Free The Mysterious Affair at Castaway House by Stephanie Lam

letters until finally, finally, they became utterly clear:

    I straightened my neck, which clicked horribly. The words were a child’s game, perhaps, or a silly joke. All the same, I wondered who Robert Carver might be, and who had etched the mysterious message.
    Robert Carver. The name jumped into clarity.
R. C.!
Of course. I got to my feet, banged my head on the windowsill on the way up and staggered upright, clutching my scalp. It could be a coincidence, of course. They were fairly common initials – mine, for example – and this Robert Carver, innocent or not, might have nothing to do with the hesitant sketch made by the R. C. that I kept between the pages of an unread book.
    All the same, I had a feeling. I looked again at the inked-in scribble. It certainly could be forty years old, although I supposed there was no way of knowing forsure. I got up and paced the kitchen excitedly, almost ashamed at being so eager over something that had happened such an achingly long time ago. So Robert Carver had arrived here, I theorized, and at some point someone had thought it necessary to tell – well, not the world, but certainly the underside of the window – that he was innocent.
    But of what? That was the question. There were so many things a person could be innocent or guilty of – my crime, for one thing, although nobody would be scratching my name into wood in my defence.
    I pulled out a chair and sat down, thinking about home and everything I’d left behind, the Sunday joint Mum would be cooking in the oven now, Frank Sinatra playing on
Two-Way Family Favourites
, me perhaps upstairs, chewing on the end of a pencil, frowning over how to conjugate a string of French verbs.
    Rosie Churchill is innocent.
    Not any more, I thought to myself. Not any more. All the same, Star thought I was a nice person, and Dockie thought I was good; and perhaps if they did, then I could believe it. And just in case we weren’t all blown up by a nuclear bomb, maybe my future really would be space age and gleaming with concrete. I pulled my feet on to the chair, hugged my knees to my chest and imagined the disintegration of my past, wasting away like metal turned to rust by the relentless tide of the rain.

4
1924
    I woke to a soft knock, mumbled an answer and then drifted back into the warm smell of fresh toast and the morning light on my face. I had the sense of velvet curtains being drawn back, I heard the slide and clip of them; and as my eyes shifted open I saw a shadow leave the room and close the door behind itself.
    Beside me was a tray with buttered toast and a steaming pot of tea. All right, I thought, pulling myself to a seated position, this was all very ostentatious and unnecessary, but it certainly bested having to stumble downstairs for your first cup of the day. I sat up in bed, feeling rather like a roosting crow, in my nest at the top of the house. Perhaps in a moment I would wake up and be back in my tiny bedroom at home, with the noise of the milkman’s dray passing in the yard below and Elsie, my mother’s help, shouting across the wall to the neighbours.
    After a while I hauled myself out of bed, and washed and shaved in the bathroom below. Alec had said I might encounter his wife at breakfast. ‘I’m skipping the whole thing at the moment: the sight of her gives me indigestion,’ he’d said last night. She had been absent for dinner as, apparently, was usual at the moment, and it had been a relief to get drunk with Alec and consume Mrs Pennyworth’s excellent saddle of lamb without constraint.
    In the hall, the dining-room door stood ajar. I braced myself, took a breath and entered.
    It was a large-windowed, high-ceilinged room, with portraits of pastoral scenes hanging from the picture rails. The stench of the cigar Alec had smoked last night was gone, and in the brisk light from the sea the place appeared crisp and clean. There was a starched white cloth on the table, and at one end of it, reading a newspaper