The House on Cold Hill

20

‘So did you find that fellow you were looking for?’ Lester Beeson asked, placing a Diet Coke on the counter. ‘You wanted ice and lemon you said?’

The landlord was distracted today, as there were a dozen elderly, noisy ramblers in the bar, all in soaking wet cagoules, brightly coloured anoraks and muddy boots, a couple of them poring over a soggy map at a table.

‘Yes, thanks, ice and lemon is fine. Yes, I’ve found him.’

‘Good.’

‘Where are the toilets, please?’ a woman called to the landlord.

Beeson jerked a finger over to the far wall.

Ollie ordered a prawn salad, carried his drink over to an alcove, as far away from the ramblers as he could get, and sat down. Then he pulled his phone out of his pocket, opened his photos and looked at the two he had taken an hour earlier in the graveyard, of Harry Percival Walters’s headstone. Born May 1928, died October 2008. That made him eighty when he died, he calculated. Then he swiped across to have another look at the photograph of Harry Walters himself.

It was no longer there.

Puzzled, he checked through his albums. All the most recent photographs he had taken, over the weekend and yesterday, chronicling every step of the restoration work on the house, were still there. Even though he backed up all his photographs to his laptop and iPad and to the Cloud, he usually kept them on his phone too, for quick reference.

It definitely wasn’t there.

While he waited for his food to come, he phoned his computer man. From the crackling noise on the phone, it sounded as if Chris Webb was either driving or in a poor reception area.

‘I’m just on my way home from a client,’ Webb said. ‘Can I call you back when I get home?’

‘No probs.’

Half an hour later, Ollie strode up the drive towards the house, his head bowed against the rain which was now pelting down. He was pleased to see a row of workmen’s vans outside the house, and that a skip had been delivered.

He hurried inside, where there was a hive of activity in several of the downstairs rooms and the cellar. As he climbed back up into the kitchen, his phone pinged with a text. It was from Cholmondley, requesting an addition to the website. While he stood reading it, the plumber, Michael Maguire, wriggled out backwards from under the sink and looked round at him. ‘Ah, Lord Harcourt! How are you, sir?’

‘I’m OK — how’s it going?’ Ollie raised his phone and took a photograph of the pipework beneath the sink, to add to his photo record of the restoration work.

‘I don’t know who did this work before, but they were real bodgers!’ the Irishman said.

Before he could reply, Ollie’s phone rang. It was Chris Webb.

‘I’m back now, how can I help?’

Ollie waved for the plumber to carry on, and as he spoke to the computer man he walked back out of the kitchen and headed upstairs, needing to change out of his wet clothes, looking around warily. ‘It’s OK, Chris, it’s just that the photograph I emailed you earlier has gone from my iPhone and I needed you to send it to me. But it’s OK, I’m home now, it’ll be on my computer. Thanks.’

‘No problem!’

Ollie changed in their bedroom, taking a pair of jeans out of the huge Victorian mahogany wardrobe they’d brought from Carlisle Road, a fresh T-shirt and a light sweater, then climbed up the tower to his office, thinking again about the newspaper article about ghosts. Energy seemed a key factor. One of the theories it posited was that energy from dead people could still remain in the place where they had died. Could the energy of some elderly lady who had died here still be around? Was that what his mother-in-law had seen on the day they were moving in? Did that explain the spheres of light he had seen in the atrium?

Why had Jade asked him about ghosts this morning? Had it really been a bad dream that had spooked her on Sunday night — or something more?

What the hell was in this house? Something, for sure. He needed to find out — and find an explanation — before Caro saw something, too, and really freaked out.

Buying this place had been a stretch beyond what they could really afford. They were hocked up to the eyeballs. Moving out and selling right now was not an option. Whatever was going on, he needed to get to the bottom of it and sort it. There were always solutions to every problem. That had always been his philosophy. It was going to be fine.

He sat down at his desk and realized his hands were shaking. They were shaking so much it took him three goes to tap in the correct code to wake up his computer.

He went straight to Photos and checked through it carefully.

All the photos he had taken of the work in the house were there, and the photographs of Harry Walters’s headstone, as well as the one he’d just taken of the pipework. But there was no photograph of Harry Walters.

He turned to his iPad, and opened Photos again. It was the same. Everything else he had taken was there. But no photograph of the old man.

Was he going mad?

But Caro had remarked on the photo this morning, and Chris Webb had received it and talked about it. He dialled his number.

‘Chris,’ he said, when he answered. ‘I’m sorry, I do need you to send that photograph. I can’t find it.’

‘I’ve got a bit of a problem with that,’ Webb replied. ‘Must be a bloody iCloud issue, like I said. I’m sorry, mate, it’s vanished.’