The Mysterious Affair at Castaway House

by Lam, Stephanie

  ‘Garden?’ She looked at me as if I were mad. ‘No, sir, he ain’t in the garden.’

  ‘I didn’t think so.’ I yawned and stretched. ‘I found him there last night, sound asleep in the arbour. Looked so peaceful I thought I’d leave him.’

  ‘All right.’ She looked about, as if unsure what to do now. ‘I’ll – um – go and tell Mr Scone.’

  ‘He’ll be back in a moment, I’m sure,’ I said. ‘You know what he’s like.’

  She fiddled with a hem on her apron. ‘Yes, sir. I’m sure you’re right, sir. It’s only Mr Scone don’t usually worry so.’

  ‘I’m sure everything’s fine,’ I said, although after Agnes had gone a sense of unease asserted itself. I imagined Alec stumbling out of the house, perhaps going towards the town, and then … maybe he had just fallen asleep somewhere and, for whatever reason, had been unable to make his way back home. I thought of Bump, and his suite at the Majestic. It was quite within the realms of possibility that Alec had gone there, and was continuing the party right now, with no thought of the rest of the household.

  I dressed and went downstairs. The dining room was empty, but I found a maid and asked for Mrs Pennyworth to make me up some sandwiches. When Scone arrived with them I said, ‘Any word from Mr Bray?’

  ‘No, sir.’ He paused. ‘We are getting rather concerned.’

  I put an entire egg-and-cress sandwich in my mouth. ‘Why?’

  ‘I saw Mr Bray last night in the hall.’

  I looked up. Scone never usually volunteered any unnecessary speech.

  ‘After everybody else had gone home,’ he continued. ‘Before the thunderstorm broke. He was holding the large red umbrella from the stand and said he was going to look at the sea.’

  ‘Then there’s your answer. Went out to look at the rain and then decided to go on for a drink somewhere. A few of those places will open if you know the correct knock, I believe.’ I grinned. ‘I’m sure my cousin knows them all.’

  ‘Undoubtedly.’ Scone brushed invisible crumbs off the table into his gloved hand. ‘However, he certainly has not been home yet. The door was still unbolted when I came down this morning.’

  ‘Come on, Scone, you know Alec as well as I do. He’s probably still asleep somewhere, dead drunk.’ I took a huge draught of lemonade to ease my parched throat. ‘Where’s Mrs Bray?’

  ‘Mrs Bray is at the police station.’

  ‘What? She’s that worried?’

  Scone did not look at me. ‘She is convinced he met with some sort of accident in the storm.’

  I knew the cause of her anxiety: guilt over her place in my bed last night had sped her on to the police station, exaggerating her wifely concern. ‘She’s mistaken. In fact, I shall go out now and endeavour to bring him home.’

  Scone paused. ‘Please do,’ he said. ‘Sir.’

  The storm had abated, but a fierce wind whipped along the cliff, nearly taking my hat with it. The sky was iron-clad and menacing, and I bent my face to the ground and marched onwards. The beach was empty bar a few brave souls; I saw a man swimming in the sea, and stopped to squint in case it was Alec on some mad adventure, but as soon as he emerged I saw this was an elderly man, with tough, leathery skin, built like a bird of prey.

  The receptionist at the Majestic gave no sign of recognizing me, but said he would call up his lordship immediately. I hovered in the lobby under the giant chandelier, remembering the last time, and my shame as I had run out, and how none of that seemed important any more.

  ‘Carver!’ Bump emerged from the wheezing lift doors and came towards me. ‘I’ve a head like a pumpkin on me today. Still, I expect you’re bright as a farthing. Bet you hardly touched a drop, you weasel.’ He clapped me on the back, sending me stumbling forwards a few paces.

  ‘Actually, I did,’ I said, but he was not listening. ‘Anyway, I was wondering if I could pick my cousin up. I know it’s a bore, but the house is in panic and Clara’s gone to the police station.’

  ‘What’s that?’ he said. ‘Do you want a drink? Or tea? Coffee?’

  ‘No, no drink. I’d just like to take Alec home, to be honest.’

  He frowned. ‘Why would Bray be here? Heard he’s got a perfectly good bed at home, what.’

  My stomach dipped. ‘You mean, he didn’t come to you last night?’

