Текст книги "The House on Cold Hill"
Автор книги: Peter James
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‘Brilliant! We’ll put torches around the place. Glass of wine?’
‘A large one! How was your day?’
‘Not great either. One distraction after another with the builders, the electricians, the plumber. And the architect called to say that our planning application to have a new window in our bedroom has been turned down because the house is a listed building.’
‘It’s only Grade 2. Why?’
Ollie shrugged. ‘Every generation who’s owned this place over the past two hundred and fifty years has made changes to it. Why do they sodding think in the twenty-first century that now has to stop?’
‘We can appeal it.’
‘Yes – at a cost of thousands.’
‘I need that drink.’
He led the way along the hall and through the atrium, then into the kitchen. He took a bottle of Provence rosé out of the fridge and opened it. As he poured he said, ‘Want to take a walk around the grounds? It’s such a beautiful evening.’
Peeling off her jacket and slinging it over the back of a chair, she said, ‘I’d like that. How’s Jade? How was her first day at school?’
‘She’s fine. A bit quiet and still sullen, but I get the feeling she secretly quite enjoyed it. Or that it wasn’t as bad as she thought. She’s doing homework.’
He said nothing about Jade’s insistence that her grandmother had come into her room last night.
While Caro went upstairs to see their daughter, Ollie carried their glasses out onto the rear terrace, where their outside dining table and chairs were set up, and onto the lawn. Caro came back down. ‘God, it’s so glorious – if we could get the pool cleaned up we could have a swim on evenings like this next year!’ She smiled. ‘You’re right – Jade does seem to have got on OK today.’
‘Yes, thank heavens! The local pool company’s coming on Friday,’ Ollie said. ‘To give me an estimate on what it will take to replace the damaged tiles and get the heating up and running again.’
‘Good! Can’t believe how warm it is – half past six in the evening!’
The sun was still high in the sky over the fields to the west. Caro gave him a hug and kissed him. ‘I was really worried about moving here,’ she said. ‘But driving out of Brighton tonight, it was such a joy to leave the city – I think we’ve made the right decision.’
He smiled, hugged her back and kissed her. ‘We have. I just love it. I think we’re going to be so happy here.’
‘We will be. It’s a happy house!’
7
Tuesday, 8 September
The following morning brought the start of an Indian summer heatwave. Ollie, dressed in shorts, T-shirt and trainers, again dropped Jade off at school. She’d found her first day OK, but was still not happy about being separated from all her old friends. He returned home, relieved that the Migraleve tablets he had been taking seemed to have warded off any migraine. He had a lot to do on his client’s website this morning.
But no sooner had he sat down in his office, than his distractions continued, starting with a visit from the boss of the building contractors, Bryan Barker, who read out a litany of doom and gloom that further inspection of the house had revealed, in his irrepressibly cheerful way that made everything seem somehow less bad than it really was.
Barker started with the rot in the cellar, then the damp beneath all of the windows on the front facade, which took the brunt of the weather, then the leaking roof. They could do it all in one go, Barker told him, or do it piecemeal, but that would be a false economy. Then, almost by way of reducing the impact, Barker mentioned Ollie’s Specialized hybrid bike that he had seen in one of the outbuildings and invited him to join a regular weekly boys’ bike ride around the area.
As the builder spoke, pound signs with several rows of noughts after them flashed, constantly, through Ollie’s mind. Then the electrician arrived with a story of equal doom and gloom. The current electrics in the house were, in his view, a serious fire hazard, and if they weren’t replaced could invalidate the insurance.
Their plumber, who appeared at the same time, a chatty Irishman called Michael Maguire, told him the results of his inspection yesterday. Much of the piping was lead, which would eventually give them all brain damage from the drinking water if they left it in situ. It would be wise to replace the lot with modern plastic piping. The painter’s news was no more encouraging. It seemed that the property development company had employed a total bodger of a builder, who, instead of having walls stripped down, had merely painted over them – possibly just to tart this place up in order to sell it.
