The Death of Mrs. Westaway(27)

“Th-thank you,” Hal said. The little room was extremely cold, and her teeth chattered, though she tried to keep her jaw clenched tight to stop it. “Wh-when should I c-come down?”

“The others aren’t here yet,” Mrs. Warren said, seeming to answer her question without quite doing so. “No doubt they went around by the coast road, it’s always bad this time of year with the storms.”

And she turned, before Hal could ask any more questions, and stumped off down the narrow stairs. Hal waited, and heard the door at the bottom slam smartly shut, and then she sank down on the little bed and took in her surroundings.

The room was barely a couple of meters side to side, and the barred window gave it the feeling of a cell, even with the door open. It was also achingly cold. As the air settled around her, Hal realized that she could see her breath if she huffed hard enough. There was a mint-green eiderdown on the bed, and Hal pulled it off the mattress and wrapped it around her shoulders. The fragile satin pulled beneath her fingers so that she was afraid the fabric might disintegrate in her grip, but she was too cold to sit without some kind of warmth.

She thought about lighting the fire, but it seemed pointless when she would have to go downstairs to face the family. And just the thought of asking the disapproving Mrs. Warren for another scuttle of coal made Hal quail, remembering her thinned lips and grim expression.

Did Mrs. Warren dislike all the family this much, or was it just Hal? she wondered. Perhaps it was because of the short notice of her arrival—though Mrs. Warren hadn’t seemed exactly surprised. Perhaps it was Hal’s bedraggled dress and shoes. Or could it be . . . did she suspect something? There had been something Hal couldn’t quite pin down in her expression, when she saw Hal, a kind of wary . . . calculation. It was the look, Hal suddenly thought, of a child who sees a cat appear among a flock of pigeons, and stands back to watch the slaughter. What did it mean?

Hal shivered again, in spite of the eiderdown, and then, remembering her vow on the journey over, she pulled her phone out of her bag and opened up the search screen. Her fingers, as she typed the words in the search box, were stiff and reluctant, and not only with cold, and she paused for a long moment before she hit the search button.

Maud Westaway St. Piran missing dead

Then she pressed ENTER.

The little icon whirred for a long time, long enough for Hal to look doubtfully at the coverage bars in the top right-hand corner of the screen. Two out of five. Not great . . . but it should be enough to get some kind of Internet, surely?

At last the results flashed up on the screen, and Hal felt her stomach flip, for there, right at the top of the list, was the piece she had known would come up. It was a newspaper link about her mother’s death.

Maud Westaway St. Piran missing dead said the grayed-out text beneath the link, showing that it didn’t tick all the search boxes, but that, nonetheless, this piece was the best match.

Hal didn’t click. She didn’t need to. The information she needed didn’t lie in this piece, with its lurid details and sorrowful tone. Self-styled psychic practitioner, Hal remembered, and familiar local figure in her characterful dress, as though her mother were one step away from a medicated stay in a secure facility, rather than a cheerful, down-to-earth woman making a living for herself and her child in the best way she could.

Great loss to the pier community, though, that was true.

Hal still remembered the way they had gathered round her when she returned to her mother’s booth, the mute sympathy on their faces, the way she had found that for months and months afterwards, cups of hot tea would be left quietly outside her kiosk on cold days, how the mistakes in the change at the fish-and-chips stand were somehow always in her favor.

Now she blinked as she scrolled past the links about the crash, her vision blurring as she tried to make out the text in the other pieces. She clicked through to a few, but none of them were related. There was a missing West Highland terrier in St. Piran, and a slew of totally irrelevant links from baby name websites and the St. Piran tourist board.

At last, she shut down the screen, drew the eiderdown around her shoulders, and simply sat, looking out of the little barred window across the rain-spattered garden.

Whoever Maud Westaway had been, whatever had happened to her, she seemed to have gone without a trace.

CHAPTER 12


* * *

It was the sound of tires on the gravel outside the window that made Hal’s head jerk up, breaking into her thoughts. The satin eiderdown slithered from her shoulders and she snatched for it reflexively, shivering in the sudden gust of cold wind, and then let it fall as she went to the window to see who had arrived.

She could not see the faces of the people below, only the tops of their heads and their umbrellas as they hurried across to the main doors, but she could see the parked cars—they were the two long black sedans, sleek as sharks, that had made up the funeral cortège.

The family had arrived. The real test was about to begin.

She felt suddenly sick with nerves, lightheaded with tension. This was it. A face-to-face encounter with her supposed relatives. Was she really going to do this?

She played people for a living—in her moments of clear-eyed honesty, she knew that. But this was different. This wasn’t just telling gullible people what they wanted to hear or already knew. This was a crime.

“Bugger tea,” Hal heard, floating up the stairwell as she reached the bottom of the narrow attic staircase. “Brandy’s what I want—or whiskey, if you can’t do that, Mrs. Warren.”