The Death of Mrs. Westaway

by Ruth Ware

  They drove in silence for perhaps twenty minutes. The roads were not busy, but as the visibility worsened the traffic in front of them slowed. A few miles farther on, Hal put her hand out towards Ezra’s arm and he nodded.

  “I’ve seen it.”

  It was a long line of stationary red lights in the distance, faintly visible through the falling snow. He was pressing on the brakes, slowing the car as it caught up with the jam, and then they stopped completely, the yellow wink of hazard indicators flashing all around them as the cars behind caught up and signaled the delay.

  Ezra put the hand brake on and then sat, staring into the distance. Hal, too, was lost in her own thoughts, mulling over the conversation at the service station. After what seemed like a long time, but might have been anything from five to twenty-five minutes, a driver up ahead leaned on his horn, a long mournful beeeeeep, like a foghorn sounding across the hills, and then another took it up, and another.

  Ezra glanced at the clock, then back at the line of stationary traffic, and then he seemed to make a decision.

  “I’m going to turn around,” he said. “They must have closed the road over the moor. We’ll try going round, via St. Neot. The snow might be worse, but this traffic is going nowhere. I think we’ll make better time.”

  “Okay,” Hal said. There was a brief flurry of horns as he executed an awkward turn, and then they were making their slow way down the road away from Bodmin, back along the route they had come.

  Hal yawned. The car was warm, the heater comfortable, and she pulled off her coat and crumpled it up beneath her head, where it rested against the window. Then she closed her eyes, and let herself drift off into sleep.

  • • •

  HER DREAMS WERE TROUBLED, A confused tangle of chasing through the long corridors at Trepassen with Mrs. Warren’s stick tap-tapping ominously in her wake, and however fast she ran, she could never outpace it. Then somehow she was at the head of the stairs again, and though she knew the thread was there, stretched across it, she tripped and fell, and as she looked back over her shoulder she saw Edward, standing there at the top, his head thrown back, laughing at her. She had time to think, I’m going to die, but when she fell, it was not with the bone-crunching impact she had feared, but with a splash, into cold, cold water, dappled with leaves and dead insects. When she surfaced, the smell of the boathouse was in her nostrils, the scent of stagnant water and rotting wood, and the slime of the leaves was beneath her and around her as she thrashed in the frozen water.

  Help! she tried to scream, but the icy water rushed in, choking her.

  She awoke with a shock and a beating heart to darkness, and for a moment she couldn’t remember where she was, but then she saw. She was in Ezra’s car. They were in a lay-by beside a deeply sunken lane, and the snow was still falling, and Ezra had turned the engine off.

  “Are we stopping again?” Hal’s mouth was dry, and the words came thickly.

  “I’m afraid so,” Ezra said heavily. He rubbed his eyes, as if he too was very tired. “This fucking snow. I’m sorry, we’re not going to get through. It’s gone eight and we’re not even at Plymouth.”

  “Oh God, I’m so sorry. What about your crossing?”

  Ezra shook his head.

  “There’s no way I’ll make it. I’ve rung and they’ve said I can pay a fee to change the ticket to tomorrow.”

  “So—so what do we do?”

  Ezra didn’t reply straightaway, just nodded back along the way they had come. Hal bit her lip. The snow continued to fall with a soft patter on the glass of the windscreen.

  “I’m sorry,” Ezra said, seeing her expression. “I did think about trying to push through, at least to Brighton, but I’m just too tired—and it’s too dangerous, none of these roads have been gritted.”

  “So . . . we go back . . . ? To—” She swallowed. “To Trepassen?”

  “I think we have to. It won’t take as long going back, the roads going south are pretty quiet. We can try again tomorrow.”

  “Okay,” Hal said. She felt something shift inside her at the thought of returning to the cold house, and Mrs. Warren’s waiting figure, rocking by her fireside, mistress once again of all she surveyed. It was not an inviting prospect. But what was the alternative—a B&B? She had no money for a room, and she could not very well ask Ezra to pay.

