The House on Cold Hill

24

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.