The Death of Mrs. Westaway(88)

But the second possibility was in a way even more worrying. For the other possibility was that Maud was alive—and that someone in this house was hell-bent on concealing that fact. But why? Could it be the money again? The will? If the legacy to Hal failed, would the money revert back to the pot, or would it travel back up the line that would have inherited it, back to Maud? Or was it something else that someone was trying to conceal—something Maud knew, or could reveal?

There was no way of knowing. But either way, the first step was finding out which possibility she was dealing with.

Finding out whether someone was alive or dead was surprisingly hard—Hal knew that from a client who had come back time and time again, begging Hal to tell her whether her missing husband was still alive, in spite of Hal’s increasingly emphatic insistence that she did not know.

It was always the way. The people who were skeptics would never be convinced—and the people who believed would never be persuaded otherwise. Hal was used to that—used to the resigned disbelief when she told people that she could not answer their questions or change the facts of their lives, as if she had powers she was concealing but chose not to admit for some perverse agenda of her own. She knew the source of their disbelief: it was a reluctance to come to terms with the fact that they would never get the answers and outcomes they craved. But most people, however unwillingly, accepted that Hal would not change fate for them, even if they did not accept that she could not. They went away secretly believing that if Hal would not oblige, there would be others out there who could, if they only searched hard enough.

This woman, however, had been different.

She had come back time and time again, phoning under different names when Hal stopped accepting appointments from her, turning up without warning and banging on the glass, so that Hal learned to dread the clutch of her lean fingers and the desperation in her hollowed eyes.

At last, more from a desire to be rid of her than any kind of charity, Hal had taken down the husband’s name and last known address, and had herself turned to the Internet to try to give the woman the answers she needed—only to run up against an almost complete lack of information. The man wasn’t on Facebook, and it seemed impossible to search for a death certificate without knowing the date of death. Hal had assumed that the records would be computerized, and that a simple search of the man’s name and perhaps his date of birth would throw up anything on record—but it seemed not. For historic records, such a facility existed—but for anything in the last fifty years, you needed to know the exact details of death not just to obtain a death certificate, but simply to find out if such a certificate existed.

It seemed that without knowing when someone had died, there was no way of finding out if they even had.

But Hal had no date of death. If Maud was dead, her brothers knew nothing of the true facts of what had happened, and Mr. Treswick’s searches had not uncovered the fact. The alternative, then, was to prove the opposite—that she was still alive. But how?

The only lead Hal had was the Oxford college that Lizzie had mentioned. An unconditional offer from Oxford, she had said. And later, that she thought it was a women’s college. Hal opened up Google on her phone. In 1995 there had been only one women’s college left in Oxford—St. Hilda’s, though Somerville had only just become coeducational the year before. It was possible that Maud might have called it a women’s college in her description to Lizzie.

A few minutes of searching threw up a database of alumni for both colleges, but it was searchable only by people who were themselves former members of the specific college. Oxford itself would confirm a candidate’s degree and class to an employer, but took twenty-one days to respond to requests.

Hal sighed, but wrote down the numbers of the colleges. Perhaps if she spoke to a real person, she could blag the information she needed. Or she could pretend to be Maud herself, and perhaps whether they spoke to her or not would reveal whether she was a former member of the college.

Really, though, where did that get her? Two, three years on from Maud’s disappearance from Trepassen? It still left a huge gulf of years after that on which Hal had no information whatsoever. And out of the only people she could have asked, one had just tried to kill her.

In the cold light of day, it was hard to realize and remember. Had it really happened? The bump on her head was clear enough, but the nails, and the piece of string—had she really seen what she had thought?

It was almost seven now, and Hal stood, shivering as the covers fell away, and pulled on her clothes, cold as the floor they had been lying on. Outside in the hallway she took a deep breath, and switched on the torch on her mobile phone.

The nails were still there, rusted and bent, on either side of the stairs.

But the string had gone.

Hal frowned. She was certain she remembered it—a piece of unremarkable garden twine, dark against the drab boards, fastened at one end around the left-hand nail. But it wasn’t there anymore; only a pale loose thread from the lino on the landing trailed down.

Had someone come up and cleared it away? Or was it possible she had mistaken the lino thread in the darkness?

She switched off the phone and walked slowly and carefully down the stairs, watching her steps for shards of the broken glass, and thinking as she did. Last night, her one thought had been to show Harding, Abel, and Ezra the evidence of what someone had tried to do. Now she was reconsidering. The nails were bent and rusted, and even to Hal’s eye they looked as if they could have been there for some time. And as for the string . . . she could just hear Harding’s skepticism: Really, Harriet? Isn’t it possible you just caught your foot in that trailing thread from the lino? Regrettably careless, certainly, but hardly a plot to kill. . . .