The Death of Mrs. Westaway Read online

  As she stepped towards the shelf where it should have been, something crunched beneath her boots, and when she looked down, there it was—the frame faceup on the hearth, the glass smashed to smithereens by a stamped foot, the picture scratched and torn by the grinding of a heel into the broken frame.

  Her hands shaking, eyes swimming, Hal forced herself to pick it up, cradling it like some small, broken animal, picking out the shards of glass from the paper. But it was no good. The picture was ripped and ruined, and the laughing faces of that girl and her mother were gone for good.

  She would not cry. She refused to. But she felt something huge and bitter and wild with grief rise up inside her. It was the injustice of it that stung so, like acid in her throat. She wanted to cry out with it, scream with the unfairness of it all.

  I want a break, she wanted to sob. Just once, I want something to go my way.

  She found herself sinking to her knees, bowed down beneath the weight of it all, and for a moment she crouched over the broken shards of glass, her head bent, hugging her knees to her rib cage as if to make herself as small and safe as possible. But there was no safety anymore, no one to hug her and clean up the mess and make her a hot cup of tea. She was going to have to deal with this herself.

  As she began to pick up the glass, sweeping the splinters carefully with the sleeve of her coat, Reg’s voice sounded in her head, his comforting Cockney croak. If anyone deserves a break, it’s you, my darlin’. You take any money they offer you and run, that’s my advice. Take the money and run.

  If only she could. She slipped the glass into the bin, the torn scraps of photograph fluttering after.

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

  Hal’s phone was in her pocket, and, almost without being aware of what she was doing, she pulled it out and opened up the Trainline website.

  December 1.

  7 a.m.

  Brighton to Penzance, return.

  She clicked.

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

  When the ticket prices came up on-screen, she couldn’t suppress a wince. The money in her pocket wasn’t enough to cover the fare. Not even a single. And her overdraft was already maxed out. But maybe . . . maybe if the website didn’t check in with her bank . . . She pulled out her bank card, tapped in the number, and held her breath. . . .

  Miraculously, the payment went through.

  Even so, Hal didn’t quite believe it until her phone vibrated with an e-mail. Here’s everything you need for your Penzance trip, it read, and below that, a ticket collection number confirming her purchase.

  Her stomach clenched and turned, as if she were riding a ship in rough seas and a wave had dropped away beneath the hull. Was she really going to do this? But what was the alternative? Wait here for Mr. Smith’s minions to pay her a return visit?

  I might be heir to a secret fortune.

  The words she had spoken to Reg echoed in her ear, half taunt, half promise. Hal stood, feeling the stiffness in her limbs, the tiredness of her muscles now that the adrenalized fear had abated.

  It might be true. And if it wasn’t, perhaps she could make it true. All she had to do was make herself believe it.

  • • •

  WHEN SHE HEADED TO HER bedroom, she told herself it was to go straight to bed. But instead, she pulled her mother’s battered suitcase from the top of the wardrobe, and began to pack. Shampoo, deodorant. That was straightforward. What to wear was more difficult. Black was not a problem—more than half Hal’s wardrobe was black or gray. But she couldn’t turn up to a stranger’s funeral in ripped jeans and a T-shirt; people would expect a dress, and she had only one.

  She pulled it out of the bottom drawer where she had shoved it after her mother’s funeral three years ago, held on a blazing May day. It was respectable, but far too summery for December, made of cheap, flimsy cotton, with short sleeves. She could wear it with tights, though her only pair of tights was laddered at the top of the thigh. Hal unrolled them, examining the damage. She had carefully stopped the run with a blob of nail varnish, and now she would just have to hope that the fix held.

  Next, a couple of T-shirts, a hoodie, and her least-threadbare jeans. A spare bra. A handful of knickers. And finally her precious laptop, and a couple of paperbacks.

