The House on Cold Hill

by James, Peter

  ‘Not sure I’ve ever tried it.’

  ‘Got some of my own homemade in the fridge. Jolly good it is, too. Come in and have a glass and tell me a bit about yourselves. I hear you’ve a little girl. Nice to have a young couple come to the village – too many old fogeys like myself here!’

  What little he saw of the interior house as he followed her through into the rear garden was as dilapidated as the exterior, although evidently good quality. There was a threadbare Persian hall carpet and a handsome grandfather clock. On one wall was a photograph of a man in naval uniform next to a frame containing a row of medals, and on the opposite wall, a couple of fine seascapes in ornate frames, and a black-and-white photograph of a modern warship. Several gaily painted vases and mugs were arranged on shelves in the kitchen, which they passed through on their way out to the unkempt rear garden. It was filled mostly with vegetables, Ollie noticed, rather than flowers, and there was a row of cloches. At the far end was a shed that looked in imminent danger of collapse, which presumably housed her pottery studio.

  They sat at a small round metal table on hard chairs, under the glare of the sun, and he gratefully sipped the sweet but refreshingly cold cordial. It was several minutes of being pumped with questions by Annie about himself, Caro and Jade, before he had the opportunity to ask her anything back.

  ‘So how long have you lived here, Annie?’ he said, finally.

  ‘In Cold Hill? Gosh, let me think. About thirty-five years. We bought this place as a bit of a retirement dream – my late husband and I. But you know how things work out.’ She shrugged.

  ‘I’m sorry – did you split up?’

  ‘Oh no, nothing like that.’ She looked sad, suddenly, for the first time. ‘No, Angus died in the Falklands War – his ship was hit by one of those Exocet missiles.’

  ‘I’m really sorry.’

  She shrugged. ‘That’s how life goes sometimes, isn’t it?’ She pointed at a small bed planted with tall sunflowers. ‘They always make me smile, sunflowers!’

  ‘They make everyone smile,’ Ollie said.

  ‘Daft-looking things. Daft but happy. We all need a few daft things in our lives, don’t you think?’

  ‘I guess!’ He smiled and sipped some more of his drink, wondering whether it would be polite or rude to ask any more about her life. ‘This is delicious.’

  She beamed. ‘Good, I’ll give you a couple of bottles to put in your fridge. I always make far too much of the bloody stuff! I give it out to several people in the village. The shop want me to go into mass production so they can stock it, but I can’t be bothered with all that!’

  ‘You must know most of the people here, I imagine?’ Ollie said.

  ‘Oh, everybody, dear. Everybody. Well, nearly everybody. Most people who come here stay – for a good long while, at any rate. So, are you all happy in the house?’

  After a moment Ollie said, ‘Yes, yes, we are. Very. Well, my daughter, Jade, is a bit miffed about being separated from all her friends. We lived in the centre of Brighton previously – well, Hove, actually. Are there any young girls, around twelve, here in the village? I’d like to try and find her some friends.’

  ‘There’s one other family with young children, in the Old Rectory – that Victorian house at the far end. You might not have noticed it, because it’s behind gates, set back quite a long way, like your house. The Donaldsons. He’s some bigwig corporate lawyer who commutes to London, a bit aloof, but his wife is very friendly. She comes along to the informal pottery classes I hold every now and then. I’ll introduce you. I know most people around here.’

  ‘Thank you, I’d appreciate that. There’s a chap just thundered past in a tractor a few minutes ago, going up the hill. Who’s he?’

  She grinned. ‘That’ll be Arthur Fears. His family have farmed around here for generations. They own quite a bit of grazing land on the hill. He’s a miserable bugger, and he always drives too fast. I think he reckons he owns the road.’

  ‘I waved at him and he just blanked me.’

  ‘I wouldn’t worry about that – he ignores me, too. He only speaks to locals, and in his view you’re not a local unless you were born here!’ She smiled. ‘Some of the older country people have strange views. But, anyhow, you’re settling in?’

  ‘Yes. Sort of.’ He shrugged.

  She saw his hesitation. ‘Oh?’