  ‘I bloody hope not,’ he said. ‘I was out for the count. God, you didn’t think it was the same set-up as last time, did you? When one’s fiancée is staying on the floor below, it rather hampers one’s movements somewhat.’

  I had forgotten his fiancée. ‘Then,’ I said, ‘where is he?’

  He scratched his head. ‘You said Clara’s at the police station?’

  I nodded. ‘She’s worried he may have been caught up in the storm last night.’

  ‘I’ll ring the station now,’ he said. ‘See what news they can give me. Come upstairs.’

  I travelled with him in the lift, my unease mounting. The suite was transformed from before; now all was neat and orderly. Bump placed me on the sofa, facing the armchair where I had been humiliated, while he sat at the desk and placed a call to Helmstone police station.

  ‘Hello,’ he drawled. ‘Lord Hugh Mason-Chambers here. Listen, I’m calling about a friend of mine, Mr Alexander Bray. Apparently he went missing last night. Just wondering if you had any news.’

  There was a pause, and then, ‘Hello. Morgan, isn’t it? Yes, I’m fine, just down for the weekend with my fiancée. Oh, thank you. Now, I’m calling about Mr Bray … Yes, that’s right … I see …’

  He scratched notes on the pad in front of him. Despite my hatred of him, I was impressed by his urbanity, his languid ‘Lord Hugh Mason-Chambers here’, and the way his courtesy title unlocked doors.

  He replaced the receiver in its cradle and turned to me. ‘It’s not good news,’ he said, and my stomach dropped further. ‘A dog walker this morning found a discarded shoe on a ledge of the cliff. And on the rocks by the water, what appeared to be the shreds of a red umbrella.’

  I found my hands were shaking. I pushed them into the sofa. ‘Perhaps it’s not his.’

  ‘Perhaps.’ Bump sighed. ‘Although it seems as if the shoe is. I suppose Clara’s identified it.’

  ‘He may have stumbled.’ I clutched at straws. ‘He could be unconscious a few yards further along.’

  ‘They’re doing a search of the area now. Lifeboat’s already gone out, apparently. Although the Inspector says if the accident happened last night it … well, it may be too late.’

  ‘Oh, Lord.’ And then I thought of Alec’s misery yesterday, his talk of losing Castaway, his complaint of a worthless life. ‘I hope he hasn’t done anything stupid.’

  ‘What are you saying?’ snapped Bump. ‘Because that’s rather a strong implication, and I’m not sure I like it.’

  ‘I don’t like it either,’ I snapped back. ‘But we may have to face facts.’

  Bump got to his feet and walked to the window. ‘Bray wouldn’t kill himself,’ he said. ‘And if you knew him at all you’d understand that.’

  ‘I didn’t say he had.’ The word kill buzzed about my brain like an angry wasp.

  ‘Then what are you saying?’ He turned towards me.

  ‘I’m just trying to understand what happened.’ I stood too. ‘I should go back to the house. See if I’m needed.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said dismissively. ‘Go.’

  I took the lift down to the ground floor. As I walked back to Castaway, the wind battering my senses from my body, a great dread bubbled within me. I knew Alec was not a depressive sort, and yet I could not deny that he had been in the blackest of moods yesterday, the sort of mood when an impulse could strike him and he might act on it. I thought of our argument, and I prayed that nothing had happened to him bar a minor accident. I trudged up the cliff as if walking towards my doom.

  Scone met me in the hallway.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I was convinced I knew where he would be. I was wrong.’
/>
  ‘That’s quite all right, sir,’ he said. His tone was almost kind. ‘There’s a policeman in the dining room interviewing everybody. I said you would be back shortly.’

  I looked at the dining-room door, which now, unlike every other occasion, was firmly closed. ‘Do you really think …?’ I began, looking about, expecting Alec to walk into the hall with tales of another mad escapade ringing from his lips. ‘It seems like a joke.’

  ‘I can assure you, sir, it is not a joke.’ Scone turned away. ‘If you wait in the library, I shall call you when you are needed.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, of course.’ I curled a hand over the snail end of the banister. It was beautiful, I thought. It had never occurred to me before just how beautiful it was. ‘Is Mrs Bray here?’

  ‘She arrived back about half an hour ago.’

  I looked up the stairs and he added, ‘She has given instructions not to be disturbed. I’m sure you understand.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said automatically, knowing that she had not meant to include me in that instruction but unwilling to test the theory just yet. I sat in the library with a dry mouth and listless hands. I held a book on my lap but was unable to concentrate on more than a line. I waited anxiously for my interview with the policeman, wanting it over with and wishing it would not come at all.

