The Death of Mrs. Westaway Page 9

  Six for gold, Hal thought. She bit her lip. If she was superstitious, she might call that an omen. But she was not.

  Years of working the cards had not made her more of a believer—if anything, quite the opposite. There were many readers out there who did believe, she had met them. But Hal knew, for she had seen it up close and personal, that signs and symbols were created by people looking for patterns and answers—in and of themselves, they meant nothing.

  Now that Mr. Treswick had pointed them out, she could see the magpies, sheltering in the yew tree copse. Two were on the ground, pecking at the berries. Four up in the branches. And the last, the one that had dive-bombed the car, was sitting on the porch roof in the rain, looking balefully down at them.

  “What about seven?” she said lightly. “More gold?”

  “No,” Mr. Treswick said with a laugh. “Alas not.” He climbed out of the car and hurried round with the umbrella unfurled. He spoke above the sound of the rain drumming on the fabric. “Seven is the last line of the rhyme. Seven magpies are for a secret never to be told.”

  Perhaps it was the rain, or the wind that blew up the valley. But Hal could not help shivering as she took her case out of the car boot and followed Mr. Treswick, under cover of his umbrella, into the porch of Trepassen House.

  4th December, 1994

  I was sick again this morning, skittering down the steep stairs and down the long passageway to the toilet in my nightgown, kneeling on the cold tiled floor to heave up the last remains of yesterday’s dinner.

  Afterwards, I brushed my teeth, huffing on my hands to make sure my breath didn’t have any telltale sourness, but when I opened the door to the corridor, Maud was standing outside, her arms crossed over the ratty old Smiths T-shirt that she wears instead of proper pyjamas.

  She said nothing, but there was something in her expression that I didn’t like. It was a look of mingled concern and something else, I’m not sure what. I think it might have been . . . pity? The thought made me angry.

  She was leaning against the wall, blocking my way, and she didn’t move as I came out and shut the bathroom door behind me.

  “Sorry.” I shook my hair back from my face, trying to look unconcerned. “Were you waiting long?”

  “Yes,” she said flatly. “Long enough. Are you all right?”

  “Of course,” I said, pushing past her, forcing her to step backwards against the wall. “Why wouldn’t I be?” I called back over my shoulder.

  She shrugged, but I know what she meant. I know exactly what she meant. I thought about the expression on her face, the way her flat black eyes followed me as I walked back to my attic. And as I sit here in bed writing this on my knees, watching the magpies swooping low over the snowy garden, I am wondering . . . how far can I trust her?

  CHAPTER 11

  * * *

  Mr. Treswick led the way through a side entrance, into a vaulted vestibule tiled with red terra-cotta squares. Hal followed him in, shaking her head as the hiss of the rain was replaced with the hollow drip of water pattering from her coat, and Mr. Treswick’s umbrella.

  “Mrs. Warren!” he called, his voice echoing along the long corridor. “Oh, Mrs. Warren! It’s Mr. Treswick.”

  There was a silence, and then Hal heard, as though from a great distance, the click-click, click-click of heels on the tiled floor, each set of steps followed by an unfamiliar chink. She turned her head, and through the glass panes of the door to her left, she saw an old lady dressed all in black half walking, half hobbling along the corridor.

  “Is that Mrs. Warren?” she whispered to Mr. Treswick, before she could think better of the question. “But she looks—”

  “She must be eighty if she’s a day,” Mr. Treswick said under his breath. “But she wouldn’t hear of retirement while your grandmother was alive.”

  “Is that you, Bobby?”

  Her accent was broad Cornish, and the voice was cracked as a raven’s. Mr. Treswick winced, and in spite of her nerves, Hal was a little amused to see a flush of red on his gray-stubbled cheek. He removed his overcoat and coughed.

  “It’s Robert Treswick, Mrs. Warren,” he called down the corridor, but she shook her head.

  “Speak up, boy, I can’t hear you. All you young people are the same. Mumble mumble.”

  As she came closer, Hal saw that she was using a cane, and the iron ferrule on the tiles was the chink she had heard. It gave her step an odd, uneven rhythm, click-click . . . chink, click-click . . . chink.

