The Death of Mrs. Westaway Read online

  The piece of paper she pulled out wasn’t an invitation. It was a letter, written on heavy, expensive paper, with the name of a solicitor’s firm at the top. For a minute Hal’s stomach seemed to fall away, as a landscape of terrifying possibilities opened up before her. Was someone suing her for something she’d said in a reading? Or—oh God—the tenancy on the flat. Mr. Khan, the landlord, was in his seventies and had sold all of the other flats in the house, one by one. He had held on to Hal’s mainly out of pity for her and affection for her mother, she was fairly sure, but that stay of execution could not last forever. One day he would need the money for a care home, or his diabetes would get the better of him and his children would have to sell. It didn’t matter that the walls were peeling with damp, and the electrics shorted if you ran a hair dryer at the same time as the toaster. It was home—the only home she’d ever known. And if he kicked her out, the chances of finding another place at this rate were not just slim, they were nil.

  Or was it . . . but no. There was no way he would have gone to a solicitor.

  Her fingers were trembling as she unfolded the page, but when her eyes flicked to the contact details beneath the signature, she realized, with a surge of relief, that it wasn’t a Brighton firm. The address was in Penzance, in Cornwall.

  Nothing to do with the flat—thank God. And vanishingly unlikely to be a disgruntled client, so far from home. In fact, she didn’t know anyone in Penzance at all.

  Swallowing another chip, she spread the letter out on the coffee table, pushed her glasses up her nose, and began to read.

  Dear Miss Westaway,

  I am writing at the instruction of my client, your grandmother, Hester Mary Westaway of Trepassen House, St Piran.

  Mrs Westaway passed away on 22nd November, at her home. I appreciate that this news may well come as a shock to you; please accept my sincere condolences on your loss.

  As Mrs Westaway’s solicitor and executor, it is my duty to contact beneficiaries under her will. Because of the substantial size of the estate, probate will need to be applied for and the estate assessed for inheritance tax liabilities, and the process of disbursement cannot begin until this has taken place. However if, in the meantime, you could provide me with copies of two documents confirming your identity and address (a list of acceptable forms of ID is attached), that will enable me to begin the necessary paperwork.

  In accordance with the wishes of your late grandmother, I am also instructed to inform beneficiaries of the details of her funeral. This is being held at 4 p.m. on 1st December at St Piran’s Church, St Piran. As local accommodation is very limited, family members are invited to stay at Trepassen House, where a wake will also be held.

  Please write to your late grandmother’s housekeeper Mrs Ada Warren if you would like to avail yourself of the offer of accommodation, and she will ensure a room is opened up for you.

  Please accept once again my condolences, and the assurance of my very best attentions in this matter.

  Yours truly,

  Robert Treswick

  Treswick, Nantes and Dean

  Penzance

  A chip fell from Hal’s fingers onto her lap, but she did not stir. She only sat, reading and rereading the short letter, and then turning to the accepted-forms-of-identification document, as if that would elucidate matters.

  Substantial estate . . . beneficiaries of the will . . . Hal’s stomach rumbled, and she picked up the chip and ate it almost absently, trying to make sense of the words in front of her.

  Because it didn’t make sense. Not one bit. Hal’s grandparents had been dead for more than twenty years.

  CHAPTER 2

  * * *

  Hal wasn’t sure how long she sat there, puzzling over the letter, her eyes flicking between the folded white sheet and the search page of her phone. But when she looked up, the clock on the microwave said five to midnight, and she stretched, realizing with a pang of anxiety that the gas fire had been burning the whole time. She stood and turned it off, listening to the cooling click of the elements, mentally adding on another fifty pence to the gas bill already lying there, and as she did, her gaze fell on the photograph on the mantelpiece.

