burning, and I noticed that it was indeed very cold in here, despite the warm summer evening outside. I sat down on a chair opposite her, still keeping my tailcoat folded carefully across me, although Agnes was too distracted to notice anything about my appearance. I put the brandy on the table and pushed it towards her.

She shook her head vehemently. ‘Oh no, sir, I can’t.’

‘Drink it,’ I said. ‘Then I’ll take the glass back upstairs and, should anyone ask, it was mine.’

She paused, and then picked up the tumbler, held it to her lips and took a sip, pulling a face and screwing up her eyes in a manner that under usual circumstances would
have been much cause for amusement. ‘Tastes like fire,’ she muttered, wrinkling her nose at the glass.

I watched her. ‘You can’t continue like this, you know.’

She frowned. ‘I will if you don’t tell no one.’ She took another cautious sip. ‘Sir.’

‘Well, perhaps I can help. How about if you changed your room?’

‘It’s Madam,’ she said sulkily. ‘She’ll send me away if I start causing a fuss.’

‘I’m sure she won’t,’ I said, only recalling, after I spoke, her determination to do exactly that at the dinner tonight. ‘But perhaps I can … I don’t know, speak to her.’

‘Would you, sir?’ For the first time, Agnes’s eyebrows lifted in hope.

‘That’s no guarantee, by the way.’ In fact, I thought, any intervention of mine was perhaps more likely to secure Mrs Bray’s mind in the opposite direction, not least because any interest I showed in the female servants’ sleeping arrangements would implicate me as some sort of depraved beast. ‘But I don’t understand. Why on earth would you be scared of your room?’

She looked down at her hands. ‘It was Sally’s room. When I got promoted they gave it me, and I tried to say I didn’t want it, only they said I had to now I was parlourmaid, that it wouldn’t be proper for one of the others to have a room to herself.’

‘Sally? The girl who disappeared?’

She nodded. ‘That room’s evil, and it brings evil on everyone who sleeps there.’

I remembered her melodramatic talk on the pier the
day after my arrival at Castaway. ‘What do you mean, evil? Sally may just have … I don’t know, had a better offer.’

Agnes moved her lips sulkily. ‘But before that, sir, it was Gina’s. I mean a while before, but still. I know she slept there, because Sally told me.’

I stifled a yawn. ‘And who is Gina?’

Tears welled in her eyes. ‘She was parlourmaid, like me. See, I’m scared, sir. I’m scared that what happened to Gina’ll happen to me, and … well, Sally caught evil too.’

She was making no sense, but then, all of a sudden, a thought struck me as I remembered Dotty’s half-told tale in the tiny back-facing house. I sat upright. ‘Gina … Was she here about nine years ago?’

‘Something like that. I wasn’t here then, of course. But we heard about it, in the town. Most people heard about it. I was a kid then; didn’t think nothing of it. Then I started here and it’s like I can’t get it out of my head.’

‘Tell me,’ I said, urgently now. ‘Tell me what happened.’

She cradled the brandy glass in her lap. ‘Gina was … she was going to have a baby.’

‘I see.’

‘No, sir. I mean, sorry, sir, but you don’t see. She never told anyone. She kept it a secret.’

‘And who …’ I paused, and took a breath. ‘Who was the father?’

Agnes looked at the ground. ‘Nobody knows, sir. They … people will talk, won’t they? But nobody ever found out for sure. She kept it a secret.’

‘A nasty little secret,’ I muttered, a chill rattling my spine,
remembering Dotty’s odd warning last week. ‘What happened?’

Agnes sighed. ‘Well, one day she was down late for work, and they sent the under-housemaid to knock her up and … and …’

‘And?’

‘She’d hanged herself in the wardrobe in my bedroom, sir, and I keep thinking I can see her in the night, swinging from the rail.’ Agnes’s voice quavered. ‘I daren’t sleep in there, sir, and it’s making me almost mad.’

I sank further into my chair. I was dog-weary with tiredness, but despite that a fear was stirring my heart. ‘Oh, God,’ I muttered, and prayed that the suspicion my mind was forming was completely, utterly untrue.

