The House on Cold Hill

by James, Peter

  Ollie listened carefully, drank some more coffee, then thought for some moments. ‘OK, what you’re saying does make sense, but if all the tap washers were useless, how come I was able to turn the taps off and stop the water? The taps were all opened – surely they couldn’t have opened by themselves?’

  ‘Well, they could, Ollie, if there was enough vibration in the pipes. Like the nuts on the wheel of a car can work loose if there’s enough vibration for long enough.’

  Ollie’s phone pinged with an incoming text. He saw it was from Cholmondley but didn’t read it. He looked back at the plumber. ‘Nearly every tap in the house – and the outside one as well?’

  ‘As I said, Ollie, I can’t tell you categorically that this is what happened. There is, of course, another possibility.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘Someone causing mischief. Some intruder, vandal?’

  ‘Mike, I can’t see anyone breaking into a house at three in the morning and then running around turning all the taps on. That doesn’t make any sense.’

  ‘I’m just speculating – couldn’t have been your daughter and some of her friends having a bit of a laugh?’

  ‘A bit of a laugh?’

  He raised his hands. ‘Kids today. Mine are constant mischief.’

  ‘We’re lucky with Jade, she’s pretty sensible – she—’ He stopped and frowned, as a thought occurred to him.

  When Jade was younger she had sleepwalked regularly. Could it have been her who had done this? Could she have gone around the entire house, in her sleep, turning on taps? Why? And yet, he did remember one incident, some years back when she was about seven, when she’d gone out into the garden shed, lifted several items out and put them on the lawn. In the morning she’d had absolutely no recollection of doing it. And another occasion, around that same time, when she had gone into the kitchen and emptied everything out of the fridge and freezer and stacked it all neatly on the floor, again with no recollection in the morning.

  ‘My daughter had a sleepwalking problem when she was younger. I wonder – I – I’m just – could she have done this?’ Ollie said. ‘Just—’ He fell silent for some moments, then turned his palms upwards in despair. ‘I’m just speculating.’

  ‘That’s all I’m doing, too,’ Michael Maguire said. ‘I’m just speculating.’

  24

  Wednesday, 16 September

  Ollie went back up to his office. The plumber’s explanation for the running taps might account for some of them. But surely not for every damned tap in the entire bloody house? He just couldn’t buy that. Although he wished he could.

  He’d not yet told Caro about the running taps; until the ceiling had caved in she’d only stirred and not really been aware of the drama around the house. How many taps were there? He started to count in his head. The bathroom in the attic – two in the sink there and a mixer shower – three. But they hadn’t been running. On the first floor there were the en-suite ones in their bedroom, Jade’s and the yellow room, plus the family bathroom for the other four spare rooms – and the washbasin in the blue room. Downstairs there were two toilets with basins off the hall, and then the kitchen, the scullery and the outside tap.

  He noted them down, trying hard to think with his tired brain if he’d missed any out. The sink in the disused kitchen in the cellar, he suddenly remembered, and noted that down also. The more he thought about it, the less convincing the plumber’s explanation seemed. Not every tap on the main system, every single one. No way.

  Jade?

  The possibility that it was Jade doing it in her sleep did make uncomfortable sense.

  He thought back again to some of those previous episodes, then he sat at his desk, logged on and googled sleepwalking. As he had imagined, there were hundreds and hundreds of sites. He went back and entered some key words to narrow the search parameters. Then he scanned through the shorter list of sites, selected and began to read. The third site he came to interested him the most. He bookmarked it and read through it several times, taking particular note of the list of possible symptoms.

  Little or no memory of the event – that had been true. She always had no memory.

  Difficulty arousing the sleepwalker during an episode – also true of Jade.

  Screaming when sleepwalking occurs in conjunction with sleep terrors.

