The Death of Mrs. Westaway Page 4

  “I’ve been waiting,” said a hectoring female voice. “Don’t you want customers?”

  Hal sighed, feeling her tension drain away, and she opened the door.

  “I’m sorry.” She used the calm, professional voice that somehow became part of her persona the moment she picked up the cards. It was halfway between serene and serious, and a tone deeper than her own, though it was harder to conjure than usual, with her heart still thumping with the aftermath of the sudden rush of fear. “You should have knocked earlier.”

  “If you was a real psychic, you would’ve known,” said the woman with a sour triumph, and Hal suppressed another sigh. She was going to be one of those.

  It always baffled Hal why skeptics were so drawn to her booth. It wasn’t like she was forcing anyone to come. She wasn’t making any claims for her services—she didn’t pretend to cure anything, or advise dangerous courses of action—she didn’t even say that her readings were anything other than a bit of fun. Weren’t there better people to debunk? And yet they came, and folded their arms and pursed their lips, and refused to be led, and looked grimly delighted at every failure, even while they wanted, desperately, to believe.

  But she couldn’t afford to turn a customer away.

  “Please come in and sit down, it’s a cold night,” Hal said. The woman drew up a chair, but didn’t speak. She only sat, her herring-bone coat drawn firmly around herself, chapped lips clamped together, eyes narrowed.

  Hal settled herself at the table, drew the box of tarot cards towards her, and began to run through the practiced introduction she always used when new clients walked in off the street: a few generalized guesses designed to impress the listener with her insight, a sprinkling of braggadocio, all mixed in with a potted history of tarot, aimed at people who knew little about it and needed a context to understand what she was about to do.

  She had only run through a few of the phrases when the woman interrupted.

  “You don’t look like much of a psychic.”

  She looked Hal up and down, taking in the frayed jeans, the thick-gauge earring, shaped like a thorn, through her right ear, the tattoos peeping out from beneath her T-shirt.

  “I thought you’d have a costume, and a veil with dangly bits. Like a proper one. Madame Margarida it says on the sign—you don’t look like much of a madame. More like a twelve-year-old boy.”

  Hal only smiled and shook her head, but the words had broken her rhythm, and as she resumed her little speech she found herself thinking of the veil at home in the drawer under the bed, the fine black gauze with the jet drops sewn around the edge. She stumbled over the well-worn phrases and was glad when at last she reached the end of the spiel.

  She added, as she always did, “Please, tell me what brings you to consult the cards today.”

  “Shouldn’t you know that?” the woman snapped.

  “I sense many questions in you,” Hal said, trying not to sound impatient. “But time is short.”

  And I want to go home, she thought, but did not say. There was a silence. The wind howled through the struts of the pier, and in the distance Hal could hear the crash of the breakers.

  “I got a choice,” the woman said eventually, her voice grudging, as if the words were wrung out of her. She shifted in her seat, making the candle flame gutter.

  “Yes,” Hal said carefully, not quite a question. “I sense that you have two roads ahead of you, but they twist and turn, and you can’t see far. You want to know which you should take.”

  In other words, a choice. It was pretty pitiful stuff, as well it might be, given how little she had to work with, but the woman gave a grudging nod.

  “I will shuffle the cards,” Hal said. She opened the lacquered box where she kept her work cards and shuffled them briefly, then spread them out on the table in a long arc. “Now, hold the question you came to consult me about in your mind, and indicate a card to me. Don’t touch, just point with your finger to the card that calls to you.”

  The woman’s jaw was clamped, and Hal sensed a turmoil in her out of all proportion. Whatever had driven her here tonight was no ordinary question; she had come against her will, turning to something she believed in spite of herself. When she leaned forwards, a cross glinted out from behind her buttoned-up cardigan, and she gestured jerkily at a card, almost as if she suspected a trap.

  “This one?” Hal said, pushing it out from the deck, and the woman nodded.

