The Death of Mrs. Westaway Read online

  Spreading the major arcana facedown on the desk, I picked three cards and then placed them in front of me in a spread. Past. Present. Future. The questions crowded in my mind, but I tried to clear my head—to focus on just one thing, not a question, but the answer unfurling inside my body.

  Then I turned the cards.

  The first card, the one that represented the past, was the Lovers upright—which made me smile. It’s often a mistake in tarot to take the most obvious reading of a card, but somehow here it felt right. In my deck, the card shows a naked man and woman entwined, surrounded by flowers, his hand on her breast, and a glowing light from above bathing them both. It’s a card I love—both to look at, and to draw—but the words that come with it aren’t always positive: lust, temptation, vulnerability. Here, though, cleansed by fire, I saw only the simplest meaning—a man and a woman in love.

  The next card I turned over was the Fool—but upside down. It was not what I was expecting. New beginnings, new life, change—all that, yes. But reversed? Naïveté. Folly. Lack of forethought. I felt the smile fade on my lips and I pushed the card away, and hurried on to the third and most important—the future.

  It was another card reversed, and I felt my stomach drop away a little, for the first time almost wishing that I had not begun this reading, or at least not done it now, today. I know my deck too well to need to turn the picture upright, but even so I studied it with fresh eyes, seeing the picture as if anew, from upside down. Justice. The woman on her throne was grave-faced, as if conscious of her responsibilities, and the impossibility of finding truth in a world like ours. In her left hand she held the scales, and in the other a sword, ready to mete out punishment or mercy.

  I spent a long time looking at the woman on her throne, trying to understand what she was telling me, and still, as I’m writing this, I don’t know. I hoped that writing in my diary would clarify what the cards were trying to say, but instead all I feel is confusion. Dishonesty? Can that really be true? Or am I reading it wrong? As I sit here I am sifting back through all the other, deeper, subtler meanings, the willingness to be deceived, the traps of black-and-white thinking, the mistaken assumptions—and none of them reassure.

  I have been thinking all day about that last card—about the future. And still I do not understand. I wish there were someone I could talk to, discuss it with. But I already know what Maud thinks of tarot. “Load of wafty BS,” was what she said when I offered to do her reading. And when she succumbed, finally, it was with a snort and a cynical look. I could see her thoughts running across her face as I turned over the cards she had chosen and asked her what question she was seeking answers to.

  “If you’re so bloody psychic, shouldn’t you be telling me?” she said, flicking the card with her fingertip, and I shook my head, trying to hide my annoyance, and told her that tarot isn’t a party trick, the kind of mentalism that cheap magicians practise on Saturday night TV—telling people their middle names or the inscription on their pocket watch. It’s something bigger, deeper, more real than that.

  I cleansed the deck after that reading, upset not just because she touched the cards, but because she touched them with contempt in her soul. But now, thinking back to that day, I realise something. When Maud turned over the future card, I told her something else, something that I should have reminded myself today, and something that gives me comfort. And it’s this: the cards do not predict the future. All they can do is show us how a given situation may turn out, based on the energies we bring to the reading. Another day, another mood, a different set of energies, and the same question could have a completely different answer.

  We have free will. The answer the cards give can turn us in our path. All I have to do is understand what they are saying.

  CHAPTER 4

  * * *

  It was almost midday as Hal hurried along the seafront, clutching her jacket against the biting wind. It cut like a knife, chapping at her face and fingers and nipping at the skin of her knees, where her jeans had ripped through.

  As she pressed the button for the pedestrian crossing she felt that flutter again, in the pit of her stomach. Excitement. Trepidation. Hope. . . .

  No. Not hope. There was no point in hoping. The papers in her mother’s box had put an end to that. There was no way this could possibly be true. For her to claim that money would be . . . well, there was no point in trying to evade the reality of what she was considering. It would be fraud. Plain and simple. A criminal offense.

