by Ruth Ware
There was a drop—but only a couple of feet, to the veranda below, and she carefully lowered her case out, then dropped to her knees to clamber out herself.
She was halfway there, one leg over the sill, when a voice spoke from the darkness of the other end of the room.
“That’s right. Sneak away in the night. Coward.”
Hal’s head shot up, her blood suddenly racing with fear.
“Who’s there?” she demanded, the fright making her voice more aggressive than she had meant, but the speaker at the other end of the room only laughed, and walked into the shaft of moonlight.
In truth, Hal hadn’t really needed to ask. She had known who it was—who else would be prowling so silently through the darkened rooms in the middle of the night?
Mrs. Warren.
“You can’t stop me,” Hal said. She put her chin up defiantly. “I’m going.”
“Who said I’m stopping you?” Mrs. Warren said. Her lip was curled, and there was a kind of scornful laugh in her voice. “I told you to leave once, and I’ll say it again. Good riddance. Good riddance to you, and your trash mother before you.”
“How dare you.” Hal found her voice was shaking—not with fear, but with anger. “What do you know about my mother?”
“More than you,” Mrs. Warren said. She leaned towards Hal, her voice full of a venom that made Hal shrink back. “Little milk-and-water coward. She was a conniving little gold digger, just like you.”
Hal scrambled backwards out of the window, and staggered to her knees on the paving. She was so angry, she felt a ringing in her ears, a kind of hissing fury. It was a mixture of fury . . . and shock.
“Don’t you dare talk about my mother that way. You don’t know what she went through to bring me up—”
“Don’t talk to me about what you don’t know anything about,” Mrs. Warren spat. “Get out. You should never have come back here.”
With that, she swung the window shut, so that Hal had to snatch her fingers out of the way, just before the heavy frame banged to.
She caught a glimpse of a face, filled with a poisonous hate, and then the shutter slammed closed too, and she heard the bang and scrape of the bar being pulled across.
Hal stood for a moment, her heart beating hard in her chest. She found that her arms were wrapped around herself, as if trying to shield herself from something—though from what, she didn’t know. As her heart slowed, she let her arms drop to her sides, and forced herself to breathe slowly and more deeply.
Thank God. Thank God she was out of that horrible house, and away from that horrible woman. Let them write. Let them come after her, for all she cared. They couldn’t make her return. They couldn’t make her show them anything. She could move—change addresses—change her name, if that was what it took.
About one thing, Mrs. Warren was right, she thought, as she picked up the case and began the long walk down the drive to the main road, to try to hitch a lift to Penzance. She should never have come.
• • •
IT WAS ONLY LATER, MUCH later, after a lift on a lorry on its way to St. Ives and a lecture from the driver about personal safety, when she was huddled in the doorway of Penzance station, her coat around her, waiting for the doors to open and the first train to London to arrive, that she had time to reflect on Mrs. Warren’s words, to unpick the realization beneath the hissed invective.
Conniving little gold digger.
Good riddance to you, and your trash mother before you.
Those words could mean only one thing: Mrs. Warren knew. She knew the truth.
She knew that Hal’s mother was not Mrs. Westaway’s daughter, but the dark-eyed cuckoo cousin, taken in as an orphan.
And she knew, therefore, that Hal herself was an impostor.
But she had said nothing. Why?
The puzzle had been in the back of Hal’s mind since last night, twisting and turning in her imagination, shaping and morphing into a dozen different possibilities. But it was only when the doors of the station opened and Hal rose stiffly, stretching out her chilled, cramped limbs and trying to smile at the station attendant, that Mrs. Warren’s last words spoke again inside her head, like a bitter echo.
She should never have come. That was right. But it wasn’t quite what Mrs. Warren had said.
What she had said was, You should never have come back.
CHAPTER 28
* * *
The words stayed with Hal, niggling at her on the long journey back to London.
Come back. What had she meant? Was it a slip of the tongue?
Was it possible that she had been to Trepassen as a child, too young to remember? But if so, Mrs. Warren must know full well the truth about her mother. In which case, why had she not said anything? Was she hiding something of her own?
Suddenly Hal longed to be back in Brighton. Not just to be home—but to look through the box of documents beneath her bed.
There was so much in there that she had never looked at—boxes of papers and old letters, diaries, postcards—things Hal had found too painful to read after her mother’s death, but that she could not bear to throw away. She had bundled them up and stored them, out of sight and out of mind, ready for a day when she would have a reason to go through them.
And now that day had come. For one thing Hal was sure of. Her mother did have a connection to that house. And so did Hal. She was not Mrs. Westaway’s granddaughter, that was certain. But she was a relation. And if her mother was connected to that place, so was she, and she was determined to find out what that connection was.
• • •
IT WAS THE MIDDLE OF the afternoon when Hal reached her flat, footsore from carrying her case all the way from Brighton station. She had no money for a cab, and her bus pass had expired.
As she drew closer to Marine View Villas, she found her heart was thumping hard in her chest—and not just from the long walk. Words hissed in her ear in time with her footsteps: Broken teeth . . . broken bones . . .
