Текст книги "The House on Cold Hill"
Автор книги: Peter James
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Текущая страница: 8 (всего у книги 19 страниц)
24
Wednesday, 16 September
Ollie went back up to his office. The plumber’s explanation for the running taps might account for some of them. But surely not for every damned tap in the entire bloody house? He just couldn’t buy that. Although he wished he could.
He’d not yet told Caro about the running taps; until the ceiling had caved in she’d only stirred and not really been aware of the drama around the house. How many taps were there? He started to count in his head. The bathroom in the attic – two in the sink there and a mixer shower – three. But they hadn’t been running. On the first floor there were the en-suite ones in their bedroom, Jade’s and the yellow room, plus the family bathroom for the other four spare rooms – and the washbasin in the blue room. Downstairs there were two toilets with basins off the hall, and then the kitchen, the scullery and the outside tap.
He noted them down, trying hard to think with his tired brain if he’d missed any out. The sink in the disused kitchen in the cellar, he suddenly remembered, and noted that down also. The more he thought about it, the less convincing the plumber’s explanation seemed. Not every tap on the main system, every single one. No way.
Jade?
The possibility that it was Jade doing it in her sleep did make uncomfortable sense.
He thought back again to some of those previous episodes, then he sat at his desk, logged on and googled sleepwalking. As he had imagined, there were hundreds and hundreds of sites. He went back and entered some key words to narrow the search parameters. Then he scanned through the shorter list of sites, selected and began to read. The third site he came to interested him the most. He bookmarked it and read through it several times, taking particular note of the list of possible symptoms.
Little or no memory of the event – that had been true. She always had no memory.
Difficulty arousing the sleepwalker during an episode – also true of Jade.
Screaming when sleepwalking occurs in conjunction with sleep terrors.
Jade had screamed last night. He’d run into her room, turned off the taps on the overflowing bathtub and pulled the plug out. She had terror in her eyes, and now, thinking about that more clearly, he could remember that look of frozen fear on her face from years back. It was the same way she used to look straight after waking from a sleepwalking episode when she was seven.
She’d been quiet in the car on the school run this morning, Instagramming all her friends with a dramatic picture of the hole in her parents’ bedroom ceiling. He had no idea what she was saying but could see several rows of smiley, scowly, frowny and other emoticons.
Then a thought struck him hard. They’d taken Jade to a child psychologist back then. The woman had put her night terrors and sleepwalking down to her fears at starting at her new school, and predicted they would stop when she settled in and started making friends. The psychologist had been right, that was exactly what happened.
Now Jade was in her early days at another school.
Was the pattern repeating itself?
It made sense.
A flash alert for an incoming email from Chris Webb caught his eye, distracting him, and he opened it.
No luck with that old boy with the pipe, I’m afraid. I went on a Photos forum to see what I could find there – it seems that what usually happens is that photographs get misfiled – but they don’t disappear completely. Not like your chap has. Don’t know what to suggest. You sure he wasn’t a ghost?
25
Wednesday, 16 September
‘Dad, can I invite Charlie as well as Niamh to my birthday party? We will still have it, won’t we?’
Pulling the Range Rover away from traffic lights, after he had collected her from school, Ollie reached out and squeezed Jade’s arm, lightly. ‘Of course we’ll still have the party, my lovely.’ Then he shot her a glance. ‘Charlie – who’s that?’
‘My friend,’ she said, very matter-of-factly. ‘She’s nice.’
‘A new friend?’
She nodded and looked down at her phone, her fingers moving rapidly on the keys.
He was pleased that she looked a lot happier this afternoon. In fact it was the first time in the ten days since she had started at St Paul’s that she seemed like her old self. ‘Is she at school with you?’
‘Yes.’
‘OK, that’s great. Of course she can come to your party. You can invite anyone else you like from the school, too.’
‘There might be two other girls,’ she said, then looked solemn. ‘But I’m not sure if I really like them, yet.’
‘Well, you’ve got time, over a week still.’
She was focused again on her phone and barely nodded acknowledgement. Then after a few moments she said, ‘Charlie’s mum works for a vet.’
‘OK.’
‘Her mum knows a labradoodle breeder – and can you believe it, Dad? They’re expecting a litter next week. Can we go and see them, can we? A puppy could be my birthday present, couldn’t it?’
‘I thought you wanted a new iPad?’
‘Well, I do, but I’d rather have a puppy, and you said we could have one.’
