فصل 8

CHAPTER 8

Hal’s mother had taught her tarot, and she’d been familiar with the images on the cards almost before she could walk—the smiling High Priestess, the stern Hierophant, the scary Tower with the lost souls falling away. And she had accompanied her mother to the booth on West Pier often enough as a little girl, when school was off and her mother couldn’t find anyone to babysit. She’d sat quietly behind the curtain in the corner reading a book, listening to her mother’s skillful back-and-forth, and she grew to understand the tactics almost without realizing—the leading questions, the graceful forks: “A brother . . .”—a slight frown from the client—“no, wait, someone like a brother. A friend? A male relative?” Hal learned how far to generalize and when to backtrack when you had hit a rut. She watched how her mother stopped trying to apply a statement when the client was stubbornly shaking his or her head, and how she changed tack with an unruffled, “Ah, well, I will leave that image with you to decipher. Perhaps its meaning will come to you later, or it may be a warning for the future.” So much she had picked up without even trying. But to conduct a reading herself . . . that was another matter.

In the end, though, she had no choice. A couple of days before Hal’s eighteenth birthday, her mother was killed in a hit-and-run on a hot summery day, right outside their flat, by a speeding driver who was never found. Hal was left reeling, grieving—and broke.

When the pier manager, Mr. White, came to her a few weeks later, his ultimatum was not unkind—he wanted to give Hal first refusal, he said. But the kiosk could not remain empty in the height of the season. If she wanted her mother’s booth it was hers, no question. But she would have to start soon. It was June, the pier was full every day and every evening, and shuttered kiosks were bad for everyone.

And so Hal had picked up her mother’s cards, turned on the neon sign outside the booth, and become Madame Margarida in her turn.

The regular clients were easy. She had watched her mother read time and again for these people, had listened to them spill the details of wayward husbands, tetchy bosses, unhappy children. And the drunken walk-ins were not too bad—she could bluff her way through those, and besides, they tended to be tourists who would never be back.

No, it was the bookings that worried her. The people who paid for a full hour’s consultation, who rang up beforehand to make sure she would be in.

For those, Hal did something her mother had never resorted to. She cheated.

It was scary how much you could find out online. Hal had never used Facebook before her mother’s death, but in those early, uncertain days she created a fake profile, with an unthreatening picture of a blond girl taken from Google images, and christened her “Lil Smith.” Lil was a conscious choice—a name that could be short for Lily, Lila, Lillian, Elizabeth, or a hundred other names. Smith was obvious, as was the unassuming prettiness of the girl.

It was amazing how readily people accepted a friend request from someone they had never met, but much of the time she didn’t even need to do that, for their privacy settings were wide open, and she could find out details of their family, their employer, their education and hometown, all without ever leaving her room.

Now, as the train sped west, she opened up her laptop and turned her attention to the Westaways, a nervous fluttering in the pit of her stomach.

The first Google hit was a death notice in the Penzance Courier for Hester Mary Westaway, born September 19, 1930, died November 22, 2016, at Clowe’s Court, St. Piran. The brief obituary stated that she was the widow of Erasmus Harding Westaway, by whom she had had three sons and a daughter. She is survived by her sons, Harding, Abel, and Ezra Westaway, and her grandchildren, read the notice.

Was she supposed to be the daughter of one of these men?

Neither Abel nor Harding was a big Facebook user, but nor were they hard to find. Only one hit came up for each name, and Harding had helpfully listed his hometown as St. Piran, and tagged Abel as his brother. As Hal scrolled down through his profile, looking at photographs of weddings and christenings, family parties and first days at school, she felt a lump in her throat. There was a wife, Mitzi Westaway (née Parker), and three children, Richard, Katherine, and Freddie, ranging from early to mid teens.

Abel was younger by a good few years, a kind-looking man with a neat brown beard and hair the color of dark honey. His relationship status wasn’t visible, but scrolling through his profile pictures Hal picked out a handsome blue-eyed man called Edward in many of the photos. There was a tagged photograph of the two of them together in Paris on Valentine’s Day 2015, and another of them hand in hand at some kind of formal event. Black and White Ball for the Orphans of the Philippines, read the caption. Both men were wearing black tie, and Abel was smiling up at his companion with a kind of anxious pride.

Both profiles exuded an air of comfortable wealth that made Hal’s heart hurt with a kind of longing envy. There was nothing ostentatious, no yachts or Caribbean cruises. But there was casual mention of holidays in Venice, skiing in Chamonix, private schools, and tax planning. The evolving slide show of profile pictures showed children on ponies, four-wheel-drive cars, and polo equipment, and their Facebook memories were of restaurant meals and family get-togethers.

