The Death of Mrs. Westaway

The woman said nothing; she only looked at Hal, her eyes so hungry they made Hal almost afraid. Her face in the candlelight was shadowed, the eye sockets sunken.

“Ultimately,” Hal said softly, “you have to decide for yourself what the cards are telling you, but my feeling is that the Priestess is telling you to listen to your intuition. You know the answer already. It’s there in your heart.”

The woman drew back from Hal, and then she nodded, very slowly, and bit her white, chapped lips.

Then she stood, threw down a crumple of banknotes on the table, and turned on her heel. The kiosk door banged behind her, letting in a gust of wind, and Hal snatched for the notes, spreading them out, and then shook her head when she saw how much had been left.

“Wait,” she called. She ran to the door, forcing it open against the thrust of the wind. It caught from her fingers and slammed back against the side of the kiosk, making her wince for the fragile Victorian glass, but she could not spare more than a glance back to check it was okay. The woman was already disappearing.

She began to run, her feet slipping on the wet planks.

“Wait!”

The wind had picked up, and a mix of rain and salt spray stung her eyes as she reached the entrance to the pier, the illuminated sign above the entrance casting long, flickering shadows.

“Wait, come back!” she called into the wet night, straining through the drizzle for a shadowy figure. “This is far too much!”

She was panting, but now she tried to still her breath, listening for the sound of footsteps hurrying through the darkness; she could hear nothing above the roar of the sea and the patter of the rain.

The promenade was empty, and the woman had disappeared into the darkness as if made from rain herself.

• • •

HAL WAS WET AND SHIVERING by the time she gave up, the notes still crumpled in her hand, fast softening in the rain that dripped from the canopy. Sixty pounds the woman had left. A ridiculous sum—more than four times Hal’s usual charge for a fifteen-minute reading. And for what—for making a few simple guesses, and telling her to listen to what she already knew?

Shaking her head, she pushed the notes into her pocket with a shiver and turned around, ready to go back to her booth, close up for the night. As she passed beneath the covered entrance, she put her hand down automatically to pat the plastic guide dog with the slot in his head for charitable donations, as hundreds of children did every time they passed him. Hal had always patted him as a little girl, every time she visited her mother, and sometimes, if they had had a bit of money to spare, her mother had let her put a pound in the slot at the top. It was a custom she tried to keep up—though lately, the pounds had dwindled to fifty-pence pieces, and sometimes to pennies.

Tonight, with those anonymous letters fresh in her mind, she hadn’t been intending to give anything at all, but now, as she passed through the high, arched gates, she hesitated, and turned back.

The dog sat patiently beneath the inadequate shelter of the canopy, along with two other donation boxes, though the others were less popular with children. One was a ship in a frame, for the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, and the other was a giant ice cream cone with a sign saying SUPPORT THE WEST PIER’S CHOSEN CHARITY! THIS MONTH WE ARE DONATING TO:——and a space to advertise the current good cause.

Now Hal bent to look at the wet paper slip that had been inserted. It was hard to read the letters, for rain or seawater had got in behind the plastic and made the ink run, but Hal could just make out the words. THE LIGHTHOUSE PROJECT—DRUG REHABILITATION IN BRIGHTON AND HOVE. Hal felt in her pocket for the fistful of wet notes the woman had left, and she thought of the pile of red demands on the living room table, and the typed note slid beneath her kiosk door.

Her hand shook as she counted out the banknotes, and then one by one, she shoved them into the slot of the ice cream cone, trying not to think of the shoes they could have bought, the bills she could have paid, and the hot dinners she could have eaten with the money.

At last the final note fluttered through the slot, and as she turned for her kiosk, the cone lit up, its bright pastel glow throwing a long shadow into the rainy night as she walked away.

CHAPTER 7

* * *

Hal shivered as she made her way back to her kiosk. She wished she had brought her coat in the headlong rush to catch up with the woman. Now she was wet through, and she would have to walk home in cold, wet clothes, and waste more money on gas to try to warm up before bed.

She picked her way carefully, avoiding the broken planks, feeling the rain-wet wood slippery beneath her feet, the puddles glittering in the few lights still showing. It wasn’t yet ten o’clock, but the pier was almost closed—the ballroom was locked, Reg’s tea kiosk was shuttered, and the candy floss stand had the blinds pulled down inside. NO CASH LEFT ON THESE PREMESIS, read the sign, though if Hal hadn’t seen it a hundred times before she would have had a hard time making out the words, with the strings of lights swinging in the gusting wind and casting crazy lurching shadows over everything. The pier didn’t shut for the winter—it had once, but now it was a year-round operation, like its twin sister farther up the beach—but there was a definite air of winding down at the end of the season, and Hal sighed as she thought of the long winter days that lay ahead. Now, though, she wondered—could she afford to keep going? But if she didn’t, what was the alternative?

When she got back to the kiosk, the door was closed, though she had no memory of shutting it. She put her hand to the salt-rusted knob and turned the door handle, and slipped inside the dark booth, feeling relief as the wind dropped and the vestigial warmth from the space heater enveloped her.

“Hello, sunshine,” said a voice, and the red-shaded lamp on the table clicked on.

Hal felt the blood drain from her face, and her heart started beating in her ears with a sound like the crash of waves on a beach.

The man standing in the pool of lamplight was very tall, and very broad, and very bald, and he was smiling, but not in a pleasant way. He was smiling like someone who enjoyed scaring people—and Hal was scared.

“Wh . . .” she tried, but her voice didn’t seem to be working. “What are you doing here?”

“Maybe I’ve come for a reading,” the man said pleasantly, but he had his hand in his coat pocket, caressing something in there in a way Hal didn’t like. He spoke with a slight lisp, his speech whistling through a gap in his two front teeth.

“I’m closed,” she managed to say, trying to keep her voice steady.

“Ah, don’t be like that,” the man said reproachfully. “You could manage a reading for an old friend of your ma’s, now, couldn’t you?”

Hal felt something inside her grow cold and still.

“What do you know about my mother?”

“I’ve been asking around about you. Friendly curiosity like.”

“I’d like you to leave,” Hal said. There was a panic button in her booth, but it was on the far side, where the man himself was standing, and in any case, it would all depend on whether the pier security guard was in his office.

The man shook his head, and she felt the panic rise up, choking her.

“I said, get out!”

“Tut-tut,” said the man, shaking his head, the smile slipping for a moment, though it was still there in his eyes, a kind of amusement at the terror he saw in her, and at the way she was trying to hide it. The lamplight glinted off his bald head. “What would your ma say to her little girl, treating an old friend of hers like that?”

“I’m not a little girl,” Hal said through gritted teeth. She wrapped her arms around herself, trying to stop her hands shaking. “And I don’t believe for a second you knew my mother. What do you want?”

“I think you know what we want. You can’t say we didn’t try to do this the nice way. Mr. Smith wrote you that note himself, he did. He wouldn’t do that for all his clients.”

“What do you want,” Hal repeated stonily, but it wasn’t really a question. She knew. Just as she knew what the note meant. The man shook his head again.

“Come on, now, Miss Westaway. Let’s not play games. It’s not like you didn’t know the terms when you signed up.”