  ‘Actually,’ he went on, ‘there’s one person I’d like to ask you about. An old boy I met in the lane. He had a pipe and walking stick. He was very odd.’

  She frowned. ‘A pipe and a walking stick? Doesn’t ring a bell.’

  ‘He’s a local, he told me.’

  She shook her head. ‘I can’t think who you mean. Can you describe him a bit more?’

  Ollie sipped some more cordial then put the glass down, thinking hard. ‘Yes, I would guess in his late seventies, quite wiry, with a beard and very white hair. Oh yes, he had a briar pipe in his mouth and a very gnarled stick. We had a conversation – he asked me where I was from and when I told him Brighton, he shook his head and said something that made me smile. He said he’d never been there – he didn’t like big cities!’

  ‘He sounds like a rambler. A bit nutty?’

  ‘He was definitely odd.’

  She shook her head. ‘There’s really no one around here I can think of who fits that description.’

  ‘He’s very definitely a local. He said he used to work at our house years back.’

  ‘I honestly can’t think who you mean. There’s definitely no one in the village of that description. I know everyone, trust me.’

  13

  Monday, 14 September

  ‘I’m being shown a house,’ Kingsley Parkin said, totally out of the blue.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ Caro said to her client.

  ‘A house! I’m being shown a very big country house – not far from Brighton!’

  Caro’s modern office, in the centre of Brighton, had a window that looked directly down on the courtyard in front of the city’s Jubilee Library. Not that she ever had time to take in the view. From the moment she arrived in her office, in the small law firm in which she was a junior partner, before 8.00 a.m. every morning, she was full-on, reading documents, drafting and redrafting transfers and leases. At 9.00 a.m. the phone would begin to ring, incessantly, until the switchboard closed at 5.00 p.m. Some clients would email or phone her – or both – several times a day, anxious about properties they were buying or selling.

  Additionally, she had meetings throughout the day both with existing clients and to take new instructions. Mostly she enjoyed face-to-face meetings, they were her favourite part of her work. She had a natural instinct to help people, and she enjoyed the challenge of pointing out pitfalls in property transactions. But with the way her days stacked up, she needed to keep her client meetings as brief as possible and to the point; there was little time to spare for small talk.

  Which was why this new client, seated in front of her, a pleasant, but very, very long-winded man, vacillating over whether to bid for a potential student housing property which was shortly coming up at auction, was beginning to irk her.

  He was an elfin creature, of indeterminate age somewhere north of sixty, in a high-collared emerald shirt beneath a shiny black jacket on which the tailor’s white stitching was part of the design, silver trousers, and patent-leather Cuban-heeled boots. His fingers were adorned with large jewelled rings. His hair was jet black, his skin was pockmarked and sallow, as if rarely exposed to daylight, and he reeked of tobacco. He’d once been the lead singer of a 60s rock band that was something of a one-hit wonder, and had scraped a living doing pub gigs and cruise ships on the back of it ever since, he had told her. Now he was looking to shore up his finances for his old age with some property investments.

  ‘There are a couple of things I need to make you aware of,’ Caro said, reading through a long email from the vendor’s solicitor, a particularly sharp character called Simon Alldis.

&nb
sp; Mr Parkin picked up his cup of coffee and held it daintily in the air. ‘Listen, my love,’ he said in his coarse, gravelly voice. ‘I’m being told something.’

  ‘Told something?’

  ‘Happens to me all the time. The spirits won’t leave me alone – know what I mean?’ He flapped his hands in the air, as if they were a pair of butterflies he was trying to shake free from his bangled wrists.

  ‘Ah.’ She frowned, not knowing what he meant at all. ‘Spirits?’

  ‘I’m a conduit, my love, from the spirit world. I just can’t help it. They give me messages to pass on.’

  ‘Right,’ she said, focusing back on the document in the hope it would concentrate his mind on the business in hand.

  ‘You’ve just moved into a new house, Mrs Harcourt?’

  ‘How do you know that?’ she asked sharply, uncomfortably surprised. She did not like her clients knowing about her private life, which was why she kept her office bland, with just one photograph facing her on her desk, of Ollie and Jade holding paddleball bats on the beach in Rock, Cornwall.