  I heard men talking in the hallway, voices I did not recognize. Nobody came to get me. Sickly yellow afternoon light filtered through the windowpanes. It seemed disrespectful, somehow, to switch on the electric lamp. The rain began pattering again. Summer was over. Alec was … He was … but I would not think of it.

  I was finally called into the dining room a couple of hours later. ‘Sorry to keep you waiting, sir,’ said the policeman at the table, who’d introduced himself as Dawes. ‘Thought we’d do the servants first. Hope you don’t mind.’

  ‘Not at all,’ I said faintly, sitting opposite him.

  He asked me a few basic questions – my name, my age, what my purpose was in the house – and then pushed an item resting on a white handkerchief over to me. ‘Can I ask if you recognize this, sir?’

  I stood up to view it and saw a wristwatch face, smashed to pieces and reassembled as much as possible. I felt queasy. ‘Is it Alec’s?’

  ‘It appears to be. So you don’t recognize it?’

  I sighed. ‘Couldn’t say, I’m afraid.’ I sat down again, light-headed. My chest was tighter now than it had been for days, weeks. I coughed. ‘Was it on the cliff ?’

  ‘On the rocks by the water’s edge. I take it you know about the umbrella?’ When I nodded, he added, ‘We found bloodstains on the spokes, protected from the rain.’

  I thought I might be sick. ‘Surely …’ I began. ‘Is there a chance …?’

  ‘I’m sorry. The boat’s been out all day, and they’ve found nothing.’ He shot me a look. He was only a few years older than me – the same age as Alec, perhaps. ‘We should prepare ourselves for the worst.’

  Oh, God, I found myself thinking, please let it have been an accident. He slipped and fell; it was a terrible night. I could not bear the thought that he might have done this to himself, alone.

  ‘I’m sorry to have to ask you this, Mr Carver, but how has Mr Bray seemed to you recently? Has he been in good spirits or … or not?’

  ‘He was …’ I looked at the table. ‘He had some financial problems … I mean, that’s not a secret … and … and he’s been drinking quite a lot recently. But really, I can’t believe he would … it must have been an accident, mustn’t it?’

  ‘That’s what we’re attempting to find out, sir.’ He consulted his notes. ‘Now, Mr Scone says he came across Mr Bray in the hall last night at quarter past one. Did you see him after that time?’

  I shook my head. ‘The last time I saw him, he was asleep in the garden. There’s a sort of sheltered part out there. He was on one of the benches.’

  ‘And that would have been at …?’

  I thought. ‘Perhaps nine o’clock?’

  He scribbled a note. I wanted to curl up in a ball and hug my misery inwards. Instead, I had to answer more questions, about yesterday’s party, about what time I had gone to bed, about whom I’d seen and whom I’d talked to.

  ‘Thank you, sir. Just one last thing.’ He frowned at his page. ‘Now, you say the last time you saw him was at about nine o’clock. However, we have two witnesses who say they saw you walking up the cliff outside the house at half past one last night, with Mr Bray.’

  I blinked. ‘I’m sorry?’

  He glanced up at me. He looked awkward and embarrassed. ‘You deny being there?’

  I coughed, my brain whirling. ‘Of course I deny it. I went to bed at about eleven o’clock, as I told you. They must … they must be mistaken.’

  ‘And your relationship with Mr Bray? It’s a – er – that is, do you get on well?’

  ‘Absolutely. We’re cousins and friends. At least, I’d like to think so.’ As I spoke, I realized that we were talking about him in the present tense, and wondered, with a sick feeling, whether it ought to be changed to the past. ‘Look, I don’t know why anybody would say they’d seen me talking to him, but it wasn’t me.’

  ‘I see.’ He folded his notebook closed. ‘I have to tell you, sir, that it is possible your cousin was not alone on the cliff edge last night; if, indeed, that is where he was.’

  Words stuck in my throat. ‘Wh-wh-what do you mean?’

  ‘There are very faint indications that there were two people on the cliff.’ He paused. ‘A lot of the grass there has been churned up. That could be due to any number of reasons, but one of them is that there may have been some sort of a struggle.’

  ‘Are – are you saying …?’ But my mind did not want to grasp what he was saying.