  Jade had screamed last night. He’d run into her room, turned off the taps on the overflowing bathtub and pulled the plug out. She had terror in her eyes, and now, thinking about that more clearly, he could remember that look of frozen fear on her face from years back. It was the same way she used to look straight after waking from a sleepwalking episode when she was seven.

  She’d been quiet in the car on the school run this morning, Instagramming all her friends with a dramatic picture of the hole in her parents’ bedroom ceiling. He had no idea what she was saying but could see several rows of smiley, scowly, frowny and other emoticons.

  Then a thought struck him hard. They’d taken Jade to a child psychologist back then. The woman had put her night terrors and sleepwalking down to her fears at starting at her new school, and predicted they would stop when she settled in and started making friends. The psychologist had been right, that was exactly what happened.

  Now Jade was in her early days at another school.

  Was the pattern repeating itself?

  It made sense.

  A flash alert for an incoming email from Chris Webb caught his eye, distracting him, and he opened it.

  No luck with that old boy with the pipe, I’m afraid. I went on a Photos forum to see what I could find there – it seems that what usually happens is that photographs get misfiled – but they don’t disappear completely. Not like your chap has. Don’t know what to suggest. You sure he wasn’t a ghost?

  25

  Wednesday, 16 September

  ‘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.

  So did you unpack your tennis racquet yet? Back to usual this week? Friday at Falmer?

  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.

  Prepare for a thrashing

  Ollie typed back.

  In your dreams!

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

  Btw, check out a guy called Dr Nick Vaughan in Queensland, Oz, doing interesting research work in macular degeneration. Might be interesting for your mother. B.

  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.

  26

  Wednesday, 16 September

  Ten minutes later, Ollie helped Caro, still in her office clothes, to lug sheets, duvets, pillows and towels up the two flights of stairs to the tiny spare room in the attic. They were going to sleep here for the next couple of nights until their bedroom was habitable again.

  ‘Well, it’s going to be cosy, my love!’ Caro said as they went in.

  ‘That’s for sure!’

  Right under the eaves, the room had a sloping roof and a small window looking out on to the rear garden. The ancient wrought-iron double bed took up almost all of the space. It fitted snugly against the right-hand wall, leaving just enough room to open the door and enter. There was a gap of about three feet between the left of the bed and the built-in cupboards that ran the full length of the left wall.

  ‘It reminds me of the bed in that little French hotel we stayed in once on our way down to the south – remember?’ she said, staring dubiously at the horribly stained old mattress, before dumping her armful of bedding on it.

  ‘Near Limoges, wasn’t it? Which creaked l
iked crazy when we made love in it!’

  She laughed. ‘God, yes, and it rocked so much – we thought it was going to collapse!’

  ‘And that tight little French woman who ran it and charged us extra for having a bath!’ he said.

  ‘And I went out into the corridor in the night to have a pee and walked into someone’s bedroom!’ She shook her head, grinning at the memory. ‘God, this mattress needs airing. I’ll bring a fan heater up here and leave it on for a couple of hours.’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘Let’s turn it over and see if it’s any better on the other side.’

  Ollie dumped the bedding on the floor. Then they lifted the mattress; the ceiling was so low they bashed the bare light bulb, hanging from an ancient cord, in the process.

  There was a large brown stain in the centre on the reverse side. ‘Yech!’ Caro said.

  They turned it back again. ‘It’ll be fine when we’ve got a clean undersheet and bedding on it, darling,’ Ollie said.

  ‘I hope no one died in this.’

  Nope, the last owners died before they even got a chance to sleep here, he nearly answered. But instead he said, ‘It was probably some servant who was put up here.’

  ‘The mystery is, how on earth did they ever get a bed this size in this room?’ she said.

  ‘I would imagine in bits and they assembled it up here. Unless they built the house around it!’

  Later, with the clean bedclothes on it, and the pillows freshly plumped, it was looking more inviting. Ollie slipped his arms round Caro’s waist. ‘Want to try it out?’

  ‘I need to get Jade her supper. What do you fancy tonight?’