  At long last she reached the door and paused to fumble with her cane, before Mr. Treswick sprang to hold the door open, and she hobbled through.

  “So.” She ignored Mr. Treswick, and her surprisingly dark, bright eyes settled on Hal. There was an expression in them that Hal couldn’t read—but it wasn’t warmth. Far from it. A kind of . . . speculation, perhaps? There was absolutely no smile in her voice as she said, “You’re the girl. Well, well, well.”

  “I—” Hal swallowed. Her throat was dry as dust, and she became suddenly aware of her defensive stance—her folded arms, her hair hanging down to shield her eyes. Think of the client, her mother’s voice in her head. Think of what they want to see when they come to you. She wished she had taken out her large thorn earring, but it was too late for that now. She forced a smile, making her face as open and unthreatening as possible. “Yes, that’s me.”

  She held out a hand to shake, but the old lady turned away as if she hadn’t seen it, and she was forced to let it drop.

  “They didn’t tell me if you were coming,” Mrs. Warren shot over her shoulder, “but I had a room aired in case. You’ll be wanting to change your clothes.”

  It was a command, not a request, and Hal nodded in meek agreement.

  “Follow me,” Mrs. Warren said, and Hal caught Mr. Treswick’s eye and raised one eyebrow in mute question. He gave a little dry smile and waved his hand towards the stairs, but Mrs. Warren hadn’t waited for Hal to acquiesce and was already making her way painfully up the long flight, step by step, her arthritic knuckles clamped to the banister.

  “It’ll have to be the attic,” she said, as Hal hastened up after her, her case bumping each step. There were brass stair-rods across each tread, but so much dust had lodged in the crevices around them, it was almost impossible to see them, or the pattern of the carpet beneath.

  “Of course,” Hal said breathlessly, as they reached the landing, and Mrs. Warren began another flight, this one carpeted with a more utilitarian stair runner that felt hard and bumpy beneath Hal’s feet. “No problem at all.”

  “There’s no point in complaining,” Mrs. Warren said grimly, as if Hal had done so. “No warning I had, so you’ll have to put up with it.”

  “It’s fine,” Hal said. She pushed down the prickle of resentment at Mrs. Warren’s manner and smiled again, hoping it showed through in her voice. “Honestly. I wouldn’t dream of complaining. I’m very grateful to have a room at all.”

  They had reached what seemed to be the top landing. There were no more stairs from here—only a tiled passageway with a long row of what seemed to be bedrooms opening off either side. A window must have been open in one of the bedrooms, for there was a cold draft blowing, forceful enough to stir the dust around Hal’s ankles as she stood.

  “Lavatory is there,” Mrs. Warren said shortly, nodding at a door at the far end of the tiled corridor. “The bathroom is a floor below.”

  The bathroom? Surely there had to be more than one bathroom for this whole house?

  But Mrs. Warren had opened one of the doors that Hal had taken to be bedrooms, revealing a narrow staircase set into the wall. She pressed a light switch, and a bare bulb at the top flickered and illuminated a narrow flight, this one bare wood, with no carpet, not even drugget, just a thin strip of lino at the top landing. The old lady started up the steps, her metal-tipped cane thudding against the wood as she climbed.

  Hal waited at the foot of the stairs, under the pretense of catching her breath.

/>   There was something she didn’t like about that staircase—perhaps it was the narrowness of it, or the lack of natural light, for there were no windows, not even a skylight, or perhaps it was the way that it seemed to be shut away from the rest of the house, the door at the bottom hiding its very existence. But she swallowed, and pushing the door as wide as she could, she hitched up her case and followed Mrs. Warren up the final flight.

  “Is this where the servants used to sleep?” she asked, hearing her voice echo in the confined space.

  “No,” Mrs. Warren said shortly, without turning back. Hal felt snubbed, but when they reached the landing, Mrs. Warren stopped and looked at her, and seemed to relent a little. “Not anymore. They moved the servants’ quarters over the kitchen when they rebuilt,” she said. “Of course, they’re all shut up now, there’s only me left and I sleep downstairs, next to Mrs. Westaway’s room, in case she needed me in the night.”