  “Okay,” she said again, trying to make herself sound—and feel—more positive. “Back to Trepassen it is, then.”

  “It’s not likely to be a very warm welcome,” Ezra said, as he turned the key in the ignition and the engine roared out into the quiet. “But at least we won’t freeze.”

  CHAPTER 44

  * * *

  Returning to Trepassen felt strange, like putting on the heavy pack that you’d downed a few hours earlier, the blisters from the straps still raw. Or sliding your feet back into wet shoes that were once soggily clammy, and had become in the interim downright unpleasant.

  The gate onto the road was still ajar, but as they turned up the drive, Hal saw that the long stretch of whiteness was unmarked. No car had passed this way for many hours. Either Abel and Harding had thought better of leaving, or they had left soon after Hal and Ezra, and had not returned.

  “There’s no lights on,” Ezra said beneath his breath as they wound round the last bend of the drive. The white marker rocks were hard to see, except in the places beneath the trees where the canopy had protected the road from the snowfall, and he had to slow to a crawl to ensure he didn’t slide off the path. “Mrs. Warren must be in bed.”

  Good, was all Hal could think, though she did not say it.

  They parked in front of the porch, and Ezra turned off the engine, and they both sat for a moment. Hal had an image of two athletes before a fight, strapping up knuckles, snapping mouth guards into place. Except it was not Ezra she was fighting.

  “Ready?” he said, with a short laugh. Hal didn’t smile in return. She only nodded, and they stepped out into the falling snow.

  The door was locked, but Ezra lifted one of the flat stones that formed the sheltered seating of the porch, and beneath it Hal saw a huge, blackened key—a thing from another era, at least six inches long. He fitted it into the lock and turned it cautiously, and they stepped inside, into the dark, breathing house.

  “Mrs. Warren?” Ezra called softly, and then when there was no answer, a little more loudly, “Mrs. Warren? It’s just me, Ezra.”

  “Do you think Harding and Abel have gone?” Hal whispered. Ezra nodded.

  “Harding texted while you were asleep. They made it across Bodmin Moor before the road closed and holed up at a travel lodge near Exeter.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Hal said. She felt a stab of guilt. “It’s my fault—if you hadn’t gone via Penzance . . .”

  “No use crying over spilt milk,” Ezra said shortly, but the suppressed rage Hal had seen earlier seemed to have vanished, and there was only resignation in his tone. “Look, Hal, it’s very late, and I don’t know about you, but I’m shattered. Are you okay for me to head up?”

  “Of course,” Hal said. “I’ll go to bed too.”

  There was a short, awkward silence, and then Ezra pulled her into a clumsy hug, almost too hard, that scraped her face on his jacket, and left her bones bruised.

  “Good night, Hal. And tomorrow . . .”

  He stopped.

  “Tomorrow?” Hal echoed.

  “Let’s just get going as early as possible, okay?”

  “Okay,” she agreed. They climbed the first flight of stairs together, and then at the landing, they went their separate ways.

  • • •

  WHEN HAL OPENED THE DOOR to the attic chamber, the little room was just as she had left it—curtains pulled back, so that the pale snowy light filtered through the barred windows, covers thrown back, even down to the blown bulb on the landing.

  There were a few pieces of coal left in the scuttle, and with the comforting knowledge that she would not be around for very long
in the morning to face Mrs. Warren’s censure, Hal screwed up a page of newspaper, placed the coals in the grate, and put a match to the fire.

  As it flared up, she sat, hunched in front of it, thinking about her mother crouching here so long ago, tearing the pages from her diary, and everything Hal had learned since finding it.

  Edward. Could it really be true?

  It must be—but when she thought of him, of his smooth blond hair, carefully coiffed mustache—she felt nothing. No sense of connection. Just a faint loathing for the man who had impregnated her mother and then left her, ignored her letters, leaving her to the mercy of a woman like Mrs. Westaway.

  Part of her wanted to push the knowledge aside and move on, into the future, as Ezra had suggested. But the questions still niggled. Why had Abel lied so transparently? Had he banked on her not asking the same questions of Ezra?

