The House on Cold Hill

by James, Peter

  Ollie glanced at his phone and saw there was still no returned call from Manthorpe. He grinned, downed a large gulp of his drink, then wiped the back of his mouth with his hand. ‘I’ve just got a shitload of stuff on my mind at the moment,’ he said. ‘Sorry if my game was rubbish.’

  ‘It’s always rubbish.’

  ‘Sod you!’

  Kaplan grinned. ‘So what’s on your mind?’

  Kaplan worked in the Artificial Intelligence faculty at Brighton University. He had a number of theories that had always seemed to Ollie to be on the wild side of science, but he never dismissed anything. One of Kaplan’s interests, and the topic of a book he had written, which had been published by a respected academic imprint, was whether a computer could ever appreciate the taste of food, laugh at a joke or have an orgasm.

  ‘What’s your view on ghosts, Bruce?’ he asked him, suddenly.

  ‘Ghosts?’ the professor repeated, quizzically.

  ‘Do you believe they exist?’

  ‘Absolutely, why wouldn’t they?’

  Ollie looked at him, astonished. ‘Really?’

  ‘I think you’ll find a lot of mathematicians and physicists – like me – believe in them.’

  ‘What’s your theory – I mean – what do you think they are?’

  ‘Well, that’s the ten-gazillion-dollar question.’ He laughed again, the short, nervous, ‘Heh-heh’ laugh he regularly made, like a nervous tic. ‘Why are you asking?’

  ‘I think our new house may be haunted.’

  ‘I can’t remember – did you say it had a tennis court?’

  ‘No, but there’s plenty of room for one.’

  ‘Going to put one in?’

  ‘Maybe. A lot of maybes at the moment.’

  ‘And you have a ghost, you think? A smart or a dumb ghost?’

  ‘There’s a difference?’ Ollie considered Bruce to be super-intelligent and he liked that the scientist always had an unusual – and often unique – perspective on almost any topic they ever discussed.

  ‘Sure! A big difference. Want to tell me about this ghost?’

  Ollie told him about the bed turning round, about the spheres, the apparition that Caro and Jade had seen and all the other strange events that had happened. Kaplan listened, nodding his head constantly. When he had finished, Ollie asked him, ‘So what do you make of all that?’

  Kaplan removed his towelling headband and held it up. ‘Do you know what Einstein said about energy?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘He said energy cannot be created or destroyed, it can only be changed from one form to another.’ Making a show of it, he squeezed his headband until droplets fell from it on to the white surface of the table. ‘See those droplets? That water’s been around since the beginning of time. In one form or another molecules of it might have passed through Attila the Hun’s dick when he was taking a piss, or gone over the Niagara Falls, or come out of my mother’s steam iron. Heh-heh. Every molecule in them has always existed, and always will. Boil one and it turns to steam and goes into the atmosphere; then it’ll return with a bunch of others as mist or rain one day, somewhere; it’s never going to leave our atmosphere. No energy will or can – you with me?’

  ‘Yes,’ Ollie said, dubiously.

  ‘So if you stick a knife through my heart now, killing me, you can’t kill my energy. My body will decay, but my energy will remain behind – it will go somewhere – and re-form somewhere.’

  ‘As a ghost?’ Ollie asked.

  Kaplan shrugged. ‘I have theories about memory – I’m doing research into it right now – I think it’s a big part of consciousness. Our bodies have memory – keep doing certain movements in certain ways – certain stretches – and our bodies find them increasingly easier, right? Fold a piece of paper and the crease remains – that’s the paper’s memory. So much of what we do – and the animal kingdom does – is defined by memory. If a person spends a long time in a confined space, maybe the energy has memory, too. There’s one of the colleges at Cambridge where a grey lady was regularly seen moving across the dining hall. About fifty years ago they discovered dry rot and had to put a new floor in, raising the level about a foot. The next time the grey lady was seen, she was cut off at the knees. That’s what I mean by a dumb ghost. It’s some kind of memory within the energy that remains after someone dies – and sometimes it retains the form of that person.’

  ‘So what’s a smart ghost?’

