فصل 39

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.

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. . . .

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.

She was leaning on the door, peering through a gap between two of the planks, when suddenly the rotten wood gave and the door burst inwards, sending Hal stumbling inside, slipping on the wet, slimy platform so that she staggered, trying to save herself from shooting into the water, and fell to her knees, barely inches from the lake surface.

She knelt there, panting, steadying herself. The fall had jarred bones already bruised from last night, making her grit her teeth with pain, but as she sat back on her heels nothing seemed to be broken.

Was she safe? Hal looked down at the jetty planks beneath her feet, at the lapping, leaf-strewn water, thin shards of ice floating on the surface. She wasn’t sure. This place looked ready to collapse into the lake at the slightest provocation, and she would not have been surprised if her foot had gone straight through the planks into the water beneath. At least it was shallow. Cautiously, she picked up one of the sticks that had fallen through the holes in the roof, and pushing aside the fragile, broken sheets of ice, she tested the depth. Barely a foot before the stick jagged on something hard beneath the water, a smooth shape that showed pale as Hal pushed away the leaf mold with her stick.

As she peered closer through the dark, slightly peaty water, she recognized the shape of a boat, hull up beneath the water. Black, rotting leaf debris had settled over it, masking it, but her stick had stirred up the water, and faint streaks of white showed where she had trailed the tip. As her eyes got used to the dim light and the way the water slanted the perspective, Hal made out something else—a jagged hole near the keel. Had someone sunk it deliberately?

All of a sudden, this didn’t feel like the place her mother had described in her diary, the place where she had laughed and swum and played with her cousins, and with the boy she was about to fall in love with. It felt . . . The realization came to Hal suddenly, like a cold touch on the shoulder. It felt like a place where something had died.

Hal shuddered, and stepping as lightly as she could, she stood and moved backwards, through the broken door, and back out into the cold morning light. The air tasted fresh and sea-clean after the scent of brackish water and rotten wood in the boathouse, and she breathed it deeply. As she did, her phone pinged with a reminder, and she pulled it out of her pocket to check, though the lurch in her stomach told her what she already knew.

11.30—appt with Mr Treswick.

God. Well, there was no point in putting it off. And even a kind of relief to think that in a few hours the whole business would be laid to rest. She just had to hope that Mr. Treswick would be as accepting of her part in the “mix-up” as Harding, Abel, and Ezra had been . . . or appeared to be, at least.

Hal shivered, pushing her hands deep into the pockets of her fleece. Suddenly toast and coffee—even Mrs. Warren’s coffee—seemed very welcome, and she walked quickly up the hill to the house, her frosty breath streaming over her shoulder.

Behind her, the boathouse door swung quietly closed, but she did not look back.