  If anyone can pull this off, it’s you.

  The thought flitted treacherously through the back of her mind as she crossed to the opposite pavement, and she shook her head, trying to ignore it. But it was hard. Because if anyone had the skills to turn up at a strange house and claim a woman she’d never met as her grandmother, it was Hal.

  Hal was a cold reader, one of the best. From her little booth on Brighton’s West Pier, she told fortunes, read tarot cards, and made psychic predictions. It was the tarot she was best at, though, and people came from as far away as Hastings and London to get her readings, many of them coming back again and again—returning home to tell their friends about the secrets Hal had divined, the unknowable facts she had produced, the predictions she had made.

  She tried not to think of them as fools—but they were. Not the tourists so much, the hen parties who came in for a giggle and just wanted to ask questions about the size of the groom’s dick, and the prospects of him coming up to scratch for the wedding night. They shrieked and oohed when Hal trotted out her well-worn phrases—the Fool for a new beginning, the Empress for femininity and fertility, the Devil for sexuality, the Lovers for passion and commitment. Occasionally she palmed the cards she needed for a satisfying message, pushing them forwards to the querent to avoid an off-putting spread, full of minor cards, or trumps like Death or the Hierophant. But at the end of the day, it didn’t really matter what they turned up—Hal made the images fit with what the women wanted to hear, with just enough of a frown and a shake of her head to make them gasp impressively, and a reassuring pat to the hen’s hand when she reached her final conclusion (always that there would be love and happiness, though tough times might come—even with the most unpromising match).

  Those, Hal didn’t mind fooling. It was the others. The regulars. The ones who believed, who scratched together fifteen, twenty pounds, and came again and again, wanting answers that Hal could not give, not because she could not see what they wanted—but because she couldn’t find it in herself to lie to them.

  They were the easiest of all. The ones who made appointments—giving a real name and phone number, so that she could google and Facebook them. Even the customers who walked in off the street gave so much away—Hal could guess their age, their status; she noticed the smart but worn shoes that showed a downward change in fortune, or the recently bought designer handbag that indicated the reverse. In the dim light of her booth, she could still see the white line of a recently removed wedding ring, or the shaky hands of someone missing their morning drink.

  Sometimes Hal didn’t even know how she knew until after—and then it was almost as if the cards really were speaking to her.

  “I see you’ve had a disappointment,” she would say. “Was there . . . a child involved?” and the woman’s eyes would well, and she would nod, and before she could stop herself a story would spill out, of miscarriage, stillbirth, infertility. And only afterwards Hal would think, How did I know that? And then she would remember the way the woman had looked out of the window of the waiting room as Hal came to find her, at the woman walking with a baby in a sling and a toddler with candy floss stains around her mouth, and the stricken look on her client’s face, and Hal would realize.

  Then she felt bad, and sometimes she would even give back the money, telling the customer that the cards had told her it would be unlucky to take payment, even though that only seemed to increase their fervor and make them more certain to return, banknotes in hand.

  Mostly
, though, Hal liked her job. She liked the raucous, drunken hen parties. She even liked the stags who came in bellowing and skeptical and full of suggestive cracks about feeling their crystal balls. And she felt that in some small way she helped some of her more vulnerable clients—she wasn’t base enough to tell them only what they wanted to hear, she told them what they needed to know as well. That truth wasn’t found at the bottom of a bottle. That drugs weren’t the answer. That it was okay to leave the man who was responsible for the bruises that peeped from behind the neckline of that blouse.

  She was cheaper than a therapist, and more ethical than many of the psychics who posted cards through people’s doors, claiming to heal incurable disease with crystals, or offering contact with dead lovers and children—for a price, of course. . . .

  Hal never made those promises. She shook her head when the clients asked her if she could contact David or Fabien or baby Cora. She was not in the business of séances, profiting off grief that was all too nakedly visible.