The warnings had all been there, in those stark pages of the survey. But they had been panicked into making a decision when the estate agents informed them there was another buyer in the frame. Ollie had convinced Caro there would be no urgency to do the work – they could do it bit by bit over a few years. That no longer seemed to be the case. It had been a financial stretch to buy the house and they thought they had budgeted sufficient for the first year to carry out the renovations. Now, after listening to Barker, Ollie realized they were going to have to add thousands to this figure – and somehow find the money. They were in this financially up to their necks. To make things worse, the market had turned in the time since they had exchanged contracts and if they tried to put it back on the market they would be facing a substantial loss. They had no option but to make it work.
And they damned well would!
In the middle of his discussions with the painter, a neighbour appeared, asking him for a subscription to the local parish magazine – which he agreed to. It was close to midday before, almost brain-dead, he began work again on the Charles Cholmondley Classic Motors, Purveyors of Horseless Carriages to the Nobility and Gentry since 1911, website, making sure the pages were clear and readable on tablets and on phone screens. Next, he checked all the links worked – the client’s email address, the Twitter, Facebook and Instagram pages.
At 1.30 p.m., finally satisfied, he emailed a link for the test site to his client, then took a break and went back downstairs to make himself some lunch. When he reached the atrium he stopped and looked around for any sign of the lights he had seen here yesterday, but all he could see were a few dust motes in front of the windowpanes in the door. The pills had done the trick, he thought, relieved.
He made himself a Cheddar and Branston pickle sandwich, poured himself a glass of chilled water from the fridge, and carried them, together with the morning’s copy of The Times, out onto the rear terrace, blinking against the brilliant sunlight. He set everything down and went back inside to find his sunglasses. As he did so, the front doorbell rang. It was a large delivery of flat-pack wardrobes.
Ten minutes later he returned to his lunch. As he read the paper and ate his sandwich, he looked up occasionally, watching a pair of ducks paddling across the lake. Afterwards, he walked round the side of the house, down the drive, and out through the front gates, deciding to stroll down towards the village and look around before returning to work.
As he headed down the narrowlane, which had no pavement and was bounded by trees and hedgerows on both sides, breathing in the country scents, his phone vibrated. It was an email from his new client, Charles Cholmondley, saying he loved the website and would come back to him later in the day, or tomorrow, with his amendments. Ollie felt suddenly incredibly happy. Cold Hill House was going to be a lucky home for them. Sure, there was a massive amount of work to be done, but his new business was on its way. Everything was going to be fine!
As he passed a small, dilapidated Victorian cottage on his right, with an overgrown front garden, he saw an elderly man in a baggy shirt, grey trousers and hiking boots striding up the hill towards him, holding a stout stick, and with an unlit briar pipe in his mouth. He had a wiry figure, white hair styled in an old-fashioned boyish quiff, a goatee beard and leathery, wrinkled skin. As they drew close, Ollie smiled. ‘Good afternoon,’ he said.
‘Good afternoon,’ the man replied in a rural Sussex burr, removing his pipe. Then he stopped and pointed the stem in the air. ‘Mr Harcourt, would it be?’
‘Yes?’ Ollie said, still smiling.
‘You’re the gentleman who just bought the big house?’
‘Cold Hill House?’
The old man gripped his walking stick hard, letting it support some of his weight. His rheumy eyes were like molluscs peeping out beneath spiky fringes of white hair. ‘Cold Hill House, that would be it. How you getting on with your lady, then?’ He stared hard at Ollie.
‘Lady?’ Ollie retorted. ‘What lady?’
He gave Ollie a strange smile. ‘Maybe she’s not there no more.’
‘Tell me?’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t want to frighten you, not when you’ve just moved in.’
‘Yeah, well I’m frightened enough already – by the estimates I’m going to be getting from the builders!’ He held out his hand. ‘Nice to meet you – you’re local?’
‘You could say that.’ He nodded and pursed his lips, but made no attempt to take the proffered hand.
Ollie withdrew his hand, awkwardly. ‘It’s a delightful contrast to Brighton, I have to say.’
The old man shook his head. ‘Not been to Brighton.’
‘Never?’ Ollie said, surprised.
‘I don’t like big cities, and I don’t like to travel much.’
Ollie smiled. Brighton was less than ten miles away. ‘Tell me – you said you don’t want to frighten me. Is this lady something I should be frightened of?’
The old man gave him a penetrating stare. ‘I’m going back some years now – I worked for Sir Henry and Lady Rothberg, when they owned this place, when I was a young man. Bankers they were. I were one of the gardeners. One day they asked me if I could do a bit of caretaking for them while they were abroad. They used to have live-in staff and that, but Sir Henry lost a lot of money and had to let them all go.’ He hesitated. ‘That room they called the atrium, that still there?’
