The marks in the ferry office
An original fiction passage set in the nineteenth century.
The ferry office had one entrance, a door opening onto the landing. Mara, the clerk, had returned after closing to fetch her ledger. The door was shut, but its bolt had been drawn back. She bent to follow a trail of damp sand from the threshold to the counter. Then she examined the locked ticket drawer: fresh scratches marked the keyhole, and several tickets lay scattered beneath it. Mara listened at the door before she went to fetch the ferryman.
Suggest two different conclusions Mara can draw from the evidence she examines.
456 exam-style questions on Edexcel GCSE English Language 1.3 Content: prose fiction study requirements, covering 1.3.1 Read challenging prose fiction for the unseen 19th-century extract. Each one has a worked solution and a mark scheme showing where the marks go.