The House on Cold Hill

8

Ollie stood still and watched the strange character walk on up the lane. He wasn’t sure if it was his imagination, but the old man seemed to quicken his pace as he passed the entrance gates to Cold Hill House, slowing down again on the far side.

Digger? What the hell did he mean, Ask someone about the mechanical digger?

He felt disturbed by the encounter, and determined to press the old man for more information. There would be other opportunities, he decided. He’d bump into him again, or perhaps he’d find him one evening in the pub and buy him a pint or two, and get him to loosen up.

He walked on, further than he had intended, right down into the village, with the hope he might meet the old man again when he went back up to the house, and entered the small, cluttered shop with faded, old-fashioned sign-writing across the lintel proclaiming COLD HILL VILLAGE STORES. It smelled of freshly baked bread, which masked the dry, slightly musty smell that reminded him of ironmongers’ stores. The elderly proprietor and his wife seemed to know all about him already. Clearly the new occupants of Cold Hill House were a major source of village gossip.

He discovered to his delight that they would do a daily newspaper delivery. He gave a list of the papers and magazines he and Caro wanted: The Times, Mail, the Argus, the weekly Brighton and Hove Independent, the Mid-Sussex Times and the monthly Motor Sport, Classic Cars and Sussex Life magazines. He bought a homemade lemon drizzle cake and a loaf of locally made wholemeal bread, then went back out into the sunshine.

He looked up the hill, trying to spot the old man. A tiny woman in a Nissan Micra was coming down towards him, the top of her head barely visible above the dashboard, with a green van impatiently tailgating her. As he headed back up the hill, he was deep in troubled thought. Was the old man a nutter? He didn’t think so. The fear in his eyes had seemed very genuine.

Should he tell Caro?

But what good would that do? Frighten her into imagining something that might not be there? He would wait, he decided. His thoughts returned to the website for Charles Cholmondley Classic Motors. One of the most expensive cars on the list that he’d had to provide copy for was a stunningly fine 1924 Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost Canterbury Landaulette, priced at £198,000, a black sedan with whitewall tyres, and an open roof above the driver’s cab, and a complete ownership history. Ghost, how very appropriate, he thought with a grin. As he reached the front gates of the house, he stood and waited for some moments, looking up the hill again for any sign of the old man heading back down. But there was none.

He walked up the drive. As he approached the house his spirits lifted once more. The warm sunshine beat down on him, and his T-shirt stuck to his back with perspiration. Then, suddenly, looking up at the sun, high in the sky, he stopped and thought hard.

Thought back to the pinpricks of light he had seen in the atrium.

He had dismissed them as either reflections of the sunlight through the windowpanes in the rear door, or symptoms of an approaching migraine. But the rear of the house faced north and, he now realized, however high the sun was as it traversed from east to west across the sky, it would not shine in through that rear door.

Which made it impossible for those spheres he had seen to have been reflections of sunlight. So it must have been a migraine.