The Death of Mrs. Westaway

by Ruth Ware

  He stepped forwards into the moonlight, one hand stretched out as if to take hers, lead her back to safety.

  “Hal, are you sure you’re all right? You look very strange. And what’s that you’ve got there—is it . . . is it a book?”

  She looked down at her hands, in which she was still holding the yellow album, and then up at Ezra, at her father.

  She met his eyes, and it was like falling into dark, leaf-strewn water, like falling into her own past.

  Because suddenly, in a single, crystallizing instant, she understood.

  Once, at school, Hal’s teacher had had them conduct an experiment, where they cooled a bottle of water to below freezing, and then tapped it sharply on a table. When they did, the water froze all in an instant, the ice spreading with impossible swiftness, like some kind of magic spell.

  As she stood there, gazing into Ezra’s dark, liquid eyes, Hal felt as if the same process were taking place inside her—a painful chill spreading out from her core, turning the blood in her veins to ice, and her limbs stiff and frozen. Because she understood—finally—and without needing to know what had happened to Mrs. Warren.

  She understood Mrs. Warren’s odd expression that first day, Mrs. Westaway’s will, and her strange, cryptic message to Harding.

  She understood the wording of the bequest, and the “mistake” that had occurred—not Mr. Treswick’s fault at all—how could she have ever thought that dry, careful little man would make such a catastrophic error?

  She understood why Abel had denied Edward’s presence at the lake that day, and why Ezra had refused to challenge the will or pursue the deed of variation, and that odd, throwaway line that had niggled and niggled and niggled at her subconscious.

  And most of all she understood why her mother had cut herself off from her past, and Hal with her.

  Get out—if you know what’s good for you.

  Not a threat, but a warning.

  And she had understood it too late.

  CHAPTER 47

  * * *

  Time seemed to slow as they stood, staring at each other. Hal’s throat was dry, and her voice croaked when she finally spoke.

  “It’s an album. But—but maybe you knew that.”

  She tried to say the words lightly, but they sounded strange in her own mouth, and she realized she was hugging herself defensively, as though to protect herself from some unknown attacker. Think about how you hold yourself, Hal, it’s not just what we read in others—it’s what they read in us.

  Her face was stiff, and she forced a smile, widening the corners of her mouth in what felt like a death-mask grimace.

  “Well . . . I’m very tired . . .”

  Ezra took the album from her hand, but he didn’t move to leave. Instead he put his hand on the wall, leaning casually, blocking Hal’s route to the exit, and he cocked his head and smiled at her as he leafed through the pages.

  “Oh . . . this old thing. Gosh, I had no idea Mother had kept hold of so many pictures.”

  Hal said nothing, only watched as he turned the pages.

  “How did you stumble across this old thing?”

  “I—” Hal swallowed, hard. She forced her arms to drop to her sides, making her body language open, trying to look relaxed. “I couldn’t sleep. I was looking for a book to read. I went to the study.”

  “I see. And . . . did you . . . look at the photographs, by the way?”

  His voice was casual, careless even. But as he said the words, Hal knew—he knew.

  She had seen something in him, some change in the way he held himself, some imperceptible difference in his stance. She had seen that flicker of recognition when she hit a nerve too often in her booth to be mistaken.

  She saw it now.

  “J-just the first ones,” Hal said. She made her breathing slow, steady, listening detachedly to the tremor in her own voice, trying to quiet it, make her voice calm, soothing. “Why?”

  “No reason,” he said. But there was no pretense now. He was not smiling any longer, and Hal felt her heart quicken.

  Get out—while you still can.

  “Well . . . I think I’ll go back to bed now, if you don’t mind. . . .” She said the words slowly and carefully, keeping very calm, waiting for him to move aside. But he only shook his head.

  “I don’t think so. I think you did look at that album.”

  There was a long, long silence. Hal felt her heart beating inside her. And then it was as if something inside her broke open, and the words came tumbling out, full of bitterness.

  “Why didn’t you tell me? You knew. You knew. You were Ed. Why did you pretend it was poor Edward?”

  “Hal—”

  “And why did you let me go on thinking that my mother—that my mother—”

  But she couldn’t finish. She could only sink to the bed, her head in her hands, shaking with tears.

  “My whole life has been a lie!”

  Ezra said nothing, only looked down at her, motionless, and Hal felt the cold inside her harden into certainty.

  “What did you do to her, Ezra?” She said the words softly, but they sounded like what they were: an accusation.

  His face was neutral, but he was not able to hide his eyes, and in the stark, bright moonlight Hal saw the pupils, black against dark, dilate suddenly, wildly, with shock, and then contract. And she knew that she had hit the truth.

  “You made a mistake,” she said quietly. “Earlier tonight. It niggled at me all evening, something you’d said, I couldn’t pin down what it was that was bothering me. I kept thinking it was something you’d said in the car, and running over our conversations, but it wasn’t. It was something you said in the food court.”

  “Hal—” Ezra said. His throat was hoarse, and he cleared it, as if he were finding it hard to speak. He took his arm down from the wall, folded his arms. “Hal—”

  “Mown down outside her own house, you said. You were talking about Maud, Ezra, not Maggie. And how did you know that, about the house?”