‘How do you think Bombay and Sapphire would get on with a puppy?’
‘I’ve been reading about it, Dad. I know exactly what to do.’
Ollie smiled. He believed her. When she was eight, Jade had had two gerbils and she had doted on them, keeping their cage immaculate. She had even trained them to go through a mini gymnastics course she had set up on her bedroom floor, and she and her closest friend, Phoebe, had invented gymnastic awards which they’d presented so seriously to them.
Jade had also trained them, much to his and Caro’s amusement, to come downstairs on their own. She explained, in the very serious manner she sometimes adopted, that this was in case the house ever caught fire when everyone was out, so they would be able to escape. Neither he nor Caro had wanted to disillusion her by pointing out the one flaw she hadn’t spotted, which was that the gerbils would still have been trapped in their cage.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘Your mother and I will need to work out some time when we can go to see them – isn’t there another breeder having a litter also?’
‘Yes, but that’s not for ages.’
‘I thought you said it would be in about a month?’
‘I did, Dad. That’s what I mean, ages.’
Ollie was kept hanging on by Cholmondley. He half wondered if it was deliberate, and the pompous little man was paying him back for not returning his calls this morning.
After several minutes he laid the receiver on the desk, leaving it on loudspeaker, and began to check his emails. The first was from his regular tennis opponent, Bruce Kaplan, an American-born computing science professor at Brighton University. They’d met and become friends whilst studying IT at Reading University. Kaplan had subsequently taken an academic path whilst Ollie had gone down a commercial one. They were closely matched at tennis, and he enjoyed Kaplan’s company – he had a massive intellect and frequently an unusual take on the world.
So did you unpack your tennis racquet yet? Back to usual this week? Friday at Falmer?
He’d had a weekly game with Kaplan at the Falmer Sports Centre, on the University of Sussex campus, for the past ten years or so.
Prepare for a thrashing
Ollie typed back.
In your dreams!
came the reply. It was followed immediately by another email from him.
Btw, check out a guy called Dr Nick Vaughan in Queensland, Oz, doing interesting research work in macular degeneration. Might be interesting for your mother. B.
Ollie replied, thanking him. His mother had recently been diagnosed with early-stage macular degeneration, but whether she – or his father – would take any notice of anything he sent them, he doubted. They were far too conservative in their views. Their doctor was always right, so far as they were concerned; they weren’t interested in anyone else’s opinion.
They weren’t interested in the new house, either, and that made him sad. He would love them to come down and see the house, and see how well he had done in life, but he doubted they ever would. Before moving in he’d suggested his parents should come for a visit. ‘Too long a journey,’ his father had replied, bluntly. ‘And your mother can’t really travel now, not with her eyesight.’
She had never travelled when her eyesight had been perfect, either. Neither of them had, although they could have afforded to. His father had earned a decent living as the works manager of an engineering plant and his mother had been a primary school teacher. Instead, every summer throughout his childhood, for their annual family holiday, Ollie, his brother, Bill, and his sister, Janis, had been driven by their parents thirty miles to Scarborough on the Yorkshire coast, where they’d stayed in a self-catering cottage. It was a lot cheaper than many places in the town, his father boasted every year without fail, because, he would say proudly, ‘It doesn’t have a sea view. Who the hell needs that when you’ve got legs to walk to the bloody sea, eh?’
Their parents might not have travelled but their children had. Janis was in Christchurch, New Zealand, married with four children, and Bill was in Los Angeles, living with his boyfriend, and working as a set designer. It had been a couple of years since he had seen either of his siblings, there was quite an age difference between each of them; none of them had been close. That cold and distant relationship he’d always had with his parents was a big part of the reason he tried to keep a closeness with Jade.
Despite his misgivings, he typed out an email to them both with a link to Dr Nick Vaughan’s website, and sent it. They wouldn’t take any notice, but it was duty done.
Then the penny dropped.
O’Hare.
‘Hello? Hello? HELLO?’ A disembodied voice snapped him out of his thoughts. Then he realized with a start it was coming from the phone receiver.
He snatched it up. ‘Charles?’
‘Listen, Mr Harcourt, I’m not very happy about being buggered around all day.’
‘I apologize, our bedroom was flooded out in the middle of the night and we’ve been in chaos.’
‘With all due respect, that’s not my problem. You could have had one of your staff call me.’