  Hal placed it facedown in the center of the table and glanced discreetly at the clock positioned behind the woman’s back. Usually she did the Celtic Cross, but she was damned if she’d spend half an hour with this woman when she was tired and cold and her stomach was rumbling. A three-card spread was the very most she was going to do.

  “This card”—Hal touched the card the woman had chosen—“represents the current situation, the problem you have come to consult me about. Now choose another.”

  The woman flicked her finger towards a second card, and Hal placed it alongside the first, facedown again.

  “This card represents the obstacle you face. Now choose one final card.”

  The woman hesitated, and then pointed at the first card in the deck, to the far left of the spread. It was one people rarely chose—most people picked towards the middle in a fairly even spread, choosing the cards closest to them, while a very few, the most suggestible types, picked up on the implicit instruction in final and chose a card towards the right of the spread, at the bottom of the original pack.

  To pick the first card was unusual, and Hal was surprised. She should have known, she thought. This was someone perverse and contrary, someone who would do the opposite of what they thought you wanted.

  “This final card represents the advice the cards are giving you,” Hal said.

  She turned the first card, and from the other side of the table she heard a choking sound, as the woman’s hand went to her face, to cover her mouth and smother a name. Looking up, Hal saw that the woman’s eyes were wide and harrowed, and full of tears, and suddenly she knew. She knew why the woman was here, and she knew what the image on the card meant to the woman sitting opposite.

  The young man setting out with his pack into the sunshine was handsome and smiling, turning his dark face to the sun, and only the cliff edge at his feet gave a clue to the deeper, darker meanings of the card—impetuosity, naïveté, impulsiveness.

  “This card is called the Fool,” Hal said softly, and when the woman gave a little broken sob and a nod, almost in spite of herself, she went on, “but tarot isn’t about simple meanings. The Fool, though he can symbolize foolishness, doesn’t always mean that. Sometimes this card means new beginnings, sometimes it means doing things without thinking about the path ahead, without considering the future.”

  The woman gave another dry, choking sob, and said something that sounded like “His future!” in a tone of such bitter disbelief that Hal could not help herself—she put out her hand.

  “I . . . forgive me, but . . . is your question about your son?”

  The woman began to cry at that, broken and in earnest, and as she wept she nodded, and Hal heard words tumbling out—names of drugs, of treatment centers she recognized in Brighton, needle exchanges, of money stolen from handbags, of treasured heirlooms sold and pawned, of sleepless nights waiting for a call that didn’t come. The story between the racking sobs was plain enough—a desperate struggle to save a son who did not want to be saved.

  A choice, the woman had said, and Hal knew what that choice was, and she wished now that she had not opened the door.

  With a feeling of foreboding, Hal turned the second card. It was the Wheel, reversed.

  “The second card you chose represents the obstacle you and your son face together. This is the Wheel of Fortune, or the Wheel of Life. It symbolizes fortune and renewal and the cycle of life, and shows that you and your son have come to a turning point”—a little, reluctant nod, as the woman swiped fiercely at her eyes—“but here it’s reversed
—that’s what we call it when the card is upside down like this. The Wheel reversed represents bad luck. This is the obstacle that has come into your life. There are negative forces here that are out of your control, but they are not always completely external—they come about as the result of choices we’ve made in the past, your choices and your son’s, of course.”

  “His choices,” the woman said bitterly. “His choices, not mine. He was a good boy, until he took up with those boys at his school and started dealing. What was I supposed to do—stand by and watch him sink into depravity?”

  Her eyes were bleak holes in her skull, and as she waited for Hal’s response she bit at the chapped skin of her lips, pulling at it with her teeth until a bead of blood appeared. Hal shook her head. Suddenly she wanted this to be over very much indeed.

  “The last card represents a possible course of action, but”—the hunger in the woman’s eyes made her add hastily—“it’s important to know that it is not a prescription. The cards don’t predict the future—they don’t give a fail-safe course. They simply tell you what could, on a given day, be one outcome to your problem. Some situations have no simple resolution; all we can do is steer the course that causes the least harm.”

