by Ruth Ware
“I’m not your niece,” Hal said. She swallowed again. There were tears coming up from somewhere deep inside, and it would have been so easy to let them out—play for their sympathy—but the knowledge made her force them back down. She would not play the victim here. She was done with dissembling.
“I should have realized before—there were . . . things . . . they didn’t add up. But it was only when I went home, I looked in my mother’s papers to try to get to the bottom of it, and I found . . . I found diaries . . . letters . . . making it clear there had been a terrible mix-up. My mother wasn’t your sister. She was Maggie.”
“Oh my God.” It was Abel who spoke, his voice flat and blank with shock. He put his head in his hands, as if to try to contain thoughts that threatened to burst out. “Oh my God. Hal—but this is—this is—” He stopped, shaking his head like someone punch-drunk, trying to shrug off blows. “Why didn’t we see?”
“But—but wait, this means the will is invalid,” Harding burst out.
“For God’s sake!” Ezra said. He gave a derisive laugh. “Money! Is that all you can think of? The will is hardly the most important thing.”
“It’s what brought Harriet here in the first place, so I would say it’s quite important, yes!” Harding shot back. “And the money isn’t the point at all. I deeply resent what you’re implying there, Ezra. It’s about—it’s about—oh dear God, just when we were beginning to get the whole benighted situation sorted out—what in hell’s name was Mother thinking?”
“A good question,” Abel said in a low voice. He was slumped in his seat, his head still in his hands.
“But—but your name was in the will,” Harding said slowly. He had the air of someone whose first shock was beginning to wear off, who was retracing his footsteps . . . trying to piece things together. “Or—wait, are you telling us—are you not Harriet Westaway at all? Who are you really?”
“No!” Hal said quickly. “No, no, I am Harriet. I promise you. And my mother really is Margarida Westaway. But I think your mother must have asked Mr. Treswick to trace her daughter.” Hal’s face felt stiff, and her fingers cold, in spite of the fire. “And somehow the threads became crossed, and he found my mother instead, without realizing the mix-up. I think he must have reported back to your mother that he had found your sister and that she had died, but that she’d had a daughter. And so she put my name in the will—not realizing that I wasn’t her granddaughter at all.”
“How did you not realize?” Abel said, but there was no anger in his voice, only bewilderment. He looked up at Hal, his eyes full of a puzzled pain that she didn’t fully understand. “Surely there were things that didn’t add up—things that made you think—”
He stopped. Hal felt herself grow still and careful. This was it. This was the dangerous part. Because he was right.
She forced herself to stop pacing, and to sit, and her mother’s voice was in her head. When you’re tempted to answer in a hurry—slow down. Make them wait for you. Give yourself time to think. It’s when we hurry that we’re most prone to stumble.
“Well . . .” she said slowly. The sofa springs squeaked as she shifted her weight uncomfortably, and the wind howled in the chimney. “Well . . . there were things. Not at first—but later . . . but you have to understand . . . my name, it was there in the will. And Mum never spoke much about her childhood. She never mentioned any brothers, or a house in Cornwall, but then there was so much she never talked about. She didn’t talk about her parents either, or my father. I just took it for granted that this was another part of her I didn’t know. And I wanted so much . . .” Her voice faltered, no artifice here as she fought hard against the tremor in her voice, for this was the truth. “I wanted so much for it to be true. I wanted this—all of this—” She waved her hand at the room, at the fire and the house and the men sitting around her, looking at her with varying degrees of puzzled exasperation and bewilderment. “Family. Security. A home. I wanted it all so much, Mr. Treswick’s letter felt like—it felt like an answer to a prayer. I think—I think I shut my eyes to my doubts.”
“I can understand that,” Abel said heavily. He stood and rubbed his hands over his face, looking suddenly very old, much older than his fortysomething years. “Dear God, what a mess. At least you’ve told us now.”
“Well, I for one will be having stern words with Mr. Treswick tomorrow,” Harding said angrily. His face was a worrisome shade of purple. “This is damn close to some sort of—of professional negligence on his part! Lord knows how we’ll sort out this legal tangle. Thank God it came out before we obtained probate!”
“Jesus,” Ezra said under his breath. “Can we stop banging on about the bloody will? Presumably you’ll get the bloody money now, isn’t that enough?”
“I resent—” Harding began more hotly, but was interrupted by a tremendous resounding clanging that made everyone jump convulsively, and Harding slam down his whiskey glass as the noise died away.
“For God’s sake, Mrs. Warren!” he bellowed, opening the drawing room door. “We are all in here. Was there really any need for that?”
She came to the door, hands on hips.
“Dinner’s ready.”
“Thank you,” Harding said, rather ungraciously. He folded his arms, and then looked at Abel, seeming to ask him an unspoken question. Hal couldn’t quite read Harding’s face, but Abel evidently understood, for he shrugged and nodded, rather reluctantly.