  “I don’t know what—”

  “Oh, for God’s sake.” She stood up, facing him, her head barely to his chest, but suddenly she was no longer afraid, she was angry. I am so angry, she remembered him saying. I am angry all the time.

  Well, this man was her father, and she could be angry too.

  “Stop pretending,” she said. Her voice was quiet, and the trembling had stopped. This was it. This was what she was good at—reading people, reading their body language. Reading between the lines to the truth they did not want to admit, even to themselves. “It wasn’t reported in any of the papers that it was outside our house—in fact, the police deliberately kept it out of the public reports because I didn’t want people doorstepping the flat. You weren’t there. You’ve never been to my flat. Unless . . . you have.”

  “What are you talking about,” he said, but the words were almost mechanical, as if he knew himself that she had seen through to the truth he had been hiding all this time.

  For Hal had seen something. Something in Ezra’s eyes, some flicker of consciousness that she had seen a hundred, a thousand times before. And it told her that she was right.

  “You knew,” she said, full of certainty. “You were there. What did you do?”

  For a long, long moment he said nothing, he simply stood, his back to the door, his arms folded. His face was in shadow, the moonlight only showing Hal his brows, knit in an angry frown, but she was not frightened of him. She could read this man. And he was afraid. She had him cornered, not the other way around.

  “Ezra, you’re my—” The word stuck in her throat. “You are my father. Don’t you think I have a right to know?”

  “Oh, Hal,” he said, and he shook his head, suddenly not angry anymore, but as if he were very sad, or very tired, Hal was not sure. “Hal, why the fuck couldn’t you just leave it.”

  “Because I have to know. I have a right to know!”

  “I’m sorry,” he said softly. “I am so . . . so sorry
.”

  And then she knew.

  CHAPTER 48

  * * *

  “You killed my mother.”

  The truth hit her like a slap of icy water, knocking all the breath out of her.

  She felt herself falling into a deep black certainty.

  It was as if she had always known—and yet the shock of hearing it, in her own quiet, flat voice, was still absolute.

  She found herself gasping for breath, a kind of slow drowning, and then she could not speak any longer, only shake her head—but not in disbelief. It was a kind of desperation for this not to be true.

  But it was. And she had known it for longer than she had realized.

  Perhaps she had known it since she had come to this house.

  She just could not bear for it to be true.

  “Maud was going to tell you everything,” he said sadly. “She wrote and told Mother, she said you had a right to know, and that she was going to tell you when you turned eighteen. And I couldn’t let her. I couldn’t let her tell you the truth.”

  “You killed her. And you killed Maggie.”

  “I didn’t mean to. God, I loved her, Hal, once, but she was—” He shook his head, as if trying, even now, to understand. “It was an accident, but she made me so, so angry, Hal, that’s what you have to understand.”

  Keep them talking, Hal. Questions can make people clam up—make open statements, show them that whatever they are holding inside them, you know already.

  “I understand,” she said, though the words were painful in her throat, and hard to say. She swallowed. “You must have had a reason.”

  “Running away . . .” He said the words slowly, his head down, almost as if he were speaking to himself. “Leaving Trepassen, I could understand that. Mother made her life unbearable, and I was away at school, there wasn’t much I could do. But then she came back, and God, she was so different, so cold, so hard. She came up to the house—it was July or August, I think, and I’d finished school. Mother was out and Maggie came to see me, and she said . . .” He gave a short, choking laugh. “She said, ‘I’m not going to beat around the bush, Ed, you have an obligation to support this child.’

  “I mean—can you believe it? The”—he seemed almost to choke with the memory of it—“the sheer effrontery. She ran away, left me wondering where the hell she was, what she’d done, and then she turns up out of the blue, without so much as an apology, demanding money. After all we’d been to each other, after all I’d—”

  He sank to the bed, his head in his hands.

  “Oh God.” The words were out before she could stop herself, and as soon as they were spoken she heard her mother’s voice in her head: Never show them you’re shocked, nothing makes people more defensive than censure. You’re their priest, Hal. This is a confessional, of a sort. Be open—and they will give you the truth.

  She put her hands to her mouth, as if preventing herself from saying any more, and then simply stood there, looking down at the top of his head, cold with shock. A small, far-off, practical part of her mind was whispering: If only you had your phone, you could have recorded this. But it was too late. Her phone was far away, up in the attic, with no hope of her reaching it without alarming him. And besides, the truth was more important now. She had to know.

  He spoke again, his voice harsh and cracked, his head still bowed as if with the weight of his confession.

  “I asked her to go for a walk, I thought if we went out of the house, to somewhere with happy memories . . .” He trailed off, and then shook his head. “We went down to the lake. She always loved the boathouse, but when we got there it was so cold, there was ice on the water, and it was like everything had changed. When I tried to kiss her, she slapped me. She slapped me.” He sounded incredulous. “And I was angry, Hal. I was so angry. I put my hands around her neck, and I kissed her—I kissed her, and when I let go . . .”

  He stopped. Hal was cold with the horror of it.

