by Peter James
‘He’s been receiving malicious emails, apparently, this Mr Bhattacharya. Someone who has a grudge against him, and has hacked your system to attack him. Was there some other reason why Mr Webb sent it to me?’
Shit! Ollie thought. Shit, shit, shit. So much for his carefully constructed plan to calm the man down. How the hell did he dig himself out of this one?
‘Perhaps you should be more careful who you are sending emails to, Mr Harcourt.’
‘Let me try to explain, Charles, please.’
A few minutes after he ended the call, he saw an email had come in from Bhattacharya. It was the one Webb had sent to Cholmondley. There was a curt message from his Indian client at the top.
Wrong recipient.
Ollie checked his Sent Messages box. Both the messages, to Bhattacharya and to Cholmondley, had been sent correctly. So how the hell had the wrong one ended up with each of them?
He phoned Chris Webb and told him what had just happened.
‘No way,’ Chris replied. ‘I double-checked, knowing how sensitive this was. There’s no way those emails went to the wrong people. It’s just not possible.’
‘I checked too. It may not be possible, Chris, but it’s happened. OK?’
‘I’m telling you, it’s not possible. Hold on a sec, will you?’
Ollie listened to the putter of a keyboard. Then Webb came back on the line.
‘You there?’
‘Yes,’ Ollie replied.
‘I’d blind-copied myself on both emails, Oliver. They’ve both come through. The one to your client, Cholmondley, was sent to Cholmondley’s address. The other one to Bhattacharya – that was sent to his address. There is no way each could have received the other’s email.’
‘Well, they have, Chris. How do you explain that?’
‘I can’t. I don’t have an explanation. Maybe there’s some problem with your address book. Or . . .’
‘Or?’
‘You know what I’m going to say, don’t you?’
51
Monday, 21 September
The green digits on Ollie’s clock radio showed 3.10 a.m. He had barely slept. Apart from just now, when he’d woken from a dream in which he’d been in the retired vicar Bob Manthorpe’s house. A gale was raging outside, rattling the windows, and a cold draught blew on his face. The Sunday papers lay on the floor by his bed, unread. He’d been unable to concentrate on anything during the evening. He just kept thinking about the figures by the stairs he had seen at lunchtime, and the ones he and Caro had seen behind the mystery window.
The window where there was no room. Or no way into it – or out.
In the dream he had been in the vicar’s sitting room, watching a rising smoke ring. They were having the same conversation they’d had on Thursday – just three days ago – three days that felt like a month.
‘He’d unearthed letters and journals and what-have-you from that time, and he used to like sitting in the pub and telling anyone who’d listen that Brangwyn’s wife had not been on the outbound ship with him. That he’d left her behind in the house.’
‘In the closed-up house?’
‘Or buried her somewhere in the grounds. I don’t think they had quite the calibre of detection work we have today. If it’s true, he went away for long enough, came home, opened up the house and started life over again with a new bride. Rumour had it, apparently, that his wife’s spirit was pretty angry . . . And that she didn’t like people leaving the house.’
Ollie could hear his heart pounding in his chest. A slightly uneven boomph . . . boomph . . . boomph like a boxing glove striking a punchbag. Unease shimmied through him. This room, this secret room – was Matilda De Glossope – formerly Matilda Warre-Spence – in there?
Suddenly there was a loud cracking sound. An instant later something smelling damp and musty fell on the bed, covering his face and dripping foul-smelling water on him.
He sat up, yelling, pushing it away with his hands, but it kept falling back onto him.
‘Ols, what’s happening, what’s happening, what’s happening?’ Caro was trying to push it away, too.
It felt like paper. Sodden paper. He rolled sideways out of the bed and crashed to the floor. Caro was still wrestling with it, shouting. He stood up, found the wall light switch and pressed it. And saw the writhing mound of Caro on the bed, struggling to find her way out from under a huge sheet of red flock wallpaper that had come away from the wall behind the headboard and fallen across the bed, leaving a bare brown strip of exposed wall, like a wound.
