The House on Cold Hill

by Peter James

  ‘You mean the website? Charles Cholmondley? How do you pronounce it?’

  ‘Chumley.’ Ollie nodded. ‘Partly that.’

  ‘I think it looks great.’

  ‘I think the client likes it.’

  ‘Of course he does, you’ve done a great job – particularly considering everything else you’ve had to deal with this week! I meant to ask, did you remember to put the sign for a cleaning lady up on the village shop noticeboard?’

  ‘Yes – Ron, who runs the shop with his wife, Madge, said there were a couple of people they thought might be interested.’

  ‘On first-name terms with the locals after just a week?’ she said with a grin.

  ‘They’re a lovely couple. He’s a retired accountant and she was a teacher. The shop’s a labour of love – they do it for pin money.’

  ‘Nice there are people like that in the world,’ she said. ‘And I like that you’re getting to know the place a bit. We ought to go in the pub sometime. Perhaps see if they do Sunday lunch? We need to try to be a bit involved in the community – and there might be some other girls here around Jade’s age she could become friends with.’

  ‘Yes, absolutely. Maybe you could join the local jam-making class?’ he joked.

  ‘There is one?’

  ‘There was an ad in the store!’ He fell silent. He’d still not told Caro about the old lady. Fortunately, it seemed to have slipped from his father-in-law’s mind and he had not mentioned her again at lunch. But at some point soon, Ollie knew, he would have to say something to Caro. Hopefully in the coming days he’d find the strange old man again and pump him for more about the background of the apparition. If both his in-laws had seen her, and he’d seen something too, then others must have seen her as well. Presumably it was someone who had lived here in the past. Did the estate agent know about her? Was there any legal obligation for it to have been disclosed?

  And if it had been disclosed, would that have made a difference? Would they have still bought the house if they’d known it had a ghost?

  Whatever ghosts were . . .

  He wasn’t so much frightened by the idea of the house having a ghost, as intrigued. But Caro wouldn’t have agreed to buying this place in a million years if she’d known.

  He stared at the paper, at the headline of the article in the ‘News Review’ section. As if it had been planted there by an unseen hand.

  DO GHOSTS EXIST?

  He grinned at the coincidence. Then, before he had a chance to start reading, he felt Caro’s fingers trace softly down his navel, then further down still, and she turned and nuzzled his ear. ‘We’ve been here over a week,’ she said. ‘We haven’t had a date night and we haven’t done anything naughty in all that time. That’s far too long.’

  ‘Far too long,’ he echoed, feeling suddenly deeply aroused. They’d promised each other when they had got engaged that they would not become like some couples and let the romance in their relationship ever fade. As part of that resolve they had a date night once a week and had rarely missed one, except in the period around Jade’s birth. That had been a terrible time in which Caro had nearly died, and she had been left unable to conceive again.

  With her free hand she switched off the television, placed the remote on her bedside table and began lifting sections of the paper and magazines off the bed and chucking them on the floor. Then her left hand moved lower still, and he winced in pleasure, then gasped as she closed her fingers around him.

  He leaned away from her, for an instant, to turn off the overhead light, leaving just his bedside table lamp on. Then he turned back to face her. ‘I love you,’ he said.

  She stared at him, as if examining his face, with a quizzical look. As her reply she kissed him.

  Minutes later, lying on top of her and deep inside her, Ollie had the sudden sensation of being watched. Distracted, he turned his head, suddenly and sharply, towards the door. But it was closed. There was no one there.

  ‘What is it?’ she murmured.

  ‘Sorry – I thought – I thought I heard Jade come in.’ He kissed her and held her tightly, his arms round her, pressing their cheeks tightly together. ‘I love you so much,’ he said.

  ‘You too.’

  Afterwards, Ollie fell asleep within minutes. He awoke a while later from a bad dream, drenched in perspiration, confused, unsure for some moments where he was. A hotel room? Their old house in Brighton? The green glow of his clock radio was the only light in the room. He saw the time flip from 2.47 to 2.48. Outside, an owl hooted. Moments later it hooted again.