“Mrs. Warren,” Harding said heavily. “Before we go into the dining room, there’s something we should explain, as it concerns you too. It’s come to light”—he shot a glance at Hal—“that Mr. Treswick made a rather unfortunate error in drawing up Mother’s will. Harriet is not Maud’s daughter, she is in fact Maggie’s child, something Harriet only discovered when she went through her mother’s papers. God knows how Mr. Treswick made such a regrettable error, but obviously in light of it the will is invalid. I’m not sure what will happen—I presume intestacy rules will have to be followed. But there it is.”
“I never thought she was,” Mrs. Warren said. She crossed her arms, her stick beneath her elbow. Harding blinked.
“I beg your pardon?”
“A-course she’s Maggie’s child. No one with any sense woulda thought otherwise.”
“What? But why didn’t you say something?”
Mrs. Warren smiled, and her eyes, in the dim light of the fire, seemed to Hal to glitter like stones.
“Well?” Harding demanded again. “Are you saying you knew this for certain and you said nothing?”
“Not for certain. But it was common sense. And none of my business, anyway.”
“Well!” This time it was an explosion of disbelief, but Mrs. Warren had already turned and was stumping down the long, tiled corridor, her cane click-clicking as she went.
“Did you hear that?” Harding asked the silent group in the room, but no one answered.
At last Ezra walked out, his shoulders hunched in mutinous silence. Abel shook his head and followed. Harding turned too, and Hal was left alone.
Her hands were still trembling, and she paused for a minute, warming them in front of the fire, trying to get the feeling back into her numb fingertips.
She was just about to leave when a piece of coal in the grate suddenly flared and spat, throwing out a flaming splinter onto the rug. Hal was about to stamp on it when she realized her feet were bare—she had taken off her soaked shoes at the door. Instead she took up the poker and flicked the coal back towards the stone-flagged hearth, scratching out the last sparks with the tip.
There was a smoking hole in the rug, and a scorch in the board beneath, but nothing to be done about either, and looking down, Hal saw that it was not the first. There were three or four holes even larger, one where the fire had eaten quite a little way into the board. With a sigh, she put the fireguard in place and turned to leave, only to find Mrs. Warren standing in the doorway, barring the way.
“Excuse me,” Hal said, but Mrs.
Warren didn’t move, and for a brief moment Hal had a fantastic notion that she was going to have to call for help, or escape out of the window again. But when she took a step towards the doorway, Mrs. Warren pressed herself back against the frame, and allowed Hal to pass through, though she had to edge her way, to avoid tripping on Mrs. Warren’s cane.
It was only when she was past and starting up the corridor, the tiles chill beneath her feet, that the woman spoke, her voice so low that Hal had to turn back.
“What did you say?” Hal asked, but Mrs. Warren had disappeared inside the drawing room, and the heavy door slammed shut behind her, cutting Hal’s question off short.
But Hal was sure—at least, almost sure—that she had caught the words, hissed low as they were beneath the sound of the wind in the chimney.
“Get out—if you know what’s good for you. While you still can . . .”
CHAPTER 38
* * *
Hal went to bed early that night, and whether it was the strain of the day or the long walk to Cliff Cottages, she fell asleep almost at once.
She awoke stiff and with the sense of having slept a long time, but it was still not dawn, and when she got up and went to the window, shivering in the cold night air, the moon was still high. Her breath was white against the pane, and the sky had cleared, and in the moonlight she could make out the glitter of frost on the lawn.
Her mouth was dry and she reached for the glass beside her bed, but when she picked it up, it was empty. In her tiredness she must have forgotten to fill it the night before. The chilly walk through the dark landing down to the bathroom below was not enticing, and Hal decided to ignore the thirst. She got back into bed and shut her eyes, but the dryness in her mouth niggled at her, keeping sleep at bay, until at last she gave up, swung her legs out of bed, and picked up the glass. Wrapping her fleece around her, she went cautiously out into the corridor.
It was pitch-black outside, the lino freezing under her bare feet, and she tried the switch on the wall, but as she did, she remembered too late that she hadn’t told anyone about the missing bulb.
Sure enough, the switch clicked fruitlessly, and Hal sighed and went back to the attic room to pick up her phone. The thin tunnel of light from its torch made the corridor feel, if anything, even darker, but at least she could see the black, yawning opening to the stairs.
She was only one step down, when her foot caught on something.
Hal clutched, instinctively, for a banister—but there was none there. She felt her fingers scratch at the bare wall, and then the horrible stomach-wrenching lurch as the phone flew from her hand, and she realized she was falling, with nothing she could do to stop herself.
She landed with a crunch in the hallway below, thudding her head against the floor, and rolled to a stop against the wall, where she lay, gasping, winded, waiting for the sound of running footsteps, questions, solicitous inquiries. But none came.
“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.