The House on Cold Hill

7

The following morning brought the start of an Indian summer heatwave. Ollie, dressed in shorts, T-shirt and trainers, again dropped Jade off at school. She’d found her first day OK, but was still not happy about being separated from all her old friends. He returned home, relieved that the Migraleve tablets he had been taking seemed to have warded off any migraine. He had a lot to do on his client’s website this morning.

But no sooner had he sat down in his office, than his distractions continued, starting with a visit from the boss of the building contractors, Bryan Barker, who read out a litany of doom and gloom that further inspection of the house had revealed, in his irrepressibly cheerful way that made everything seem somehow less bad than it really was.

Barker started with the rot in the cellar, then the damp beneath all of the windows on the front facade, which took the brunt of the weather, then the leaking roof. They could do it all in one go, Barker told him, or do it piecemeal, but that would be a false economy. Then, almost by way of reducing the impact, Barker mentioned Ollie’s Specialized hybrid bike that he had seen in one of the outbuildings and invited him to join a regular weekly boys’ bike ride around the area.

As the builder spoke, pound signs with several rows of noughts after them flashed, constantly, through Ollie’s mind. Then the electrician arrived with a story of equal doom and gloom. The current electrics in the house were, in his view, a serious fire hazard, and if they weren’t replaced could invalidate the insurance.

Their plumber, who appeared at the same time, a chatty Irishman called Michael Maguire, told him the results of his inspection yesterday. Much of the piping was lead, which would eventually give them all brain damage from the drinking water if they left it in situ. It would be wise to replace the lot with modern plastic piping. The painter’s news was no more encouraging. It seemed that the property development company had employed a total bodger of a builder, who, instead of having walls stripped down, had merely painted over them — possibly just to tart this place up in order to sell it.

The warnings had all been there, in those stark pages of the survey. But they had been panicked into making a decision when the estate agents informed them there was another buyer in the frame. Ollie had convinced Caro there would be no urgency to do the work — they could do it bit by bit over a few years. That no longer seemed to be the case. It had been a financial stretch to buy the house and they thought they had budgeted sufficient for the first year to carry out the renovations. Now, after listening to Barker, Ollie realized they were going to have to add thousands to this figure — and somehow find the money. They were in this financially up to their necks. To make things worse, the market had turned in the time since they had exchanged contracts and if they tried to put it back on the market they would be facing a substantial loss. They had no option but to make it work.

And they damned well would!

In the middle of his discussions with the painter, a neighbour appeared, asking him for a subscription to the local parish magazine — which he agreed to. It was close to midday before, almost brain-dead, he began work again on the Charles Cholmondley Classic Motors, Purveyors of Horseless Carriages to the Nobility and Gentry since 1911, website, making sure the pages were clear and readable on tablets and on phone screens. Next, he checked all the links worked — the client’s email address, the Twitter, Facebook and Instagram pages.

At 1.30 p.m., finally satisfied, he emailed a link for the test site to his client, then took a break and went back downstairs to make himself some lunch. When he reached the atrium he stopped and looked around for any sign of the lights he had seen here yesterday, but all he could see were a few dust motes in front of the windowpanes in the door. The pills had done the trick, he thought, relieved.

He made himself a Cheddar and Branston pickle sandwich, poured himself a glass of chilled water from the fridge, and carried them, together with the morning’s copy of The Times, out onto the rear terrace, blinking against the brilliant sunlight. He set everything down and went back inside to find his sunglasses. As he did so, the front doorbell rang. It was a large delivery of flat-pack wardrobes.

Ten minutes later he returned to his lunch. As he read the paper and ate his sandwich, he looked up occasionally, watching a pair of ducks paddling across the lake. Afterwards, he walked round the side of the house, down the drive, and out through the front gates, deciding to stroll down towards the village and look around before returning to work.

As he headed down the narrowlane, which had no pavement and was bounded by trees and hedgerows on both sides, breathing in the country scents, his phone vibrated. It was an email from his new client, Charles Cholmondley, saying he loved the website and would come back to him later in the day, or tomorrow, with his amendments. Ollie felt suddenly incredibly happy. Cold Hill House was going to be a lucky home for them. Sure, there was a massive amount of work to be done, but his new business was on its way. Everything was going to be fine!

As he passed a small, dilapidated Victorian cottage on his right, with an overgrown front garden, he saw an elderly man in a baggy shirt, grey trousers and hiking boots striding up the hill towards him, holding a stout stick, and with an unlit briar pipe in his mouth. He had a wiry figure, white hair styled in an old-fashioned boyish quiff, a goatee beard and leathery, wrinkled skin. As they drew close, Ollie smiled. ‘Good afternoon,’ he said.