I finished off the corned beef and ketchup sandwich I’d made myself for lunch, and traced a finger down the much-creased bus timetable that was taped to the kitchen wall by the door. I still smelled of old egg and bacon fat, but I had no time to wash. I’d spent long enough dithering about whether to go as it was, and now it was midday already. Not that she’d be back for hours, but I didn’t want to run any risk of bumping into her. That, I already knew, would be disastrous.

There was another half an hour before the next bus to Petwick was due, so I picked up
Northanger Abbey
again and traced over Lizzie’s handwriting. I’d been trying to mention it, casually, to Mrs Hale all morning, but every time I talked about her sister she rapidly changed the subject. In the end I’d given up.

I wouldn’t have been so bothered, had it not been for my conversation with Dockie yesterday in the pub, his beard in his drink and his head in the past. Somehow, he’d bound me into his quest to discover himself, despite my best intentions, despite the present tense being my current concern. I thought over what he’d said to me, and spent a few minutes musing, rocking back on two legs of my chair at the kitchen table, when I remembered with a jolting start that I still had to pay my rent.

‘Bugger.’ I looked at my watch. Before midday, Johnny had said, and I was late, and the girls had already flipped when I’d told them I’d had to ask for an extension. I scrambled to my feet and pulled out the rent tin from its hiding place in one of the cabinets, emptying out notes and coins into my palm. I added the rest from my purse and put the whole lot in my pocket.

I ran up the stairs to the top floor, past more bathrooms on the half-landings, past flats that held the faint strumming of a guitar, the whistle of a kettle boiling, the clacking of a typewriter’s keys. At the final half-landing, where a dangling phone extension was clamped to the wall, a short linoleum-floored passageway led towards a narrow, winding flight of stairs. It was lit by one tiny window and had a closed-in, musty smell.

At the top of the stairs was the white-painted door that led to Johnny and Star’s flat; I knocked hard, hoping he hadn’t gone out. Last Friday I’d waited here for twenty minutes, knocking like a demon, dressed up dolly-bird-style while I waited to go dancing with Star. I’d been convinced she was inside, because I thought I could hear somebody crying from behind the door, even though crying was the last thing anyone would imagine Star doing. However, as I waited now I thought I heard it again, that faint sobbing sound, and realized it must be some quite other sound: pigeons in the eaves, perhaps, or the wicked cackle of seagulls.

Finally, I heard footsteps and then Johnny pulled open the door and looked down at me. He was wearing his working outfit of trousers and a paint-spattered shirt and was wielding a dangerous-looking spanner in one hand. From
behind him I heard the faint whisk of ska music playing on the turntable and, even more faintly, smelled the sweet-edged aroma of pot. He grunted when he saw me.

‘You’re taking the piss,’ he said. ‘I was just about to write you an eviction notice.’

‘I was held up.’ I was unsure if he was being serious. ‘I really appreciate this. Thank you.’

‘You owe me one.’ He jerked his head. ‘Better come in.’

I entered the narrow hallway, the sobbing sound disappearing as I followed Johnny down the corridor, past the intriguing double bedroom on my right, and the fridge, which for some reason sat opposite the bathroom beneath one of the skylights, before I finally emerged into the wider space of the flat.

I’d become used to Star and Johnny’s flat by now, but the haphazard nature of the place managed to take me by surprise every time I saw it. There were different-sized kitchen units along two of the walls, one overhanging an armchair whose stuffing was spilling out from various tears in the fabric. Beside the armchair was a stately looking cooker with encrusted rings, its grill pan thrusting forwards like an Edwardian lady’s bosom. Linoleum had infected the entire area like bindweed, bulging around the two small empty fireplaces, and scored black from where furniture had been dragged across it. In the battle between the living area and the kitchen, the kitchen was winning.

The record came to an end and revolved silently on the turntable. ‘Can I put a new one on?’ I asked, handing the notes to Johnny, who slapped them on to the draining board along with the spanner and picked up the end of a joint from where it was resting in an ashtray.

