The Death of Mrs. Westaway

by Ruth Ware

  “Really?” Hal felt a hot wave of relief wash over her. “But—but I can’t ask you to do that, Ezra. And I don’t have any money for petrol.”

  He only shook his head.

  “Just get in, would you? It’s perishing out here. And we need to get going.”

  CHAPTER 43

  * * *

  Ezra drove in silence for the most part, the snow growing heavier and heavier as they made their slow way north. Soon the deep-sunk single-track country lanes were covered with white, and Ezra slowed to a crawl as he rounded the tight bends, making only slightly better time on the main roads, where lorries had already carved dark tracks.

  As they approached Bodmin Moor, the snow grew thicker, and condensation began to mist the inside of the windscreen in spite of the heaters. Up ahead, the traffic slowed, drivers dropping their speed as the visibility grew poorer and the slush began to build up at the sides of the road. Ezra started to tap his fingers on the steering wheel, and Hal shot a sideways look at him. He was frowning deeply, his dark eyebrows knitted, and his eyes flickered from the windscreen, spattered with falling snow, to the speedometer, hovering around thirty, to the clock, and then back to the windscreen.

  At last, without warning, he pulled into the left-hand lane and began to indicate.

  “Are we stopping?” Hal asked, surprised. It was gone six. They had been driving for almost three hours. Ezra nodded.

  “Yes, I think so. My eyes are getting tired. I think we’d better stop for coffee . . . maybe a bite to eat. Hopefully it’ll be better going by the time we start again. At least they’ll probably have salted the roads.”

  The slip road was dusted with white, crossed with the tracks of motorists who had made the same decision, and he drove slowly, parking the car in an empty space near the service station. Hal got out, stretching her legs, and looked up in wonderment at the dark sky above, the flakes spiraling down. In Brighton, snow rarely settled, and she could not remember the last time they had had a fall this heavy.

  “Come on.” Ezra hunched his shoulders into his jacket. “Don’t stand there, you’ll freeze. Let’s get inside.”

  • • •

  THE SERVICE STATION WAS QUIET, full of empty tables covered in the debris of the day, and they didn’t have to queue. Hal tried to pay for the coffee, but Ezra shook his head and pushed his credit card across the counter.

  “Don’t be silly. You don’t have to be a—” He stopped, suddenly awkward.

  “What?” Hal asked, feeling defensive.

  Ezra carried the coffees to an empty table before he answered.

  “You’re young,” he said at last. “And broke. Young people shouldn’t pay for drinks. I firmly believe that.”

  Hal laughed, but took the cup he proffered.

  “You’re not offended?” he asked, sipping at his black Americano. Hal shook her head.

  “No. I am young, and broke. I can’t be offended at the truth.”

  “Thank God for proper coffee after Mrs. Warren’s muck,” Ezra said with a lopsided, rather dry smile. They sipped in silence, and then he said, “I just wanted to say I . . . I wouldn’t blame you. If you had known.”

  Hal’s heart seemed to slow and still inside her, and she put down her cappuccino.

  “What . . . what do you mean?” she said at last.

  “Forget it,” Ezra said. He swallowed another gulp of his coffee. Hal saw the muscles in his throat move beneath his stubble. “It’s none of my business. I just meant . . .” He stopped, drank again, and then said, “If you had known, about . . . about your mother not being . . . I wouldn’t have blamed you . . . for not saying something straightaway.”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” Hal said, but she felt a tide of blood beginning to climb from her breast up her throat to her cheeks, a great flush of guilt, like a tidal wave of shame.

  “That’s okay, then,” Ezra said. He looked out of the window at the falling snow, deliberately not meeting her eyes, giving her time to compose herself.

  “So . . .” he said after a minute or two, speaking still as if to the night sky outside. “You’re Maggie’s child. I’m still getting used to that fact. Did you . . . did you know . . . that she lived here for a while? With us, I mean.”

  Hal felt her breath catch.

