The Death of Mrs. Westaway(89)

And the answer was . . . yes. It was possible. Though Hal was as certain as she could be that that was not what had happened.

? ? ?

DOWNSTAIRS, HAL STEPPED LIGHTLY OFF the carpeted flight of stairs onto the cold tiles of the entrance hall. As she did, a clock somewhere deep inside the house ground into action and began to strike. Hal counted off the chimes. One . . . two . . . three . . . four . . . five . . . six . . . seven.

The silence, afterwards, was a little unnerving, but the feeling faded as she pushed open the drawing room door. It was empty—just as they had left it last night, the whiskey glasses scattered across the table.

Four cups. In tarot, the four of cups meant inwardness. It meant not noticing what was under your nose, failing to grasp the opportunities that were being presented. In Hal’s deck the card was a young woman lying under a tree, apparently asleep, or meditating. Three empty cups lay on the ground in front of her, and a fourth was being offered to her lips by a disembodied hand. But the woman didn’t drink. She didn’t even notice what was being shown to her.

What was it that she was failing to notice?

Breakfast would not be served until eight, and Hal didn’t relish the thought of bumping into Mrs. Warren, as she had the first morning, so she pushed her feet into her shoes, still damp from their soaking yesterday, put up the hood of her fleece, and gently undid the drawing room window, stepping outside into the chilly dawn air.

? ? ?

THE NIGHT HAD BEEN CLEAR, and very cold, and the temperature overnight had gone well below freezing. The grass beneath Hal’s feet was thick with frost, and it crunched gently as she walked, her breath a cloud of white, tinged with the faintest of pink by the rising sun.

Outside in the cold, bracing air, her panicked certainty of last night had begun to recede, leaving her feeling a little foolish. A blown lightbulb, which someone had got halfway through replacing and then forgotten. A couple of nails, probably left over from when a carpet runner had covered the stairs, and a single thread, both seen by the wavering light of a mobile phone—it wasn’t much to build a conspiracy theory on. And besides, it didn’t make sense. Even if Maud was dead, and even if someone wanted to prevent that fact from coming out, what would be the sense in trying to kill Hal? She had already revealed the truth—that her mother wasn’t Maud. There was nothing left to disclose. Tripping her down the stairs would be a pointless risk, and achieve nothing. The horse had bolted—and there was no stable door to close.

In the slowly brightening dawn, her fears of the night before suddenly seemed not just laughable but impossible, and she felt her cheeks flush a little as she remembered her panicked crawl back to her room, and the thumping of her heart as she sat against the door with her knees to her chest.

Oh, Hal . . . Her mother’s voice in her ear. Always so dramatic . . .

She shook her head.

She had been walking aimlessly, letting her feet take her where they wanted, and now, as she looked back over her shoulder to the house, she realized quite how far she had come.

For a moment she stood, looking back at the green sea of lawn between herself and the house, and beyond that, the tangle of stables and outbuildings, glass houses and kitchen plots.

How many homes could you build in this one garden? How many people could you house, and how many jobs could you create?

And here it all was, all this land, all this beauty, ring-fenced, first for one dying old woman, and now for her heirs.

Well, it was no longer her problem. Ezra, Harding, and Abel could fight over it now. What would they do—sell it? Perhaps it would become a hotel, with the grounds given over to swimming pools and glamping yurts. Or perhaps someone would knock the house down and build a golf course, with rolling green as far as the eye could see, a grass-green sea meeting the blue of the horizon.

Today the far-off sea was gray, tipped with white horses, and the wind was fresh in Hal’s face as she walked, always downhill.

She had been planning to get as far as the boundary and then cut back round to the house, but when she looked away from the headland, she realized that her feet had led her inexorably back to the path they always seemed to take—the clump of trees, with the dark water glimmering through.

This time, however, Hal looked at the water with different eyes. It was not just any lake that lay within the dense, overgrown copse. It was the lake. The one her mother had written about in her diary.

And there, between the bare, frosted trunks, she could see the shape of the boathouse.

She changed direction, heading down towards it, curious now.

The trees that surrounded it were a mix of beech, oak, and yew, only the yew still green. The others were bare, a few brown leaves clinging to the branches, fluttering in the wind that came up the valley. As Hal picked her way down the overgrown path, pushing aside brambles and stepping across nettles, she found the words of the diary running through her head—the description of them taking the boats out that day. “Come on, Ed,” she shouted, and he stood up, grinned at me, and then followed her to the water’s edge, and took a running jump.

Ed. Edward. Could it really be true? She remembered how Edward had come to meet her that evening at the lake, his laconic voice: Oh . . . it used to be a boathouse . . . back in the day. And she thought, too, of the way Abel had deliberately steered her away from it that first morning, before she had even known what it was. Was there something they did not want her to see?

The door was closed and seemed to be locked, but Hal could see through the cracks in the blackened, gappy planks. The building was open to the lake on the water side, and there were two platforms on either side, and in between a strip of dark water.