  It had been there almost as long as Hal could remember—ten years at least—but now she picked it up, looking at it afresh. It showed a girl, maybe nine or ten years of age, and a woman, standing on Brighton beach. They were laughing, with their eyes screwed up against a gusting wind that blew their long dark hair into identical comic upsweeps. The woman had her arm around the girl, and there was a look of such freedom, such trust between them that Hal felt her heart clench with a pain that she had almost grown used to over the last three years, but which never seemed to fade.

  The girl was Hal—and yet she wasn’t. She wasn’t the girl who stood in front of the fire now, her hair cropped short as a boy’s, her ears pierced, the tattoos on her back just peeping out from the neck of her threadbare T-shirt.

  The girl in the photograph had no need to mark her skin with remembrances because everything she wanted to remember was right beside her. She didn’t dress in black, because she had nothing to mourn. She didn’t keep her head down and her collar up when she walked home, because she had nothing to hide from. She was warm, and well-fed, and most of all she was loved.

  The fish and chips had grown cold, and Hal bundled them up in the paper and pushed them into the bin in the corner of the room. Her mouth was dry with salt, and her throat ached with grief, and the thought of a hot mug of tea before bed was suddenly comforting. She would make the tea, and fill a hot-water bottle with the rest of the kettle, something to take the chill off the sheets, help her to sleep.

  As the kettle began to hum, Hal rummaged in the cupboard above it for the box of tea bags. But almost as if it were what she had really been looking for, her hand found something else. Not the lightweight cardboard box, but a glass bottle, half-full. She didn’t need to get it out to know what it was, but she took it down anyway, weighing it in her hand, feeling the liquid slosh greasily inside. Vodka.

  She only rarely drank these days—she didn’t really like the person she became with a glass in her hand—but then her eye caught on the two notes lying across the coffee table, and with a quick movement she twisted off the cap and poured a generous measure into the cup she had been intending for the tea.

  The kettle bubbled as she lifted the cup to her lips, smelling the acrid, slightly petrolly smell, watching the meniscus tremble in the dim light coming in from the streetlamp. For a moment the imagined taste was sharp in her mouth—the fiery burn, followed by that little addictive buzz. But then something inside her stomach seemed to turn, and she poured it down the sink, swilled out the cup, and made the tea instead.

  As she carried it through to the bedroom, she realized with a kind of weariness that she had forgotten the hot-water bottle. But it didn’t matter. She was too tired to care, and the tea was hot and good. Hal curled up in bed, fully clothed, sipping the tea and staring at the bright screen of her phone.

  On the screen was Google images, and it showed a hand-tinted postcard, from perhaps 1930, featuring a country house. It had a long frontage of cream-colored stone with Georgian-style windows, covered in ivy. Chimneys poked up from a slate-tiled roof, a dozen or more, all in different styles. To the rear was more of the house, which seemed to be redbrick and built in a different style. A lawn spread out in front of the building, falling away, and a scrawled inscription across the picture read, We had a very good tea at Trepassen House before driving on to Penzance.

  That was Trepassen House. That was Trepassen House. Not a modest little bungalow, or a Victorian terrace with a pretentious name. But a bona fide country seat.

  A share, however small, of a place like that could do more than pay off her bills. It could give her back the security she had lost when her mother died. Even a few hundred pounds would give her more breathing room than she could remember for months.

  The clock at the top of the screen showed ha
lf past midnight, and Hal knew she should sleep, but she did not close down her phone.

  Instead she sat there in bed, with the steam from the tea misting her glasses, searching, scrolling, and feeling a strange mix of emotions spreading through her, warming her more than the tea.

  Excitement? Yes.

  Trepidation too, a good deal of it.

  But most of all something she hadn’t dared to feel in many years. Hope.

  CHAPTER 3

  * * *

  Hal woke late the next morning. The sun was already up, slanting through the bedroom curtains, and she lay still, feeling the mingled excitement and dread in the pit of her stomach, and trying to remember the source.

  Recollection came like a twin punch to the gut.

  The dread was the pile of bills on the coffee table—and, worse than bills, those two typed notes, hand-delivered. . . .

  But the excitement . . .