Yes, Ollie nearly said, who would you have preferred to talk to – Bombay or Sapphire? Instead he replied, as politely as he could, ‘You’re such a very important client, Mr Cholmondley, I wouldn’t dream of fobbing you off with a junior member of my team.’
A few minutes later, with Cholmondley back in his box, Ollie hung up, then went over to a stack of packing cases he had not yet opened, containing box files of documents. He checked the labels, found the one he wanted and ripped the sealing tape with a paper knife. After a couple of minutes rummaging through it, he lifted out the file he was looking for and carried it back over to his desk.
Through the window, he saw Caro’s Golf coming down the drive. Normally he would have run downstairs to greet her, but he was anxious to look at this document, to check. Hopefully he was wrong, mistaken.
Hopefully.
The box was marked, in Caro’s handwriting, COLD HILL HOUSE HISTORIC DOCS.
He opened it and a musty smell rose up. A few documents down he found the deeds, with old-fashioned script on the front, a red wax seal in the bottom right corner, and green string holding the pages together. He flicked through quickly and saw that Cold Hill House had passed through the hands of several companies until Bardlington Property Developments had purchased it in 2006. There were several accompanying documents in a folder with various architectural drawings on plans they had submitted for the redevelopment of the property; one was for demolishing the house and building a country house hotel; another was for keeping the existing house but building a further ten houses in the grounds; a third was for turning it into sheltered housing accommodation.
He turned back several pages then stopped and stared down in dismay.
Stared at the names.
John Richard O’Hare.
Rowena Susan Christine O’Hare.
On this document they were joint signatories on the purchase of Cold Hill House on 25 October 1983.
He picked up his phone, opened Photos and flicked across to the ones he had taken in the graveyard. He found the one of the headstone of the O’Hare family, and expanded it with his figure and thumb to read the dates that all four of them had died.
26 October 1983.
One day after they had bought the house.
As he went downstairs to greet Caro, he felt a deeply uncomfortable sensation.
26
Wednesday, 16 September
Ten minutes later, Ollie helped Caro, still in her office clothes, to lug sheets, duvets, pillows and towels up the two flights of stairs to the tiny spare room in the attic. They were going to sleep here for the next couple of nights until their bedroom was habitable again.
‘Well, it’s going to be cosy, my love!’ Caro said as they went in.
‘That’s for sure!’
Right under the eaves, the room had a sloping roof and a small window looking out on to the rear garden. The ancient wrought-iron double bed took up almost all of the space. It fitted snugly against the right-hand wall, leaving just enough room to open the door and enter. There was a gap of about three feet between the left of the bed and the built-in cupboards that ran the full length of the left wall.
‘It reminds me of the bed in that little French hotel we stayed in once on our way down to the south – remember?’ she said, staring dubiously at the horribly stained old mattress, before dumping her armful of bedding on it.
‘Near Limoges, wasn’t it? Which creaked liked crazy when we made love in it!’
She laughed. ‘God, yes, and it rocked so much – we thought it was going to collapse!’
‘And that tight little French woman who ran it and charged us extra for having a bath!’ he said.
‘And I went out into the corridor in the night to have a pee and walked into someone’s bedroom!’ She shook her head, grinning at the memory. ‘God, this mattress needs airing. I’ll bring a fan heater up here and leave it on for a couple of hours.’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘Let’s turn it over and see if it’s any better on the other side.’
Ollie dumped the bedding on the floor. Then they lifted the mattress; the ceiling was so low they bashed the bare light bulb, hanging from an ancient cord, in the process.
There was a large brown stain in the centre on the reverse side. ‘Yech!’ Caro said.
They turned it back again. ‘It’ll be fine when we’ve got a clean undersheet and bedding on it, darling,’ Ollie said.
‘I hope no one died in this.’
Nope, the last owners died before they even got a chance to sleep here, he nearly answered. But instead he said, ‘It was probably some servant who was put up here.’
‘The mystery is, how on earth did they ever get a bed this size in this room?’ she said.
‘I would imagine in bits and they assembled it up here. Unless they built the house around it!’
Later, with the clean bedclothes on it, and the pillows freshly plumped, it was looking more inviting. Ollie slipped his arms round Caro’s waist. ‘Want to try it out?’
‘I need to get Jade her supper. What do you fancy tonight?’
He kissed her neck. ‘You.’
She turned to face him. ‘That was the right answer!’