  If only her mother hadn’t scrubbed all the mentions of Hal’s father from the diary.

  Hal sat, staring into the flames, too tired to rouse herself sufficiently to go to bed. She was almost beyond thought now—and she had the strangest feeling that history had looped around, putting her here, in her mother’s place, where Maggie herself had crouched so long ago, watching the flames burn the name of her lover to ashes, so that she, Hal, could discover a truth that had been buried long ago. But what was that truth?

  Not just the name of her father.

  There had been something else . . . something Ezra had said that was bothering her, but she could not pinpoint what it was. Was it during their conversation in the service station? She cast her mind back, running through everything he had said, but whatever it was, it kept slipping through her fingertips, a truth too insubstantial to catch hold of.

  At last she stood, stretching her stiff limbs, the air of the room cool on her cheeks after the heat of the fire. Her case lay at the foot of the bed. In the pocket was the old tobacco tin, and she opened it and drew out her cards. Shivering a little, she cut the deck.

  The card that stared up at her was the Moon, inverted.

  Hal frowned. The Moon meant intuition, and trusting your intuition. It was a guiding light, but one that could be unreliable—for it was not always there, and sometimes when you needed it most, the night would be impenetrably dark.

  Inverted, it meant deception, and especially self-deception. It meant the intuition that could lead you astray, down a false path.

  Don’t fall into the trap of believing your own lies . . . Her mother’s voice in her ear, warning, always warning. You want to believe as much as they do.

  And she did. She did want to believe. After her mother’s death, she had found herself dealing out the cards night after night, trying to make sense of it all, trying to find answers where there were none. She had spent hours poring over her mother’s cards, running her hands over them, looking for meaning.

  But always that voice of skepticism in her ear, her mother’s voice: There is no meaning, apart from what you want to see, and what you are afraid of turning up.

  She put her hands over her ears, as if she could shut out that voice of whispered sense and logic.

  When had her mother become so cynical?

  The girl in the diary, with her superstition and her obsessive reading of the cards, she was like a different person from the woman who had taken herself to the pier every day to read for fools and strangers. Tarot had been a job for Hal’s mother—nothing more. It had been something she was good at, but she had never believed, however convincing her patter was to strangers, and she had never hidden that skepticism from Hal. How had she turned from this questing, openhearted young girl into the disillusioned, weary woman Hal remembered?

  They’re not magic, sweetheart, she had said to Hal once, in answer to her question. Hal could not have been more than four or five. You can play with them all you like. They’re just pretty pictures. But people like to pretend that life has . . . meaning, I suppose. It makes them feel happy, to think that they’re part of a bigger story.

  Then why, Hal had asked, confused, did people come to see her every day? Why did they pay money if none of it was true? It’s like going to see a play, she had explained. People want to believe it’s true. My job is to pretend it is.

  The girl in the diary had not been pretending. She had been in love—with the power of the cards, and the power of fate. She had believed. What had that changed? What had happened to make her stop believing in that power?

  There is something I’m not seeing, Hal thought, and she picked up the Moon card and stared down at it, at the shadowy face in the bright orb. Something I’m missing.

  But whatever it was, it lay just out of reach, and at last she put the cards away, and slid between the sheets, fully clothed, to try to sleep.

  She was almost asleep, drifting in the strange no-man’s-land between waking and dreaming, the firelight making patterns on the insides of her lids, when an image came to her.

  A book. A buttercup-yellow book with no lettering on the cover or spine.

  It wasn’t hers, and she could not place where it had come from, and yet . . . and yet it was somehow familiar. She had seen it before. But where?

  Hal sat up, feeling the chill air of the room at the back of her neck, and she pressed her fingers to her closed lids, trying to picture it, where she had seen it, why her subconscious was needling her now.

  She had almost given up and was about to lie back down and put it down to a tired imagination, when something came back to her in a sudden rush. Not a picture—but a smell. The smell of dust, of cobwebs, of fraying leather. The feeling of thick, sticky plastic between her fingers. And she knew.