‘Huh?’ He looked up in the middle of relighting it. ‘If you want. But none of Star’s shit, all right?’

He moved the joint around his lips as he puffed on it, attempting to count the notes. I knelt down by the portable Dansette, which stood on a table beside the door to the spare bedroom, and flipped through the records resting on the floor beneath. I showed Johnny a Prince Buster L. P., to which he nodded his approval. I peeled it from its case and slipped it on to the player.

‘Take it.’

I looked up. Johnny was holding out a badly scrawled receipt for six pounds.

‘Okay. Thanks again.’ I pocketed it and stood up to go. If I was to catch my bus I’d have to leave sharpish.

He squinted at me through his bleary eyes. ‘You might have a word with my girl.’

‘Star?’ I said stupidly, as if there might be any other.

‘She’s been in a right mood all morning. Won’t speak to me.’ He handed the joint to me, but I shook my head. ‘Nah,’ he said. ‘It’s for her. Tell her … tell her I’d give up if I could.’

I took the soggy joint between my first finger and thumb. ‘Where is she?’

He jerked his head towards the window. ‘Outside. Listen, I got to go. Bloody pipe’s leaking on the second floor. Just … y’know, cheer her up and that.’

He shambled off through the flat. Seconds later, I heard the door bang shut. I peered at the window on the other side of the room, where I could just about make out a dim shadow on a chair. I walked across the bumpy lino, under the steeply sloping roof and the bare bulb that dangled
from the ceiling, scrambled on to the table at the far end, and stuck the still-smoking joint through the window.

There was a scrape of metal on concrete. ‘I said I didn’t want any,’ I heard Star snap and then, in a different voice, ‘Oh, it’s you, Rosie.’

She shifted her chair so I could climb through on to the tiny terrace. Star was on one of the two chairs, her legs stretched out, feet folded on to the sculpted holes in the wall in front. I crammed myself against it. ‘Hello.’

‘Hi.’ She squinted up at me and I flushed, remembering yesterday, her finger tracing my jawline as we stood by the basement railings. She turned her attention to the joint end, which I’d left on the floor of the terrace, picked it up and threw it over the wall. I turned to watch its descent, leaning over the wall with the whole of the cliff falling away before me, the sea spread out in a tapestry of blues and greys, the sun sending feeble rays out through the thick cloud overhead.

‘He said he’d give it up if he could.’

‘Eh?’

I twisted my head back towards her. ‘Johnny. He wanted you to have the joint, and said he’d give it up if he could.’

‘What the hell’s he talking about?’ She shook her head impatiently. ‘Has he gone out?’

‘Fixing a leak.’ I looked again at my watch. ‘Um – listen, I’ve got to head off now. Just popped by to pay the rent and say hello, you know.’

‘Oh.’

Her violet eyes flickered, and I saw with a jolt of surprise that she was disappointed; that she wanted me to stay. I thought of the soft crush of her lips on my cheek
and said rapidly, before I had time to think, ‘You can come with me if you like.’

She raised an eyebrow. ‘Where are you going?’

The instant the words were out of my mouth, I regretted them. If she came, there was a chance she’d find out everything, and if she did that, I’d no longer be the nice person of her imagination. ‘Nowhere special,’ I said quickly. ‘Just going back home to pick up some of my clothes, that’s all.’

‘Petwick?’ She uncurled her legs from the wall. ‘Can I really come too?’

‘Um …’ I smiled glassily. ‘Um – of course. But it’s dead boring, honestly. Nothing ever happens there. I mean, I’m just going in and going out again.’

‘Great.’ She hopped to her feet. ‘Do we get the bus?’

‘Gosh, yes. It takes ages,’ I said, futilely, as Star edged past me to climb back into the flat, her hand brushing my arm. I closed my eyes for a second, wondering if I could suddenly change my mind. But this was my only opportunity: today was the only day I knew for sure that Mum would be out. I sighed, and followed Star through the flat, waiting as she disappeared inside her bedroom to collect her things and reassess the state of her make-up in front of the mirror that hung to one side of the door, then button her grey cape around her neck.