  The last thing was the most difficult. ID. They would expect ID, and the letter had asked her to bring it. The problem was, Hal had no idea what information they already had. Her full birth certificate was out of the question, but she could take her passport, or her short-form birth certificate, neither of which made any mention of parents. Those simply confirmed something they already knew—Hal’s name. The problem was, both documents also gave her date of birth.

  If they were expecting someone aged thirty-five, it would all be over as soon as they saw her—they wouldn’t even need to get to the passport. But Hal thought she could pass for anything from fifteen to twenty-five, maybe even thirty at a pinch. Unless Hester Westaway had married and had children very young, there was a good chance that the woman they were looking for was within that range; but if the solicitor’s documents showed a baby born in December 1991 and Hal produced a passport showing she was born in May 1995 . . .

  Hal pulled out the letter again, scanning for acceptable forms. The second column, proving her address, was no problem. A utility bill, said the letter. Well, she had plenty of those. And the utility company couldn’t possibly tell the solicitors anything they didn’t already know, apart from the state of her overdraft.

  But the first column was more of a problem. Passport, driving license, or birth certificate. She didn’t have a driving license, and a passport would be too hard to alter without access to serious cash. Which left . . . the birth certificate.

  Hal rummaged in the box under the bed again, looking for the envelope she had cast aside earlier. When she found it, she flipped past her mother’s certificate to her own, beneath. There was the full one . . . and yes, there beneath it was the short form. Name: Harriet Margarida Westaway, it read. Born: 15th May 1995. Sex: Female. District: Brighton, East Sussex.

  If they didn’t have a date of birth already, it would be easy—a simple question of handing over her real papers.

  If they did . . . Hal peered at it, holding it up to the light, looking at the paper. It was not a very sophisticated document—the paper was watermarked, but that wasn’t obvious from the surface, and the ink looked nothing special. With a bit of time and a scanner, she could probably use the real document to forge something fairly convincing.

  The crease lines were old and soft, and Hal folded it up carefully and put it in an inside pocket of the case, along with the utility bill.

  She was zipping up the case when she stopped . . . and reached into her bedside drawer where a small tin box rested, battered and losing its paint. It had once held Golden Virginia, though it had long since lost the scent of tobacco.

  Opening it up, Hal let her fingers rest on the cards inside, feeling their frayed edges, the soft pliability of the aging cardboard, watching the familiar images flicker past as she riffled through them, their faces watching her, judging her.

  On an impulse, she tipped the pack into her palm and, without shuffling, made a single cut, her eyes closed, only one question in her mind.

  She opened her eyes.

  The card in her palm was a young man standing in a storm-swept landscape, at his back a sky full of scudding clouds, at his feet a tumultuous sea. In his hands was a sword, upraised, as if about to strike. The page of swords. Action. Intellect. Decision.

  In that instant Hal knew, if she were reading for a client, what she would have said: The swords are the suit of the mind, of thought and analysis, and the page is a card full of energy and decision. There are stormy waters all around—but he is striding out with his sword upraised. Whatever the challenge he faces, the page is ready to meet it, and he is someone to be reckoned with.


  There is no such thing as a clear green light in tarot, she would have said. But this card—this might be the closest thing to it.

  But beneath the practiced spiel she could hear her mother’s voice, words she had told Hal again and again. Never believe it, Hal. Never believe your own patter. The actor who loses his grip on reality, the writer who believes her own lies—they’re lost. This is a fantasy—never lose sight of that, however much you want to believe.

  And there was the slippery truth of it—the confirmation bias known so well to scientists and skeptics. She wanted to believe the page’s message. She wanted to believe in his green light, even as she clapped the two halves of the deck together, and slid them back into the tin, and closed the lid.

  As she brushed her teeth in the tiny bathroom, gazing at her own reflection, soft-focus and unfamiliar without her glasses, Hal told herself, I don’t have to decide. I can sleep on it. Nothing is final. But she took her toothbrush with her when she went back into the bedroom. She stood uncertainly by her bed for a moment, shivering in the cold breeze from the drafty window, and then, almost defiantly, she shoved the toothbrush inside the open case and, with a rasping scratch, zipped it up, and climbed into bed.