  “Before I came here, I didn’t know that, no. But Abel told me about a cousin Maggie. That’s what made me add two and two together afterwards. I—I wish she’d told me about Trepassen.”

  He looked back at her, meeting her eyes. His were dark and full of understanding.

  “It wasn’t a very happy time for any of us. I can understand why she would want to forget about it.”

  “Ezra.” Hal felt a lump in her throat, and she took a deep breath. “Ezra, can I show you something?”

  He nodded, puzzled, and Hal dug in her pocket and pulled out her tarot tin. Inside was the photograph Abel had given her, folded in half. She unfolded it carefully, and watched as Ezra’s face split in a smile of recognition, though there was something sad in his eyes too. He reached out, and touched the cheek of his twin, very gently, as if she could feel it through the paper.

  “Ezra, did you—do you know . . . who took this photo?”

  He looked up at her, frowning slightly, as though he had been somewhere very far away, and the effort was in dragging his thoughts back to the present day.

  “Sorry, what did you say?”

  “Who took this photo?”

  “I’m not sure if I remember,” he said slowly. “Why do you ask?”

  “Because—” Hal took a deep breath. “Because I think—I think he might be my father.” The words felt like a confession, and she felt a great release of some kind of tension she had been hardly aware of holding back, but they provoked no reaction in Ezra; he just continued to look at her, puzzled.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “I found my mother’s diary,” Hal said. “She talks about this day—about the person taking the photograph. That’s all I know about him—that and the fact that he had blue eyes.”

  “Blue eyes?” Ezra said. He frowned again, not following her logic. “But yours are dark. How did you work that out?”

  “It’s in the diary too,” Hal said. It was such a relief to talk it over with someone that she felt the words tumbling out in her eagerness to explain. “There’s this line she writes, his blue eyes meeting her dark ones. And she mentions someone called Ed, says that he was there the day the photograph was taken. I asked Abel, but he said there was no one else there apart from the four of you—but—”

  She broke off. Ezra’s face had changed. He looked fully in the here and now, and there was a touch of something Hal could not place in his expression. She thought it might be a kind of dread.

  “But that’s not true,” he said, very slowly. Hal nodded. She felt something inside her grow quite still, waiting.

  “Oh God,” Ezra said. He put his face in his hands. “Abel. What have you done?”

  “So . . . he was lying?”

  “Yes. But I don’t know why he would protect him.”

  “Protect who?” Hal asked. She was almost certain she already knew, but she needed to hear the name—hear it from the lips of someone who had been there, someone who could tell her for sure.

  “Edward.”

  Hal felt her stomach turn inside her, as if she were on the Twister at the foot of the pier and it had flipped her in a great arc above the sea, one of those sickening twists that left you gasping.

  So it was true.

  She swallowed. It was so strange. All the pieces had pointed to him—the name in the diary, the blue eyes . . . and yet . . . and yet she felt no connection to him, and now that Ezra had confirmed her suspicions she felt nothing except a kind of sickness.

  He is my father, she thought, trying to make it real. Edward is my father—why would my mother lie about it all these years?

  Why had he said nothing? Abel must know the truth after all—or suspect it, at leas
t—or else why would he have lied to protect his lover from Hal’s inquiries?

  But why lie? Why should Edward hide his identity from his own daughter?

  Unless . . . unless there was something else he was hiding. . . .

  “Edward,” she managed, her lips dry. “He was definitely there? He was the one taking the photograph?”

  Ezra nodded.

  “So he’s my . . .” But she could not say the word aloud. She shut her eyes, pressing her fingers to her temples, trying to see him. There was nothing of herself in his face—but perhaps that was not surprising. When she opened her eyes and stared down at the photograph on the table, it was her own face she saw, in her mother’s. She was her mother’s daughter, through and through.

  It was as if her mother had erased her father’s DNA through sheer force of will.

  “Hal—don’t,” Ezra said awkwardly. He looked profoundly uncomfortable and ill-equipped to be having this conversation, and Hal could tell that every atom of him would have rather got up and walked into the night, but that he was steeling himself to see this through. “Don’t jump to conclusions, it’s just a picture.”