  ‘Heh-heh. Hamlet’s father, he’s an example of a smart ghost. He was able to talk. Let not the royal bed of Denmark be a couch for luxury and damned incest. By howsoever thou pursues this act, taint not thy mind nor let thy soul contrive against thy mother aught. Leave her to heaven.’ He grinned at Ollie. ‘Yeah?’

  ‘So a smart ghost is basically a sentient ghost?’

  ‘Sentient, yes. Capable of thinking.’

  ‘Then the next step would be a ghost capable of actually doing something physical? Do you think that’s possible?’

  ‘Sure.’

  Ollie stared hard at him. ‘I thought scientists like you were meant to be rational.’

  ‘We are.’

  ‘But you’re not talking about the rational, are you?’

  ‘You know what I really think?’ Kaplan said. ‘We humans are still at a very early stage in our evolution – and I’m not sure we’re smart enough to get much beyond where we are now before we destroy ourselves. But there’s a whole bunch of stuff waiting for us out there in the distant future if we succeed. All kinds of levels – planes – of existence we don’t even yet know how to access. Take a simple ultrasonic dog whistle as an example. Dogs can hear it but we can’t. What else is going on around us that we’re not aware of?’

  ‘What do you think is?’

  ‘I don’t know, but I want to live long enough to find out, heh-heh. Maybe ghosts aren’t ghosts at all, and it’s to do with our understanding of time. We live in linear time, right? We go from A to B to C. We wake up in the morning, get out of bed, have coffee, go to work, and so on. That’s how we perceive every day. But what if our perception is wrong? What if linear time is just a construct of our brains that we use to try to make sense of what’s going on? 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?’ He shrugged. ‘Who knows?’

  Ollie frowned, trying to get his head round his friend’s argument. ‘So are you saying that the ghost in our house isn’t really a ghost at all? That we’re seeing something – or someone – in the past, who’s still there?’

  ‘Or maybe someone in the future. Heh-heh.’

  Ollie grinned, shaking his head. ‘Jesus, you are confusing me.’

  ‘Go with it – sounds like you are on an amazing ride.’

  ‘Tell Caro that – she’s scared out of her wits. If you want to know the truth, so am I.’

  ‘None of us like being out of our comfort zone.’

  ‘We are way out of that, right now.’

  Kaplan was silent for some moments. ‘This bed that you’re convinced rotated – in a space that made it impossible – yes?’

  ‘Yes. Either Caro and I are going mental, or the bed defied the laws of physics of the universe.’

  The professor reached over and grabbed half a cheese and pickle sandwich, and bit into it hungrily. He spoke as he chewed. ‘No, there’s a much simpler explanation.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘It was a poltergeist.’ He grabbed the other half of the sandwich and crammed much of that into his mouth.

  ‘Poltergeist?’

  ‘Yeah. You know how poltergeists work?’

  ‘I’ve no idea.’

  Kaplan tapped the surface of the table at which they were sitting. ‘This table’s solid, right?’

  Ollie nodded.

  Kaplan tapped the china plate. ‘This is
solid, too?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Wrong on both. Solid objects are an illusion. This plate and this table are held together by billions and billions of electrically charged sub-atomic particles all moving in different directions. They’re being bombarded, just as you and I are, by neutroni particles that pass straight through them. If something happened to change the magnetic field for an instant and, say, all the particles in the plate moved in the same direction, for just a fraction of a second, that plate would fly off the table. The same could happen to the table, making it fly off the floor.’

  ‘Like the Star Trek transporter?’

  ‘Yeah, kind of thing, heh-heh!’

  ‘And that’s your theory for how the bed turned round?’

  ‘Like I said, Ollie, we understand so little still. Go with it and accept it.’

  ‘Easy for you to say – you weren’t the one sleeping in the room. Want to come and spend a night in there?’

  ‘No thanks!’ He laughed again.

  36

  Friday, 18 September

  Ollie stayed talking to Bruce Kaplan at the Falmer Sports Centre, then drove straight to Jade’s school to collect her at 3.30 p.m.