  ‘It’s early days yet.’ He got to his feet and smiled at me. ‘But we’ll find out what happened to your cousin, don’t you worry.’

  There was rather a menacing tone, I now realized, to his voice as he edged round the table to open the door. ‘It wasn’t me!’ I said.

  ‘Of course, sir,’ he said blandly, smiling with reptilian eyes, and stepped out into the hallway. As the front door closed on him, I took a breath and found there was none to be had.

  I gripped the edge of the table. A vice was closed about my chest. Air. I needed air. I heard the familiar rasping sound of my throat attempting to capture oxygen. I got to my feet and knocked over the chair.

  Then Scone was in the room. ‘It’s all right, sir,’ he said. ‘Sit down.’

  I heard him righting the chair, and then he planted me upon it. He put a hand on my back and commanded, ‘Breathe here. One … two … three …’

  Slowly, the panic subsided. My fingers relaxed their grip on the table. Breath entered my body. My lungs shuddered with their exhaustion. ‘I’m sorry,’ I croaked.

  ‘I wouldn’t speak if I were you.’ He disappeared momentarily; I heard him unstopping the carafe of water that sat on the sideboard. ‘Drink this.’

  He put a glass in front of me. I sipped at it, returning to myself inch by inch. ‘Thank you,’ I whispered. ‘If you hadn’t come in …’

  ‘I heard you in the hallway. It’s that whistling sound. I know it well.’

  ‘Whistling?’

  ‘I was gassed in the war.’ He put a hand over his right lung. ‘It got in here. The other lads, they used to laugh at me, for the sound my chest made when it got bad. Like an out-of-tune whistle, they said. Used to spook them at night, apparently.’

  ‘I never realized you had … similar trouble,’ I said.

  ‘Feels as if an elephant’s sitting on your chest?’ He nodded. In Alec’s absence he seemed to have assumed some sort of second-in-command role, almost father-like. ‘It’s because of the worry over Mr Bray. I’ll tell Agnes to bring you some tea in the library.’

  I allowed Scone to manoeuvre me upstairs and sit me back in the same chair.

  When Agnes came with the tea she said, ‘How are you, sir? Mr Scone says
you was took bad.’

  ‘Two witnesses …’ I began faintly, but was unable to continue. ‘Maybe he’s out there, unconscious. Lost his memory.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ She put the tea tray on the rosewood coffee table beside the fireplace. ‘Maybe writing it all down will help.’

  I looked up at her. ‘I’m sorry?’

  She shrugged. ‘Helps me when I’m feeling out of sorts. A diary or an account or something.’

  ‘Oh.’ I nodded. ‘I see. Thank you.’

  When she had gone I sat at the writing desk by the windows that looked over the back garden, dim in the afternoon gloom. I held the pen above the ink pot, but was unable to order the jumble of emotions into a coherent sequence of events. I stared at the blank paper, and then in a fit of anger took up the letter opener and gouged the paper into jagged squares, scoring into the blotter beneath.

  ‘What witnesses?’ I crunched the pieces into my fist. ‘What damn witnesses?’

  My words sprang me somehow into action. I had to do something. I had to talk to somebody. I got to my feet, leaving the letter opener and the screws of paper on the desk, and walked to the open door. Immediately to my right, at an angle, was the drawing room, its own door shut tight. I raised my fist and knocked on the wood.

  I heard nothing for a long time, but instinct told me she was inside. Eventually the handle gave a creak and the door opened a notch.

  ‘Clara.’

  Her face was slivered by the gap in the door.

  ‘Let me in. I need to talk to you.’

  ‘No.’

  But my foot was in the doorway, and I was stronger. Finally, she relaxed her hold and I entered the drawing room.

  I had barely been inside this room since coming to Castaway; it had always been Clara’s domain, a feast of gold and blue, with her vibrant paintings hanging from the rails and a huge, listing gilt mirror over the fireplace. My aunt Viviane’s heirlooms were scattered about: statuesque women holding lamps, a studded chest with Chinese letters inscribed on its borders. I felt too masculine here; too much of an unwanted intruder.

  Clara was still wearing the make-up she must have put on this morning, but her eye pencil had blotched about her face, and the bobbed set of her hair was frizzing in wild strands. She stood in the middle of the room, clutching that locket about her neck, and said, ‘What do you want?’