“Stop it.” She said the words aloud, crossing the road, and a boy of about fifteen looked sourly round at her.
“I’m eighteen, innit. You can’t tell me what to do.”
Hal shook her head, wanting to tell him that whatever he’d been talking about, it didn’t matter to her. But he was gone, and she was turning into her road, her heart going at a sickening rate now.
When she got to the narrow front door, there was no sign that it had been forced, but instead of unlocking it, she rang the bell for the ground-floor flat.
The man who answered it looked surprised, as well he might. Hal had never seen him before.
“Yes? Can I help?”
“Oh . . . I’m sorry.” Hal felt discomfited. She had been planning to ask Jeremy, who lived here, to accompany her up to her flat. “I didn’t realize—is Jeremy here?”
“Is he the guy who lived here before? I don’t know. I only just moved in this week. Are you a friend of his?”
“Yes—no. Not really,” Hal said. She hitched her case up, feeling her feet aching. “I live here, upstairs.”
“Oh. Right. Well, remember your key next time, eh? I was having a kip.”
“I’ve got my key,” Hal said. “It’s not that. I just wondered—look, you haven’t seen anyone hanging around here, have you? A bald man, bouncer type?”
“Don’t think so,” the man said briefly. He had lost interest now, and had retreated back to his own front door, plainly wanting to get back to his bed. “Ex, is he?”
“No.” Hal shifted her grip on the case, wondering how honest she could be. “No, I . . . I owe him some money, actually. And he’s not been very . . . understanding.”
“Ohhh . . .” The guy held up his hands, showing Hal his palms, really backing away now. “Look, I’m not getting mixed up in that, love. Your money, your business.”
“I’m not asking you to get mixed up,” Hal said crossly. “I just want to know, did you see anyone?”
“No,” the man sa
id, and he closed his flat door in her face.
Hal shrugged and sighed. It was not very reassuring, but it was as good as she was going to get.
As she climbed the stairs to her attic flat, she held her suitcase in front of her like a shield once again, and the image came to her, fresh and sharp, of that narrow staircase back in Cornwall, and a girl disappearing upwards, into darkness. When she shivered, it was not entirely at the thought of what might be waiting upstairs.
At the top she paused, trying to still her breathing, listening for any sound behind her front door. It was shut, and locked, and showed no signs of being forced, but then it had looked okay last time too. Clearly they had got in once, they could do so again.
When she bent and peered beneath the doorway, only a cool breeze blew in her face. There was no sign of any movement showing through the narrow crack, no feet standing silently behind the door.
At last, holding her phone like a weapon, her finger poised over the nine, she put her key into the lock as silently as she could, and then twisted and opened it with one swift movement, kicking the door hard back against the wall of the living room with a bang that echoed in the quiet hallway.
The room stood empty, silent, the only sound Hal’s pounding heart. No feet came running. Nevertheless, she didn’t put down her phone until she had checked every nook and cranny, from the bathroom, to her wardrobe, right down to the alcove behind the living room door where she kept the hoover.
Then, and only then, did her heart begin to slow, and she shut the front door, drawing the chain and bolt across, and let herself sink down on the sofa to rub her shaking hands over her face.
She could not stay here, that much was obvious.
Hal rarely cried, but as she sat there on the worn old sofa that she had jumped on as a child, in front of the cold gas fire her mother had lit so many afternoons after school, she felt her throat close with unshed tears, and a few self-pitying drops traced down her nose. But then she took a deep breath and scrubbed them away. This wouldn’t do. It wouldn’t help. She had to move on.
But before she did, she needed to find the truth, the answers to the questions she had been asking herself ever since Mr. Treswick’s letter had come through. She was sick of lies and lying. It was time for the truth.
Hal’s stomach was rumbling, so she made herself a piece of toast, and took it through into her bedroom. Then she pulled the box out from under the bed, tipped the contents upside down onto the rug, and began to sift through.
Upended like this, the first pieces of paper were the oldest—expired passports, exam certificates, old letters, photographs—though the dates were jumbled, the contents moved from drawer to drawer too many times to be strictly chronologically ordered. Hal opened an envelope at random, but it was nothing very interesting, just some of her mother’s old bank statements.
Beneath it there was a sheaf of baby photographs—herself, presumably, about six months old, smiling up at an unseen photographer. Another envelope contained the original rent contract for the flat, the ink faded, the staple in the corner beginning to rust. It was dated January 1995, a few months before Hal’s birth. Sixty pounds a week, her mother had agreed. It seemed impossibly low, even back then, and Hal thought she might almost have laughed, had she not been so close to tears.
She couldn’t do that. She couldn’t give way to self-pity. Tomorrow she would make a plan—find somewhere to go—but in the meantime she had to focus on the task at hand. She could not take all this with her, she’d have enough to do with packing her clothes and other essentials. So then—a pile for stuff that could be recycled. And for the stuff that she needed to keep, she could make one pile for personal papers relating to her mother, a pile for the flat, a pile of essentials—passports, birth certificates, anything that she might need to start her new life. And then finally on the bed she would put anything relating to Cornwall and Trepassen House, however tangentially. Perhaps there would be something there, some connection to the Westaways that would give her the foothold she needed to get out of this mess.
