The House on Cold Hill

47

Instantly the words disappeared. Ollie checked his phone, but there was no new message. There was no trace of the words.

Where had it come from?

He glanced, warily, up at the ceiling, his eyes jumping around. How much else had he imagined today?

He wondered whether to call Chris Webb and tell him what had happened and to see if he could find the source of the words. But he felt that Webb’s patience was wearing thin. He could tell from the man’s attitude that he was starting to have doubts about what was going on. Doubts about Ollie’s sanity? Yet Webb had seen the photograph of the old man, before it had disappeared, hadn’t he?

Hopefully, on Monday evening, Fortinbrass and the Minister of Deliverance would be able to help them.

To try to distract himself he turned his attention back to his task of working through the deeds, sometimes having to use a magnifying glass to decipher the handwriting, which was badly faded on some documents, listing each of the previous owners of the property.

What he was coming up with was not looking good. And over the course of the next hour, it looked even worse.

He doggedly continued typing each past owner’s name into Google, but there were no matches of any significance — just several links to various relatives, and one to an arts foundation in The Gambia. It surprised him a little, as this was such a substantial property and several of the owners had grand names.

An hour later he reached the final name on the list: the first owner of this house, Sir Brangwyn De Glossope. The name that the old vicar, Bob Manthorpe, had struggled to remember.

He entered that into Google, and moments later he was staring at a small sepia photograph of the front of Cold Hill House. It was beneath a listing on a website of a book titled Sussex Mysteries, which had been published by a small press in 1931 and was written by an author called Martin Pemberton. Ollie read the two brief paragraphs beneath.

Ollie found himself looking up at the ceiling again, uneasily. Evelyne Tyler. Was it her ghost that was causing all this mischief? Angry at what had happened? Or Matilda De Glossope — formerly Warre-Spence?

He googled the names further. There were several entries about the Warre-Spence family, but all of them referring to relatively recent events. Nothing more on the history.

Next on the internet he searched for the lifespan of human beings in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the eighteenth century, he read, although life expectancy was only forty years old, if people survived childhood and their teens, they had a good chance of living into their fifties or sixties, or even older. For his purposes at the moment, that was not good news. Life expectancy steadily increased through the twentieth century, to the current level in the UK of seventy-seven for a man and eighty-one for a woman.

Then he looked back down at his desk. At the stack of deeds, and the list of names he had written on the A4 pad beside them. And the dates he had obtained from DeadArchives.com/uk. The dates of their births and their deaths.

Sir Brangwyn De Glossope had died at the age of thirty-nine. Not one of the past owners of this house, subsequently, had ever reached their fortieth birthday, except for the Rothbergs, neither of whose lives had been much worth living past it.

Shit. He felt cold suddenly, and shivered. He would be forty himself, in just over a week’s time.

He stared out of the window. All the warmth and colour seemed to have faded from this glorious afternoon, like a photograph that had been left in direct sunlight for too many years. Then, as he looked down towards the lake, he saw Jade and Phoebe standing at the edge of the water, looking playful and happy, throwing something — bread perhaps — to the ducks.

Exactly as he had seen them earlier, when Jade had been out having her riding lesson and Phoebe had been at home with her parents.