The Death of Mrs. Westaway

“You should have known,” the old lady snapped. She clicked the hoover back into its upright position, and picked up her stick. “Coming here, swanning around like you owned the place—”

“I wasn’t!” Hal said, goaded out of politeness. “I wouldn’t do that at all—I just didn’t kn—”

“You ask, do you hear me? You don’t go poking into things that don’t concern you.” Mrs. Warren stopped, pursing her lips shut as though she would have said more, but had thought better of it, and glared at Hal with undisguised hostility.

“Look, I said I’m sorry,” Hal said. She crossed her arms protectively across her chest, nettled by the injustice of it—and yet unable to defend herself, because she could not afford to antagonize someone she might need to mine for information. Besides, at bottom the old lady was right. She was an intruder, however much she might pretend otherwise. “I’ll go back to the other wing. I was—” A sudden inspiration came. “I was just going to ask if you needed any help.”

She smiled, pleased with her own quick-wittedness, but it faded from her lips as she saw Mrs. Warren draw herself up to her not-very-full height, her expression venomous.

“Well, aren’t we the gracious little lady. I may be getting on, but I’m not quite in my dotage, and I don’t need help from the likes of you.” Mrs. Warren managed to make the final words sound like an insult. “Breakfast will be at eight.”

And she turned and switched on the hoover again.

Hal retreated quietly, closing the door behind her, and went back into the conservatory, feeling ruffled by the encounter. How could Mrs. Warren have taken her last words so personally? It was as if she had wanted to take offense.

Aren’t we the gracious little lady.

The implication stung—the more so because it was so untrue. If it had been Richard or Kitty at the door, then she could have understood. But Hal’s upbringing had been about as far from being born with a silver spoon as you could possibly get. She thought of her own childhood, of pushing their ancient, coughing hoover around the living room after school, before her mother got home from the pier, wanting to take some of the load off where she could. The secondhand clothes her mother had picked over at the charity shops, the boys’ shoes she had been forced to wear when there were no girls’ ones in her size. You know what? her mother had said, pleading with Hal with her eyes to like them. I think they’re cooler anyway. They suit you. And Hal had smiled and nodded and worn them with as much pride as she could muster. I prefer them, she’d told the girls at school. They’re better for running and jumping and playing football.

It had come to be true in the end.

You know nothing about me! she wanted to shout back through the sitting room door.

She walked back slowly through the conservatory, wondering what to do until the others came down. Outside she could see, dimly, through the green mold on the panes, the lawn stretching down to the sea, and beyond it the windswept yews, the ones farthest from the house half bent over by the continual sea wind. The magpies were strutting on the lawn, and Hal thought of the rhyme that Mr. Treswick had recited yesterday. She couldn’t make out the number of birds through the clouded glass, but there must be at least seven, maybe more, and it seemed suddenly right—in this house full of secrets.

Well, it was very plain she wasn’t going to get any answers from Mrs. Warren. The hoover was still humming from behind the sitting room door, but Hal no longer had any faith in her ability to plumb the housekeeper for information, even when she emerged. And the rest of the house was quiet. But perhaps she could use this interlude to her advantage.

Stepping softly, she opened the third door leading out from the conservatory. It led into a small hallway, with a toilet opening off one side of it, the cistern dripping hollowly, and on the other side of it a door, firmly closed.

Hal glanced behind her, thinking of Mrs. Warren’s accusations of poking and prying, but the vacuum cleaner was still going, and with a defiant spurt of adrenaline she reached out and turned the handle. She slipped inside, and closed the door behind her, as quietly as she could.

It was a study—but one that had plainly not been used in many years. Dust was thick on the books, cobwebs skeined across the desk blotter, and the telephone that rested on the desk was yellowed Bakelite of the kind Hal had only seen in films. There was a cracked leather book on the desk embossed with the words Diary Planner in faded gilt lettering, and very, very gently, Hal opened the cover. Desk diary and day planner 1979, she read. It was older than Hal herself. When she let the cover fall back, it made a sound like a soft thud, and a little cloud of dust rose up.

Whose room had this been? It was profoundly masculine in a way Hal couldn’t quite define, and she could not imagine Mrs. Westaway using it, somehow. Was it Mr. Westaway’s? What had happened to him?

She leafed through the desk diary for a few pages, hoping something useful might leap out at her—Maud’s birthday seemed too good to hope for, but there might be some nugget of information she could use to her advantage. But the writing was so crabbed it was hard to make anything out, and those notes she did decipher were resolutely unpromising and businesslike—CF meeting . . . Telephone Webber . . . 12.30 Mr Woeburn, Barclays.

Hal closed it gently and turned her attention to the rest of the study. Opposite the desk were shelves of books, rising to the ceiling, as dusty and cobwebbed as everything else—all except, Hal suddenly noticed, for one volume, tucked away at the far top right, a slim anonymous book with a buttercup-yellow spine.

Beneath it was a set of wooden steps, designed for reaching the top shelves, and looking closer Hal could see that there was a footprint in the dust—still dusty itself, to be sure, but not the thirty years of dust covering the rest of the study.

Hal cocked her head, listening to the vacuum cleaner going back and forth, back and forth, and then climbed up the steps to retrieve the book, trying to set her feet as closely as possible within the other person’s prints.

It was a photograph album—she could tell that as soon as she took it down. As she opened it the thick pages creaked gently, the plastic film that covered the pictures unsticking with reluctance.

The first page held a black-and-white snapshot of a fat blond baby in an old-fashioned stroller and a miniature Aran sweater, staring blurrily out to the camera. There was a lawn behind him, falling away to the sea, and Hal recognized the view as the top terrace at Trepassen, just outside the drawing room. Harding, 1965 was written in neat pencil across one corner.

Hal turned the pages, feeling like a time traveler tiptoeing through the past. There was a little boy aged about two on the beach below the house, and another of him sat on the lap of a stiff, formal-looking man with a bristly mustache. The boy was presumably Harding, but who was the man? Mr. Westaway?

More photographs, a color snap of the same little boy, a little older this time, on a blue tricycle. H, June 1969, read the caption. Next came Harding in a school uniform, knock-kneed in his gray shorts, and then another baby appeared, red-faced and newborn. Maud? For a second Hal felt her heart leap as she looked to the penciled caption beneath for a date. But no—it read Abel Leonard born 13th March 1972. On the facing page was a black-and-white picture of the same baby lying on a hearthrug, kicking his little legs. A.L. 3 months, said the caption.

But before she could turn the page, a noise made her freeze. There were voices filtering in through the hallway—not Mrs. Warren, by the sound of it, but members of the family. And they were coming closer.

She must not be found in here, poking through the family papers.

Hastily, Hal shoved the book back into place and scrambled down the ladder, less careful this time about where she put her feet, and then stood at the bottom, holding her breath as she tried to work out where the voices were coming from. At first her heart was thudding too much to make it out. Then she heard, “Mrs. Warren! How might one obtain some coffee?” and realized they were coming from the breakfast room.

Quickly Hal slipped out of the study, closing the door behind her, and hurried through the little hallway. She was just in time—no sooner had she entered the conservatory than the door to the breakfast room opened and Harding’s head stuck out.