  She could imagine it so well, the icy slap, slap of the water against the jetty, and poor Maggie’s desperate struggles, her feet kicking against the slippery planks. . . .

  And then what? A body . . . slipped through the thin shards of ice into the cold black waters . . . a boat, deliberately holed, to pin it down and cover the bones.

  And silence. Silence for more than twenty years.

  “Oh my God,” she whispered, her hands to her face. “Oh my God.”

  He looked up at her, and there were tears in his eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” was all he said.

  And then he stood, and he reached out, and for a moment, a terrible moment, Hal thought that he was going to kiss her too.

  But he did not. And then she realized what he was about to do.

  CHAPTER 49

  * * *

  “Ezra, don’t.” Hal began to back away, but he was between her and the door, and the only place she could go was backwards, back towards the other door, the chink of darkness at the far side of the room. Was it an exit? Or a dead end? She had no way of knowing. “Please. You don’t need to do this. You’re my father, I won’t tell anyone. . . .”

  But he was coming closer, and closer.

  “The others will realize—they’ll know you came back—they’ll see the tracks of the car. Mrs. Warren, she’ll hear you—”

  But even as she said the words, she knew they were futile. Even if Mrs. Warren was here somewhere, she had covered up one murder by her darling boy.

  There was no point in screaming. No one would hear her. But while her brain told her that, her muscles knew that it was the only thing they could do, and she took a huge breath, filling her lungs, and screamed.

  “Help me! Someone help me, I’m in ro—”

  And then he was on her, like a cat on a mouse, his hand over her mouth, stifling the sounds.

  Hal bit down, hard, tasting blood, and with one hand she scrabbled at the bedside table for something, anything to use as a weapon. A lamp. A cup. A photograph frame, even.

  Her fingers were clutching, and she heard the crack of breaking glass, and then she had something in her grip, a lamp she thought, and she hit him over the back of the head with it as hard as she could, hearing the smash of the bulb and the crunch of the metal shade.

  Ezra let go of her mouth to roar with pain and clutch at her hand, forcing her to drop the lamp, and she filled her lungs again—but this time, before she could scream, his hands were around her throat, crushing it.

  She made one last reach for the bedside table—and then she gave up. She couldn’t not. The pain in her throat was huge, a crushing pressure, and every instinct was forcing her to get her hands up, try to prize off his grip.

  Fighting was no longer the most important thing. Breathing was.

  Hal brought her hands up, digging her nails into his knuckles, trying to loosen his fingers enough to draw a single ragged breath, but his grip was immensely strong, and she could feel herself giving way, giving up, her vision disintegrating into fragments of black and red, and the roaring in her ears was like waves of darkness, and the pain in her throat was like a knife, and she had a brief flashing image of the blindfolded woman on the eight of swords, hemmed into her prison of blades, blind, bleeding, trapped, and as the room fractured into blackness she had time to think, I am not that woman. She is not my fate.

  She thought of her mother, of how fast this had been. Seconds only, how strange that life could be extinguished so fast. . . .

  Her legs were still kicking, more in instinct than by design, and through her fragmenting vision she could see Ezra’s face, his mouth ugly and square with grief, tears running down his nose.

  “I’m sorry,” she heard through the roar in her ears. “I’m so sorry, I never wanted to do this—”

  Her legs were barely moving now. She wanted to cry out, beg him, but she could not whisper, let alone speak. The pressure on her windpipe was too great, and she had no breath left in her.

  Hold on.

  She was not sur
e whose voice it was. Maggie’s. Maud’s. Or maybe it had always been her own—only her own.

  Hold on.

  But she could not. His fingers were crushing her, and everything was slipping further and further away.

  There was no point fighting. He was too strong.

  She let her fingers fall from his, stopped trying to pry his grip from her throat.

  And as she did, her knuckles brushed something on the bed, something that had fallen from the nightstand in the struggle.

  She closed her hand around it, and with almost the last of her strength, she picked it up, and smashed it into his face.

  Hal heard the crack of the glass before she realized what it was—the broken photograph frame—and then she saw the spray of blood as a shard of glass dug deep into the bony ridge above his eye socket. He gave a scream of pain and took one hand away from her throat, feeling for the piece of glass sticking out of his brow, the pouring blood blinding him. For a moment Hal stared in horror. She had no idea what she had done—whether the glass had gone deep enough to penetrate something vital. But she could not stop to find out.

  She let the picture frame drop, dug her fingers beneath his remaining hand, and then she swung her knee up and into his crotch with all the force she could muster.

  And he let go.

  Stumbling, gasping, her breath tearing in her raw throat, Hal made for the door at the far side of the room.

  “Oh no you don’t!” She heard his voice like a hoarse roar of pure fury, but it was too late to turn back even if she had wanted to.

  As she flung herself against the door it gave way beneath her weight and she found herself falling, tumbling, down cold steps, until she stopped with a crunch at the bottom.

  • • •

  IT WAS EXTREMELY DARK. HAL’S head throbbed with the old bruise, where she had hit it before, and her throat screamed with pain from Ezra’s near throttling.