The House on Cold Hill

42

Ollie stared around at the empty room. Where the hell could the vicar have gone? There was no way he had gone out of the door. And the windows were closed.

But then he saw the plate of Penguins wasn’t on the coffee table either. Nor were their two mugs. The room felt still, as if no one had been in here all morning. He could smell furniture polish and new fabric. The curtains hung motionless.

He frowned. He’d only been gone a few seconds, into the hall. He ran across to one of the bay windows and stared out at the driveway. The vicar’s little purple Kia was not there, either. What — what —

He was startled by a patter behind him.

He turned and saw Sapphire walk in, her back arched, looking around as if something was bothering her.

‘Hey, girl!’ Ollie knelt to stroke her, but before he could touch the cat it let out a meow and shot back out of the room.

Then he heard the sound of a car arriving. Through the window he could see a purple Kia heading up the drive towards the house. He watched in astonishment as it pulled up, then the vicar climbed out, locked the door carefully, and strode towards the front door.

Had he imagined it? Ollie wondered. Was he having a Groundhog Day moment?

Feeling dazed, he walked through into the hall, and opened the front door.

Fortinbrass, dressed just as he had seen him only minutes ago, in jeans, a sweater with his dog collar beneath it and stout brogues, gave him a wave as he came towards him.

‘Good morning, Oliver!’ he said, giving him a firm handshake. ‘Very nice to see you again.’

‘Yes,’ Ollie said, hesitantly, staring at the man’s face for any sign that he was being hoodwinked in some way. But all he saw was a pleasant, open smile.

‘Would you like a drink?’ Ollie asked. ‘Tea, coffee?’

‘Builder’s tea would be very nice — milk, no sugar, thank you.’

Exactly the words the vicar had just used only minutes ago.

‘Righty ho!’ He showed Fortinbrass through into the drawing room, then went into the kitchen, still dazed. What the hell was going on inside his head, he wondered? Was he actually going mad?

He opened a cupboard where the biscuits were kept and looked in. There was an unopened family pack of Penguins. He studied the cellophane wrapping, then opened them and placed several on a plate.

Five minutes later he was seated, as before, on the sofa opposite the vicar, with a mug in his hand. Ollie gestured to him to help himself from the biscuits he’d placed on the table between them.

‘I’m tempted but I mustn’t, thanks — putting on a few too many pounds at the moment.’ He smiled and patted his stomach. ‘This is such a very beautiful house,’ he said, looking up at the ornate cornicing moulding around the ceiling, and the grand marble fireplace.

This was so weird, Ollie was thinking. This was exactly the conversation they’d just had, surely? ‘It will be if we ever get the place finished!’ he said.

‘Well, I’m sure you will. It reminds me of the house I grew up in. My father was a vicar, also, and until I was fifteen we lived in a very grand rectory in Shropshire. I say very grand but it was a nightmare in winter because my father couldn’t afford to put the central heating on. I’m afraid we’re not paid very much in the clergy. We spent the winters of my childhood living in the kitchen, sitting as close to the Aga as we could get.’ He sipped his tea, then eyed the plate again, clearly wavering. ‘So tell me how you and your family are settling in here? You said on the phone that things were not all right?’

‘Yes,’ Ollie finding this extremely weird. ‘— I — well, I thought it would be good to have a chat with you on my own.’

The vicar nodded, his face giving nothing away.

‘I went to see the Reverend Bob Manthorpe, as you suggested,’ Ollie said, for the second time in — how many — minutes?

‘Good! And how is he?’

‘You didn’t hear?’

His demeanour darkened. ‘No — hear what?’

Ollie gave him the news, again.

‘Good Lord, that is so very sad. I only met him a few times. He seemed a very dedicated man — he—’

The vicar stopped in mid-sentence, looking distracted, staring at the doorway into the hall.

Ollie saw the shadow moving again, as if someone was hovering outside the door. His skin crawled with goose pimples.

Still staring at the door, Fortinbrass asked, ‘Do you have someone else living here, in addition to your wife and your daughter — I think you said daughter?’

‘Jade, yes, she’s twelve. No, no one else living here.’

Ollie could still see the shadow, moving very slightly. He jumped up, strode out of the door and into the hall again.

There was no one.

‘Very strange,’ he said, walking back into the drawing room. To his relief the vicar was still there, and reaching for a Penguin.

‘Can’t resist these, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘What was it Oscar Wilde said about temptation?’

‘I can resist everything except temptation,’ Ollie prompted.

‘Yes, so true.’ The vicar unwrapped the end of his biscuit and bit a small piece off. ‘These always remind me of my childhood,’ he said after he had swallowed.

‘Me too.’

Ollie was feeling slightly disassociated, as if he wasn’t actually fully in his body, but was floating somewhere above it.

Suddenly the words of Bruce Kaplan, after their tennis game yesterday, came back to him.

