The Death of Mrs. Westaway Page 5

  “Maybe I’ve come for a reading,” the man said pleasantly, but he had his hand in his coat pocket, caressing something in there in a way Hal didn’t like. He spoke with a slight lisp, his speech whistling through a gap in his two front teeth.

  “I’m closed,” she managed to say, trying to keep her voice steady.

  “Ah, don’t be like that,” the man said reproachfully. “You could manage a reading for an old friend of your ma’s, now, couldn’t you?”

  Hal felt something inside her grow cold and still.

  “What do you know about my mother?”

  “I’ve been asking around about you. Friendly curiosity like.”

  “I’d like you to leave,” Hal said. There was a panic button in her booth, but it was on the far side, where the man himself was standing, and in any case, it would all depend on whether the pier security guard was in his office.

  The man shook his head, and she felt the panic rise up, choking her.

  “I said, get out!”

  “Tut-tut,” said the man, shaking his head, the smile slipping for a moment, though it was still there in his eyes, a kind of amusement at the terror he saw in her, and at the way she was trying to hide it. The lamplight glinted off his bald head. “What would your ma say to her little girl, treating an old friend of hers like that?”

  “I’m not a little girl,” Hal said through gritted teeth. She wrapped her arms around herself, trying to stop her hands shaking. “And I don’t believe for a second you knew my mother. What do you want?”

  “I think you know what we want. You can’t say we didn’t try to do this the nice way. Mr. Smith wrote you that note himself, he did. He wouldn’t do that for all his clients.”

  “What do you want,” Hal repeated stonily, but it wasn’t really a question. She knew. Just as she knew what the note meant. The man shook his head again.

  “Come on, now, Miss Westaway. Let’s not play games. It’s not like you didn’t know the terms when you signed up.”

  “I’ve paid off that money three, four times over,” Hal said. She heard an edge of desperation creeping into her voice. “For God’s sake, please. You know I have. I must have given you more than two thousand pounds. I only borrowed five hundred in the first place.”

  “Terms is terms. You agreed to the interest. If you didn’t like it, you shouldn’t have agreed to it.”

  “I had no other choice!”

  But the man only smiled again, and shook his head.

  “Naughty, naughty. We always have choices, Miss Westaway. You chose to borrow money off Mr. Smith, and he wants it back. Now, he’s not an unreasonable man. Your debt is currently at . . .” He pretended to consult a piece of paper he held in his hand, though Hal was pretty sure it was all for show. “Three thousand eight hundred and twenty-five pounds. But Mr. Smith has kindly offered to take three thousand cash as a final payment and we’ll call it settled.”

  “I haven’t got three thousand pounds!” Hal said. She felt her voice rising and swallowed, forcing herself to lower it from a shout to a more reasonable level.

  Slow down.

  It was her mother’s voice in her head, soft and calming. Hal remembered her telling her about how to deal with difficult clients. Make them realize you’re in control, not them. Don’t let them make all the demands—remember you’re in charge of this reading. You ask the questions. You set the pace.

  If only this was a reading. If only she had this man across a table with the cards in between them . . . but she didn’t. She would just have to work with the situation she was in.

  She could do this.

  “Look,” she said more reasonably. She drew a shaky breath, made herself unfold her arms from their defensive posture, spread her hands to show honesty. She even forced herself to smile, though it felt like a rictus grin. “Look, I want this settled as much as you do—more, actually. But I haven’t got three thousand or any way of getting it. You might as well ask for the moon. So let’s try to work out what I can offer that your boss will find acceptable. Fifty pounds a week?”

  She didn’t stop to think about how she would come up with the money. Fifty pounds a week was money she just didn’t have at this time of year. But maybe Mr. Khan would let her defer the rent by a month, and Christmas often meant a small surge in business, with work Christmas parties and late-night shopping. Regardless, she would find the money.