‘The oak-panelled room with the two columns? The one you go through before the kitchen?’
‘That used to be the chapel when it was a monastery, back in the Middle Ages – before most of the house, as it is today, was built.’
‘Really? I didn’t know that,’ Ollie said. ‘I didn’t know there was anything remaining of the monastery.’
‘Sir Henry and Lady Rothberg used it as a kind of snug – because it was next to the kitchen, it were always cosy in winter from the heat from the oven, and it were cheaper than heating the bigger rooms in the house just for the two of them.’
‘They had no children?’
‘None that survived childhood, no.’
‘How sad.’
The old man did not react. He went on, ‘They were going away for a few days and asked me to house-sit for them, to look after the dogs and that. They had a couple of them old-fashioned wing-back chair things in there. On the Sunday night I was sitting listening to the radio, and the two dogs, in the kitchen, began growling. Wasn’t a normal sound, it was really eerie, set me off shivering. I can still hear it, that sound, all these years on. They came out into the atrium, their fur standing on end. Then suddenly they both began backing away, and I saw her.’
‘Her?’
‘The lady.’ The old man nodded.
‘What did she look like? What did she do?’
‘She was an old lady, with a horrible expression on her face, all dressed in blue silk crinoline, or something like that, and yellow shoes. She came out of the wall, walked towards me, flicked me in the face so hard with her fan it stung my cheek, and left a mark, and vanished into the wall behind me.’
Ollie shivered, eyeing the man carefully. ‘Bloody hell. What happened then?’
‘Oh, I didn’t hang around. I took off. Just grabbed my things as fast as I could and left. I phoned Mr Rothberg, told him I was sorry, but I couldn’t stay there no more.’
‘Did he ask you why not?’
‘Oh, he did, and I told him.’
‘What did he say?’
‘He weren’t very happy. But he said I wasn’t the first to have seen her, the lady. I found that out for myself.’
‘What – did you find out?’
‘Well . . .’ the old man stopped and pursed his lips, then he shook his head. For the first time, Ollie saw fear in his eyes. ‘Like I said – it’s not my place to frighten you. Not my place.’ He began walking on.
Ollie hurried after him for a few paces. ‘Please tell me a bit more about her?’
The old man shook his head, continuing to walk. Without turning his head, he added, ‘I’ve said enough. I’ve said quite enough. Except for one thing. Ask about the digger.’
‘Digger?’
‘Ask someone about the mechanical digger.’
‘What’s your name?’ Ollie called out.
But, shaking his head, the old man carried on.
8
Tuesday, 8 September
Ollie stood still and watched the strange character walk on up the lane. He wasn’t sure if it was his imagination, but the old man seemed to quicken his pace as he passed the entrance gates to Cold Hill House, slowing down again on the far side.
Digger? What the hell did he mean, Ask someone about the mechanical digger?
He felt disturbed by the encounter, and determined to press the old man for more information. There would be other opportunities, he decided. He’d bump into him again, or perhaps he’d find him one evening in the pub and buy him a pint or two, and get him to loosen up.
He walked on, further than he had intended, right down into the village, with the hope he might meet the old man again when he went back up to the house, and entered the small, cluttered shop with faded, old-fashioned sign-writing across the lintel proclaiming COLD HILL VILLAGE STORES. It smelled of freshly baked bread, which masked the dry, slightly musty smell that reminded him of ironmongers’ stores. The elderly proprietor and his wife seemed to know all about him already. Clearly the new occupants of Cold Hill House were a major source of village gossip.
He discovered to his delight that they would do a daily newspaper delivery. He gave a list of the papers and magazines he and Caro wanted: The Times, Mail, the Argus, the weekly Brighton and Hove Independent, the Mid-Sussex Times and the monthly Motor Sport, Classic Cars and Sussex Life magazines. He bought a homemade lemon drizzle cake and a loaf of locally made wholemeal bread, then went back out into the sunshine.
He looked up the hill, trying to spot the old man. A tiny woman in a Nissan Micra was coming down towards him, the top of her head barely visible above the dashboard, with a green van impatiently tailgating her. As he headed back up the hill, he was deep in troubled thought. Was the old man a nutter? He didn’t think so. The fear in his eyes had seemed very genuine.