  She came out with a group of girls, chatting animatedly, and he was happy to see her looking so settled now. As she climbed into the car and kissed him, she waved her goodbyes out of the window to the rest of the group and said, ‘Dad, is it OK that I invited Laura, Becky and Edie to come to my party as well?’

  ‘Of course.’

  As they headed off he asked, ‘So how was your day?’

  ‘It was OK,’ she said, brightly. ‘We had English. Our homework is to write a story. I’m going to write a ghost story!’

  He gave her a sideways look. ‘A ghost story?’

  ‘I’m going to write about a girl who moves into a new house, and is on, like, FaceTime with her friend, and her friend sees a strange old lady standing behind her!’

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘And what does this strange old lady do in your story?’

  ‘Well, I haven’t decided yet.’

  ‘Is she a nice ghost or a nasty one?’

  ‘Well, I think she frightens everyone. But they shouldn’t really be frightened because she’s not nasty, she can’t help being a ghost.’

  He grinned, loving her sweet innocence, and relieved about how she was still so unaffected by what had happened in the house. If only he and Caro could feel the same levity. ‘Is that what you really think?’ he asked.

  She nodded. ‘I mean, a ghost is just like coloured air, right?’

  ‘That’s a good way of describing it!’ He was thinking back a few years, to when Jade was about six. She’d had an imaginary friend called Kelly who she played with. Back then she talked about Kelly to himself and Caro constantly. She told them that Kelly lived in her cupboard. He remembered one time asking Jade what her friend looked like and she’d replied that Kelly didn’t have a face.

  It had spooked them both. Caro had talked about it to a friend who was a child psychologist, who had said it was something quite common. Rather than worry about it, they should relax and show an interest. Eventually she would grow out of it. So they had shown an interest, regularly asking about her. By the time she was eight, Kelly was long forgotten.

  ‘Do you remember Kelly?’ he asked.

  ‘Kelly?’

  ‘Your imaginary friend, when you were younger?’

  ‘Oh, Kelly, yes.’ She fell silent.

  ‘Is this woman that Phoebe’s seen anything like her?’

  She shook her head. ‘No. Do you like my idea for the story, Dad?’

  ‘Yup. I’d love to see it when you’ve written it.’

  ‘Maybe!’ she said with a mischievous grin.

  When they arrived home ten minutes later, there was a large, brown cardboard Amazon box, addressed to Ms Jade Harcourt, sitting on the hall table, which one of the workmen must have signed for.

  Ollie moved to pick it up. ‘Looks like a birthday present – I’ll take it upstairs and put it with your other presents!’

  She shook her head vigorously. ‘No, no, no, no, nooooo! I know what that is! I got Mum to order it for me, for my party!’ She grabbed it possessively, then ran upstairs, clutching it.

  Ollie went into the kitchen; three electricians were at work, and there were reels of cable everywhere. He then climbed the stairs and went into their bedroom. There were dust sheets on the floor, and a solitary workman on a stepladder was pushing a paint roller across the last segment of unpainted new ceiling. The television was back in place on its mountings on the wall.

  ‘Almost done, Mr Harcourt!’ he called down.

  ‘You’re a total star!’ Ollie replied.

  He went back down to the kitchen, and then into the cellar. There was no sign of Bryan, Chris, or any of the other workmen. But several steel Acrow props were in place. As he went back up the stairs into the scullery, Barker appeared.

  ‘Well, the good news is that your house won’t fall down this weekend, Ollie,’ he said.

  ‘Glad to hear it!’

  ‘This is the bad news.’ He handed him an envelope. ‘I’m afraid it’s the bill. If you don’t mind paying it next week, I’d appreciate it – I’ve paid the engineer out of my own pocket.’

  Ollie opened the envelope and stared at it in dismay. It was over three thousand pounds. ‘Sure,’ he said, thinking about his rapidly diminishing bank balance, and hoping to hell Cholmondley would pay promptly. He planned to invoice him this weekend. ‘Of course. I’ll do a bank transfer.’

