The Death of Mrs. Westaway

“I’m—I’m okay!” she called shakily, but there was no response, only the noise of the wind, and beneath it the far-off sound of a muffled snore, coming from somewhere below.

Cautiously, Hal sat up. She felt for her glasses, before realizing she hadn’t put them on in the first place. They were still on her bedside table, which was something at least to be thankful for. She’d almost rather have a broken arm than broken glasses, so far from home. Her phone was on the bottom step of the stairs, facedown, the torch still shining up to the ceiling, and when Hal picked it up the screen was cracked, but the phone itself still seemed to be working.

The water glass, on the other hand, had smashed—there were shards scattered on the floor, and her hand was bleeding, but there was no blood coming from the place where her head had hit the floor, and when she flexed her arms, no bones seemed to be broken. As she got shakily to her feet, dizziness swept over her, but she didn’t fall, only steadied herself against the wall, and it passed.

It was almost unbelievable luck that she hadn’t broken an arm, or even her neck. The wall of the corridor was only feet away from the bottom of the stairs. If she had hit it with her skull, she would have been dead.

A wave of trembling sickness washed over her. Delayed shock, she thought numbly, and she sank down onto the bottom step, feeling her head throb where she’d hit it against the floor, and the uncontrollable shaking in her arms and legs. She was no longer thirsty, and in any case, the idea of picking her way through the shards of shattered glass in bare feet felt impossible. She wanted only to crawl back into bed where it was safe and warm, and let the trembling in her limbs subside.

Slowly she got to her hands and knees, and not quite trusting herself to go upright, she crawled up the stairs, her phone in her hand.

In almost any other position she might have missed it—but as it was, the light from the phone fell straight onto it. It was one step down from the top. A rusty nail, driven into the skirting board at ankle height, a length of snapped string still trailing from it.

Hal felt her breath catch in her throat, and she stopped, frozen, the beam from her phone shining onto the innocuous little thing.

Then she got hold of herself, and forced herself to swing the beam to the other side of the stairs.

There was its twin, driven into the same place, only this one had been wrenched almost out of place by the force of her fall.

She hadn’t tripped. This was no accident.

Someone had driven in those nails, and strung the string across the top step, taking advantage of the fused bulb at the top of the stairs to ensure that she wouldn’t see, even in daylight, what had been done.

It hadn’t been there when she went up to bed, she was sure of it. She couldn’t have passed up the stairs without tripping over it.

Which meant that someone had come up here, while she was sleeping, to set the trap.

But no . . . she wasn’t thinking clearly—they could not have hammered in the nails. She would have heard them. Which meant . . . it meant that this had been premeditated. The nails had been there all along, waiting for the removal of the bulb, and the string to be set up. Someone had been intending this. They had prepared for her to return, back from Brighton, and they had guarded against it.

Hal’s heart seemed to slow inside her chest, a great stillness settling over her.

She should have been panicking. But it was as though something had hold of her inside, and was squeezing . . . squeezing. . . .

She crawled rather than walked the last few steps into the attic room, and shut the door, before subsiding with her back against the wooden panels. Her head was in her hands, and she was thinking, not for the first time, of the bolts on the outside, and of the silent malevolence of the person who had come up those stairs, just a few hours earlier, and set a trap designed to kill.

As she closed her eyes and pressed her forehead into her knees, an image floated into Hal’s head unbidden.

It was the eight of swords. A woman, blindfolded, bound, surrounded by a prison of blades, and the ground at her feet bloodred as though she were already bleeding from cuts that could never free her.

The cards tell you nothing you don’t already know. It was her mother’s voice, steady in her ear. They have no power, remember that. They can’t reveal any secrets or dictate the future. All they can do is show you what you already know.

Oh, but now she knew, all right.

The walls of the trap were closing around her, sharp enough to maim.

Now she knew that someone hated her enough to kill her. But why?

Because it didn’t make sense. A few hours before, she might have thought that it was an attempt by one of the brothers to regain his share of the inheritance he had thought was his. Because Hal was—had been—the residuary legatee. If she died, her share of the money obeyed the laws of intestacy, which meant that, in the absence of a husband, it would be divided among Mrs. Westaway’s children.

But now that she had admitted the truth, Harding, Ezra, and Abel had nothing left to fear from her. The money would revert to them whatever happened to her.

So why, then? Why now?

Get out—if you know what’s good for you.

Après moi, le déluge. . . .

What did it mean?

Hal’s head, where she had hit it, felt ready to burst, and it throbbed until she thought she might cry out from the pain of it.

Whatever she had done, whatever she had meant, Mrs. Westaway had started something with this legacy, and Hal was blindly following the sequence of events she had set off. Only, like the woman on the eight of swords, she was hedged about with dangers she could not even see.

At last, almost blind with the throbbing pain that had begun to envelop her entire skull, Hal crawled into bed, letting her aching head rest slowly on the cool pillow, closing her eyes, and pulling the blankets up to her chin as though they could protect her against the threats she felt crowding around.

She was almost asleep when a name came to her, like a suggestion whispered into an ear.

Margarida . . .

The word trickled slowly, like cool dark water, through the recesses of Hal’s skull, and in its wake, in spite of her tiredness, her mind began working, making connections.

Hal had claimed that her mother was Margarida Westaway—the girl called Maud in her mother’s diary. And, because of that claim, certain facts had been taken for granted. The fact that Maud had run away from Cornwall. The fact that she had moved to Brighton and had a daughter. And the fact that she had died in a car crash, just three years ago.

But the truth was very different.

The question was, how different.

And how far would someone go to keep the true facts from coming out?

One thing was certain: this was no longer about the money, for Hal had kissed good-bye to that with her confession. There was something deeper and stranger at stake here—something that someone would kill to conceal.

She should have been afraid, and part of her was. But deep down, in the core of herself, the secret predatory self that she kept hidden and locked away, Hal knew. She would not run again. Someone had tried to scare her away once, and it had almost worked. But it would not work again.

Now she wanted answers. What had set her mother running so long ago? Why had she gone to such lengths to lie about her father? And what had happened to Maud?

And most of all—what was this secret, the secret that lay at the heart of all of this mystery, that someone was ready to kill to protect?

Hal wanted answers to all those questions, and more. And she was ready to fight.

CHAPTER 39

* * *

There was no question of going back to sleep, and at last Hal could bear it no longer.

Her phone on the bedside table said 5:05. Too early to get up, but she could not lie there in the darkness for two more hours. She sat up and reached for her glasses, the movement making the back of her head throb painfully, but at last she had them settled on her nose, and she fired up her phone, frowning at the little cracked screen as she tried to work out what to search.

Something had happened to Maud Westaway—something that someone in this house knew, and did not want anyone to find out. Was it Mrs. Warren?

Hal thought again of her face last night, of the wicked gloating pleasure, and the bald admission that she had known all along of Hal’s deception. Whatever it was, Hal thought, she would not put Mrs. Warren past knowing about it and keeping it secret for her own twisted reasons.