He stepped forward, grabbed an edge of wallpaper and pulled it free.
Caro sat up, wide-eyed, shaking her head. ‘Jesus!’ she said. ‘What – what the hell?’
As she looked fearfully around there was another cracking sound. The top section of a full-length strip of wallpaper on the left side of the room suddenly detached itself from the wall. Ollie ran over to it and tried to push it back into place. It was sodden, he realized. Then as he looked around the walls, fear and confusion shimmying through him, he saw they were all glistening with damp.
Then another strip came partially free, folding over on itself.
Caro screamed and threw herself out of bed; she ran over to Ollie and clutched him. Her eyes darted about, wild with terror. ‘What’s happening, Ollie, what the hell is happening?’
‘Must be another water leak,’ he said, feeling utterly useless and helpless.
Caro looked at him in terror. ‘Another this, another that. I was nearly electrocuted by the bloody shower. Now I’m being smothered by wallpaper. This place is a sodding health hazard. What’s going to happen next?’
‘We’ll get on top of it all, darling.’
‘I can’t cope with this, Ols. I just can’t cope with this—’
She was interrupted by another loud crackle.
Ollie could not see where it came from. Christ, he wondered, were all the rest of the strips about to start peeling away from the walls, too?
‘We can’t sleep here,’ she said. ‘I’m scared more’s going to come down. God, and I’ve got such a load of meetings tomorrow . . .’
‘Maybe we should go downstairs, sleep on the sofas again tonight?’ Ollie said. ‘I’ve got an important day, too, we’ve got to get some sleep.’
But ten minutes later, lying under a duvet on the sofa that was a little too short for him, he was wide awake, thinking once more about the emails.
There was absolutely no way they’d sent them to the wrong recipients.
The more he turned it over in his mind, the more certain he was they’d not made a mistake. But at the same time, less certain. What kind of tricks was his mind playing on him? It seemed that since moving here someone else had taken control of it, similar to the way Chris Webb, thirty miles away, could take control of his computer through that simple bit of software, TeamViewer.
Was someone – or something – controlling his mind? Controlling it remotely? Making him see messages on the screen that weren’t there? Messing around with time inside his head? Making him see cracks on the ceiling that magically repaired themselves?
Making wallpaper fall off?
Caro sounded as if she was asleep, finally. He lay very still, not wanting to disturb her, trying to sleep too, but he was thinking, now, about tomorrow. Much to his surprise, Cholmondley had agreed to meet him – at his north London showroom. He would head off there straight after dropping Jade at school.
He had a headache. His scalp was pulling tightly round his skull, as if it was several sizes too small. He felt a vice-like grip in his chest, and his teeth were all hurting. And just like when he was a small child, he was keeping his eyes closed, scared of what he might see if he opened them.
This house, which he had thought would be paradise for the three of them, had turned into a nightmare he could not wake from.
And a nightmare that would not let him go to sleep.
It was all his fault, he was well aware. Caro would have been happy to
have lived in a modest house in Brighton all her life, as her parents had. He was the one with the big ambition, the hubris, who had persuaded her to take the gamble and move here.
Now he was no longer sure about anything and, least of all, his sanity.
Shadows that moved; vicars who appeared before they had arrived; girls who were not there feeding ducks; faces in windows; cracks in ceilings that sealed themselves; a window with no room behind it.
And himself, who had always been fit, now out of breath at the slightest exercise.
That scared him more than anything. Maybe he should have a check-up. Could he have a brain tumour?
Occasionally he opened his eyes to check his clock radio. Time was passing slowly, incredibly slowly.
4.17.
4.22.
4.41.
He heard a click and stiffened.
Then Jade’s whispering, anxious voice.
‘Mum? Dad?’
‘What is it, lovely?’ he said, as quietly as he could.
‘There’s a man in my room. He keeps saying he’s my dad.’