  She turned the card, and the High Priestess turned her serene face up to the dim, flickering light. From outside there was a gust of wind, and in the distance Hal heard a seagull’s scream.

  “What does it mean?” the woman demanded, all her skepticism gone, subsumed by desperation for answers. She stared down at the figure on the card, seated on her throne, her hands spread like a benediction. “Who is she—some kind of heathen goddess?”

  “In a way,” Hal said slowly. “Some call her Persephone, some say she is Artemis, goddess of the hunt. Some call her even older names. In French she’s called la Papesse.”

  “But what does she mean?” the woman said again, more urgently. Her fingers closed like claws on Hal’s wrist, painfully tight, and Hal had to fight the urge to pull away.

  “She means intuition,” Hal said shortly. She disengaged herself from the woman’s grip under pretense of rearranging the cards into a single pile, the Priestess on top. “She symbolizes the unknown—both the unknown within ourselves, and the future. She means that life is changing, that the future is always uncertain, no matter how much information we can gather.”

  “So what should I do?” the woman cried. “I can’t go through this over and over, but if I throw him out, what kind of mother does that make me?”

  “I believe . . .” Hal stopped, and swallowed. She hated this part. Hated the way they came to her asking for answers she couldn’t give. She thought carefully, and then began again. “Look, this is a very unusual spread.” She turned the rest of the pack over and spread them out, showing the woman the ratio of major to minor cards, the fact that the vast majority of the pack were numbered pip cards. “These cards—these numbered ones, with the suits on them—these are what we call minor cards. They have their own meanings, of course, but they are more . . . mutable, perhaps. More open to interpretation. But these others”—she touched the cards the woman had chosen, and the rest of the trumps, dotted through the spread—“these symbolic cards are called the major arcana, or trumps. To have a spread that’s completely composed of trump cards, as you had, that’s statistically very unusual. There just aren’t that many of these cards in the deck. And the point is that in tarot, these cards represent the strong winds of fate—the turning points in our lives—and when you get a large number of them in a reading, it can mean that the situation is largely out of your hands, that it will play out as the fates intend.”

  The woman said nothing; she only looked at Hal, her eyes so hungry they made Hal almost afraid. Her face in the candlelight was shadowed, the eye sockets sunken.

  “Ultimately,” Hal said softly, “you have to decide for yourself what the cards are telling you, but my feeling is that the Priestess is telling you to listen to your intuition. You know the answer already. It’s there in your heart.”

  The woman drew back from Hal, and then she nodded, very slowly, and bit her white, chapped lips.

  Then she stood, threw down a crumple of banknotes on the table, and turned on her heel. The kiosk door banged behind her, letting in a gust of wind, and Hal snatched for the notes, spreading them out, and then shook her head when she saw how much had been left.

  “Wait,” she called. She ran to the door, forcing it open against the thrust of the wind. It caught from her fingers and slammed back against the side of the kiosk, making her wince for the fragile Victorian glass, but she could not spare more than a glance back to check it was okay. The woman was already disappearing.

  She began to run, her feet slipping on the wet planks.

  “Wait!”

  The wind had picked up, and a mix of rain and salt spray stung her eyes as she reached the entrance to the pier, the illuminated sign above the entrance casting long, flickering shadows.

  “Wait, come back!” she called into the wet night, straining through the drizzle for a shadowy figure. “This is far too much!”

  She was panting, but now she tried to still her breath, listening for the sound of footsteps hurrying through the darkness; she could hear nothing above the roar of the sea and the patter of the rain.

  The promenade was empty, and the woman had disappeared into the darkness as if made from rain herself.

  • • •

  HAL WAS WET AND SHIVERING by the time she gave up, the notes still crumpled in her hand, fast softening in the rain that dripped from the canopy. Sixty pounds the woman had left. A ridiculous sum—more than four times Hal’s usual charge for a fifteen-minute reading. And for what—for making a few simple guesses, and telling her to listen to what she already knew?