  Fragments of the dream remained. The old woman in a blue dress chasing him down the corridors of the house, then appearing in front of him, making him turn back. Then running into a tiny room and realizing he was trapped, turning round and seeing the old man with the briar pipe glaring at him, malevolently.

  He wriggled up the bed a little to try to shake the dream away, and reached out in the darkness for the tumbler of water he kept by the bed. Caro slept deeply beside him, on her stomach, her arms round her pillow as if it were a life raft. She always slept soundly; she was capable of sleeping through a thunderstorm, and he envied her that. He envied her untroubled sleep right now, as he listened to the sound of her rhythmic breathing and the occasional little put-put sound of air bubbles through her lips.

  He sipped the water and replaced the glass then, suddenly, a deep, paralysing chill gripped his body. He heard the click of the door opening. Then someone – or something – entered the room. He held his breath. He could just make out the dark shape moving, then stopping and standing right in front of the bed, staring at him. It was motionless. Goose pimples rippled down his skin and the hair rose up on the back of his neck. Was it a burglar? What weapon could he grab? The glass? The bedside lamp? His phone? His phone had a flashlight – he could flip it on.

  Slowly, as silently as he could, he moved his hand towards the phone.

  Then he heard Jade say urgently, from the foot of the bed, ‘There’s someone in my room!’

  11

  Monday, 14 September

  The alarm clock radio came on at 6.20 a.m., as it did every weekday morning. Ollie, as usual, rolled over and pressed the ten-minute snooze button.

  Caro, who had slept fitfully after getting up in the middle of the night to settle Jade after her nightmare, was instantly awake, and thinking about the full day she had ahead of her at work. She kissed Ollie on the cheek, then climbed out of bed, went into the bathroom and ran the elderly, noisy electric shower.

  It took some moments for the water to heat up sufficiently, then she stepped in and ducked her head beneath the shower head, grateful for the stream of hot water that was waking her more every second. She reached for the shampoo, tipped some into her hand, and massaged it into her hair.

  Then she smelled the pungent reek of burning plastic.

  The water stopped.

  She heard the crackle of a fire.

  Opening her eyes, stinging from soap, she saw to her horror flames shooting around the blackened shower controls.

  ‘Ollie!’ she shrieked, pushing open the shower door and stepping back into the bathroom. She stood transfixed like a rabbit caught in headlights, as flames licked the controls then died down, acrid black smoke rising around them.

  ‘Ollie!’ she called out again, running through into the bedroom, dripping wet, shivering, blinking away the soap. He was sound asleep.

  ‘Ollie!’

  He did not stir.

  She ran back into the bathroom and peered into the shower. The smoke was dying down. ‘Fuck!’ she said, watching the control unit warily. The last wisps of smoke rose and then there was nothing.

  ‘Fuck,’ she said again, touching her soapy hair, and walked over to the washbasin. She turned on the mixer tap and, to her relief, water poured out. She waited until the temperature was OK, then ducked her head under the stream.

  As she rinsed off the shampoo she suddenly felt a sharp tug on the left side of her h
ead. Then a harder tug that hurt, making her cry out in pain.

  Something was yanking her hair, pulling it down.

  She tried to raise her head, but she was being pulled down further. Further. Further.

  It felt as though a hand was trying to pull her down into the plughole.

  ‘OLLIE!’ she screamed, trying desperately to raise her head, feeling her hair tugging painfully against her scalp. ‘OLLIE!’

  Then she heard his voice. ‘Darling, what is it?’

  ‘HELP ME!’

  The water stopped, abruptly. Ollie said, ‘It’s OK, darling. It’s OK.’

  She felt his hands on her hair. Then, suddenly, the pain stopped. Gingerly, she stood up. ‘Oh my God,’ she said.

  ‘You’re OK, darling. You’re OK. You just got it caught on the plughole.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she gasped. ‘It freaked me out. I really felt like someone was pulling it.’