  “The cards don’t predict the future,” she said again and again, insuring herself against the inevitability of things turning out differently, but also telling them what they needed to know—that there were no firm answers. “All they show is how things could come out, based on the energies you brought with you to the reading today. They’re a guide for you to shape your actions, not a prison cell.”

  The truth was, however much she tried to tell them otherwise, people liked tarot because it gave them an illusion of control, of forces guiding their lives, a buffer against the senseless randomness of fate. But they liked Hal because she was good at what she did. She was good at weaving a story out of the images the clients turned up in front of her, good at listening to their pain and their questions and their hopes; and, most of all, she was good at reading others.

  She had always been shy, tongue-tied in front of strangers, a fish out of water at her raucous secondary school; but what she hadn’t realized was that during all those years spent coolly standing back and watching others, she had been honing her detachment and learning the skills that would someday become her trade. She had been watching the versions people gave of themselves, the tells that showed when they were nervous or hopeful or trying to evade the truth. She had discovered that the most important truths often lay in what people didn’t say, and learned to read the secrets that they hid in plain sight, in their faces, and in their clothes, and in the expressions that flitted across their faces when they thought no one was watching.

  Unlike most of her clients, Hal did not believe the cards in her pocket held any mystical power, beyond her own ability to reveal what people had not admitted even to themselves.

  But now, as she hurried past the Palace Pier, the smell of fish and chips carried on the sea wind making her empty stomach rumble, Hal found herself wondering. If she believed . . . if she believed . . . what would the cards say about Trepassen House . . . about the woman who was not her grandmother . . . about the choice that lay ahead of her? She had no idea.

  CHAPTER 5

  * * *

  “Morning, treacle!”

  “Morning, Reg,” Hal said. She pushed a fifty-pence piece across the counter of Reg’s booth. “Cup of tea, please.”

  “I should say. It’s cold enough for brass monkeys today, ain’t it? Right. Let’s see. Cuppa Rosie . . .” he muttered to himself as he dropped a tea bag into a cracked white mug. “Cup . . . of . . . Rosie for my favorite twist.”

  Twist and twirl. Girl.

  Reg was not from Brighton, but London, and he sprinkled his conversation with a liberal amount of Cockney rhyming slang in a way that Hal was never quite sure was genuine. Reg definitely qualified as Cockney—at least, he did on his own account, having been born within the sound of Bow Bells and grown up running the streets of the East End. But there was something a touch pantomime about his persona, and Hal suspected that it was all part of the patter that the tourists liked. Diamond Cockney geezer, with his treacle tarts and cups of Rosie Lee.

  Now he was looking at the hot water urn and frowning.

  “Bloody urn’s playing up again. I think the connection’s loose. You got ten minutes, Hal?”

  “Not really. . . .” Hal looked at her watch. “I was supposed to be opening up at twelve.”

  “Ah, don’t you worry about that. There’s no one down your side, I’d-a seen them go past. And Chalky’s not here yet, so you won’t have no bother with him. Come inside and have a sit-down.”

  He opened the booth door and beckoned Hal in. Hal wavered, and then stepped over the threshold.

  Chalky was Mr. White, the pier manager. Hal was self-employed and to some extent set her hours, but Mr. White liked the booths to be open in good time of a morning. Nothing more depressing, he always said, than a shuttered-up pier. The West Pier already had to work harder than its twin sister, the Palace, to lure the punters down the prom, and when takings dropped, as they always did in the winter months, Mr. White was prone to start reassessing the leases of the underperforming booths. If there was one thing Hal could not afford at the moment, it was to lose her booth.

  Inside Reg’s kiosk it was warm, and smelled strongly of bacon from the grill at the back. Reg’s stock-in-trade was bacon sandwiches and cups of tea in the winter months, and Mr. Whippy ice cream and cans of Coke in the summer.

  “Won’t be a minute,” Reg said. “How are you anyway, my dear old mucker?”