  ‘I’m afraid I’ve got another bill for you – an interim one from myself – we’ve had to purchase a lot of materials. I’ll pop it in on Monday.’

  ‘Of course,’ Ollie said, his gloom deepening.

  He made himself a mug of tea and carried it up to his office. There were more bills on his desk from the electrician and the plumber, as well as his annual renewal for the Falmer Sports Centre, a reminder that the car tax was due on Caro’s Golf, a second reminder from Caffyns garage that the Range Rover was overdue for a service, and more paperwork that he didn’t even want to look at right now.

  Bob Manthorpe had still not called him back. He dialled the retired vicar’s number again, and once more it went to voicemail. He left another message. Then he checked his emails.

  There was an enthusiastic one from Bhattacharya of The Chattri House chain, accepting his quote and confirming he would now like Ollie to extend his brief to include all twelve of his restaurants and his wholesale business. There was also an encouraging one from another classic car dealer, from his visit to the Goodwood Revival, who said Cholmondley had spoken well of Ollie, and asking for a quote for an extensive website. His new business was at least starting to get some traction, he thought, with relief.

  He began work on his invoice for the car dealer, detailing the hours spent. But he was finding it hard to concentrate. He kept thinking back to his conversation with Bruce Kaplan, earlier. Energy. There had been a lot about that subject in the Sunday Times article. Also Caro had said that her medium client – the now-dead Kingsley Parkin – had talked about energy. In particular, bad energy.

  Could everything that was going on here be put down to energy? If they could understand more, they could deal with it, surely?

  Out of the window he saw Caro’s car approaching. It was just after 5.30 p.m., and pelting with rain. He went down to greet her.

  She arrived at the front door holding her briefcase in one hand and a heavy City Books carrier bag in the other. She gave him a kiss then handed him the bag. ‘These are the copies of all the deeds that you wanted. My secretary blew some of the older ones up because she said they’re not that easy to read – they didn’t start typing deeds until after the First World War – before that they’re all handwritten. And they are pretty verbose and long-winded. In those days lawyers got paid by the folio, so why use two words when you can be paid for using twenty-two . . . What do you fancy for supper toni
ght?’

  ‘You!’ he said.

  ‘That is always going to be the right answer!’ She kissed him again. ‘I really fancy a curry. A client who lives near here told me there’s a great place that does takeaways in Henfield and another good one in Hurstpierpoint. Shall I see if I can find their menus online?’

  ‘That,’ he said, ‘is the best plan I’ve heard all day.’

  ‘It’s a beautiful evening in Brighton – I was hoping we’d take a walk around the grounds but look at the rain! Amazing how the weather can be so different here – we’re only a few miles away, on the other side of the Downs, and it can be like a different climate sometimes.’

  ‘Glass of wine?’

  ‘I’ll wait, I’ve got some work to do first.’

  ‘OK.’ Ollie carried the bag up to his office, pulled out the heavy stack of photocopied documents held together by a thick elastic band, removed the band and placed the sheaf of contents on his desk. He began to read through them. As he went back much further than the O’Hare family, as Caro had said, the deeds became increasingly wordy and hard to decipher. Some were written in copperplate, and others in a variety of semi-illegible handwriting.

  He started from the top. The O’Hares, who had bought this place on 25 October 1983, had died on 26 October of that same year.

  Before them the owners were Lord and Lady Rothberg, who had bought Cold Hill House on 7 May 1947. Prior to them were a couple called Adam and Ruth Pelham-Rees-Carr. They had bought the property on 7 July 1933. The next previous owners were a Sir Richard and Lady Antonia Cadwalliston, who had bought it in 1927. Before them – and the name stopped him, momentarily, in his tracks – were a Wilfred and Hermione Cholmondley.

  With such an unusual surname, were they relatives of his client, he wondered? He would ask him – it would be a lovely coincidence if so.

  He wrote down their names and the date of their purchase, 11 November 1911. As he did so, his phone rang. He answered it, expecting it to be Bob Manthorpe. But it was Caro and she was sounding strange.

  ‘Darling, there are two policemen – detectives – here downstairs – who want to talk to you.’