  ‘Why didn’t you use the shower?’

  12

  Monday, 14 September

  It was a warm morning, the heatwave continuing. An hour and a half later, as Ollie drove Jade for the start of her second week at school, she told him about her nightmare last night in which a woman, with an expression of menace, was standing at the end of her bed.

  When she had been younger, Jade had suffered from night terrors. Terrible dreams that had made her sleepwalk around the house in her onesie, totally unaware. They had found the solution, which was to talk jokingly to her and make her laugh. Saying, repeatedly, ‘Hi, darling, stick your tongue out,’ was something that normally worked. Her face would turn from an expression of fear into a big smile. Then they could put her back to bed.

  But last night she had been too afraid to leave her parents’ room, until he and Caro had finally coaxed her back to her own bed, and then let her sleep with the lights on. It had taken Ollie a long time to get back to sleep. He had lain until dawn, his mind whirring, thinking. Thinking. Thinking.

  Deeply disturbed.

  After dropping a yawning Jade off at school and returning to the house, Ollie had an immediate word with the plumber about the shower. Maguire told him it was over thirty years old and it looked as if, at some time, the wiring had been gnawed by rodents. He told Ollie that, like so much in this house, it should have been scrapped a long time ago.

  After instructing Maguire to replace it as quickly as possible, he briefly discussed various issues and queries the workmen had raised. Then he climbed up to his office and immediately settled down to work, checking carefully through the amendments he had carried out to the Cholmondley Classics website. There were so many cars on it that he coveted. He paused for some moments to admire an immaculate blue and cream 1963 Mercedes 280SL Pagoda before, with some trepidation, emailing his client the link to the finished site.

  He frittered away the next fifteen minutes replying to emails, Tweets and Facebook posts which had been coming in daily, wishing him and his family luck in their new home. There were dozens of comments in response to his Instagram posts too, as well as a ton of spam from various trade companies. Then he turned his attention to a less urgent, but equally challenging commission from another client, a revamp of the very basic website of an Indian restaurant in the centre of Brighton, The Chattri House.

  This was a complete back-to-the-drawing-board job, to which the client, Anup Bhattacharya, whom he had met with last week, enthusiastically agreed. The man owned a chain of twelve themed Indian restaurants around the country – so a lot was riding on getting this right. He looked through the notes he had made on his iPad at their meeting: the look and the feel of the site that Bhattacharya wanted; the road map of contents; the number of pages; the social media interaction and links. There was an e-commerce side as well, with branded food products to go on sale in the entrepreneur’s online deli.

  At 11.00 when he went down for his mid-morning coffee, he hesitated before entering the atrium, as he now did each time, looking around carefully. As he stepped into the room the only thing he noticed, and perhaps it was his imagination, was that the temperature seemed to have dropped a fraction. He stopped and looked around. It wasn’t a big room – it was square, about fifteen feet by fifteen. To the left, the panelling was shaped into three arches, which fitted with this once having been the altar of the chapel of the monastery. Ahead was the window and door out onto the rear garden and grounds. To the right, past two wooden Doric-style columns, was the doorway into the kitchen.

  This was the area where his mother-in-law had very clearly seen what he could only presume was a ghost. The same one described by the old man in the lane. And from the sound of it, the one seen by his father-in-law, Dennis, yesterday. Gliding out of the altar wall to the left, moving across the tiled floor and disappearing into the wall to the right of the kitchen door.

  He suddenly felt uncomfortable standing here, feeling again as he had last night that someone was watching him. He walked through to the kitchen, selected a strong capsule for the Nespresso machine, switched it on, then checked the water level at the rear, waiting for its its twin green lights to stop blinking. The feeling that someone was watching him persisted. Someone standing behind him.

  He turned round, sharply. There was no one.

  This is not going to get to me, he thought. I’m not going to let it.

