The Death of Mrs. Westaway(41)

“You ask, do you hear me? You don’t go poking into things that don’t concern you.” Mrs. Warren stopped, pursing her lips shut as though she would have said more, but had thought better of it, and glared at Hal with undisguised hostility.

“Look, I said I’m sorry,” Hal said. She crossed her arms protectively across her chest, nettled by the injustice of it—and yet unable to defend herself, because she could not afford to antagonize someone she might need to mine for information. Besides, at bottom the old lady was right. She was an intruder, however much she might pretend otherwise. “I’ll go back to the other wing. I was—” A sudden inspiration came. “I was just going to ask if you needed any help.”

She smiled, pleased with her own quick-wittedness, but it faded from her lips as she saw Mrs. Warren draw herself up to her not-very-full height, her expression venomous.

“Well, aren’t we the gracious little lady. I may be getting on, but I’m not quite in my dotage, and I don’t need help from the likes of you.” Mrs. Warren managed to make the final words sound like an insult. “Breakfast will be at eight.”

And she turned and switched on the hoover again.

Hal retreated quietly, closing the door behind her, and went back into the conservatory, feeling ruffled by the encounter. How could Mrs. Warren have taken her last words so personally? It was as if she had wanted to take offense.

Aren’t we the gracious little lady.

The implication stung—the more so because it was so untrue. If it had been Richard or Kitty at the door, then she could have understood. But Hal’s upbringing had been about as far from being born with a silver spoon as you could possibly get. She thought of her own childhood, of pushing their ancient, coughing hoover around the living room after school, before her mother got home from the pier, wanting to take some of the load off where she could. The secondhand clothes her mother had picked over at the charity shops, the boys’ shoes she had been forced to wear when there were no girls’ ones in her size. You know what? her mother had said, pleading with Hal with her eyes to like them. I think they’re cooler anyway. They suit you. And Hal had smiled and nodded and worn them with as much pride as she could muster. I prefer them, she’d told the girls at school. They’re better for running and jumping and playing football.

It had come to be true in the end.

You know nothing about me! she wanted to shout back through the sitting room door.

She walked back slowly through the conservatory, wondering what to do until the others came down. Outside she could see, dimly, through the green mold on the panes, the lawn stretching down to the sea, and beyond it the windswept yews, the ones farthest from the house half bent over by the continual sea wind. The magpies were strutting on the lawn, and Hal thought of the rhyme that Mr. Treswick had recited yesterday. She couldn’t make out the number of birds through the clouded glass, but there must be at least seven, maybe more, and it seemed suddenly right—in this house full of secrets.

Well, it was very plain she wasn’t going to get any answers from Mrs. Warren. The hoover was still humming from behind the sitting room door, but Hal no longer had any faith in her ability to plumb the housekeeper for information, even when she emerged. And the rest of the house was quiet. But perhaps she could use this interlude to her advantage.

Stepping softly, she opened the third door leading out from the conservatory. It led into a small hallway, with a toilet opening off one side of it, the cistern dripping hollowly, and on the other side of it a door, firmly closed.

Hal glanced behind her, thinking of Mrs. Warren’s accusations of poking and prying, but the vacuum cleaner was still going, and with a defiant spurt of adrenaline she reached out and turned the handle. She slipped inside, and closed the door behind her, as quietly as she could.

It was a study—but one that had plainly not been used in many years. Dust was thick on the books, cobwebs skeined across the desk blotter, and the telephone that rested on the desk was yellowed Bakelite of the kind Hal had only seen in films. There was a cracked leather book on the desk embossed with the words Diary Planner in faded gilt lettering, and very, very gently, Hal opened the cover. Desk diary and day planner 1979, she read. It was older than Hal herself. When she let the cover fall back, it made a sound like a soft thud, and a little cloud of dust rose up.

Whose room had this been? It was profoundly masculine in a way Hal couldn’t quite define, and she could not imagine Mrs. Westaway using it, somehow. Was it Mr. Westaway’s? What had happened to him?

She leafed through the desk diary for a few pages, hoping something useful might leap out at her—Maud’s birthday seemed too good to hope for, but there might be some nugget of information she could use to her advantage. But the writing was so crabbed it was hard to make anything out, and those notes she did decipher were resolutely unpromising and businesslike—CF meeting . . . Telephone Webber . . . 12.30 Mr Woeburn, Barclays.

Hal closed it gently and turned her attention to the rest of the study. Opposite the desk were shelves of books, rising to the ceiling, as dusty and cobwebbed as everything else—all except, Hal suddenly noticed, for one volume, tucked away at the far top right, a slim anonymous book with a buttercup-yellow spine.

Beneath it was a set of wooden steps, designed for reaching the top shelves, and looking closer Hal could see that there was a footprint in the dust—still dusty itself, to be sure, but not the thirty years of dust covering the rest of the study.