The House on Cold Hill (7 page)

‘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.’

10

Sunday, 13 September

‘It’s your birthday soon,’ Caro said, during a commercial break in the TV programme. ‘You’re going to be an old man!’

‘Yep, tell me about it,’ Ollie replied.

‘Forty! Still, you’re wearing pretty well.’

He smiled.

‘We haven’t discussed how to celebrate.’

‘I think we just do something low key until we’re sorted here. Then we could think about a big party – if we can afford it. Maybe dinner with a few friends? Martin and Judith? The Hodges? Iain and Georgie?’

They were lying naked in bed, with the Sunday papers spread across the duvet and on the floor either side of them.
Downton Abbey
, which they’d recorded earlier, was playing on the television on the wall. Caro had not missed an episode. Ollie kept an occasional eye on it while he worked his way through the
Sunday Times
sections. The windows were wide open. It was a warm, balmy night. Almost too hot for the duvet.

‘You seemed very distracted today,’ she said.

‘Sorry, darling, a lot on my mind.’ He was looking up at the large brown water stain on the ceiling. At the old, faded wallpaper, not yet stripped, at the walls not yet ready for the new paint colours Caro and he had chosen, and the bare floorboards that they had decided to have sanded and varnished, and cover with rugs. At the huge old-fashioned radiators which the plumber reckoned he could get a decent price for at an architectural salvage place. At the cracked marble fireplace. At the rusty old lock on the door. The brand-new cream curtains only accentuated the poor state of decoration of the rest of the room.

The house was warm at the moment, but in another month, with the October gales coming in, all that would change. The temperature could drop within a week or so. The heating barely worked at the moment, but to replace the system, they would have to be without heat totally for a week, the plumber had estimated. They’d given him the go-ahead to get the new boiler and replace all the piping and they’d been assured the work would be completed by the end of September. It had to be or the place would start feeling pretty miserable.

‘You mean the website? Charles Cholmondley? How do you pronounce it?’

‘Chumley.’ Ollie nodded. ‘Partly that.’

‘I think it looks great.’

‘I think the client likes it.’

‘Of course he does, you’ve done a great job – particularly considering everything else you’ve had to deal with this week! I meant to ask, did you remember to put the sign for a cleaning lady up on the village shop noticeboard?’

‘Yes – Ron, who runs the shop with his wife, Madge, said there were a couple of people they thought might be interested.’

‘On first-name terms with the locals after just a week?’ she said with a grin.

‘They’re a lovely couple. He’s a retired accountant and she was a teacher. The shop’s a labour of love – they do it for pin money.’

‘Nice there are people like that in the world,’ she said. ‘And I like that you’re getting to know the place a bit. We ought to go in the pub sometime. Perhaps see if they do Sunday lunch? We need to try to be a bit involved in the community – and there might be some other girls here around Jade’s age she could become friends with.’

‘Yes, absolutely. Maybe you could join the local jam-making class?’ he joked.

‘There is one?’

‘There was an ad in the store!’ He fell silent. He’d still not told Caro about the old lady. Fortunately, it seemed to have slipped from his father-in-law’s mind and he had not mentioned her again at lunch. But at some point soon, Ollie knew, he would have to say something to Caro. Hopefully in the coming days he’d find the strange old man again and pump him for more about the background of the apparition. If both his in-laws had seen her, and he’d seen something too, then others must have seen her as well. Presumably it was someone who had lived here in the past. Did the estate agent know about her? Was there any legal obligation for it to have been disclosed?

And if it had been disclosed, would that have made a difference? Would they have still bought the house if they’d known it had a ghost?

Whatever ghosts were . . .

He wasn’t so much frightened by the idea of the house having a ghost, as intrigued. But Caro wouldn’t have agreed to buying this place in a million years if she’d known.

He stared at the paper, at the headline of the article in the ‘News Review’ section. As if it had been planted there by an unseen hand.

DO GHOSTS EXIST?

He grinned at the coincidence. Then, before he had a chance to start reading, he felt Caro’s fingers trace softly down his navel, then further down still, and she turned and nuzzled his ear. ‘We’ve been here over a week,’ she said. ‘We haven’t had a date night and we haven’t done anything naughty in all that time. That’s far too long.’

‘Far too long,’ he echoed, feeling suddenly deeply aroused. They’d promised each other when they had got engaged that they would not become like some couples and let the romance in their relationship ever fade. As part of that resolve they had a date night once a week and had rarely missed one, except in the period around Jade’s birth. That had been a terrible time in which Caro had nearly died, and she had been left unable to conceive again.

With her free hand she switched off the television, placed the remote on her bedside table and began lifting sections of the paper and magazines off the bed and chucking them on the floor. Then her left hand moved lower still, and he winced in pleasure, then gasped as she closed her fingers around him.

He leaned away from her, for an instant, to turn off the overhead light, leaving just his bedside table lamp on. Then he turned back to face her. ‘I love you,’ he said.

She stared at him, as if examining his face, with a quizzical look. As her reply she kissed him.

Minutes later, lying on top of her and deep inside her, Ollie had the sudden sensation of being watched. Distracted, he turned his head, suddenly and sharply, towards the door. But it was closed. There was no one there.

‘What is it?’ she murmured.

‘Sorry – I thought – I thought I heard Jade come in.’ He kissed her and held her tightly, his arms round her, pressing their cheeks tightly together. ‘I love you so much,’ he said.

‘You too.’

Afterwards, Ollie fell asleep within minutes. He awoke a while later from a bad dream, drenched in perspiration, confused, unsure for some moments where he was. A hotel room? Their old house in Brighton? The green glow of his clock radio was the only light in the room. He saw the time flip from 2.47 to 2.48. Outside, an owl hooted. Moments later it hooted again.

Fragments of the dream remained. The old woman in a blue dress chasing him down the corridors of the house, then appearing in front of him, making him turn back. Then running into a tiny room and realizing he was trapped, turning round and seeing the old man with the briar pipe glaring at him, malevolently.

He wriggled up the bed a little to try to shake the dream away, and reached out in the darkness for the tumbler of water he kept by the bed. Caro slept deeply beside him, on her stomach, her arms round her pillow as if it were a life raft. She always slept soundly; she was capable of sleeping through a thunderstorm, and he envied her that. He envied her untroubled sleep right now, as he listened to the sound of her rhythmic breathing and the occasional little
put-put
sound of air bubbles through her lips.

He sipped the water and replaced the glass then, suddenly, a deep, paralysing chill gripped his body. He heard the click of the door opening. Then someone – or something – entered the room. He held his breath. He could just make out the dark shape moving, then stopping and standing right in front of the bed, staring at him. It was motionless. Goose pimples rippled down his skin and the hair rose up on the back of his neck. Was it a burglar? What weapon could he grab? The glass? The bedside lamp? His phone? His phone had a flashlight – he could flip it on.

Slowly, as silently as he could, he moved his hand towards the phone.

Then he heard Jade say urgently, from the foot of the bed, ‘There’s someone in my room!’

11

Monday, 14 September

The alarm clock radio came on at 6.20 a.m., as it did every weekday morning. Ollie, as usual, rolled over and pressed the ten-minute snooze button.

Caro, who had slept fitfully after getting up in the middle of the night to settle Jade after her nightmare, was instantly awake, and thinking about the full day she had ahead of her at work. She kissed Ollie on the cheek, then climbed out of bed, went into the bathroom and ran the elderly, noisy electric shower.