The House on Cold Hill

by Peter James

  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 me
an 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.’

  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.