  Below in the cellar he could hear the whine of a drill. Somewhere above him was the sound of hammering on metal. One of the painters outside, working on the worst of the window frames, had a radio blaring out music. A clean protective runner had been laid along the hallway by the builders. He could smell fresh paint.

  He carried his coffee up to the bedroom, where there was still a smell of burnt plastic from the shower, retrieved the section of the Sunday Times where he had seen the article on ghosts last night, and carried it on up to his office. Then he sat at his desk, in the upright orthopaedic chair Caro had insisted he buy, to improve his posture and stop him getting stooped from so many hours crouched over his computer. He opened the paper out and began to read.

  Fifteen minutes later, he tore the page containing the article out, folded it and placed it in a drawer. There were a couple of names in there that might be useful, he decided. Then, fighting the distraction, he focused on The Chattri House website for the next two hours.

  Shortly after 1.30 p.m. he decided to take a break and walk down into the village to see if he could find the old man. He planned to grab a bite of lunch in The Crown pub and see what kind of food it served – and perhaps book for Sunday lunch for Caro, himself, Jade and her friend Phoebe, who was coming over for a sleepover on Saturday night, and Ruari, who was joining them on Sunday. Then, on second thoughts, he decided it would be nicer to have the lunch at home – and a lot cheaper.

  As he reached the front gate he heard the roar and clatter of a tractor towing a large piece of agricultural machinery on a trailer up the lane at speed. A grizzled man in a tweed cap, sitting in the cab, stared rigidly ahead. As he waited for it to pass, Ollie gave him a wave, but got no acknowledgement.

  He watched it for some moments rattling on up the road, almost expecting to suddenly see the old man walking down the hill. But there was no sign of him in either direction. He noticed to his irritation an empty Coke can and discarded food wrapper lying close to the front gates. Litter louts made him furious – what the hell gave people the right to just throw things out of their cars at random because they were too lazy to find a bin? He made a mental note to pick them up on his return.

  He headed down the hill. As he reached the dilapidated-looking cottage on his right, with the very faded sign, GARDEN COTTAGE, he saw the front door was a few inches ajar, and decided to go and introduce himself, as this was his nearest neighbour. The gate was sagging so much on its hinges that the latch no longer closed properly. He pushed it open, feeling it scrape along the bricks of the garden path, then pushed it shut behind him and went up to the front door.

  ‘Hello!’ he called out. There had been
a knocker once but all that remained were the two corroded brass clasps that had held it. There was no sign of a bell. He rapped with his bare knuckles and called out, again, ‘Hello!’

  ‘Yes, who is it?’ asked a friendly, female voice, with a booming, county accent that seemed very grand for this little abode.

  He heard a loud meow, then the woman saying, ‘There’s someone at the door, Horatio!’

  A moment later Ollie was facing a tall, elderly woman, with flowing white hair, fine features and clear blue eyes, who stood there with an inquisitive smile. She was dressed in flip-flops, dungarees covered in flecks of what looked like dried clay, and a frayed cream blouse, with more flecks of the stuff on her face.

  ‘Oh – I’m sorry to bother you,’ he said, politely, removing his sunglasses for a moment. ‘I’m Oliver Harcourt – my wife and I have recently moved into Cold Hill House. I thought I would just pop round and say hello as we’re neighbours.’

  ‘Well, how jolly nice of you! And welcome to Cold Hill – hope you’ll be jolly happy here. Excuse my appearance, I’ve been throwing pots.’

  Ollie wondered for a moment if she was bonkers, then he realized what she meant. ‘Clay? You’re a potter?’

  ‘Yes, I’ve got my wheel and kiln out in the back. Tell you what, I’ll make you and your wife—?’

  ‘Caro.’

  ‘Caro! I’ll make you and Caro a vase, as a moving-in present. My name’s Annie Porter.’

  ‘Are you a famous potter?’

  She laughed. ‘Good God, no. Most of my stuff explodes in the damned kiln anyway – but every now and then something survives! Do you like elderflower cordial?’