  The two butterflies flitted around above his head again. ‘I have an elderly lady with me, who passed last year!’ he said. ‘You see, the spirits tell me things, I can’t switch them on and off. I hear a click and then someone is there. They can be very irritating sometimes, you know? They can piss me off.’

  ‘Who tells you?’

  ‘Well, it varies, you see!’

  ‘Shall we concentrate, Mr Parkin?’ She looked back down at the document on her desk.

  ‘I have a message for you,’ he said.

  ‘That’s very nice,’ she said, sarcastically, glancing at her watch, the Cartier Tank that Ollie had bought her for their tenth wedding anniversary. ‘The document I have here—’

  He cut her off in mid-stream. ‘Can I ask you something very personal, Mrs Harcourt?’

  ‘I have another client immediately after you, Mr Parkin. I really think we should concentrate.’

  ‘Please hear me out for a moment, OK?’

  ‘OK,’ she said, reluctantly.

  ‘I don’t go looking for spirits, right? They find me. I’m just passing on what I get told. Does that make any sense?’

  ‘Honestly? Not much, no.’

  ‘I’m being shown a house. A very big place, Georgian-looking, with a tower at one end. Does that mean anything?’

  Now he had her attention. ‘You saw the estate agent’s particulars?’

  ‘I’m just passing on what the spirits are telling me.’ He shrugged. ‘I’m just a conduit.’

  ‘So what are these spirits telling you?’

  ‘This is just one particular spirit. She wants me to tell you there are problems with your new home.’

  ‘Thank you, but we already know that.’

  ‘No, I don’t think you do.’

  ‘We’re well aware of them, Mr Parkin,’ she replied, coldly. ‘We had a survey done and we know what we’re in for.’

  ‘I don’t think what I’m being told would have shown up on a survey, my love.’

  His familiarity annoyed her.

  ‘There are a lot of things you don’t know about this house,’ he went on. ‘You’re in danger. There are very big problems. I’m being told you really ought to think about moving out, while you still can. Your husband, Ollie, your daughter, Jade, and yourself.’

  ‘How the hell do you know all this about us?’ she rounded on him.

  ‘I told you already about the spirits. They tell me everything. But many people don’t like to believe them. Maybe you are one of those?’

  ‘I’m a solicitor,’ she said. ‘A lawyer. I’m very down to earth. I deal with human beings. I don’t believe in – what do you call them – spirits? Ghosts? I’m afraid I don’t believe in any of that.’ She refrained from adding all that rubbish.

  Kingsley Parkin rocked his head, defensively, from side to side, the butterflies soaring once more, light glinting off the rubies, emeralds and sapphires. ‘Admirable sentiments, of course!’ he said. ‘But have you considered this? Ghosts might not care that you don’t believe in them? If they believe in you?’

  He grinned, showing a row of teeth that looked unnaturally white. ‘You’re going to need help very soon,’ he said. ‘Trust me. This is what I’m being told.’

  She was beginning to feel very unsettled by the man. ‘Told by whom?’

  ‘I have this elderly lady with me who passed in spring last year. She had a grey cat who passed the year before, who is in spirit with her. She’s telling me her name was – hmmm, it’s not clear. Marcie? Maddie. Marjie?’

  Caro fell silent. Her mother’s sister, her aunt Marjory, had died in April last year. Everyone called her Aunt Marjie. She’d had a grey cat which had died a few months before she did.

  14

  Monday, 14 September

  Ollie left the old lady, Annie Porter, his head spinning. She was wrong. She must be. Maybe her memory wasn’t too great.

  He walked on down into the village, deep in thought, as the tractor driven by grim, surly Arthur Fears, local farmer and frustrated Formula One driver, rocketed by, blasting him with its slipstream. He passed the village store, then hesitated when he reached the pub. Much in character with the village, The Crown was a Georgian building, but with a rather shabby extension to the left covered with a corrugated iron roof. It was set well back from the road, with a scrubby, uneven lawn in front of it, on which were dotted around several wooden tables and benches – a couple of them occupied.

  He walked up the path. In small gold letters above the saloon bar door, were the words:LICENSED PROPRIETOR, LESTER BEESON.