  But Hal had spent too long reading the diary, too long puzzling it out, to believe him. It was the only way it made sense. Edward—the man taking the picture—was her father. And for some reason Abel was desperate to conceal that fact. Desperate enough to tell a lie he must have known would come home to roost at some point.

  “I don’t get it,” Hal said. She looked down. Her fingers were crushing the paper cup of coffee, and she forced them to release. “Why would he lie?”

  “I don’t know.” They sat in silence for a long minute, and then Ezra, with an effort, put out his hand to Hal’s shoulder. “Hal, are—are you okay?”

  “I’m not sure,” she whispered, and for a moment he rested his hand there and she felt the warmth of his fingers striking through her jacket, and she had a great urge to turn and cry into his shoulder. There was silence as she struggled to master herself.

  Then Ezra let his hand drop and the moment was broken. He picked up his cup and took a long gulp of coffee, then made a face.

  “God, I wish I could have a proper drink. I’d kill for a glass of red, right now.”

  “There’s a restaurant over the other side of the food court,” Hal said, but he shook his head.

  “Better not. I’m tired enough. Though of course there’s nothing stopping you, if you want one.”

  “I don’t,” Hal said, rather awkwardly. “Drink, I mean.”

  Ezra picked up the paper cup and sipped again, looking at her over the top with his dark eyes. They were nearly coal-black, a brown so deep that the pupil and iris merged almost into one.

  “What’s the story behind that, then?”

  “No story,” Hal said, automatically defensive, and then she felt bad. There was no truth to hide anymore, no point in holding her cards close to her chest. And this man had been kind, and had told her the truth where others had lied, and was going above and beyond his duty to try to get her home. She owed it to him to repay his honesty in kind. “Well, a bit of a story, to be honest. I mean, I’m not in AA or anything like that, but I just found . . . it was after my mother died. Drinking stopped being fun, somehow. It became . . . it was a way of coping, for a bit. And I don’t like crutches.”

  “I can understand that,” Ezra said quietly. He looked down at the paper cup, seeming to study something in the peaty depths. “Maggie was always very independent. I don’t think she really liked living with us for that reason. It was, well, a kind of charity, I suppose, and Mother never let her forget it. There was always this unspoken feeling that she needed to earn her place by being grateful, or some kind of bullshit.”

  “What—” Hal felt her breath catch in her throat. “What was she like, Ezra, when you knew her?”

  Ezra smiled. He did not look up at Hal, but there was something a little sad in his expression as he stared down into his coffee cup, swirling the dregs thoughtfully.

  “She was . . . she was fun. Kind. I liked her very much.”

  “Ezra, do you—” She swallowed. Suddenly she wanted that glass of wine very much indeed. As much as Ezra did, perhaps. “Do you think I should . . . say something? To Edward?”

  “I don’t know,” Ezra said. His face was suddenly very grave.

  “Why didn’t he say anything?”

  “He may not know, I guess.”

  “But she knew. My mother, I mean. Why wouldn’t she have said anything?”

  “Hal, I don’t know,” Ezra said, and suddenly his face was twisted with an emotion that he seemed to be trying to master, and failing. “Hal, look, I wouldn’t normally interfere, but I can’t stand by and—what I’m trying to say—” He stopped and ran his hands through his hair. “Harriet.” The use of her full name stopped her somehow, in her tracks. “Please, please, leave this.”

  “Leave it? What do you mean?”

  “Leave it alone. It’s in the past. Your mother clearly didn’t tell you this deliberately—and I don’t know why she chose to keep it secret, but she must have had her reasons, and maybe they were good ones.”

  “But—” Hal leaned forwards in her chair. “But don’t you understand? I have to know. This is my father we’re talking about. Don’t you think I have a right to know about him?”

  Ezra said nothing.

  “And it’s not just my mother—it’s—it’s everything. What happened to Maud? Why did she and my mother run away together, and why did Maud disappear?”