We walked to the main part of the house and down the stairs to the ground floor. ‘You really don’t have to come,’ I said, once we were out and walking along the path.

She turned back. ‘I want to see the place that made Rosie Churchill,’ she said. ‘Anyway, I need to get out of the flat before I murder Johnny.’

‘It’s that bad?’ I pointed to the right. ‘The bus stop’s up here.’

‘Worse.’ We walked to the junction, across from which were the bungalows and the cliff-top path where I’d nearly tumbled to my death on Saturday. The bus stop was further up, on the corner of Shanker Road and Duckett Lane, and when we got to the concrete post Star leaned against it and said, ‘Also, I’m dying to meet your mum.’

‘Oh, she won’t be there.’ I felt myself reddening. Already I’d given away far more information than I’d intended. ‘I mean, that’s why I’m going now, to avoid her.’

However, Star merely nodded and then said thoughtfully, ‘You know, I left home when I was fifteen. Went to live with my grandmother. My mother treated me as if I’d put her effigy on a bonfire.’

She gave me a swift glance, almost as if she were afraid of the effect this information would have on me.

I said with a laugh, ‘Because you went to live with your grandmother?’

Star waggled her head. ‘My father’s a vicar.’

I did laugh now. ‘You’re joking.’

She grimaced. ‘Sadly not. And my grandmother … well, she’s very different. She doesn’t get on with my mother. I mean, what I’m saying is, I’m not very welcome at the family home either, at the moment.’

On the other side of the road, the bus approached its final destination at the stop opposite ours, and its three passengers spilled out. I wanted to tell Star that it wasn’t that I was unwelcome, exactly, but I didn’t know how to do that without telling her the truth about Harry. ‘Mum didn’t get on with my grandma either,’ I said. ‘They had
a farm, Grandma and Josh – that was her husband. He always sort of resented Mum, you see, thought she had airs above her station, that she was too good for them.’

‘Her stepfather?’ asked Star, and I nodded, as the bus travelled to the end of the road, turned about and came back up again. ‘Stepfathers can be very awkward, so I’ve heard.’

I glanced at her sharply, but she was already getting on to the empty bus and had her back to me. We paid our fares and bumped on bad suspension all the way along, from Duckett Lane to Petwick Lane, past the closed-down farm and the old stone-built village, turning right at the petrol station into what the old folk called New Petwick, with its Grammar School and its Crescents and Avenues, its parade of shops ribboning the high street.

Nothing had changed during my six weeks’ absence. The Eastway chippie was still next to Dodds & Sons’ butcher’s; the ironmonger’s, with its yellow-and-green sign advertising lawnmowers to hire for fifteen bob, still remained on the corner beside Coster’s sweet shop. I took Star inside to buy a bag of sweets from Mr Coster, and we plucked cola bottles and spaceships from little paper bags to chew on as we walked.

‘I’d heard there was a lake,’ said Star, biting the head off a jelly baby. ‘Can we have a look?’

‘I suppose so.’ I looked at my watch, but it was still early. ‘It’s nothing special.’

She shrugged. ‘There’s a painting of it at the house, in the third-floor bathroom. I don’t even know who did it, but it looks quite nice.’

‘If you say so.’ I took her to the lake via a pathway
which ran along a narrow gap between two houses in one of the roads off the high street. The lake was still signposted, although the white-painted writing that showed you where to go had faded away over the years, so it merely said
TO PE AKE
now. We walked in single file along the overgrown pathway, tramping on nettles poking out of the fencing either side, until we came to a small opening and then, further along, a padlocked metal gate with
KEEP OUT!
in red pinned to it.

‘Sorry.’ I turned back to Star. ‘It’s not usually locked up. I suppose they must think it’s dangerous.’

I stood back to let her peer through the gate at the muddy path leading to the brown waters of the lake. The shopping trolley was still there, rusting gently into the ripples, and broken glass trodden into the path led to whole beer bottles camped around the edge. Just beyond the locked gate fluttered a greying, deflated balloon.