  She had spent all last night trying to talk herself out of it. Just because it was where Hester Westaway had lived, there was no guarantee that she had actually owned that huge rambling place on the postcard. People just didn’t have houses that size these days. The fact that she’d died there didn’t mean she owned it. In all likelihood, it was a retirement home now.

  But the housekeeper, whispered a voice in the back of her head. And that line about opening up a room for you. They wouldn’t say that about a retirement home, would they?

  “It doesn’t matter,” Hal said aloud, startling herself with the sound of her own voice in the silent flat.

  She stood, smoothing down her rumpled clothes, and picked up her glasses. Settling them on her nose, she gave herself a stern look in the mirror.

  It didn’t matter whether Hester Westaway owned a room, or a wing, or a cottage in the grounds, or the whole damn place. There had clearly been some sort of mistake. She was not Hal’s grandmother. The money belonged to someone else, and that was all there was to it.

  Tomorrow she would write back and tell Mr. Treswick that.

  But today . . . Hal looked at her watch, and shook her head. Today she had barely time for a shower. It was 11:20 and she was very nearly late for work.

  • • •

  SHE WAS IN THE SHOWER, the hot water drumming on her skull, driving out all other thoughts, when the voice whispered again, beneath the roar of the water.

  But what if it’s true? They wrote to you, didn’t they? They have your name and address.

  It wasn’t true, though, that was the long and the short of it. Hal’s only grandparents had died years ago, long before she was born. And her grandmother hadn’t been called Hester, she had been called . . . Marion?

  Maybe Marion was a middle name. People do that, right? They use one name for everyday, and have a different one on their papers. What if—

  Shut up, Hal said inwardly. Just shut up. You know it’s not true. You’re persuading yourself because you want it to be true.

  Still, the voice niggled away in the back of her head, and at last, more in an effort to convince herself than anything else, Hal turned off the shower, wrapped a towel around her shoulders, and made her way back into the bedroom. Beneath the bed was a heavy wooden box, and she dragged it out, wincing at the screech of castors on the wooden floor, and hoping that the downstairs neighbors weren’t treating themselves to a lie-in.

  Inside was a rat’s nest of important papers—insurance documents, the rental contract on the flat, bills, her passport. . . . Hal sifted through the layers, feeling like an archaeologist of her own history. Past the insurance schedule, past the bill for the time a pipe had burst in the attic, and then down to a stratum that was nothing but pain—her mother’s death certificate, the copy of her will, the police report, her faded driver’s license, never used again. Beneath them all was a veil, folded into a neat square—fine black gauze, edged with droplets of jet.

  There was a lump in Hal’s throat as she put it aside, hurrying past the bitter memories to the older stuff underneath—papers her mother had chosen to keep, more neatly filed than Hal’s haphazard shoving. There was an envelope with her own exam certificates, a program for a school play she had been in, a photograph of herself looking sheepish with a long-gone boyfriend.

  And then at last a plastic folder marked Important—birth certs in her mother’s neat hand, and inside, two red-and-cream certificates, handwritten, and topped with the extravagantly ornate crown emblem. Certified copy of an entry, read the top of the page. First Hal’s: Harriet Margarida Westaway, born 15th May 1995. Mother: Margarida Westaway, occupation: student.

  The space for “father” was left blank, a line drawn firmly through the box, as though to stop anyone from adding their own theories.

  And then, beneath it, another certificate, older and more creased—Margarida Westaway. Her mother. Hal’s eyes skipped to the “parents” column—Father: William Howard Rainer Westaway, occupation: accountant and beneath that Mother: Marion Elizabeth Westaway, maiden name: Brown. No occupation was given for her grandmother.

  Well, that was that then.

  She didn’t realize how much she had been hoping against hope until the sense of deflation set in, tentative thoughts of debt repayment and security collapsing like a pricked balloon.

  Substantial estate . . . whispered the voice in her ear, seductively. Beneficiaries of the will . . . family members . . .

