The Mysterious Affair at Castaway House Read Online Free Page A

differences in our backgrounds; we lived in a modest red-brick villa with a woman who came in to ‘do’, and Uncle Edward and Aunt Viviane owned a porticoed, pillared wonder of a place in Lancaster Gate, with a mighty network of black-clad servants traversing the back stairs to answer every ring of the bell, in addition to what they termed their ‘beach house’ in Helmstone.
    We had seen them rarely; once a year Mother andI made a visit to London for a quick tour of sneering relatives. Alec usually blazed in and out, on the rare occasions he was home from school. He was often being expelled for misbehaviour, and I, who at that time was still playing at conkers with the kids from the neighbourhood, thought the very idea of being expelled from school unaccountably glamorous.
    One day, when I was ten, Alec, apparently on a whim, decided to take me out for the day, leaving Mother in the company of my frail, cut-glass-voiced Aunt Viviane and the rattle of china cups. I had yet to be parcelled off to Crosspoint on the largesse of my grandfather, and still spoke with the local accent, much to Aunt Viviane’s distress. I marvelled at the way Alec tossed out instructions to the chauffeur as he loaded me into the motor car.
    ‘Natural History Museum, if you please, Fenner,’ he said, sliding in beside me, and I looked out of the windows in wonder as we whizzed through the streets. I had never been in a motor car before, and drank in every second of the experience. Alec ushered me in through the giant doors of the museum and past dinosaur skeletons, but the biggest prize of the day was being in the company of my cousin.
    We returned to the diplodocus on Alec’s request, and stood for a while looking up at it. He’d seemed a little distracted the entire day, although as I barely knew him I could not be sure that this was not just his way.
    ‘I expect I’ll be dead soon, anyhow,’ he said. This seemed to be the conclusion of several minutes’ internal questing, but I felt rather alarmed.
    ‘Are you poorly?’ I said. I knew that Aunt Viviane washighly strung – nerves, Mother called it – but Alec had always seemed in the prime of health.
    ‘If the war continues,’ he said, by way of explanation. ‘They’re talking about conscription. Perhaps it’ll all be for the best, dashed to smithereens in front of a German machine gun.’
    ‘They won’t make you go,’ I said. ‘Will they? Not until you leave school.’ The war, to me, was an adult’s preoccupation. I knew of classmates’ elder brothers who’d gone off to France. Sometimes those same classmates had been absent from school, and the teacher had told us in a solemn voice that we had to pray for the fallen but never to mention the matter to Huggins, or Wilberforce, when they came back to school next week. To me, the war was happening somewhere else.
    Alec shrugged. ‘Who knows?’ he said. ‘I’m sure everybody would be happy if I disappeared.’
    ‘I wouldn’t,’ I said stoutly, and he smiled and ruffled my hair.
    ‘Thank you, Robert. When people have already decided you’re a bad lot, you may as well continue in the same line, do you see?’
    I did not see, not at all, but I nodded anyway and tried, unsuccessfully, to emulate Alec’s shrug. ‘Mother wishes I’d never been born,’ he said darkly. ‘She’s found some new child to take my place, so I’ve heard.’
    This sounded so unlikely, even to my immature ears, that I said squeakily, ‘That can’t be true.’
    He smiled down at me coldly. ‘She’s always rather wanted someone who’d appreciate all her … her …’ He waved a hand in the air to articulate the words he wasunable to find. ‘Anyway, I’m a disappointment, so I may as well go to war.’
    ‘Please don’t go.’ My hand crept out of its pocket and felt his sleeve.
    He smiled at me again, more warmly this time. ‘All right, Carver, if you really don’t want me to, I won’t.’
    As it turned out, Alec turned eighteen