  It was a long time before she put her book down and turned out the light, and longer still before she slept. And when she slept, she dreamed—of a young man standing over her, his sword upraised.

  CHAPTER 8

  * * *

  Hal’s mother had taught her tarot, and she’d been familiar with the images on the cards almost before she could walk—the smiling High Priestess, the stern Hierophant, the scary Tower with the lost souls falling away. And she had accompanied her mother to the booth on West Pier often enough as a little girl, when school was off and her mother couldn’t find anyone to babysit. She’d sat quietly behind the curtain in the corner reading a book, listening to her mother’s skillful back-and-forth, and she grew to understand the tactics almost without realizing—the leading questions, the graceful forks: “A brother . . .”—a slight frown from the client—“no, wait, someone like a brother. A friend? A male relative?”

  Hal learned how far to generalize and when to backtrack when you had hit a rut. She watched how her mother stopped trying to apply a statement when the client was stubbornly shaking his or her head, and how she changed tack with an unruffled, “Ah, well, I will leave that image with you to decipher. Perhaps its meaning will come to you later, or it may be a warning for the future.”

  So much she had picked up without even trying. But to conduct a reading herself . . . that was another matter.

  In the end, though, she had no choice. A couple of days before Hal’s eighteenth birthday, her mother was killed in a hit-and-run on a hot summery day, right outside their flat, by a speeding driver who was never found. Hal was left reeling, grieving—and broke.

  When the pier manager, Mr. White, came to her a few weeks later, his ultimatum was not unkind—he wanted to give Hal first refusal, he said. But the kiosk could not remain empty in the height of the season. If she wanted her mother’s booth it was hers, no question. But she would have to start soon. It was June, the pier was full every day and every evening, and shuttered kiosks were bad for everyone.

  And so Hal had picked up her mother’s cards, turned on the neon sign outside the booth, and become Madame Margarida in her turn.

  The regular clients were easy. She had watched her mother read time and again for these people, had listened to them spill the details of wayward husbands, tetchy bosses, unhappy children. And the drunken walk-ins were not too bad—she could bluff her way through those, and besides, they tended to be tourists who would never be back.

  No, it was the bookings that worried her. The people who paid for a full hour’s consultation, who rang up beforehand to make sure she would be in.

  For those, Hal did something her mother had never resorted to. She cheated.

  It was scary how much you could find out online. Hal had never used Facebook before her mother’s death, but in those early, uncertain days she created a fake profile, with an unthreatening picture of a blond girl taken from Google images, and christened her “Lil Smith.”

  Lil was a conscious choice—a name that could be short for Lily, Lila, Lillian, Elizabeth, or a hundred other names. Smith was obvious, as was the unassuming prettiness of the girl.

  It was amazing how readily people accepted a friend request from someone they had never met, but much of the time she didn’t even need to do that, for their privacy settings were wide open, and she could find out details of their family, their employer, their education and hometown, all without ever leaving her room.

  Now, as the train sped west, she opened up her laptop and turned her attention to the Westaways, a nervous fluttering in the pit of her stomach.

  The first Google hit was a death notice in the Penzance Courier for Hester Mary Westaway, born September 19, 1930, died November 22, 2016, at Clowe’s Court, St. Piran. The brief obituary stated that she was the widow of Erasmus Harding Westaway, by whom she had had three sons and a daughter. She is survived by her sons, Harding, Abel, and Ezra Westaway, and her grandchildren, read the notice.

  Was she supposed to be the daughter of one of these men?

  Neither Abel nor Harding was a big Facebook user, but nor were they hard to find. Only one hit came up for each name, and Harding had helpfully listed his hometown as St. Piran, and tagged Abel as his brother. As Hal scrolled down through his profile, looking at photographs of weddings and christenings, family parties and first days at school, she felt a lump in her throat. There was a wife, Mitzi Westaway (née Parker), and three children, Richard, Katherine, and Freddie, ranging from early to mid teens.

