The Death of Mrs. Westaway

Outside in the cold, bracing air, her panicked certainty of last night had begun to recede, leaving her feeling a little foolish. A blown lightbulb, which someone had got halfway through replacing and then forgotten. A couple of nails, probably left over from when a carpet runner had covered the stairs, and a single thread, both seen by the wavering light of a mobile phone—it wasn’t much to build a conspiracy theory on. And besides, it didn’t make sense. Even if Maud was dead, and even if someone wanted to prevent that fact from coming out, what would be the sense in trying to kill Hal? She had already revealed the truth—that her mother wasn’t Maud. There was nothing left to disclose. Tripping her down the stairs would be a pointless risk, and achieve nothing. The horse had bolted—and there was no stable door to close.

In the slowly brightening dawn, her fears of the night before suddenly seemed not just laughable but impossible, and she felt her cheeks flush a little as she remembered her panicked crawl back to her room, and the thumping of her heart as she sat against the door with her knees to her chest.

Oh, Hal . . . Her mother’s voice in her ear. Always so dramatic . . .

She shook her head.

She had been walking aimlessly, letting her feet take her where they wanted, and now, as she looked back over her shoulder to the house, she realized quite how far she had come.

For a moment she stood, looking back at the green sea of lawn between herself and the house, and beyond that, the tangle of stables and outbuildings, glass houses and kitchen plots.

How many homes could you build in this one garden? How many people could you house, and how many jobs could you create?

And here it all was, all this land, all this beauty, ring-fenced, first for one dying old woman, and now for her heirs.

Well, it was no longer her problem. Ezra, Harding, and Abel could fight over it now. What would they do—sell it? Perhaps it would become a hotel, with the grounds given over to swimming pools and glamping yurts. Or perhaps someone would knock the house down and build a golf course, with rolling green as far as the eye could see, a grass-green sea meeting the blue of the horizon.

Today the far-off sea was gray, tipped with white horses, and the wind was fresh in Hal’s face as she walked, always downhill.

She had been planning to get as far as the boundary and then cut back round to the house, but when she looked away from the headland, she realized that her feet had led her inexorably back to the path they always seemed to take—the clump of trees, with the dark water glimmering through.

This time, however, Hal looked at the water with different eyes. It was not just any lake that lay within the dense, overgrown copse. It was the lake. The one her mother had written about in her diary.

And there, between the bare, frosted trunks, she could see the shape of the boathouse.

She changed direction, heading down towards it, curious now.

The trees that surrounded it were a mix of beech, oak, and yew, only the yew still green. The others were bare, a few brown leaves clinging to the branches, fluttering in the wind that came up the valley. As Hal picked her way down the overgrown path, pushing aside brambles and stepping across nettles, she found the words of the diary running through her head—the description of them taking the boats out that day. “Come on, Ed,” she shouted, and he stood up, grinned at me, and then followed her to the water’s edge, and took a running jump.

Ed. Edward. Could it really be true? She remembered how Edward had come to meet her that evening at the lake, his laconic voice: Oh . . . it used to be a boathouse . . . back in the day. And she thought, too, of the way Abel had deliberately steered her away from it that first morning, before she had even known what it was. Was there something they did not want her to see?

The door was closed and seemed to be locked, but Hal could see through the cracks in the blackened, gappy planks. The building was open to the lake on the water side, and there were two platforms on either side, and in between a strip of dark water.

She was leaning on the door, peering through a gap between two of the planks, when suddenly the rotten wood gave and the door burst inwards, sending Hal stumbling inside, slipping on the wet, slimy platform so that she staggered, trying to save herself from shooting into the water, and fell to her knees, barely inches from the lake surface.

She knelt there, panting, steadying herself. The fall had jarred bones already bruised from last night, making her grit her teeth with pain, but as she sat back on her heels nothing seemed to be broken.

Was she safe? Hal looked down at the jetty planks beneath her feet, at the lapping, leaf-strewn water, thin shards of ice floating on the surface. She wasn’t sure. This place looked ready to collapse into the lake at the slightest provocation, and she would not have been surprised if her foot had gone straight through the planks into the water beneath. At least it was shallow. Cautiously, she picked up one of the sticks that had fallen through the holes in the roof, and pushing aside the fragile, broken sheets of ice, she tested the depth. Barely a foot before the stick jagged on something hard beneath the water, a smooth shape that showed pale as Hal pushed away the leaf mold with her stick.

As she peered closer through the dark, slightly peaty water, she recognized the shape of a boat, hull up beneath the water. Black, rotting leaf debris had settled over it, masking it, but her stick had stirred up the water, and faint streaks of white showed where she had trailed the tip. As her eyes got used to the dim light and the way the water slanted the perspective, Hal made out something else—a jagged hole near the keel. Had someone sunk it deliberately?

All of a sudden, this didn’t feel like the place her mother had described in her diary, the place where she had laughed and swum and played with her cousins, and with the boy she was about to fall in love with. It felt . . . The realization came to Hal suddenly, like a cold touch on the shoulder. It felt like a place where something had died.

Hal shuddered, and stepping as lightly as she could, she stood and moved backwards, through the broken door, and back out into the cold morning light. The air tasted fresh and sea-clean after the scent of brackish water and rotten wood in the boathouse, and she breathed it deeply. As she did, her phone pinged with a reminder, and she pulled it out of her pocket to check, though the lurch in her stomach told her what she already knew.

11.30—appt with Mr Treswick.

God. Well, there was no point in putting it off. And even a kind of relief to think that in a few hours the whole business would be laid to rest. She just had to hope that Mr. Treswick would be as accepting of her part in the “mix-up” as Harding, Abel, and Ezra had been . . . or appeared to be, at least.

Hal shivered, pushing her hands deep into the pockets of her fleece. Suddenly toast and coffee—even Mrs. Warren’s coffee—seemed very welcome, and she walked quickly up the hill to the house, her frosty breath streaming over her shoulder.

Behind her, the boathouse door swung quietly closed, but she did not look back.

CHAPTER 40

* * *

“Oh dear.” Mr. Treswick removed his glasses and polished them, though they were quite clean already, from what Hal could make out. “Oh dear, oh dear. This is most awkward.”

“Please.” Hal put out a hand. “Please, it’s my fault. I should have—I should have said something earlier.”

“I blame myself, very much,” Mr. Treswick was saying, as if he hadn’t heard. “I must say, it absolutely never occurred to me that Maggie’s name was Margarida too. I knew of course that there had been a cousin, but everyone referred to her as Maggie, and I’m afraid I simply assumed her full name was Margaret. Oh dear, this is extremely problematic.”

“But the legacy cannot stand, presumably?” Harding said impatiently. “That’s surely the main thing?”

“I will have to take advice,” Mr. Treswick said. “My instinct is to say that no, it does not stand, since Mrs. Westaway clearly meant the legacy to pass to her daughter’s child. But the fact that Harriet is named along with her address . . . oh dear. This is very knotty indeed.”

“Well . . .” Ezra rose and stretched, so that Harriet heard his spine and shoulders cracking. “We’ve done all we can to sort this out for the moment, so I suggest we leave it to the lawyers now.”