As they went back downstairs, Caro said, ‘It’s such a beautiful evening, let’s take a walk down to the lake and see the ducks. I was talking to one of the partners who lives out in the country and has ducks on his lake. He said the way to encourage them to stay is to feed them – at least once every day. He keeps an old metal milk churn at the edge with duck food pellets that float. He’s given me the name of the stuff to get and a place you can order from online. He said if we throw them a few scoops of food every day we’ll soon have a large colony in residence.’
‘Milk churn?’
‘It stops rats getting the food. You can find them on the internet, apparently.’
‘Great, I’ll have a look tomorrow.’
‘I’ll go and put some jeans on.’
Whilst she did so, Ollie unplugged his clock radio alarm, took it up to the attic room, and reset it.
Ten minutes later, holding hands and wearing wellies, Ollie and Caro walked up to the edge of the lake. A solitary coot paddled coyly away from them, its head nodding like a clockwork toy, towards the little island in the middle. A pair of mallards eyed them warily and also moved away, to the far side of the lake.
They walked around, behind tall reeds, then stopped and stared over the wooden rail and post fence at the overgrown paddock, and at the hill rising steeply beyond.
‘This would be ideal for Jade’s pony,’ Caro said. ‘But if we got one, we’d need to put up a stable.’
‘She seems more into dogs at the moment – a labradoodle,’ Ollie said. ‘She’s not mentioned a pony since we came here.’
‘She asked me to book her a lesson for this Saturday. There’s a good riding school, apparently, at Clayton – I’m going to see if they can fit her in. I hope she takes to it again – she’s not ridden in a while.’ She shrugged. ‘I was madly into ponies – until I started dating, then I lost all interest. Do you think that’s what’s happened with her?’
‘I don’t think her seeing Ruari is exactly dating,’ Ollie said. ‘Going for milkshakes in the afternoon is more a kind of play dating.’
‘I hope so. I don’t want her to lose her innocence too soon. She’s a happy soul.’
‘And boyfriends make you unhappy?’ he said with a quizzical smile.
‘God, I remember teenage angst over boys.’
Ollie nodded. ‘Yep, same over girls.’
Above them a flock of migrating swallows were heading south, passing high over the roof of the house. Heading to the sun. How nice that would be right now, Ollie thought, envying them the simplicity of their lives.
Caro stared at the house. ‘Strange just how different the front and rear look.’
He nodded. Compared to the handsome front, with its finely proportioned windows, the back of the house really was a mishmash. It seemed even more so than when he had last looked at it: partly red brick and partly grey rendering, with windows of different sizes seemingly placed here and there at random, and with an ugly single-storey garage block and assortment of dilapidated outbuildings, some brick, some breeze block and some wooden.
Caro pointed with her finger. ‘I still haven’t got the hang of the geography. Over to the left, those two windows are the scullery and that’s the scullery door. Then the two kitchen windows and the door into the atrium, and the dining room windows to the right.’
‘Yes.’
‘Going left to right on the first floor is Jade’s bedroom. Then the two back spare bedrooms, then our room at the right?’
Ollie nodded.
Then she pointed up at the row of dormers. ‘That one – that’s where we’re sleeping tonight, right?’
Ollie did a calculation. ‘It is.’
‘Then the three to the left?’
‘They’re the other side of the loft space. You get to them via the staircase next to Jade’s room. I think they’re all part of the old servants’ quarters. I’ll check.’
‘Incredible to be living in a house where we can’t even remember all the rooms!’
He grinned. ‘Just think how beautiful this place is going to look in a few years’ time when we’ve finished all the restoration!’
She smiled, then said a hesitant, ‘Yes.’
‘You sound dubious?’
She shrugged. ‘No – it’s just – it – it’s all still so daunting. I hope we haven’t taken on too much.’
‘We haven’t! In a couple of years we’ll be laughing that we even worried about it.’
‘I hope you’re right, darling.’
‘I’m right, trust me.’
She gave him a strange look and grimaced.
‘What?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Tell me?’
‘Nothing. You’re right. And we don’t have much option, do we?’
‘We could move.’
‘With our mortgage? The vendors had dropped the price three times because no one was mad enough to take it on. I don’t think we’d find a buyer very easily at all. Not until we have improved it one hell of a lot. So we don’t have an option. We’re here and we’ve just got to get on with it.’ Again she gave him a strange look and shrugged.
‘Don’t you love it, though, darling?’
‘Ask me in five years’ time,’ she replied.
