The Death of Mrs. Westaway(105)

“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.’