  “I see,” Hal said humbly. She shivered. She had never felt more out of place, in her draggled wet coat, her laddered tights, her short black hair drying into spikes from the rain. “She was lucky to have you.”

  “She was,” Mrs. Warren said. Her mouth was a thin line of pinched disapproval. “God knows the family cared little enough for her comfort, though I see you’re all happy enough to come down picking like magpies over the spoils now.”

  “I—I didn’t—” Hal started, nettled, but then stopped as Mrs. Warren turned away and hobbled down a short, unlit corridor towards a closed door, rattling the knob with her gnarled hand. What could she say? It was true, after all, at least as far as she herself was concerned. She let her mouth fall shut and waited as Mrs. Warren struggled with the stiff knob, her cane clamped under her arm.

  “Damp,” Mrs. Warren said shortly over her shoulder, as she tugged at the knob. “Frame swells.”

  “Can I—” Hal began, but it was too late—as the words left her mouth, the door gave suddenly, and a flood of cold light illuminated the landing.

  Mrs. Warren stood back and let Hal pass through. Inside was a narrow little room, painfully bare, with a metal bedstead in one corner, a washstand in the other, and a barred nursery window overlooking the garden. There was no carpet, only bare boards, and a tiny knotted rug by the head of the bed. There was also no radiator, just a small grate filled with coal and kindling already laid out.

  The bars gave Hal a strange feeling in the pit of her stomach, though she could not have said why. Perhaps it was the incongruity of finding them up here, in the attic. On the ground floor they might have been needed to keep out intruders. But up here there was only one explanation: these were bars not to keep someone out—but in. Only . . . this was not a nursery room, where the bars might be needed to safeguard a clambering toddler. It was a maid’s room, far from the rest of the house, totally impractical for a small child.

  What kind of person needed to stop their maids from escaping?

  “Well, here you are,” Mrs. Warren said irritably. “There’s matches on the mantelpiece, but we’re short of coal, so don’t be thinking you can have a fire willy-nilly, now. There’s no money to burn. I’ll leave you to unpack.”

  “Th-thank you,” Hal said. The little room was extremely cold, and her teeth chattered, though she tried to keep her jaw clenched tight to stop it. “Wh-when should I c-come down?”

  “The others aren’t here yet,” Mrs. Warren said, seeming to answer her question without quite doing so. “No doubt they went around by the coast road, it’s always bad this time of year with the storms.”

  And she turned, before Hal could ask any more questions, and stumped off down the narrow stairs. Hal waited, and heard the door at the bottom slam smartly shut, and then she sank down on the little bed and took in her surroundings.

  The room was barely a couple of meters side to side, and the barred window gave it the feeling of a cell, even with the door open. It was also achingly cold. As the air settled around her, Hal realized that she could see her breath if she huffed hard enough. There was a mint-green eiderdown on the bed, and Hal pulled it off the mattress and wrapped it around her shoulders. The fragile satin pulled beneath her fingers so that she was afraid the fabric might disintegrate in her grip, but she was too cold to sit without some kind of warmth.

  She thought about lighting the fire, but it seemed pointless when she would have to go downstairs to face the family. And just the thought of asking the disapproving Mrs. Warren for another scuttle of coal made Hal quail, remembering her thinned lips and grim expression.

  Did Mrs. Warren dislike all the family this much, or was it just Hal? she wondered. Perhaps it was because of the short notice of her arrival—though Mrs. Warren hadn’t seemed exactly surprised. Perhaps it was Hal’s bedraggled dress and shoes. Or could it be . . . did she suspect something? There had been something Hal couldn’t quite pin down in her expression, when she saw Hal, a kind of wary . . . calculation. It was the look, Hal suddenly thought, of a child who sees a cat appear among a flock of pigeons, and stands back to watch the slaughter. What did it mean?

  Hal shivered again, in spite of the eiderdown, and then, remembering her vow on the journey over, she pulled her phone out of her bag and opened up the search screen. Her fingers, as she typed the words in the search box, were stiff and reluctant, and not only with cold, and she paused for a long moment before she hit the search button.