‘Maybe ghosts aren’t ghosts at all, and it’s to do with our understanding of time... What if everything that ever was still is — the past, the present and the future — and we’re trapped in one tiny part of the space — time continuum? That sometimes we get glimpses, through a twitch of the curtain, into the past, and sometimes into the future?’

But they were in the present now, weren’t they? The vicar took another bite of his chocolate biscuit. Then another. Ollie stared back at the doorway. The shadow was there again, just as if someone was hovering outside.

‘Who’s that out there, Oliver? Is there someone who wants to join us?’

‘There’s no one there.’

Both men stood up and walked to the doorway. Fortinbrass stepped out, followed by Ollie. The hall was empty.

They returned to their seats.

‘It’s why I called you,’ Ollie said, and glanced out of the window, hoping Caro would not return until they’d finished this conversation. She would be an age, he knew — it would take her a good couple of hours to finish her shopping. But nevertheless he worried.

‘Please feel free to speak openly. Tell me anything that’s on your mind.’

‘OK, thank you. When I went to see Bob Manthorpe on Thursday, he told me some quite disturbing rumours about this house. He said that every county in England has a diocesan exorcist — or Minister of Deliverance, I believe you call them? Someone to whom clergymen can turn when something happens within their parish that they cannot explain. Is that correct?’

Fortinbrass nodded, pensively. ‘Well, broadly, yes. You want me to see if I can arrange someone to come here?’

Ollie watched the vicar’s eyes move back to the doorway. The shadow was still there, lurking.

‘Tell me something, you seem a very rational man to me, Ollie. Are you sure you want to open yourself up to this? Might it not be preferable to close yourselves to whatever is bothering you, ignore it and wait for it to go away?’

‘You’ve seen that shadow out there, right, Vicar — Roland — Reverend?’ He pointed at the doorway. There was nothing now.

Fortinbrass smiled, amiably. ‘It could just be a trick of the light. A bush moving outside in the wind.’

‘There is no wind today.’

Fortinbrass cradled his mug and looked thoughtful.

‘I’m an atheist, Roland. I had religion drummed into me so much at school. All that Old Testament stuff about a vengeful, sadistic, egotistical God who would kill you if you didn’t swear undying love to him? What was that about?’

The vicar studied him for some moments. ‘How God presents himself in the Old Testament can indeed challenge all of us, I can’t deny that. But I think we need to look to the New Testament to find the true balance.’

Ollie stared hard back at him. ‘Right now I’m prepared to accept anything. We’re living a nightmare here. I feel like we’re under siege from something malign.’ He glanced up, warily, at the ceiling, then his eyes darted around at the walls, the doorway. He shivered.

Fortinbrass set his mug down on the table and placed the Penguin wrapper next to it. ‘I’m here to try to help you, not to judge you. Would you like to tell me exactly what has been happening?’

Ollie listed everything he could remember that had happened. His mother-in-law’s first sighting of the ghost. His father-in-law’s encounter with her. Caro’s sighting of her. Jade’s friend’s sighting. The spheres he had seen. The bed rotating during the night. The taps. The photograph of Harry Walters. Parkin then Manthorpe being found dead. The computer messages. The emails to his clients. He omitted only the curious déjà vu he had experienced over the vicar’s arrival this morning.

When he had finished he sat back on the sofa and stared, quizzically, at the clergyman. ‘It sounds mad, I know. But, believe me, it’s true. All of it. Am I insane? Are all of us?’

Fortinbrass looked deeply troubled. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I believe you.’

‘Thank God,’ Ollie said, feeling a sense of deep relief.

‘I’ll put in a request. I’m not sure of the formalities, but I will ask.’

‘There must be something the church can do,’ Ollie implored. ‘We can’t go on like this. And we can’t leave — if we could, we’d be out of here like a shot. But there must be something — something you can do to help us, surely?’

An hour later, as Ollie stood in the front porch watching the vicar’s car heading away, Caro’s Golf appeared.

‘Hi, darling,’ she said, as he opened her car door for her. ‘Who was that?’

‘The vicar,’ he said.

‘And — what did you tell him?’

‘Pretty much everything.’

She walked round to the rear of the car and opened the tailgate. The boot was crammed with white and green Waitrose carrier bags.

‘I’ll help you in with everything,’ he said.

‘So what did the vicar say? Was he sceptical or helpful?’

Ollie hefted out four heavy bags. ‘He saw something himself, while he was here.’

Following him into the house, holding a clutch of grocery bags herself, she said, ‘Did he have a view on it?’

‘He took it seriously.’

‘Great,’ she said, sarcastically. ‘That makes me feel a whole lot better.’

They dumped the bags on the refectory table. Ollie took her in his arms. ‘We’ll get this sorted, darling, I promise you. In a year’s time we’ll be looking back on all of this and laughing.’

‘I’m laughing right now,’ she said. ‘I was laughing all the way down the supermarket aisles. Just how much fun has our life become, eh?’