Should he tell Caro?
But what good would that do? Frighten her into imagining something that might not be there? He would wait, he decided. His thoughts returned to the website for Charles Cholmondley Classic Motors. One of the most expensive cars on the list that he’d had to provide copy for was a stunningly fine 1924 Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost Canterbury Landaulette, priced at £198,000, a black sedan with whitewall tyres, and an open roof above the driver’s cab, and a complete ownership history. Ghost, how very appropriate, he thought with a grin. As he reached the front gates of the house, he stood and waited for some moments, looking up the hill again for any sign of the old man heading back down. But there was none.
He walked up the drive. As he approached the house his spirits lifted once more. The warm sunshine beat down on him, and his T-shirt stuck to his back with perspiration. Then, suddenly, looking up at the sun, high in the sky, he stopped and thought hard.
Thought back to the pinpricks of light he had seen in the atrium.
He had dismissed them as either reflections of the sunlight through the windowpanes in the rear door, or symptoms of an approaching migraine. But the rear of the house faced north and, he now realized, however high the sun was as it traversed from east to west across the sky, it would not shine in through that rear door.
Which made it impossible for those spheres he had seen to have been reflections of sunlight. So it must have been a migraine.
9
Sunday, 13 September
On this weekend, every year, Ollie would normally be watching the classic and historic car racing at the Goodwood Revival meeting, his favourite motoring event of the year. But right now, instead of wandering around the famous motor-racing circuit, dressed in vintage clothing, ogling the millions of pounds’ worth of fabulous cars, and watching the racing with some of his mates, he stood in the early-morning sunshine in a sodden T-shirt, Lycra shorts and cycling shoes, staring down at a dead frog floating in a puddle at the bottom of the empty swimming pool.
There were already a lot of changes to their lifestyle due to this huge commitment they had taken on with the house, but just over a week after moving here he was loving the challenge and not regretting it for a moment.
‘Breakfast, darling!’ Caro called out.
‘OK – just need to have a quick shower!’
He’d completed a fifteen-mile bike ride, exploring some of the surrounding lanes, and was feeling exhilarated and happy, although a lot more tired by the ride than he would normally have been, he thought. Perhaps because he’d had no rest so far this weekend. Yesterday he’d taken a few hours out from helping Caro to move furniture, unpack and unwrap their best crockery and glasses, hang paintings, and pore over paint charts and wallpaper and fabric swatches, to drive across West Sussex to the Goodwood race meeting.
But it was a short visit, principally to see his client, Charles Cholmondley, and photograph his stand at the Revival meeting to add to the website, but he’d also wanted to visit the other classic car companies which had stands and put his business card around. He was going to need to generate a lot of business to earn enough to get this place into shape. Caro’s income would cover the hefty mortgage and additional bank loan interest payment, but he was going to have to start earning serious money again to pay for the renovations. It was only after living here for the past week that he’d started to realize the full enormity of their undertaking. Everything was in even worse condition than they had realized, and the pool was just a tiny part of it. Despite that, he still loved it here.
The pool was surrounded by a collapsing wooden safety fence, and tiles had fallen in big chunks off the sides of it. The large pool house, close by, was so rotten he could push his finger right through parts of its walls.
A man from the pool company had been to survey it, and confirmed just what a poor state of repair it was in. Many of the remaining tiles were loose, and there were deep cracks in the walls. The heating and filtration system were archaic, and had not been used for decades. Just about everything would need replacing. Pool parties looked like a very distant dream. Right now he was even reluctant to pay the cost of having the Range Rover’s busted wing mirror repaired.
He turned and gazed at the rear of the house. It was quite different this side from the elegant Georgian facade. It was more stark and institutional-looking, and cluttered on one side with the old stable block, part of which had been converted into the garages, outbuildings and two storage sheds. One housed the lawn tractor, strimmer, hedge-cutter, chainsaw and other garden maintenance equipment they’d had to buy, the other was filled with rolls of rusting chicken wire and a large stack of logs that looked, mostly, infested with woodworm.
He stared at the windows, trying to work out which belonged to which room. The downstairs at least was fairly straightforward with the kitchen and scullery windows, the door leading out from the atrium, then the twin sash windows of the dining room. The upstairs, with its different levels, was harder to figure out.