  Abel was younger by a good few years, a kind-looking man with a neat brown beard and hair the color of dark honey. His relationship status wasn’t visible, but scrolling through his profile pictures Hal picked out a handsome blue-eyed man called Edward in many of the photos. There was a tagged photograph of the two of them together in Paris on Valentine’s Day 2015, and another of them hand in hand at some kind of formal event. Black and White Ball for the Orphans of the Philippines, read the caption. Both men were wearing black tie, and Abel was smiling up at his companion with a kind of anxious pride.

  Both profiles exuded an air of comfortable wealth that made Hal’s heart hurt with a kind of longing envy. There was nothing ostentatious, no yachts or Caribbean cruises. But there was casual mention of holidays in Venice, skiing in Chamonix, private schools, and tax planning. The evolving slide show of profile pictures showed children on ponies, four-wheel-drive cars, and polo equipment, and their Facebook memories were of restaurant meals and family get-togethers.

  Of Ezra there was no sign.

  Judging by Facebook, both Abel and Harding were old enough to have a child in her twenties, but it was the daughter who kept drawing Hal’s attention. She is survived by her sons. What had happened to the daughter?

  Without a name, there was no way of finding out, and there was no mention of a sister on either Harding’s or Abel’s Facebook profile. After a moment’s thought, Hal—or rather, Lil Smith—put in a friend request to Harding’s eldest son, Richard Westaway. She deliberately did not ask Abel. He had only 93 friends, and didn’t look the type to accept unsolicited friend requests from mystery girls. Harding was an even worse choice—he had only 19 friends and didn’t seem to have checked his account for almost four months. Richard, on the other hand, had 576 friends and had already posted an update checking in at a service station outside Exeter.

  Hal was just opening up another tab, when a notification flashed up—Richard had accepted her request. She clicked through to his profile and liked the first photograph that came up—Richard’s muddy face brandishing some kind of cup. Thrashed St Barnabus at rugger AGAIN. Pretty sure their fly half was a girl with facial hair , read the caption. Hal rolled her eyes, and returned to Google search.

  There was nothing for Trepassen Hous
e on the land registry, and there were no businesses registered there. It wasn’t listed under care homes, or inspected as a food premises. There seemed to be no indication that it was anything other than a private home. Google maps brought it up, though, and Hal switched the view first to satellite and then to street view. Street view was unhelpful, showing nothing but a country lane flanked by a long brick wall with yews and rhododendrons shrouding anything behind it. Hal clicked along the road for a few miles in either direction, until finally she came to a wrought-iron gate across a driveway, but the photo was taken from the wrong angle to provide any view of the house, and she switched back to satellite.

  The blurry image was too small to show anything apart from a gabled roof and a gated expanse of green punctuated by trees, but if nothing else, Hal could see that the place was big. Very big. This looked like a stately home, almost. These people had money. Serious money.

  “Tickets, please,” said a voice over her shoulder, breaking into her thoughts, and Hal looked up to see a uniformed conductor standing in the aisle next to her. She rummaged in her wallet for a moment and held out the ticket. “Home for the weekend, are we?” he said as he punched a hole in it, and Hal was just about to shake her head, when something stopped her.

  She had to step into this part sometime, after all.

  “No, I . . . I’m going back for a funeral.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry.” The conductor handed her back her ticket. “Anyone close?”

  Hal swallowed. She felt the cliff yawning beneath her feet. It’s just a role, she told herself. No different from what you do every day.

  The words seemed to stick in her throat, but she forced herself on.

  “My grandmother.”

  For a moment the statement felt like what it was—a lie. But then she rearranged her face into an expression . . . not of grief, for that would be too much, for this woman she could not possibly be close to. But a kind of solemn regret. And she felt a shiver of something run through her—the same shiver she felt when she switched on the light outside her booth and stepped into her role.