  “I’m all right,” Hal said, though it was not really the truth. Those two typewritten sheets of paper on the coffee table at home were giving her a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach, and she was half afraid of finding another envelope when she opened up the booth this morning. If only. If only Mr. Treswick’s letter had been really meant for her.

  The urn was up to temperature now, and she watched Reg as he expertly manipulated the spigot and mug with one hand, while flipping the bacon with the other. Somehow talking to the back of his head felt easier than addressing his face. She did not have to see the concern in his eyes.

  “Actually . . .” she said, and then swallowed, and forced herself on. But the words, when they came, were not the ones she had been intending to say. “Actually, I might be better than all right. I got a letter last night, telling me I might be heir to a secret fortune.”

  “You what?” Reg turned, mug in his hand, open astonishment in his face. “What did you say?”

  “I got a letter last night. From a solicitor. Saying I might be due a substantial bequest. ”

  “You winding me up?” Reg said, his eyebrows almost up to his nonexistent hairline. Hal shook her head, and seeing that she was serious, Reg echoed her shake of the head, and handed the tea across.

  “You be careful, love. There’s a lot of these scammers about. My trouble got one the other day, telling her she won the Venezuelan lottery or some nonsense. Don’t you be handing over no money. Not that I need to tell you that.” He gave her a wink. “No flies on you.”

  “I don’t think it’s a scam,” Hal said honestly. “More like a mistake, if anything. I think they might have got me mixed up with someone else.”

  “You think it’s one of these heir-hunter things, where someone’s died and they’re trying to track down the long-lost rellies?” He was frowning again, but it was not with worry now, more as if considering a conundrum.

  “Maybe,” Hal said. She gave a shrug and sipped cautiously at the scalding tea. It was hot and bitter, but good. The cold, clammy thought of the notes on the coffee table was starting to recede, and she felt a flicker of some old memory stir inside her—the sensation of what it had been like to wake in the morning and not worry about every bill, not think about where the next rent payment would come from, not worry about the knock on the door. God, what she wouldn’t give to get that security back again. . . .

  She felt something harden inside her—a kind of steely resolve.

  “Well,” Reg said at last, “if anyone deserves a break, it’s you, my darlin’. You take an
y money they offer you and run, that’s my advice. Take the money and run.”

  CHAPTER 6

  * * *

  “Good-bye,” Hal said, as the three tipsy girls rolled out the door, shrieking and laughing down the pier towards the bars and clubs. “May fortune favor you,” she added, as she always did, but they were already gone out of earshot. Glancing at her watch, she realized it was 9 p.m., and the pier would be closing soon.

  She was tired—exhausted, in fact—and earlier that evening, as the time stretched on, and the pier had stayed empty of visitors, she had thought about giving up, switching the sign off, and going home, but she was glad she had stayed. After almost no clients all day, there had been a mini-rush at seven o’clock—two coworkers came in to ask what they should do about a bullying boss, and then the three drunk girls looking for a laugh around eight. She hadn’t made a lot, but with luck she would cover the rent on the kiosk this week, which was more than she could guarantee in the off season.

  With a sigh, she turned off the small space heater at her feet and stood, ready to switch off the little illuminated sign outside her kiosk.

  MADAME MARGARIDA it read in flowing, ornate letters, and though the description didn’t really suit Hal, conjuring as it did some kind of Gypsy Rose Lee figure, she had not had the heart to change it.

  SPECIALIST IN TAROT, PSYCHIC READINGS, AND PALMISTRY said the smaller letters below, although in truth Hal didn’t really enjoy reading palms. Perhaps it was the physical contact, the warm dampness of the sweaty palm in hers. Or perhaps it was the lack of props—because in spite of her skepticism, she loved the tarot cards as physical objects, the finely drawn images, their soft fragility.

  Now, though, as she flicked the switch in her booth and the light clicked off outside, there was a rap at the glass. Her stomach flipped, and for a moment she froze, even her breathing stilled.