Twenty minutes later, showered and dressed in jeans and a fresh T-shirt, he had a quick breakfast of cereal and fruit, glanced through the Sunday papers, then helped Caro to lay the table. She had a girlfriend popping over to see the house this morning, then the in-laws were coming to lunch.
‘Try and get Jade up,’ she asked him. ‘I’ve tried to wake her twice already.’
Despite the fact that he’d driven their daughter into Brighton yesterday morning and let her stay with Phoebe until 10 p.m., she’d thrown a strop in the car on the way home because she was going to have to stay in and have lunch with, as she called them, the old people, instead of being able to go back into Brighton and spend Sunday with her boyfriend, Ruari, and her other best friends, Olivia and Lara.
Ollie went into her bedroom, opened the curtains, and pulled back her duvet. Bombay was asleep, curled up beside her.
‘Dad!’ she protested.
‘Your mother needs help. Up!’ he said.
The cat eyed him warily.
Jade lay in her pyjamas and looked up at him with her large blue eyes. ‘Did you mean what you said about getting a dog? A labradoodle?’
‘Yes, darling, I did. I think a labradoodle would be great!’
‘Olivia’s getting a Schnauzer next week. And guess what, I’ve found a labradoodle breeder in Cowfold that’s expecting a litter next month!’ she said.
‘OK, we’ll go and have a look after they’re born.’
Jade suddenly cheered up. ‘Great! Promise?’
‘I promise! So long as you promise to look after the dog. Deal?’
‘Deal! Can we get an alpaca of our own, too?’
‘Shall we get a dog first? There are enough alpacas out in the field!’
‘OK.’
Ollie then climbed up to his office to work on the final revisions of the classic car website. He had promised Cholmondley yesterday that he would send the amended test site to him by the middle of the week for final approval.
As he sat in front of his computer, tantalizing smells of roasting beef wafted up. Two hours later, at 12.30, he heard the sound of a car, and peered down from the window overlooking the drive. His in-laws’ maroon Volvo was pulling up beside his Range Rover and Caro’s Golf. Moments later he heard the doorbell.
Normally he would have waited until Caro called him, but today he was on a mission. As the doorbell rang, he logged off, then hurried downstairs, just in time to join Caro in greeting the sweet pair of oddballs and lead them through into the drawing room.
His father-in-law, Dennis, was dressed as usual in a tweedy three-piece suit. His only concession to the heatwave was to have the top button of his Vyella shirt open and to sport a paisley cravat instead of a tie. His mother-in-law, Pamela, wore a white lace-trimmed blouse and a floral confection of a skirt, with pink Crocs.
‘So, it’s still standing, eh!’ Dennis said with a smile, looking up and around him. ‘And you’ve made up your mind to buy it, then?’
‘They have bought it, Dennis,’ his wife reminded him. ‘We helped them move in last week.’
Dennis frowned, looking bewildered. ‘Ah, right, if you say so, dear.’
‘You’ve done wonders with this room,’ Pamela said, enthusiastically. ‘What a transformation!’
‘It’s coming along, isn’t it?’ Caro said.
‘G and T, Pamela?’ Ollie asked his mother-in-law.
‘I’ll pass on the G and just have the T, thank you.’
‘A snifter before lunch?’ he asked his father-in-law.
‘Hmmn,’ the old man said, peering at the fireplace. ‘Rather fine marble this. Could be an Adam. Hmmn. Make sure the buggers don’t try to remove it if you do buy the place. I fancy this would be worth a few bob to some of those dealers down the Lanes.’ He then peered up at the ceiling. ‘Nasty damp patch up there. I’d get a survey report before you make an offer. Yes, I think an Amontillado sherry, thank you, Ollie.’ He pulled a leather cigar case from his inside pocket. ‘Want to join me outside in a little smoke before lunch?’
‘We thought we’d have lunch outside, actually, Dennis. I’d love a cigar later.’
‘Do you have some shade?’ Pamela asked, dubiously.
‘Yes! Bought some big parasol umbrellas from the local garden centre yesterday.’ Ollie led them through the atrium and straight out onto the rear terrace. As his father-in-law lit a cigar he went back indoors to prepare their drinks.