  If he ever had to create the interior of an iconic English country pub for a website, Ollie thought, as the ingrained sour reek of beer struck his nostrils, this place would be it. Booths recessed into the walls, wooden tables and chairs, window seats, and a warren of doorways leading to other rooms. The ochre walls were hung with ancient agricultural artefacts, and there was a row of horseshoes along one side, along with a dartboard.

  Presiding over the L-shaped bar was a massively tall man in his late fifties, with a mane of hair, a cream shirt with the top two buttons undone and a gut the size of a rugby ball bulging his midriff. Behind his head were rows of optics, a photograph of a cricket team, and several pewter tankards.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ the landlord greeted him warmly, lifting a pint glass up and drying it with a cloth.

  ‘Good afternoon!’

  ‘Mr Harcourt would it be, by any chance?’ He set the glass down.

  Ollie grinned, surprised. ‘Yes.’ He held out his hand. ‘Ollie Harcourt.’

  The landlord shook it firmly. ‘Les,’ he said. ‘All of us in Cold Hill are very happy to have you and your family with us. We need a little rejuvenation. What can I offer you as a drink on the house?’

  Normally, Ollie avoided drinking alcohol at lunchtime, but didn’t want to look a prig. ‘Well, that’s very kind of you, thank you. I’d like a draught Guinness – and also a lunch menu, please.’

  The plastic-coated menu appeared in front of him instantly, as if conjured from out of the ether by the landlord. The Guinness took some minutes longer. As Lester Beeson stood over the glass, which was steadily filling with black liquid and cream foam, Ollie ventured, ‘Do you by chance know an old guy in the village, with a briar pipe and walking stick?’

  ‘Pipe and walking stick?’ He thought for a moment. ‘Doesn’t ring a bell. Local, is he?’

  Ollie nodded. ‘A wiry little fellow with a goatee beard and very white hair. In his seventies or even eighties?’

  ‘No, doesn’t ring any bells.’

  ‘I understand he lives here, in the village. I met him last week – I wanted to have another chat with him.’

  ‘I thought I knew everyone.’ The landlord looked puzzled. He turned towards an elderly, morose couple seated in a window booth, eating in silence as if they had run out of conversation with each other years earlier. ‘Morris!’
he called out. ‘You know an old fellow who smokes a pipe and has a walking stick?’

  After some moments the man, who had lank white hair hanging down either side of his face, as if a damp mop had been plonked on his head, set down his knife and fork, picked up his pint of beer and sipped it.

  Ollie thought at first he couldn’t have heard the landlord. But then he said, suddenly, in a northern accent, ‘Pipe and a walking stick.’ He licked froth from his lips, revealing just two teeth, like a pair of tilting tombstones, at the front of his otherwise barren mouth.

  The landlord looked at Ollie for confirmation. He nodded.

  ‘That’s right, Morris. A beard and white hair,’ Beeson added.

  The old couple looked at each other for a moment and both shrugged.

  ‘He’s as old as God, Morris is!’ Beeson said to Ollie with a grin, and loudly enough for the old man to hear, then turned towards him. ‘You’ve been here in the village – what – forty years, Morris?’

  ‘Forty-two it is, this Christmas,’ the old woman said.

  Her husband nodded. ‘Aye, forty-two. We came down here because our son and his family moved here.’

  ‘Morris were engineer on the railways,’ she said, inconsequentially.

  ‘Ah,’ said Ollie, as if that explained everything. ‘Right.’

  ‘Don’t know of anyone like that,’ she said.

  ‘I’ll ask around for you,’ Beeson said to Ollie, helpfully.

  ‘Thank you. I’ll give you my home and mobile phone numbers – if you hear anything.’

  ‘If he lives anywhere around here, someone will know him.’

  ‘Old as God, did you say?’ the old man suddenly called out to Beeson. ‘I’ll have you know, young man . . . !’ Then he began chuckling.

  Later that day, when Caro came home from work, Ollie again said nothing to her about the strange old man with the pipe.

  Caro said nothing to Ollie about her encounter with Kingsley Parkin.

  15

  Monday, 14 September