The House on Cold Hill

13

‘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.

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.