  It had been that first morning at Trepassen. The study, frozen in time, and the book on the high shelf that she had started to look through, only to be interrupted.

  The photographs. Perhaps they would show her something she was missing. Edward, maybe, as he had been as a young man. Or even her mother.

  And more than the photographs—the footstep in the dust.

  Someone, that very first morning at Trepassen, or perhaps a week before, had been in that study to look at the pictures. It might have been nostalgia, but Hal thought that of all the people she had ever met, the Westaways had not a bone of nostalgia in their bodies. The past for them was not a happy place, full of golden memories, but a minefield charged with pain. No—if Abel, Ezra, Harding, Edward, or any of the others had got down that album, it had been for some other, very practical reason. And suddenly Hal wanted to know that reason very much.

  There was something in that album that someone had wanted to see, or check, or remove. But why?

  And if she and Ezra left first thing tomorrow, she might never have another chance to find out.

  Swinging her legs out of bed, Hal pulled her coat back on as some protection from the chilly night air, and shoved her bare feet back into her cold shoes. Then she pushed open the attic door, and tiptoed quietly down the stairs.

  At the first landing she paused, listening, but no sound of snores reached her ears. If Ezra was asleep—and he must be, for he had looked exhausted enough to fall asleep on his feet—he was a silent sleeper.

  And then she was down in the hallway, in the dark.

  Hal did not dare to turn on a light, but the house was no longer the unfamiliar maze of that first morning, and she did not need one; the faint light coming in through the hall windows was enough for her to pick her way past the drawing room, past the library and the billiard room and the boot closet. She pushed through a dividing door, and there on her left was the breakfast room, the dirty dishes still laid out on the table. The sight made Hal stop in her tracks—had Mrs. Warren done anything since they left? But she could not stop now to wonder about that.

  The next part was the most dangerous, for it took her right past Mrs. Warren’s sitting room, and Hal had no idea where she slept. If she slept. Somehow she would not have put it past her to be still awake at midnight, rocking in her chair in front of the hissing fire
.

  The stone floor of the orangery was cold, and too noisy to risk. However, there was no way round it—it was the only route to the study, or the only one Hal knew, at least. In the end, she bent and took off her shoes, tiptoeing across the frosty flags, wincing at the chill striking up into her bare soles.

  And then she was through, and in the little vestibule on the far side, and her hand was on the study door.

  • • •

  WHEN SHE ENTERED THE STUDY, Hal had, for the second time, the strangest sense of having stepped back in time. The dust of years was soft beneath her feet as she stepped across the fraying carpet, the only resistance the minute crunch of small insects or gusted leaves, crushed beneath her toes.

  The room was shrouded in darkness, and Hal had no choice but to fumble for the switch of the green-shaded desk lamp. It was very old, the cord fraying and fabric-covered, prewar at the least, she thought, but when she found the brass switch and clicked it, it came on without protest, illuminating the room in a soft, verdant glow.

  There were the steps, untouched since her last visit, the footprint upon them clearly visible. And there, at the top, was the book she had hurriedly replaced, still sticking out at a very slight angle into the room.

  Her heart beating in her mouth, Hal set her foot onto the library steps, in the footprint of that other person, and stepped up, up, and up once again, until her hand closed on the soft yellow spine, and she slid the book out into her waiting arms.

  • • •

  BACK DOWN AT THE DESK, Hal sat in the wing-backed chair and angled the desk lamp towards the book. Then, with a sense almost of trepidation, she opened the softly creaking spine.

  The pictures were just as clear and old-fashioned as she remembered. Harding as a baby, chubby-necked in his scratchy-looking sweater, Harding riding on the shiny tricycle, and then a few pages later Abel’s first appearance: A.L. 3 months.

  But this time the caption rang a bell. Al. Why was that? Hal was racking her brains when it came to her suddenly—the entry in her mother’s diary, Maud calling her brother Al. Hal had not thought of it at the time, but now it made sense.