  Shaking her head, she pushed the notes into her pocket with a shiver and turned around, ready to go back to her booth, close up for the night. As she passed beneath the covered entrance, she put her hand down automatically to pat the plastic guide dog with the slot in his head for charitable donations, as hundreds of children did every time they passed him. Hal had always patted him as a little girl, every time she visited her mother, and sometimes, if they had had a bit of money to spare, her mother had let her put a pound in the slot at the top. It was a custom she tried to keep up—though lately, the pounds had dwindled to fifty-pence pieces, and sometimes to pennies.

  Tonight, with those anonymous letters fresh in her mind, she hadn’t been intending to give anything at all, but now, as she passed through the high, arched gates, she hesitated, and turned back.

  The dog sat patiently beneath the inadequate shelter of the canopy, along with two other donation boxes, though the others were less popular with children. One was a ship in a frame, for the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, and the other was a giant ice cream cone with a sign saying SUPPORT THE WEST PIER’S CHOSEN CHARITY! THIS MONTH WE ARE DONATING TO:——and a space to advertise the current good cause.

  Now Hal bent to look at the wet paper slip that had been inserted. It was hard to read the letters, for rain or seawater had got in behind the plastic and made the ink run, but Hal could just make out the words. THE LIGHTHOUSE PROJECT—DRUG REHABILITATION IN BRIGHTON AND HOVE. Hal felt in her pocket for the fistful of wet notes the woman had left, and she thought of the pile of red demands on the living room table, and the typed note slid beneath her kiosk door.

  Her hand shook as she counted out the banknotes, and then one by one, she shoved them into the slot of the ice cream cone, trying not to think of the shoes they could have bought, the bills she could have paid, and the hot dinners she could have eaten with the money.

  At last the final note fluttered through the slot, and as she turned for her kiosk, the cone lit up, its bright pastel glow throwing a long shadow into the rainy night as she walked away.

  CHAPTER 7

  * * *

  Hal shivered as she made her way back to her kiosk. She wished she had brought her coat in the hea
dlong rush to catch up with the woman. Now she was wet through, and she would have to walk home in cold, wet clothes, and waste more money on gas to try to warm up before bed.

  She picked her way carefully, avoiding the broken planks, feeling the rain-wet wood slippery beneath her feet, the puddles glittering in the few lights still showing. It wasn’t yet ten o’clock, but the pier was almost closed—the ballroom was locked, Reg’s tea kiosk was shuttered, and the candy floss stand had the blinds pulled down inside. NO CASH LEFT ON THESE PREMESIS, read the sign, though if Hal hadn’t seen it a hundred times before she would have had a hard time making out the words, with the strings of lights swinging in the gusting wind and casting crazy lurching shadows over everything. The pier didn’t shut for the winter—it had once, but now it was a year-round operation, like its twin sister farther up the beach—but there was a definite air of winding down at the end of the season, and Hal sighed as she thought of the long winter days that lay ahead. Now, though, she wondered—could she afford to keep going? But if she didn’t, what was the alternative?

  When she got back to the kiosk, the door was closed, though she had no memory of shutting it. She put her hand to the salt-rusted knob and turned the door handle, and slipped inside the dark booth, feeling relief as the wind dropped and the vestigial warmth from the space heater enveloped her.

  “Hello, sunshine,” said a voice, and the red-shaded lamp on the table clicked on.

  Hal felt the blood drain from her face, and her heart started beating in her ears with a sound like the crash of waves on a beach.

  The man standing in the pool of lamplight was very tall, and very broad, and very bald, and he was smiling, but not in a pleasant way. He was smiling like someone who enjoyed scaring people—and Hal was scared.

  “Wh . . .” she tried, but her voice didn’t seem to be working. “What are you doing here?”