Of Ezra there was no sign.

Judging by Facebook, both Abel and Harding were old enough to have a child in her twenties, but it was the daughter who kept drawing Hal’s attention. She is survived by her sons. What had happened to the daughter?

Without a name, there was no way of finding out, and there was no mention of a sister on either Harding’s or Abel’s Facebook profile. After a moment’s thought, Hal—or rather, Lil Smith—put in a friend request to Harding’s eldest son, Richard Westaway. She deliberately did not ask Abel. He had only 93 friends, and didn’t look the type to accept unsolicited friend requests from mystery girls. Harding was an even worse choice—he had only 19 friends and didn’t seem to have checked his account for almost four months. Richard, on the other hand, had 576 friends and had already posted an update checking in at a service station outside Exeter.

Hal was just opening up another tab, when a notification flashed up—Richard had accepted her request. She clicked through to his profile and liked the first photograph that came up—Richard’s muddy face brandishing some kind of cup. Thrashed St Barnabus at rugger AGAIN. Pretty sure their fly half was a girl with facial hair Images, read the caption. Hal rolled her eyes, and returned to Google search.

There was nothing for Trepassen House on the land registry, and there were no businesses registered there. It wasn’t listed under care homes, or inspected as a food premises. There seemed to be no indication that it was anything other than a private home. Google maps brought it up, though, and Hal switched the view first to satellite and then to street view. Street view was unhelpful, showing nothing but a country lane flanked by a long brick wall with yews and rhododendrons shrouding anything behind it. Hal clicked along the road for a few miles in either direction, until finally she came to a wrought-iron gate across a driveway, but the photo was taken from the wrong angle to provide any view of the house, and she switched back to satellite.

The blurry image was too small to show anything apart from a gabled roof and a gated expanse of green punctuated by trees, but if nothing else, Hal could see that the place was big. Very big. This looked like a stately home, almost. These people had money. Serious money.

“Tickets, please,” said a voice over her shoulder, breaking into her thoughts, and Hal looked up to see a uniformed conductor standing in the aisle next to her. She rummaged in her wallet for a moment and held out the ticket. “Home for the weekend, are we?” he said as he punched a hole in it, and Hal was just about to shake her head, when something stopped her.

She had to step into this part sometime, after all.

“No, I . . . I’m going back for a funeral.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.” The conductor handed her back her ticket. “Anyone close?”

Hal swallowed. She felt the cliff yawning beneath her feet. It’s just a role, she told herself. No different from what you do every day.

The words seemed to stick in her throat, but she forced herself on.

“My grandmother.”

For a moment the statement felt like what it was—a lie. But then she rearranged her face into an expression . . . not of grief, for that would be too much, for this woman she could not possibly be close to. But a kind of solemn regret. And she felt a shiver of something run through her—the same shiver she felt when she switched on the light outside her booth and stepped into her role.

“Very sorry for your loss,” the conductor said, and he nodded gravely, and passed on up the corridor and into the next carriage.

Hal was putting the ticket back into her near-empty wallet when the train dipped into a tunnel, causing the lights to flicker out, so that for a second the only illumination was the glow of her laptop, and the sparks of the wheels on the track, like lightning flashes against the blackened brick of the tunnel.

The screen of her laptop glowed emerald bright, the huge expanse of grass, the narrow snaking road, and suddenly Hal felt a kind of anger wash over her.

How could one family, one person, have so much? The grounds of Trepassen House could fit not just Hal’s apartment block, but her entire road and most of the next one. Just the cost of mowing those lawns was probably more than she made in a month. But it wasn’t just that—it was everything. The ponies. The holidays. The casual acceptance of it all.

How could it be right that some people had so much, while others had so little?

The lights came back on with a strobing flicker, and another Facebook notification popped up. Another update from Richard. Hal clicked on it, and a picture filled the screen—Richard and his family against a backdrop of paneled wood, all of them beaming proudly. Harding had his arm clasped so hard around his son that the boy was staggering slightly.

Richard has shared a Facebook memory, said the caption, and peering closer Hal read, Prize-giving day at St A’s. Ma doing the ol maternal pride thing so hard i thought she might rupture something. Just gotta make sure Dad makes good on our deal—500 squids for not flunking maths—and then HELLOOOO Ibiza!

As the train swooped out of the tunnel into daylight, Hal felt again that fluttering sickness in the pit of her stomach—but she knew in that instant that she would not turn back.

For the flutter wasn’t only nerves. It wasn’t even just envy. It was also a kind of excitement.