  “Hal, I don’t know,” Ezra said heavily. He stood up and paced to the tall glass wall at the front of the service station, his shape silhouetted against the falling snow and the lamps in the car park. They had dimmed the lights in the food court now, and Hal had the feeling they were getting ready to close.

  “Is Maud dead?” she persisted. “Is she hiding?”

  “I don’t know!” Ezra cried, and this time it was more a shout of fury. Across the food court, a boy in a uniform stopped sweeping up crumbs and looked towards them, his expression puzzled and alarmed.

  For a moment Hal felt a prickle of fear, but then Ezra rested his forehead very gently on the windowpane, and his shoulders seemed to sag in a kind of despair, and she understood.

  Of course. She had been so blindly focused on her own need for answers that she had forgotten—this was his past too. Maud was his twin, the person he had been closest to in all the world, and she had cut him off too, without explanation, and disappeared. He had lived with that uncertainty for longer than Hal had lived with hers.

  “Oh God, Ezra.” She stood too, walked towards him, and put out her hand, but let it fall, not quite daring to touch his shoulder. “I’m sorry, I didn’t think—she’s your sister, you must—”

  “I miss her so much,” he said. There was an anguish in his voice that Hal had never heard before, a depth of feeling she would not have believed from his dry, sarcastic everyday demeanor. “God, I miss her, like a hole in me. And I’m so fucking angry. I’m angry all the time.”

  And suddenly Hal understood the source of Ezra’s lightness, his perpetual sarcasm, the dry smile that always seemed to hover around his lips. He laughed, because if he did not, something inside him would break free, a raging loss that he had been containing for twenty years.

  “I’m so sorry.” Hal felt a lump in her throat. She thought of her own mother, of the fury she herself had felt at the way she had been snatched away, so abruptly, so meaninglessly. But at least she knew. At least she had been able to stroke her mother’s hair, to bury her, to say good-bye. At least she knew what had happened.

  “When I heard about the car accident, I thought—” He stopped, and Hal saw him draw a deep, shuddering breath, and then force himself on. “I thought that was it, that I knew what had happened, and however much it hurt that I’d never see her again, I thought that at least if we—if we knew—”

  He broke off, and Hal realized afresh what she had done to this f
amily with her little deception, and the way that it had grown and grown out of all proportion to what she had intended. What she had done to Ezra, to this man standing in front of her now, holding himself together with such pains.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered again. She sank back onto the hard plastic chair at the coffee table, and put her head in her hands, wishing she could tell him exactly how sorry, but she could never do that, not without confessing what she had done. “Ezra, I’m—I’m so sorry.”

  “It makes me so angry—the waste. Maggie. Maud. Mown down in front of your own house—what a fucking waste of a life.”

  “Ezra—”

  “It’s all right,” he said at last, though she could tell from his voice and the way that he scrubbed at his eyes with his sleeve that it was not. He drew a long breath, and turned around to face her, even managing a twisted smile.

  Across the food court the boy had started sweeping again, and the servers at the hot food counter had turned off its lights.

  Hal found she could not speak, but she nodded. Ezra closed his eyes for a moment, and suddenly she had a great urge to put her arm around him, tell him that it would be okay, that they would find the truth about his sister, but she knew she could not do that. It was not a promise she could make.

  “Due to the inclement weather”—the announcement broke into their silence, tinny and echoing in the high rafters—“and road closures, this service station will be closing in thirty minutes for health and safety reasons. All customers are requested to complete their purchases and return to their cars within the next thirty minutes. We apologize for any inconvenience.”

  “Well . . .” Ezra cleared his throat, and picked up his jacket from the back of the plastic chair. “We should probably get going anyway. It’s getting late, and we’ve got a long way still to go. Do you want anything else?”

  Hal shook her head, and Ezra said, “I’ll get us a couple of sandwiches at the shop, we won’t have time to stop again.”

  • • •

  OUTSIDE THE SNOW HAD NOT stopped falling; if anything, it was coming down faster. Ezra shook his head as they climbed into the sports car and buckled in.