  “Here—” She went to the table, picked up the latched box that she kept on the side with the day’s takings. Her hands were shaking almost too much to work the lock, but at last she got it open, and when she held out the notes, she made herself look up at him through her lashes and smile, a little girl’s smile, shy and pleading, appealing to his better nature—if he had one. “Look, there’s . . . twenty . . . thirty . . . nearly forty pounds here. Take that to be going on with.”

  Never mind that she still needed to pay Chalky White for the lease on the kiosk. Never mind the bills, and the rent, and the fact that she had no food in the house. Anything to get him out of her kiosk and buy her some time.

  But the man was shaking his head.

  “Look, you’ve gotta understand, if it was up to me, I’d love to. There’s nothing I’d like better than to help out a young girl like you, all alone in the world.” His eye swept appraisingly round the little kiosk. “But it isn’t up to me. And Mr. Smith, he feels like he’s been very generous, and you’ve taken advantage of that generosity. Mr. Smith wants his money. End of.”

  “Or what?” Hal said, suddenly weary of it all. She shoved the notes in her pocket, and deep within her, in the core of her, she felt a flicker of anger ignite, its determined warmth beginning to replace her chilly fear. “What’s he going to do? Seize my goods? I’ve got nothing to offer you. You could sell everything I own and it wouldn’t raise three grand. Take me to court? I didn’t sign anything—you’ve got nothing except your word against mine. Or maybe he’ll go to the police? You know—” She paused, as if the idea had only just struck her. “Yes, that’s an idea. Maybe we should do that. I think they’d be interested in his loan collection methods.”

  That wiped the smile off the man’s face, and he leaned forwards, so close to Hal’s face that she could feel his saliva flecking her forehead as he spat the words. She forced herself not to flinch away.

  “Now, that, Miss Westaway, is a very, very stupid suggestion. Mr. Smith has a lot of friends in the police, and I think they’d be upset to hear you talking like that about one of their mates. You say you didn’t sign anything? Well, guess what that means, Miss Cleverclogs? No bloody evidence. You’ve got nothing to take to the police except for your word against mine. I’m going to give you one week to raise that money, and I don’t want to hear any fucking nonsense about not having any way of getting it. You sell something, you rob someone, you stand on a street corner and give randy businessmen blow jobs in the backseat of their cars for twenty quid a pop, I don’t fucking care. I want that money by this time next week. You reckon you’ve got nothing now? You can have a lot less than this, sweetheart. A lot less.”

  With that he turned and, very casually, swept everything off the shelf behind the table. Hal flinched as the contents went crashing down: the crystal ball on its wooden stand, the carved painted ornaments, the clay pot she had made her mother for some long-ago Christmas present, the books and cups, and the china vase of Kau Chim sticks . . . Down they came, smashing one by one across the desk and floor below.

  “Oops,” the man deadpanned, the lisp of the s somehow making the word sound even more sarcastic. He turned and gave her a wide, gap-toothed smile. “Sorry about that. I’m a bit clumsy, me. Broken bones too. Lots of bones. Knocked out three teeth the other day. Accidentally. But accidents happen, don’t they?”

  Hal found she was trembling. She wanted to run away from the booth, hammer on the door of the security guard’s office, crouch under the dripping boardwalk of the pier until he went, but she could not—would not—give way. She would not show him her
fear.

  “I’ll be off now,” he said. He pushed past her to the door, and as he did, he put out one hand and casually tipped the table, sending the tarot cards flying into the air and Hal’s cup of tea, left over from the morning, smashing to the floor. The cold tea spattered Hal’s face, making her flinch.

  In the doorway he paused, turned up his collar against the rain.

  “Good-bye, Miss Westaway.” That sibilant, whistling ssss. “See you next week.”

  And then he was gone, slamming the door behind him.

  • • •

  AFTER, HAL STOOD FOR A long moment, frozen, listening to his steps receding up the pier. And then something inside her seemed to release, and with shaking hands she pulled the latch of the kiosk door shut and then stood, her back to the door, trembling with relief and fear.

