The Death of Mrs. Westaway(68)

There was a drop—but only a couple of feet, to the veranda below, and she carefully lowered her case out, then dropped to her knees to clamber out herself.

She was halfway there, one leg over the sill, when a voice spoke from the darkness of the other end of the room.

“That’s right. Sneak away in the night. Coward.”

Hal’s head shot up, her blood suddenly racing with fear.

“Who’s there?” she demanded, the fright making her voice more aggressive than she had meant, but the speaker at the other end of the room only laughed, and walked into the shaft of moonlight.

In truth, Hal hadn’t really needed to ask. She had known who it was—who else would be prowling so silently through the darkened rooms in the middle of the night?

Mrs. Warren.

“You can’t stop me,” Hal said. She put her chin up defiantly. “I’m going.”

“Who said I’m stopping you?” Mrs. Warren said. Her lip was curled, and there was a kind of scornful laugh in her voice. “I told you to leave once, and I’ll say it again. Good riddance. Good riddance to you, and your trash mother before you.”

“How dare you.” Hal found her voice was shaking—not with fear, but with anger. “What do you know about my mother?”

“More than you,” Mrs. Warren said. She leaned towards Hal, her voice full of a venom that made Hal shrink back. “Little milk-and-water coward. She was a conniving little gold digger, just like you.”

Hal scrambled backwards out of the window, and staggered to her knees on the paving. She was so angry, she felt a ringing in her ears, a kind of hissing fury. It was a mixture of fury . . . and shock.

“Don’t you dare talk about my mother that way. You don’t know what she went through to bring me up—”

“Don’t talk to me about what you don’t know anything about,” Mrs. Warren spat. “Get out. You should never have come back here.”

With that, she swung the window shut, so that Hal had to snatch her fingers out of the way, just before the heavy frame banged to.

She caught a glimpse of a face, filled with a poisonous hate, and then the shutter slammed closed too, and she heard the bang and scrape of the bar being pulled across.

Hal stood for a moment, her heart beating hard in her chest. She found that her arms were wrapped around herself, as if trying to shield herself from something—though from what, she didn’t know. As her heart slowed, she let her arms drop to her sides, and forced herself to breathe slowly and more deeply.

Thank God. Thank God she was out of that horrible house, and away from that horrible woman. Let them write. Let them come after her, for all she cared. They couldn’t make her return. They couldn’t make her show them anything. She could move—change addresses—change her name, if that was what it took.

About one thing, Mrs. Warren was right, she thought, as she picked up the case and began the long walk down the drive to the main road, to try to hitch a lift to Penzance. She should never have come.

? ? ?

IT WAS ONLY LATER, MUCH later, after a lift on a lorry on its way to St. Ives and a lecture from the driver about personal safety, when she was huddled in the doorway of Penzance station, her coat around her, waiting for the doors to open and the first train to London to arrive, that she had time to reflect on Mrs. Warren’s words, to unpick the realization beneath the hissed invective.

Conniving little gold digger.

Good riddance to you, and your trash mother before you.

Those words could mean only one thing: Mrs. Warren knew. She knew the truth.

She knew that Hal’s mother was not Mrs. Westaway’s daughter, but the dark-eyed cuckoo cousin, taken in as an orphan.

And she knew, therefore, that Hal herself was an impostor.

But she had said nothing. Why?

The puzzle had been in the back of Hal’s mind since last night, twisting and turning in her imagination, shaping and morphing into a dozen different possibilities. But it was only when the doors of the station opened and Hal rose stiffly, stretching out her chilled, cramped limbs and trying to smile at the station attendant, that Mrs. Warren’s last words spoke again inside her head, like a bitter echo.

She should never have come. That was right. But it wasn’t quite what Mrs. Warren had said.

What she had said was, You should never have come back.

CHAPTER 28


* * *

The words stayed with Hal, niggling at her on the long journey back to London.

Come back. What had she meant? Was it a slip of the tongue?

Was it possible that she had been to Trepassen as a child, too young to remember? But if so, Mrs. Warren must know full well the truth about her mother. In which case, why had she not said anything? Was she hiding something of her own?

Suddenly Hal longed to be back in Brighton. Not just to be home—but to look through the box of documents beneath her bed.

There was so much in there that she had never looked at—boxes of papers and old letters, diaries, postcards—things Hal had found too painful to read after her mother’s death, but that she could not bear to throw away. She had bundled them up and stored them, out of sight and out of mind, ready for a day when she would have a reason to go through them.

And now that day had come. For one thing Hal was sure of. Her mother did have a connection to that house. And so did Hal. She was not Mrs. Westaway’s granddaughter, that was certain. But she was a relation. And if her mother was connected to that place, so was she, and she was determined to find out what that connection was.