  There’s always your father, whispered the voice again, as she dressed. You have another grandmother, you know. Hal shook her head bitterly at that. If your subconscious could betray you, Hal’s just had.

  For years she had fantasized about her father, spinning increasingly elaborate tales to the girls at school to cover her own ignorance and her anger at her mother for telling her so little. He was a pilot who had gone down in a crash in the sea. He was an undercover policeman who had been forced to return to his real life by his superiors. He was a celebrity, whose name couldn’t be revealed, or they would be hounded by the tabloids, and her father’s life would be ruined.

  At last, when the rumors had reached the ears of the teachers, someone had had a quiet word and Hal’s mother had taken her aside and gently told her the truth.

  Hal’s father had been a one-night stand—a student her mother had met in a nightclub in Brighton and had slept with for the first and last time on the night they met. He had a Spanish accent, and that was all Hal’s mother knew.

  “You didn’t even find out his name?” Hal had asked incredulously, and her mother had bitten her lip and shaken her head. Her cheeks were scarlet, and she looked more uncomfortable than Hal could ever remember.

  She was very sorry, she said. She hadn’t wanted Hal to find out this way, but Hal had to stop spinning these . . . Her mother had stopped there, too kind to say the word she had been thinking; but even at seven, Hal was good at reading people, and perceptive enough to understand what it was her mother hadn’t said.

  These lies.

  The truth was, her father was no one special. Who he was, where he lived now, she had no idea, and would probably never know. He had likely gone back to Spain or Mexico or wherever he had come from in the first place. But one thing she did know for sure—he was most certainly not a Westaway.

  Wherever the mistake had come from, it wasn’t there. But a mistake it was. Somewhere, wires had been crossed. Maybe there was some other Harriet Westaway in another city, rightfully entitled to this money. Or maybe it was like one of those heir-hunter programs, where someone had died without legitimate heirs, and the money would go to waste if the executors didn’t track down some relative, however distant, to scoop the pot.

  Whatever the truth was, the money wasn’t hers, and she couldn’t claim it. And the voice inside her head had no answer to that.

  Hurrying now, Hal shoved the papers back underneath the bed and dressed. Her hairbrush seemed to have gone missing, but she combed her hair as well as she could with her fingers, and checked herself in the mirror by the front door. Her face looked even paler and
more pinched than usual, the forlorn wet spikes of black hair making her look like an extra from Oliver Twist. Makeup would have helped, but it wasn’t really Hal’s style.

  But as she pulled on her coat, still damp from the night before, the voice piped up with one last remark. You could claim this money, you know. Not many people could, but if anyone can pull this off, it’s you.

  Shut up, Hal said inwardly, gritting her teeth. Shut. Up.

  But she didn’t say it because she didn’t believe it.

  She said it because it was true.

  1st December, 1994

  Today is the first day of Advent and the air should have been full of new beginnings and the countdown to a momentous event, but instead I woke up heavy with a kind of nameless dread.

  I have not read the cards for over a week. I haven’t felt the need, but today, as I sat at the desk at the window, the eiderdown around my shoulders, I felt my fingers itch, and I thought that perhaps it would comfort me to shuffle them. But it was only when I had spent some time sorting and shuffling and dealing different spreads, none feeling right, that I realised what I needed to do.

  There were no candles in my room, so I took one from the big brass candlesticks on the mantelpiece in the dining room, and a box of matches from the fireplace. I slipped the matches into my pocket, but the candle was too long to fit, so I slid it inside the sleeve of my cardigan in case someone met me on the stairs, and asked what I was doing.

  Up in my room I set everything out on the table—cards, candle, matches, and an empty teacup. I melted the candle a little at the wrong end and stuck it into the cup to make a firm base, and then I lit it, and I passed the tarot cards through the flame three times.

  When I had finished, I blew out the flame and then simply sat, looking out of the window at the snowy lawn, weighing the cards in my hand. They felt . . . different. Lighter. As if all the doubts and bad feelings had burned away. And I knew what to do.