  It had been almost a year ago that she had taken out the loan, and now she couldn’t believe she had been so stupid. But at the time she had felt backed into an impossible corner—it had been winter, and takings from the pier had fallen, and fallen, until one awful week she had made only seventy pounds. The other stallholders had shrugged, and told her some weeks were just like that—inexplicably bad. But for Hal, it had been a disaster. She had no savings to fall back on, no second job. She was behind on the rent, behind on the bills, she had no way of covering the lease on the kiosk, even. She had tried everything—she’d advertised for a roommate, but no one wanted a flat where the landlady slept on a sofa in the one room. She’d attempted to find bar work, but it clashed with the times she was supposed to be at the pier, and in any case, one look at her empty CV and most of the places she’d tried had simply shaken their heads. Even the people at the job center had sucked their teeth when she told them she’d never even finished her A levels. The fact that her mother had died two weeks before she had been supposed to take the exams didn’t really matter.

  Touch up a relative, one of the guys on the pier had said, call in a favor from a mate, and Hal had not known how to reply, not known how to explain quite how alone in the world she was. Yes, she had grown up in Brighton, had even had friends here before her mother’s death, but it was hard to explain how frighteningly fast their lives had diverged after the accident. She remembered turning up to school the day after the funeral, listening to them laughing about mobile phone bills, boyfriends, being grounded for some minor misdemeanor—and feeling like she was in a separate world. The image that had kept coming to her at the time was of a railway track, with the route stretching out ahead, already planned: A levels, university, internships, careers . . . and then a switch had been thrown, and she had been hurtled down a completely different route, simply trying to survive, to pay the bills, to get by from day to day, while her friends continued on down the old familiar track that Hal herself should have taken, if not for that speeding car.

  There had been no time for A levels. She had dropped out of school, taken over the kiosk, and coped in any way that she could—one moment trying to forget, cropping her hair so that she didn’t see her mother’s face in the mirror quite so painfully every day, drinking herself into oblivion when she could afford the alcohol; the next moment holding on to her memories with painful intensity, inking them into her skin.

  The person she was now was not the girl she would have been. The girl who had given her pocket money to the homeless, frittered away pennies on the pier, whiled away Sundays eating popcorn in front of bad films—she was gone. In her place was someone hardened, someone who had had to become hardened in order to survive. The laughing confidence of that girl on the beach had been stripped away, but inside, Hal had found a very different kind of strength that she had barely even known was there—a cold, hard core of determination that made her get up on frosty mornings to walk to the pier, even when her nose streamed with cold and her eyes were red with weeping, a kind of steel that made her carry on, putting one foot in front of the other, even when she was too tired to keep going.

  She had become a different person.

  The person she was now walked past beggars and turned her face away. The TV had been sold, and she never had Sundays off anyway. She was always tired from working, and always hungry, and most of all . . . most of all she was lonely.

  A few months after the funeral she had seen a group of her old friends in Brighton town center—and they had not even recognized Hal. They had walked straight past her, talking and laughing. She had turned and opened her mouth, ready to call after them—then stopped. A chasm had opened between them, and it was too wide for any of them to bridge. They would not have understood anything about the person she had become.

  So she had watched them walk away without saying a word; and then, just weeks later, they had scattered, to universities all around the country, to jobs and careers and gap years, and now she didn’t see them anymore, even from afar.

  But she did not know how to explain all that to the pier worker. No, was all she had said, her throat tight with loss and anger at his casual belief that everyone must have someone to fall back on. No I can’t do that.

  She couldn’t quite remember how the suggestion had come about, but at last she had become aware of someone who did loans, no collateral needed. The interest was high, but the lender would accept small repayments, even let you skip a week if you couldn’t keep up. It was all unofficial—no office premises, meetings in odd places, envelopes of cash. But it seemed like the answer to a prayer, and Hal jumped at it.