Ollie snapped on the lamp on the side table at the end of the sofa, and saw his daughter, in a long cream T-shirt, looking gaunt.
‘Uh?’ Caro said.
‘It’s OK, darling,’ he whispered.
‘He says he’s my dad. He’s really scary. I can’t sleep, Dad.’
Ollie stood up, in his boxers and T-shirt, and hugged her. ‘Tell you what, lovely, stay down here with us – you can sleep on the sofa with your mum. Tell me about this man in your room?’
‘He comes in every night.’
‘Every night?’
She nodded. ‘But normally he doesn’t speak.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me? What does he look like?’
‘Like you, Dad. I thought it was you. He said we should all have left, but it’s too late now.’
He hugged her again. ‘Is that how you feel?’
Jade shook her head. ‘I like it here now. This is where we belong.’
‘We do, don’t we?’
‘We do,’ she nodded, then moments later was fast asleep, standing up in his arms.
Gently, he eased her onto the sofa, beside Caro, who sleepily pulled the duvet over her daughter and put a protective arm round her.
Ollie lay down again on the other sofa, with the light on, listening to his wife and his daughter sleeping. Thinking again, as he had earlier. Full of guilt for bringing them into this.
What a sodding mess.
Ghosts.
Bruce Kaplan had no problem with ghosts.
Hopefully, after tomorrow, he would not either. There would be no ghosts here any more. Benedict Cutler would deal with them.
Lay Lady Matilda finally to rest.
And then they could get on with their lives.
It was going to be fine. Really it was. Exorcisms here might not have worked in the past, but hey, the past was another country, wasn’t that what they said? This was today, 2015. Peeps felt different about stuff, as Jade might say.
And this was their dream home. You had to try to live your dreams. Too many people went to their graves with their dreams still inside them. And that was not going to happen to him. Life presented you, constantly, with idiots. But, just very occasionally, if you opened yourself up to the opportunities, life presented you with magic, too.
They mustn’t lose the dream. He would make this house safe and happy for Jade and Caro. Somehow. They’d find a way. It would begin tomorrow. This house was magic. He listened to his daughter and his wife breathing. The two people who meant more to him than anything else on earth.
The two people on this planet he would die for.
52
Monday, 21 September
The Monday-morning traffic into London was shit, with the M25 and then the Edgware Road clogged, and it was almost midday when Ollie finally arrived at the swanky Maida Vale premises of Charles Cholmondley Classic Motors.
As he pulled into one of the velvet-roped visitor parking bays, he stared, covetously, at the array of cars behind the tall glass wall of the showroom. A 1970s Ferrari, a Bugatti Veyron, a 1950s Bentley Continental Fastback, a 1960s Aston Martin DB4 Volante and a 1960s Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud. All of them gleamed, as spotless and immaculate as if they’d spent all their years wrapped in cotton wool and had not yet been exposed to a road.
On the way here he had managed to speak to his builder’s foreman, frustrated that his calls yesterday hadn’t been returned, and asked him, urgently, to have someone climb in through the tiny window to see what was there between the blue and yellow bedrooms, and left another voicemail for his plumber to investigate the sudden dampness of the walls in their bedroom. Then he spent twenty minutes on the phone trying to pacify Bhattacharya. He wasn’t sure he had succeeded, although the restaurateur had at least accepted the possibility of a malicious hacker – albeit one malicious to Ollie, not to himself. Someone with a grievance against Ollie, he told him. Very unfortunate, but was he willing to take the risk of someone whom Ollie had upset damaging his own business? He told Ollie he would think about it.
Seated in Cholmondley’s oak-panelled office, which was adorned with silver models of classic cars and framed photographs of exotic car advertisements from decades ago, overlooking the showroom floor, the discussion did not go so well. The car dealer himself was the very model of unctuous charm. He gave a reasoned explanation as to why he was not going to pay his bill, accompanied by expansive arm movements, and periodic flashes of his starched white double cuffs and gold links. However, he told Ollie, if he was prepared to waive this bill, in lieu of damages caused, he would be prepared to consider retaining his services going forward.
