The House on Cold Hill

25

‘Dad, can I invite Charlie as well as Niamh to my birthday party? We will still have it, won’t we?’

Pulling the Range Rover away from traffic lights, after he had collected her from school, Ollie reached out and squeezed Jade’s arm, lightly. ‘Of course we’ll still have the party, my lovely.’ Then he shot her a glance. ‘Charlie — who’s that?’

‘My friend,’ she said, very matter-of-factly. ‘She’s nice.’

‘A new friend?’

She nodded and looked down at her phone, her fingers moving rapidly on the keys.

He was pleased that she looked a lot happier this afternoon. In fact it was the first time in the ten days since she had started at St Paul’s that she seemed like her old self. ‘Is she at school with you?’

‘Yes.’

‘OK, that’s great. Of course she can come to your party. You can invite anyone else you like from the school, too.’

‘There might be two other girls,’ she said, then looked solemn. ‘But I’m not sure if I really like them, yet.’

‘Well, you’ve got time, over a week still.’

She was focused again on her phone and barely nodded acknowledgement. Then after a few moments she said, ‘Charlie’s mum works for a vet.’

‘OK.’

‘Her mum knows a labradoodle breeder — and can you believe it, Dad? They’re expecting a litter next week. Can we go and see them, can we? A puppy could be my birthday present, couldn’t it?’

‘I thought you wanted a new iPad?’

‘Well, I do, but I’d rather have a puppy, and you said we could have one.’

‘How do you think Bombay and Sapphire would get on with a puppy?’

‘I’ve been reading about it, Dad. I know exactly what to do.’

Ollie smiled. He believed her. When she was eight, Jade had had two gerbils and she had doted on them, keeping their cage immaculate. She had even trained them to go through a mini gymnastics course she had set up on her bedroom floor, and she and her closest friend, Phoebe, had invented gymnastic awards which they’d presented so seriously to them.

Jade had also trained them, much to his and Caro’s amusement, to come downstairs on their own. She explained, in the very serious manner she sometimes adopted, that this was in case the house ever caught fire when everyone was out, so they would be able to escape. Neither he nor Caro had wanted to disillusion her by pointing out the one flaw she hadn’t spotted, which was that the gerbils would still have been trapped in their cage.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘Your mother and I will need to work out some time when we can go to see them — isn’t there another breeder having a litter also?’

‘Yes, but that’s not for ages.’

‘I thought you said it would be in about a month?’

‘I did, Dad. That’s what I mean, ages.’

Ollie was kept hanging on by Cholmondley. He half wondered if it was deliberate, and the pompous little man was paying him back for not returning his calls this morning.

After several minutes he laid the receiver on the desk, leaving it on loudspeaker, and began to check his emails. The first was from his regular tennis opponent, Bruce Kaplan, an American-born computing science professor at Brighton University. They’d met and become friends whilst studying IT at Reading University. Kaplan had subsequently taken an academic path whilst Ollie had gone down a commercial one. They were closely matched at tennis, and he enjoyed Kaplan’s company — he had a massive intellect and frequently an unusual take on the world.

He’d had a weekly game with Kaplan at the Falmer Sports Centre, on the University of Sussex campus, for the past ten years or so.

Ollie typed back.

came the reply. It was followed immediately by another email from him.

Ollie replied, thanking him. His mother had recently been diagnosed with early-stage macular degeneration, but whether she — or his father — would take any notice of anything he sent them, he doubted. They were far too conservative in their views. Their doctor was always right, so far as they were concerned; they weren’t interested in anyone else’s opinion.

They weren’t interested in the new house, either, and that made him sad. He would love them to come down and see the house, and see how well he had done in life, but he doubted they ever would. Before moving in he’d suggested his parents should come for a visit. ‘Too long a journey,’ his father had replied, bluntly. ‘And your mother can’t really travel now, not with her eyesight.’

She had never travelled when her eyesight had been perfect, either. Neither of them had, although they could have afforded to. His father had earned a decent living as the works manager of an engineering plant and his mother had been a primary school teacher. Instead, every summer throughout his childhood, for their annual family holiday, Ollie, his brother, Bill, and his sister, Janis, had been driven by their parents thirty miles to Scarborough on the Yorkshire coast, where they’d stayed in a self-catering cottage. It was a lot cheaper than many places in the town, his father boasted every year without fail, because, he would say proudly, ‘It doesn’t have a sea view. Who the hell needs that when you’ve got legs to walk to the bloody sea, eh?’

Their parents might not have travelled but their children had. Janis was in Christchurch, New Zealand, married with four children, and Bill was in Los Angeles, living with his boyfriend, and working as a set designer. It had been a couple of years since he had seen either of his siblings, there was quite an age difference between each of them; none of them had been close. That cold and distant relationship he’d always had with his parents was a big part of the reason he tried to keep a closeness with Jade.

Despite his misgivings, he typed out an email to them both with a link to Dr Nick Vaughan’s website, and sent it. They wouldn’t take any notice, but it was duty done.

Then the penny dropped.

O’Hare.

‘Hello? Hello? HELLO?’ A disembodied voice snapped him out of his thoughts. Then he realized with a start it was coming from the phone receiver.

He snatched it up. ‘Charles?’

‘Listen, Mr Harcourt, I’m not very happy about being buggered around all day.’

‘I apologize, our bedroom was flooded out in the middle of the night and we’ve been in chaos.’

‘With all due respect, that’s not my problem. You could have had one of your staff call me.’

Yes, Ollie nearly said, who would you have preferred to talk to — Bombay or Sapphire? Instead he replied, as politely as he could, ‘You’re such a very important client, Mr Cholmondley, I wouldn’t dream of fobbing you off with a junior member of my team.’

A few minutes later, with Cholmondley back in his box, Ollie hung up, then went over to a stack of packing cases he had not yet opened, containing box files of documents. He checked the labels, found the one he wanted and ripped the sealing tape with a paper knife. After a couple of minutes rummaging through it, he lifted out the file he was looking for and carried it back over to his desk.

Through the window, he saw Caro’s Golf coming down the drive. Normally he would have run downstairs to greet her, but he was anxious to look at this document, to check. Hopefully he was wrong, mistaken.

Hopefully.

The box was marked, in Caro’s handwriting, COLD HILL HOUSE HISTORIC DOCS.

He opened it and a musty smell rose up. A few documents down he found the deeds, with old-fashioned script on the front, a red wax seal in the bottom right corner, and green string holding the pages together. He flicked through quickly and saw that Cold Hill House had passed through the hands of several companies until Bardlington Property Developments had purchased it in 2006. There were several accompanying documents in a folder with various architectural drawings on plans they had submitted for the redevelopment of the property; one was for demolishing the house and building a country house hotel; another was for keeping the existing house but building a further ten houses in the grounds; a third was for turning it into sheltered housing accommodation.

He turned back several pages then stopped and stared down in dismay.

Stared at the names.

John Richard O’Hare.

Rowena Susan Christine O’Hare.

On this document they were joint signatories on the purchase of Cold Hill House on 25 October 1983.

He picked up his phone, opened Photos and flicked across to the ones he had taken in the graveyard. He found the one of the headstone of the O’Hare family, and expanded it with his figure and thumb to read the dates that all four of them had died.

26 October 1983.

One day after they had bought the house.

As he went downstairs to greet Caro, he felt a deeply uncomfortable sensation.