When he returned, Dennis was wandering down the lawn towards the lake, puffing away. Pamela was sitting in the shade of the two huge umbrellas, clearly uncomfortable in the sticky heat. Ollie put her tonic on the table, then sat beside her, cradling a bottle of cold Grolsch, and looked around. Neither Caro nor Dennis was in earshot.
‘Pamela, Friday last week, the day we moved in, when you and I were standing in the porch, you saw something, didn’t you?’
She raised her glass. ‘Cheers!’
He clinked the neck of his bottle against it. ‘Cheers.’
She gave him a strange, almost evasive smile, and sipped her drink.
‘What was it you saw?’ he pressed.
‘I thought you’d seen it too,’ she said.
Out of the corner of his eye he noticed Dennis walking back towards them.
‘Darling,’ Caro called out from the doorway. ‘Please go and get Jade up!’
‘OK, in a moment!’
‘Please go now, the beef’s going to be ruined! Tell her if she wants us to drive her into Brighton this afternoon, to see Ruari, then she needs to be polite and join us for lunch.’ Caro disappeared back inside.
He turned back to his mother-in-law. ‘All I saw was a shadow in the atrium.’
‘A shadow?’
‘I thought I had imagined it. Or that it might have been a bird flitting past or something. What did you see?’
‘Do you need to know, Ollie?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes, I’m sure. I didn’t want to spook Caro out on the day we moved in, which is why I dismissed it. But now I do need to know.’
She nodded, and peered into her tumbler, inspecting the contents with an eagle eye. She poked a flake of lemon suspended among the tiny bubbles like a micro-organism. ‘I really did think you’d seen it, too,’ she said finally.
He shook his head. Dennis was only yards away. ‘Please tell me, it’s really important.’
‘I saw an elderly lady in a blue dress. She appeared out of the wall on the left, glided across the room and disappeared into the wall on the right.’ She gave him a quizzical stare.
He looked back at her numbly.
‘Are you going to tell Caro?’ she asked.
‘You’ve got a lot of damned weed in that lake, Ollie,’ Dennis said, bluntly crashing in on the conversation. ‘That’s another thing you’d have to consider – grass-eating carp.’
‘Grass-eating carp?’
‘Might be just the ticket.’ He took a puff on his cigar then laid it in the ashtray Ollie had provided on the table, and set his empty sherry glass down beside it.
‘It’s not a high priority – need to get the house done before we start spending money on the grounds,’ Ollie replied, and shot a glance at his mother-in-law. She gave him a to-be-continued smile in return.
Dennis looked around suddenly with a bewildered expression, as if he had lost his bearings.
‘A top-up, Dennis?’ Ollie asked.
‘Huh?’
‘Some more sherry?’
‘Ah, no, right. I’ll wait until lunch, I’ll have a glass of wine at lunch. Have you booked a table somewhere?’
‘We’re having lunch here, Dennis,’ Pamela said, a tad sharply.
‘Really? That’s jolly decent of them – they must be keen to sell!’ He looked around again then said, ‘Are we allowed to use the little boy’s room?’
‘Straight through the door, it’s on the left.’
‘Jolly decent of them!’ He entered the house.
As soon as the old man was out of earshot, Ollie leaned across to Pamela. ‘What do you think? Should I tell Caro?’
‘She hasn’t seen her?’
‘No.’ He took a swig of his beer. ‘Well, she certainly hasn’t said anything if she has.’
‘Have you seen anything since?’
Ollie hesitated. ‘No.’
‘It’s possible you might never see her again,’ she said. ‘I think you might find it helpful to see if you can discover any background, who this woman might be – or rather, might have been.’
‘I’ve tried googling already and doing some other internet searches on the house and the village, but so far nothing. I thought of going to the County Records Office to see if I can find anything there about the place.’
‘You’d probably do better talking to some of the older locals. There must be a few who’ve been here for generations.’
He nodded, thinking about the old man he’d seen in the lane. He’d go into the village and track him down tomorrow, he decided.
A couple of minutes later, Dennis came back out. ‘She’s a bit of a surly one, the housekeeper,’ he said.
‘Housekeeper?’ Ollie said.
‘Well, I presume that’s who it was. Woman in an old-fashioned dress. I said good afternoon to her and she just blanked me.’
