The Death of Mrs. Westaway(73)

And then in Harding’s own voice, slightly pompous and half a tone deeper than his natural register: “Harding Westaway.”

“Please leave a message after the tone,” continued the woman, and there was a bleep.

Hal coughed.

“Um . . . Uncle Harding, it—it’s Hal. Harriet. I am so sorry for running out yesterday, but the fact is—”

She swallowed again. She had spent the time since getting up trying to decide what to say, and in the end she had decided there was only one thing she could say, only one thing that made sense of her actions. The truth.

“The fact is, I—I’ve been pretty freaked out by all of this. Whatever I was expecting when I came down to Cornwall, it wasn’t what Mr. Treswick read out, and I’ve found it very hard to come to terms with my grandmother’s will. On Friday night I couldn’t sleep, and I’m afraid I—I just—”

Beeep. And the message cut out, indicating that she had taken too long to explain herself.

“To send the message, press one. To rerecord the message, press two,” said the female voice.

Hal swore quietly, pressed one, and then hung up and redialed. This time it went through to voice mail almost immediately.

“Sorry, I took too long and the message cut out. Look, the long and the short of it is, I’m very sorry I left without talking to you first, but I’ve had some time to think and—and I’d like to come back. Not just because I appreciate you probably need me present for the interview with Mr. Treswick, but also—well—I have a lot of questions about my mother and about why my grandmother chose to do this and—well, that’s it, really. I hope you’ll forgive me. Please call me back on this number and let me know. Bye. And sorry again.”

When she put down the phone, she felt her stomach turn with a feeling halfway between nervousness and sickness. Was she mad—to go back?

Perhaps. But she could not stay here—not with Mr. Smith’s men waiting for her, and not without knowing the truth of her own past. If she burned these bridges now, then she might never be able to find out what had happened at Trepassen. Who her father really was.

Why had her mother lied about her father’s identity?

Last night she had been too busy searching in the diary for answers—answers she had not found. But now the question was beginning to press upon her like a guilty secret, demanding her attention. For some reason, her mother had chosen not just to keep Hal in the dark about the identity of her own father, but to go further: to spin a whole tale of falsehoods. The Spanish student—the one-night stand. None of it had existed. But why? Why go to such lengths to keep Hal in the dark about something she had every right to know?

Before she could unpack the conundrum any further, her phone buzzed against her leg, the shrill sound of the ringer following with a millisecond delay. She looked at the screen, and her stomach flipped. Harding.

“He-hello?”

“Harriet!” Harding’s voice was full of a kind of hectoring relief. “I’ve just listened to your messages. Young lady, you gave everyone here a severe fright.”

“I know,” Hal said. “I’m sorry.” She was sorry, genuinely sorry. “I just—it’s like I said in my message, I was overwhelmed by it all. It’s hard to go from having no one and being answerable to no one to—well.”

“You could at least have left a note,” Harding said. “Mitzi got the shock of her life when she went up to wake you and found your bed empty and your belongings gone. We had no idea what had happened.”

“I saw Mrs. Warren as I was leaving. Didn’t she tell you?” The memory of that strange, disjointed encounter was dreamlike. Had it really happened? Had Mrs. Warren really said the things Hal remembered? Good riddance to you, and your trash mother before you. It seemed impossible.

There was a disconcerted silence.

“Mrs. Warren, you say?” Harding said at last. “No. No, she said nothing. How very odd.”

“Oh.” Hal felt wrong-footed. She had assumed Mrs. Warren would have got her side of the story in first—Hal creeping out like a thief in the night, probably with the family silver under her arm. “I just assumed . . . well, I should have phoned earlier. I’m sorry, Uncle Harding.”

Uncle Harding. It was strange how the words slipped out so automatically. A few days ago they had been so hard to say—she had practically had to force the title uncle out of her mouth. Now it was becoming habit. She was beginning to believe her own lies.

“Well, we will say no more about it, my dear,” Harding said, a little pompously. “But for goodness’ sake, don’t run away in the middle of the night again. We’d only just found you after all these years and—well—” He stopped and gave a kind of harrumphing cough, covering up the emotion that Hal sensed lurking beneath the matter-of-fact fa?ade. “I don’t think your aunt, for one, could stand the strain. She was beside herself yesterday, with no idea where you were and no means of contacting you. Now—did you say you were coming back?”

“Yes,” Hal said. She swallowed. With her free hand she picked up the topmost letter from the pile in her lap, folding it back into the creases of the envelope it had lain in for so many years. “Yes, I am.”

CHAPTER 32


* * *

Hal had not considered how she would pay for the ticket back to Penzance until she got to the ticket office at Brighton station, and her card was refused. As she dragged her case away from the counter, her face scarlet with embarrassment, she ran through her options in her head, and could see only one—to try the app again, and hope that the website would process the ticket without checking in with her bank. It seemed a slim hope, but she had no others.