  It wasn’t until a few months in that she had the wit to ask how far she was getting in paying back her debt.

  The answer had rocked her back on her heels. Five hundred pounds, she had borrowed—she’d actually only asked for three hundred, but the man had been nice enough to suggest that she up it a little, to see her through any rough patches.

  She’d been paying it back at the rate of a few pounds a week for about four months. And now the debt was over a thousand.

  Hal had panicked. She had immediately paid back the unspent portion of the original loan, and upped the repayments to the maximum she could afford. But she’d been too optimistic. She couldn’t keep up with the new schedule, and after one particularly bad week at the pier, she missed a payment, and then a month later, she missed another. As the repayments spiraled and the calls from Mr. Smith’s collectors got more and more aggressive, Hal realized the truth. She had no way out.

  Eventually, she did the only thing she could do. She simply stopped paying. She stopped answering calls from unregistered numbers. She stopped answering the door. And she started looking behind her when she walked home alone at night. The one saving grace, she had kept telling herself, was that they didn’t know where she worked. On the pier, she was safe. And—up until now—she had at least felt secure in the knowledge that there was a limit to what they could do. She had no goods for them to seize, and she was fairly sure that the arrangement itself was on the shady side of legal. They were highly unlikely to take her to court.

  But now it seemed that they had tracked her down, and their patience had run out.

  As Hal’s shivering subsided, the words the man had uttered seemed to echo inside her head. Broken bones. Broken teeth.

  Hal had never thought of herself as cowardly—or vain—but at the thought of that steel-toe-capped boot casually swinging towards her face, the crunch as it met her nose and teeth, she couldn’t help flinching.

  So what could she do? Borrowing money was out of the question. There was no one she could ask—no one who had that kind of funds at their disposal, anyway. And as for turning tricks on the street corner as the man had suggested . . . Hal felt her mouth twist in grim revulsion. Brighton had a thriving sex trade, but she wasn’t that desperate. Not yet.

  Which left . . . stealing.

  You have two roads ahead of you, but they twist and turn. . . . You want to know which you should take. . . .

  • • •

  BACK AT THE FLAT, HAL let herself in the front door and stood silently in the hallway, listening
. No sound came from above, and when she reached the topmost landing, the door to her flat was closed, no light showing beneath it.

  As she peered at the door lock in the dimness, though, she thought there was something different about the scratches on the plate, as if someone had been at work with a picklock. Or was that just her own paranoia? Surely all lock plates had chips and scrapes on them, from keys carelessly shoved in, clattering against the metal.

  Her heart was beating fast as she inserted her key, unsure of what she might find on the other side, but as the door swung wide and she groped for the light, her first thought was that everything was miraculously untouched. There was the post where she had left it on the table. There was her laptop. Nothing broken, nothing stolen for part payment.

  Hal’s heart slowed, and she let out a sigh, not quite of relief but of something close to it, as she shut the door behind her and double-locked it, then shrugged off her jacket. It was only when she went across to the kitchen counter to turn on the kettle that she noticed two things.

  The first was a pile of ashes in the sink—ashes that had definitely not been there when she left. It looked as if a sheet of paper had been burned . . . perhaps two. Peering closer, Hal made out letters on one of the scraps that had not yet crumbled to fragments, silvery against the black background. . . . u’re fina . . . she made out, and beneath it . . . ll again. . . .

  Hal knew what it was, even without glancing behind herself at the coffee table, where she had left the letters from Mr. Smith, neatly stacked beside the bills. She knew they would be gone, even before she looked around. But still she could not stop herself from checking, from moving the pile of final demands aside, searching desperately in case they had gusted off the table when she opened the door.

  It was no use. The letters were gone—and with them any evidence she could have shown to the police.

  And something else was missing too, she realized with a lurch. The photograph on the mantelpiece, the picture of Hal and her mother, arm in arm on Brighton beach, their hair gusting in the sea wind.