‘Good afternoon,’ the man replied in a rural Sussex burr, removing his pipe. Then he stopped and pointed the stem in the air. ‘Mr Harcourt, would it be?’

‘Yes?’ Ollie said, still smiling.

‘You’re the gentleman who just bought the big house?’

‘Cold Hill House?’

The old man gripped his walking stick hard, letting it support some of his weight. His rheumy eyes were like molluscs peeping out beneath spiky fringes of white hair. ‘Cold Hill House, that would be it. How you getting on with your lady, then?’ He stared hard at Ollie.

‘Lady?’ Ollie retorted. ‘What lady?’

He gave Ollie a strange smile. ‘Maybe she’s not there no more.’

‘Tell me?’

‘Oh, I wouldn’t want to frighten you, not when you’ve just moved in.’

‘Yeah, well I’m frightened enough already — by the estimates I’m going to be getting from the builders!’ He held out his hand. ‘Nice to meet you — you’re local?’

‘You could say that.’ He nodded and pursed his lips, but made no attempt to take the proffered hand.

Ollie withdrew his hand, awkwardly. ‘It’s a delightful contrast to Brighton, I have to say.’

The old man shook his head. ‘Not been to Brighton.’

‘Never?’ Ollie said, surprised.

‘I don’t like big cities, and I don’t like to travel much.’

Ollie smiled. Brighton was less than ten miles away. ‘Tell me — you said you don’t want to frighten me. Is this lady something I should be frightened of?’

The old man gave him a penetrating stare. ‘I’m going back some years now — I worked for Sir Henry and Lady Rothberg, when they owned this place, when I was a young man. Bankers they were. I were one of the gardeners. One day they asked me if I could do a bit of caretaking for them while they were abroad. They used to have live-in staff and that, but Sir Henry lost a lot of money and had to let them all go.’ He hesitated. ‘That room they called the atrium, that still there?’

‘The oak-panelled room with the two columns? The one you go through before the kitchen?’

‘That used to be the chapel when it was a monastery, back in the Middle Ages — before most of the house, as it is today, was built.’

‘Really? I didn’t know that,’ Ollie said. ‘I didn’t know there was anything remaining of the monastery.’

‘Sir Henry and Lady Rothberg used it as a kind of snug — because it was next to the kitchen, it were always cosy in winter from the heat from the oven, and it were cheaper than heating the bigger rooms in the house just for the two of them.’

‘They had no children?’

‘None that survived childhood, no.’

‘How sad.’

The old man did not react. He went on, ‘They were going away for a few days and asked me to house-sit for them, to look after the dogs and that. They had a couple of them old-fashioned wing-back chair things in there. On the Sunday night I was sitting listening to the radio, and the two dogs, in the kitchen, began growling. Wasn’t a normal sound, it was really eerie, set me off shivering. I can still hear it, that sound, all these years on. They came out into the atrium, their fur standing on end. Then suddenly they both began backing away, and I saw her.’

‘Her?’

‘The lady.’ The old man nodded.

‘What did she look like? What did she do?’

‘She was an old lady, with a horrible expression on her face, all dressed in blue silk crinoline, or something like that, and yellow shoes. She came out of the wall, walked towards me, flicked me in the face so hard with her fan it stung my cheek, and left a mark, and vanished into the wall behind me.’

Ollie shivered, eyeing the man carefully. ‘Bloody hell. What happened then?’

‘Oh, I didn’t hang around. I took off. Just grabbed my things as fast as I could and left. I phoned Mr Rothberg, told him I was sorry, but I couldn’t stay there no more.’

‘Did he ask you why not?’

‘Oh, he did, and I told him.’

‘What did he say?’

‘He weren’t very happy. But he said I wasn’t the first to have seen her, the lady. I found that out for myself.’

‘What — did you find out?’

‘Well...’ the old man stopped and pursed his lips, then he shook his head. For the first time, Ollie saw fear in his eyes. ‘Like I said — it’s not my place to frighten you. Not my place.’ He began walking on.

Ollie hurried after him for a few paces. ‘Please tell me a bit more about her?’

The old man shook his head, continuing to walk. Without turning his head, he added, ‘I’ve said enough. I’ve said quite enough. Except for one thing. Ask about the digger.’

‘Digger?’

‘Ask someone about the mechanical digger.’

‘What’s your name?’ Ollie called out.

But, shaking his head, the old man carried on.