Leaving Maida Vale shortly after 1.00 p.m., having been offered neither tea, coffee nor water, Ollie was parched and starving. He’d barely eaten a thing yesterday, and he’d only managed to swallow a couple of mouthfuls of cereal for breakfast today. His nerves were jangling, his stomach felt like it was full of writhing snakes, and he was feeling light-headed from lack of sugar.
He pulled onto a garage forecourt, filled up with diesel, then bought himself a ham sandwich, a KitKat, and a Coke. He returned to his car and sat, listening to the news on the radio, while he ate.
The traffic was better than earlier but still heavy, the rain not helping, and it would be touch and go whether he made it to Jade’s school in time to pick her up. He decided to ignore the route the satnav was suggesting, which would put him outside the school ten minutes late, and short-cut his way down through Little Venice, White City and then Hammersmith, and cross the Thames there.
Suddenly his phone rang. He saw it was Bryan Barker. ‘Hi, Ollie, sorry I didn’t call you back yesterday, we’d gone over to my sister in Kent and I left my phone behind. How was your weekend?’
‘I’ve had better.’
‘Wish I could give you some good news now to cheer you up, but I’m afraid every time we look behind anything at the house, we find another problem.’
‘So what’s the latest doom and gloom?’
‘There are some nasty-looking cracks around the base of the tower, below your office – we’ve only found them since chipping away some of the rendering.’
‘What’s causing them?’
‘Well, it could just be slight movements of the earth – changes in the water table, the soil beneath drying out. Or it could be subsidence.’
‘Subsidence?’ Ollie said, knowing full well what that would entail. Cripplingly expensive underpinning. ‘Why didn’t this show up on the survey?’
‘Well, I’m looking at the relevant section of the survey now. It warned of possible movement but inspection wasn’t possible without removing some of the rendering. It says they brought this to your attention and you told them to leave it.’
‘Great!’ Ollie said, gloomily. ‘Just one thing after another after another.’
‘Should have bought yourselves a nice little brand-new bungalow if you wanted a
n easy life!’ Barker said.
‘Yeah, great.’ Ollie concentrated on the road for a second. He used to know this part of London well – his first job was for a small IT company down the skanky end of Ladbroke Grove, on the fringe of Notting Hill – and he cycled everywhere then. He drove along with the canal on his right.
‘Oh, and another thing,’ Barker said. ‘That window you asked us to take a look through – there’s a bit of a problem.’
‘What?’
‘I climbed up this morning – we put two ladders together – but I couldn’t see in – there are metal bars blocking out the light.’
‘Metal bars? Like a prison cell?’
‘Exactly.’
‘So is it a room?’
‘I don’t know – we’d either have to cut away the bars or go in through a wall.’
‘How long are you going to be there today, Bryan?’
‘I’ve got to leave early today – I’ve got a site visit to make, and it’s Jasmin’s birthday – I’ll be in big trouble if I’m late!’
‘I’ve asked the plumber, but if you have time could you also take a look in our bedroom? I think we may have a serious damp problem there.’
‘OK – and you’ll be at the house in the morning?’
‘Yes, I’ll be working from home all day.’
Ollie ended the call and drove on, immersed in his thoughts. At least he had a resolution, of a kind, with Cholmondley. He was going to have to accept the bastard’s deal, he knew, because it was still a gateway to other classic car dealers. And he had a lot of damage limitation ahead with the other dealers who’d been copied in on the vile email that had gone to Cholmondley. With luck, Bhattacharya could be salvaged. And tonight the vicar and Benedict Cutler were coming.
He had a good feeling about that.
Fortinbrass seemed a very human man, concerned and interested. He and Benedict Cutler would help them clear whatever malevolence was in the house. It was 2015, for God’s sake. Ghosts might have terrified people in past centuries, but not any more. This evening was high noon for any spectral guests at Cold Hill House.