27
Wednesday, 16 September
Caro prepared a simple supper for the three of them, of baked potato with tuna. She made her own version of a tuna salad filling with chopped spring onions and capers, which Ollie particularly loved – and always felt to be a healthy meal.
Ollie’s rule – that Caro totally agreed with – was that they turned the television off for meals and talked. They both made a particular effort to instil that in Jade.
‘So,’ Ollie said, ‘tell your mum and me a bit about your new friend, Charlie?’
‘New friend, darling?’ Caro said.
Jade nodded thoughtfully, as she mixed some tuna into her potato. ‘I don’t know if she’ll be a best friend yet, but she’s nice.’
‘Did she just join the school, too?’
‘Yes. Quite a lot of them have been there since they were eleven, so they can be a little bit cliquey.’
‘Do you want to invite her to your party?’
‘Well, I think so. There’s another girl I might ask also, called Holly.’
Ollie and Caro caught each other’s eye and smiled. This was a good sign that she was making new friends.
Afterwards, Jade went up to her room, and Ollie and Caro sat in front of the television, with a glass of white wine, watching an episode of Breaking Bad from the box set he had given her last Christmas – they were still less than halfway through the second season. Caro joked that they’d still be watching it well into their old age.
After the episode had finished, Caro stood up, yawning, then walked round the house on her obsessive tour of inspection, exactly as she had done when they lived in the city. She couldn’t sleep until she had checked that every door and downstairs window was secure. Then she went round for a second time, double-checking. Ollie let her get on with it. He knew from past experience that otherwise she would wake in the middle of the night in a panic and go downstairs to start checking.
Tonight he joined her, wanting to make sure none of the workmen had left any dangerous electrics on that might cause a fire. There was no sign of improvement in any room so far – wherever the workmen were at the moment looked in a considerably worse state than when they had moved in. They were still at the ripping out and stripping down stage.
‘I bloody love you!’ Ollie said, as they reached the top of the stairs to the attic bedroom, sliding his hands round Caro’s waist.
She turned towards him. ‘And I bloody love you, too!’
They kissed. Then kissed again, charged with sudden deep passion. He pushed her T-shirt up her back, then slid his fingers down inside the rear of her jeans.
‘Did I ever tell you that you have the most beautiful bum in the world?’ he whispered.
‘No, Mr Harcourt,’ she said, busily unzipping him. ‘No, Mr Harcourt, I don’t believe you did.’
He worked his hands around her front, then slowly down inside her thighs. As he did so she unbuckled his belt, popped the stud fastener of his trousers and pulled them down, sharply. Then his boxer shorts. She knelt in front of him and cupped him in her cool hands.
He gasped, delicious sensations rippling through him. Then he helped her back to her feet, tugged at the zip of her jeans, pulled them down, too, then her lacy underwear. They staggered through the bedroom door, in a clumsy manoeuvre that was part embrace, part dance, tripping over their trousers, then he eased her backwards on to the bed.
Afterwards, lying on top of her in the dark of the room, lit only by the weak yellow glow from the bare bulb hanging over the staircase, he grinned. ‘Hmmmn, I quite like this bed.’
‘It’s not shit, is it?’ she grinned back.
Ten minutes later, their teeth brushed and clothes discarded, they fell asleep, comfortably and happily spooned. ‘I love you, babes,’ Ollie whispered.
She murmured back, contentedly.
He woke from a nightmare some while later, his entire body pounding, disorientated. Where the hell was he? Something dark, undefined, a terrible dark dread, engulfed him. Then he had the sensation that the bed was moving. Jigging, very slightly. An intense pressure was pinning him to the mattress. It was as if the air had suddenly become leadenly heavy and was pressing down on him, crushing him, smothering him.
He tossed his head wildly from left to right in panic, unable to breathe. Terror spiralled through him. He fought to breathe. Sucking through his mouth, his nostrils. It was as if he was breathing in cloying soot.
Then everything was fine. He could breathe normally again. Beside him he heard the steady rhythm of Caro breathing. His heart hammering, he rolled over and looked down at the clock radio he had placed on the floor last night.
00.00.
He stared at the flashing green digits. That happened when there was a power cut. Were they having one now – or had there been one earlier?
Then something moved.
There was someone in the room.
Jade?
A shadow moved beside him. Shit. Oh shit. Someone was standing over the bed, looking down.
He began to shiver. Was it an intruder? A burglar?
The shadow moved a fraction.