  Maud Westaway St. Piran missing dead

  Then she pressed ENTER.

  The little icon whirred for a long time, long enough for Hal to look doubtfully at the coverage bars in the top right-hand corner of the screen. Two out of five. Not great . . . but it should be enough to get some kind of Internet, surely?

  At last the results flashed up on the screen, and Hal felt her stomach flip, for there, right at the top of the list, was the piece she had known would come up. It was a newspaper link about her mother’s death.

  Maud Westaway St. Piran missing dead said the grayed-out text beneath the link, showing that it didn’t tick all the search boxes, but that, nonetheless, this piece was the best match.

  Hal didn’t click. She didn’t need to. The information she needed didn’t lie in this piece, with its lurid details and sorrowful tone. Self-styled psychic practitioner, Hal remembered, and familiar local figure in her characterful dress, as though her mother were one step away from a medicated stay in a secure facility, rather than a cheerful, down-to-earth woman making a living for herself and her child in the best way she could.

  Great loss to the pier community, though, that was true.

  Hal still remembered the way they had gathered round her when she returned to her mother’s booth, the mute sympathy on their faces, the way she had found that for months and months afterwards, cups of hot tea would be left quietly outside her kiosk on cold days, how the mistakes in the change at the fish-and-chips stand were somehow always in her favor.

  Now she blinked as she scrolled past the links about the crash, her vision blurring as she tried to make out the text in the other pieces. She clicked through to a few, but none of them were related. There was a missing West Highland terrier in St. Piran, and a slew of totally irrelevant links from baby name websites and the St. Piran tourist board.

  At last, she shut down the screen, drew the eiderdown around her shoulders, and simply sat, looking out of the little barred window across the rain-spattered garden.

  Whoever Maud Westaway had been, whatever had happened to her, she seemed to have gone without a trace.

  CHAPTER 12

  * * *

  It was the sound of tires on the gravel outside the window that made Hal’s head jerk up, breaking into her thoughts. The satin eiderdown slithered from her shoulders and she snatched for it reflexively, shivering in the sudden gust of cold wind, and then let it fall as she went to the window to see who had arrived.

  She could not see the faces of the people below, only the tops of their heads and their umbrellas as they hurried across to the main doors, but she
could see the parked cars—they were the two long black sedans, sleek as sharks, that had made up the funeral cortège.

  The family had arrived. The real test was about to begin.

  She felt suddenly sick with nerves, lightheaded with tension. This was it. A face-to-face encounter with her supposed relatives. Was she really going to do this?

  She played people for a living—in her moments of clear-eyed honesty, she knew that. But this was different. This wasn’t just telling gullible people what they wanted to hear or already knew. This was a crime.

  “Bugger tea,” Hal heard, floating up the stairwell as she reached the bottom of the narrow attic staircase. “Brandy’s what I want—or whiskey, if you can’t do that, Mrs. Warren.”

  Hal heard no reply from Mrs. Warren, but there was a remark from one of the other brothers and a gust of laughter, and she heard one of Harding’s children complaining at having to put away his phone.

  This was it. The moment of truth. The words floated into her head unbidden, and she let out a short laugh. Truth? No. Lies. The moment of lies.

  She had been preparing for this her whole life.

  If anyone can do this, you can, Hal.

  She flexed her fingers, feeling like a boxer before the fight—no, that wasn’t quite right, for this was going to be a test of mental agility, not physical. Like a grand master before a chess match, perhaps. She saw herself, as if from above, her hand hovering over a pawn, ready to make the first move.

  The cold seemed to be leaving her now, and her face felt flushed and hot with anticipation as she descended the next flight of stairs, her heart beating hard beneath the black dress.

  “Let’s see if we can’t get you some hot chocolate, darling,” she heard from a female voice—not Mrs. Warren, for it was clipped and rather monied. Mitzi, presumably? “That morbid wait by the grave was the absolute limit, Harding. Kitty’s frozen, where are the bloody radiators in this place?”