The Death of Mrs. Westaway(87)

It was the eight of swords. A woman, blindfolded, bound, surrounded by a prison of blades, and the ground at her feet bloodred as though she were already bleeding from cuts that could never free her.

The cards tell you nothing you don’t already know. It was her mother’s voice, steady in her ear. They have no power, remember that. They can’t reveal any secrets or dictate the future. All they can do is show you what you already know.

Oh, but now she knew, all right.

The walls of the trap were closing around her, sharp enough to maim.

Now she knew that someone hated her enough to kill her. But why?

Because it didn’t make sense. A few hours before, she might have thought that it was an attempt by one of the brothers to regain his share of the inheritance he had thought was his. Because Hal was—had been—the residuary legatee. If she died, her share of the money obeyed the laws of intestacy, which meant that, in the absence of a husband, it would be divided among Mrs. Westaway’s children.

But now that she had admitted the truth, Harding, Ezra, and Abel had nothing left to fear from her. The money would revert to them whatever happened to her.

So why, then? Why now?

Get out—if you know what’s good for you.

Après moi, le déluge. . . .

What did it mean?

Hal’s head, where she had hit it, felt ready to burst, and it throbbed until she thought she might cry out from the pain of it.

Whatever she had done, whatever she had meant, Mrs. Westaway had started something with this legacy, and Hal was blindly following the sequence of events she had set off. Only, like the woman on the eight of swords, she was hedged about with dangers she could not even see.

At last, almost blind with the throbbing pain that had begun to envelop her entire skull, Hal crawled into bed, letting her aching head rest slowly on the cool pillow, closing her eyes, and pulling the blankets up to her chin as though they could protect her against the threats she felt crowding around.

She was almost asleep when a name came to her, like a suggestion whispered into an ear.

Margarida . . .

The word trickled slowly, like cool dark water, through the recesses of Hal’s skull, and in its wake, in spite of her tiredness, her mind began working, making connections.

Hal had claimed that her mother was Margarida Westaway—the girl called Maud in her mother’s diary. And, because of that claim, certain facts had been taken for granted. The fact that Maud had run away from Cornwall. The fact that she had moved to Brighton and had a daughter. And the fact that she had died in a car crash, just three years ago.

But the truth was very different.

The question was, how different.

And how far would someone go to keep the true facts from coming out?

One thing was certain: this was no longer about the money, for Hal had kissed good-bye to that with her confession. There was something deeper and stranger at stake here—something that someone would kill to conceal.

She should have been afraid, and part of her was. But deep down, in the core of herself, the secret predatory self that she kept hidden and locked away, Hal knew. She would not run again. Someone had tried to scare her away once, and it had almost worked. But it would not work again.

Now she wanted answers. What had set her mother running so long ago? Why had she gone to such lengths to lie about her father? And what had happened to Maud?

And most of all—what was this secret, the secret that lay at the heart of all of this mystery, that someone was ready to kill to protect?

Hal wanted answers to all those questions, and more. And she was ready to fight.

CHAPTER 39


* * *

There was no question of going back to sleep, and at last Hal could bear it no longer.

Her phone on the bedside table said 5:05. Too early to get up, but she could not lie there in the darkness for two more hours. She sat up and reached for her glasses, the movement making the back of her head throb painfully, but at last she had them settled on her nose, and she fired up her phone, frowning at the little cracked screen as she tried to work out what to search.

Something had happened to Maud Westaway—something that someone in this house knew, and did not want anyone to find out. Was it Mrs. Warren?

Hal thought again of her face last night, of the wicked gloating pleasure, and the bald admission that she had known all along of Hal’s deception. Whatever it was, Hal thought, she would not put Mrs. Warren past knowing about it and keeping it secret for her own twisted reasons.

But trying to work out who in the house was concealing something was a blind alley, because the truth was, everyone had something to hide, Hal knew that well from her tarot readings. Everyone had secrets, things that they did not want to reveal and would go to great—sometimes extraordinary—lengths to conceal.

What she had to do was try to work out what the secrets were—and what her own part in them was. Someone had been prepared to kill her to stop her revealing what she knew. And what was that?

Hal rubbed her knuckles into her eyes, trying to think clearly.

Because of her evidence, everyone had assumed Maud was dead, that much was clear. And they had assumed, too, that she had died in a car crash. So there were two possibilities. The first was that Maud was dead—but not in a car crash, and someone wanted to cover up what had really happened to her.

That was alarming enough—the idea that Hal might have stumbled onto a potential murder.