Caro, beside him, did not stir.
He clenched his fists, thinking, his heart hammering even more now, as if it was trying to break out of his chest.
Then a small boy’s voice rang out, shrill and crystal clear and excited. ‘Are we nearly there yet?’
The voice sounded like it was coming from the end of the bed.
Then a small girl’s voice, equally shrill. ‘Are there dead people in there, Mum?’
Ollie listened, paralysed by fear. He was dreaming, he had to be.
Then he heard a blood-curdling cry of shock and pain, then screams.
Moments later a man with stark raw terror in his voice howled, ‘Oh Jesus!’
Suddenly, Ollie could smell cigar smoke. Not a faint whiff carried on the night breeze from a distant dwelling, but the thick pungent smell of someone smoking a cigar inside this house. Inside this room.
The figure still stood beside the bed, moving a fraction, just enough for Ollie to be certain it was a person and not the shadow of a piece of furniture.
Then he saw a small ring of glowing red, right above him.
It was this man by the bed who was smoking a cigar.
Who are you? Who are you? WHO ARE YOU? WHAT DO YOU WANT? Ollie tried to scream, but the words were trapped in his gullet.
An Arctic gust of fear ripped through him. Christ. Oh Christ.
Then the bed began to rock.
‘Ols? Ols? Ollie?’
Caro’s voice, gentle, anxious.
‘Ols? Ols, darling? You’re having a nightmare. You’re screaming. Ssshhh, darling, you’ll wake Jade.’
He opened his eyes, bewildered, feeling Caro’s warm breath on his face. His whole body was pounding, and he was shaking. The bedclothes felt sodden with perspiration. ‘I’m sorry,’ he gasped. ‘I’m sorry, darling. I had a – horrible – horrible—’
‘Go back to sleep.’ She stroked his face tenderly.
He lay for some moments breathing deeply, too scared to close his eyes in case he returned to the dream. His whole body felt heavy, as if gravity was pulling him down deep into the mattress.
Slowly he felt himself drifting away. Lying on a raft on an ocean with Caro beside him, beneath clear blue sky and the yellow disc of the sun. ‘So many windows, so many.’
‘Lots.’
She was pointing up at the sky. ‘So many to count.’
The raft began to rock in the gentle swell. Then the sky darkened and the swell deepened, pitching them up and down, rocking the raft so much they were struggling to cling to it.
Peep . . . peep . . . peep . . .
The alarm was sounding. He opened his eyes, sleepily, blinking. The room was filled with early-morning light. But something was wrong. Where was he? Of course, it was coming back to him now. Of course, in the attic bedroom. But even so, something else was wrong.
Peep . . . peep . . . peep . . .
He suddenly remembered that there had been a power cut in the night, hadn’t there? Zeroing the dials on the clock? Shit, what was the time? He reached a hand down to the clock to hit the snooze button, to give him another ten minutes of sleep, but all it hit was the wall. Frowning, he realized he was lying right beside the wall. The concentric circle pattern of the stained Anaglypta wallpaper was inches in front of his eyes.
Where the hell was his clock radio?
Still befuddled by sleep, he remembered the figure standing by the bed, in his dream. Smoking a cigar.
Had they been burgled in their sleep?
Then he heard Caro’s voice, sounding very disturbed.
‘Ollie?’
‘Yurrr.’
‘Ollie. What – what – what the hell’s happened?’
‘Wasshappened?’ he said.
‘Shit!’ she said. ‘Shit, shit, shit!’ She dug a finger hard into his back.
‘What?’
‘Look!’ There was real terror in her voice.
‘Look at what?’
‘Look out of the sodding window!’
He stared at the end of the bed, where the window was. Except there was no window.
Slowly, dimly, his memory put things into order. They were up in the attic because their bedroom ceiling had collapsed from the flooding. The window, which had no curtains, had been just beyond the foot of the bed when they had gone to sleep.
Now all he could see instead was the wall to the landing, and the closed door beside it.
He frowned.
The memory was returning. They’d made love with a crazy, urgent passion, last night. Had they slept at the wrong end of the bed?
He sat up with a start and cracked his head against two upright bars of the iron bedstead.
‘Ollie,’ Caro said, her voice trembling. ‘Ollie, what the hell’s happened?’
Clarity was returning. A terrible clarity. And with it the realization.
The bed.
The bed had moved during the night.
It had rotated one hundred and eighty degrees.