The first thing to go on the bed was a postcard. The writing side was blank, but the picture, when she turned it over, made Hal sit up. It featured Penzance. She recognized the harbor. The postcard was divided into four quarters, with Penzance on the bottom left, St. Michael’s Mount on the top right, and two photographs of unidentified headlands that Hal didn’t recognize on the other sections. The link might be a slim one, but it was evidence, however thin.
But what made Hal’s heart really miss a beat were letters—a sheaf of them, tied up with string. They were addressed to Margarida Westaway, at an address in Brighton Hal didn’t recognize, and the postmark was Penzance. Hal peered inside the first one, but there was no return address, and the ink was so faded she had trouble making out the words.
I am sending this to you via Lizzie . . . something Hal couldn’t make out . . . please don’t worry about the deposit—I have a little money left from my parents and beyond that I’ll—oh, God, I don’t know. I’ll tell fortunes on Brighton Pier, or read palms on the seafront. Anything to get away. There were more, several more. But it would take her hours to go through them and decipher the crabbed, faded writing. Resolutely she put them on the bed and carried on sifting.
She was only halfway down the box when she came across something wrapped in an old tea towel. It felt like a book. Hal frowned and picked it up, but the thing unraveled, and into her lap fell—yes, a book. But not a printed book. A diary.
Gently, Hal picked it up and began to leaf through the pages. Great chunks had been ripped out—frayed stubs of paper all that was left of their existence—and the pages that were left were hanging by a thread, unanchored by the loss of their neighbors. The first whole entry was one towards the end of November, but judging by where it came in the book, Hal thought that the diary itself must have been started in October or September, perhaps even earlier. Only fragments of those months remained, though. The rest of the pages—less than half, by Hal’s estimate—were thickly covered with writing, but even there, sections were scrawled over, names erased, whole paragraphs scratched out.
The entries came to an end on December 13, and after that the pages were whole, but blank. Only one single page, right at the end of the diary, had been removed. It was as if the diarist had simply stopped.
Hal leafed slowly back to the beginning, past fragments of text, running her fingers over the thickly scored-out sections. Who had done this? Was it the writer of the diary? Or someone else, scared of what evidence might be found within its pages?
And more to the point, whose diary was it? The writing looked a little like her mother’s—but an immature, unformed version—and there was no name inside the front cover.
At last she came to the first whole section, and began to read.
29th November, 1994, Hal read, frowning to make out the faint, discolored letters, the scrawling hand. The magpies are back. . . .
CHAPTER 29
* * *
It was almost dark when Hal finally looked up from the papers, and she realized, blinking, how the light had faded, so that she had been squinting to make out the letters on the torn and butchered pages.
But at last she knew—she had the answers she had been looking for—or some of them, at least.
The writer of the diary was Hal’s mother. And she was pregnant—with Hal herself. It must be. The dates matched exactly—Hal had been born just five months after the final entry.
But as she walked through to the living room, switching the light on as she went, Hal was thinking back over what she had read. She turned on the kettle, and while it came to the boil she leafed back through the fragile pages until she came to the entry she was looking for, the one dated December 6. And as she reread it, a cold certainty hardened in Hal’s stomach.
Her mother had known who her father was. And not just that, Hal had been conceived there, at Trepassen.
Everything her mother had told her—the story about t
he Spanish student, the one-night stand—it had all been lies.
In so many ways, the diary explained everything. The mix-up with the names. The reason Mrs. Westaway had never told Mr. Treswick about a black sheep cousin with the same name as her own daughter. She had cut off her niece, a disgrace to the family, and no one had spoken of her again.
But in other ways, it explained nothing.
Why had her mother lied?
And who was her father?
If only, Hal found herself thinking, as she flicked through the torn, disintegrating pages, if only you hadn’t destroyed his name, everything about him. Why?
So often she had heard her mother’s voice inside her head—lecturing, admonishing, encouraging—but now, when she needed her most, her voice was silent.
“Why?” Hal said aloud, hearing the despair in her own voice, the way the single word echoed in the silent flat. “Why? Why did you do it?” It was a cry for help, but there was no answer, only the imperceptible ticking of the clock, and the crackle as her fingers tightened on the diary in her hand.
The symbolism was painfully obvious—if there is an answer, Hal, it’s in your hands. She could almost hear her mother’s voice, a little mocking. And she felt rage flood her, at having the truth dangled in front of her and then snatched away, just as the legacy had shimmered there like a beautiful mirage for a moment before disappearing into nothingness.
But the answer was not there. If it was, it lay in the torn-out sections. Even in the passages that remained, her mother had blacked out names and paragraphs.
And she had no time. She had to leave tomorrow, before Mr. Smith’s men noticed that the girl they were hunting was back.
Slow down. Her mother’s voice again, softer this time. Think clearly.
Slow down? she wanted to shout. I can’t slow down.
More haste, less speed.