The House on Cold Hill Read online

  ‘Whatever. When are you coming over?’

  ‘I have to negotiate an exit from here with the Cold Hill House Escape Committee. But my parents say I can have a birthday party here. Three weeks’ time! I’m going to have a retro photo booth with Polaroid cameras! And we’re going to have pizzas – everyone can order them and Dad said he’d collect them.’

  ‘Epic! But that’s three weeks, can I come over and see your place before then?’

  ‘Yes. I’ve got a great room – the biggest bath you’ve ever seen. You can almost swim in it! Can you come the weekend after next? Sleepover Saturday night? Ruari said his mum’s going to drive him over on the Sunday.’

  ‘Maybe we can have a swim in your pool, if it’s nice?’

  ‘I’ll have to get Dad to remove the dead frogs first. And fill it and heat it. That is so not going to happen.’

  ‘Yech!’ Then suddenly Phoebe’s voice changed. ‘Hey, Jade, who’s that?’

  ‘Who’s what?’

  ‘That woman!’

  ‘Woman? What woman?’

  ‘Er, the one right behind you? Hello!’

  Jade spun round. There was no one. She turned back to the phone. ‘What woman?’

  Then her phone screen went blank. Annoyed, she redialled. She heard the sound of the connection being made, and then Phoebe’s face reappeared.

  ‘What did you mean, Phebes? What woman?’

  ‘I can’t see her now, she’s gone. She was standing behind you, by the door.’

  ‘There wasn’t anyone!’

  ‘I saw her!’

  Jade crossed over to the door, opened it and looked out onto the landing. She held up her phone, pointing it down the landing so Phoebe could see, then she closed the door behind her, walked back across the room and sat down again. ‘There’s no one been in, Phoebe, I’d have heard them.’

  ‘There was, I saw her clearly,’ her friend insisted. ‘I’m not making it up, Jade, honestly!’

  Jade shuddered, feeling cold suddenly. She turned round again and stared at the closed door. ‘What – what did you see?’

  ‘She was, like, an old lady, in a blue dress. She had a really mean look on her face. Who is she?’

  ‘The only old lady here’s my Gran. She’s here with Gramps, helping unpack stuff downstairs.’ Jade shrugged. ‘They’re both a bit weird.’

  Twenty minutes later, when she had ended the conversation, Jade went downstairs. Her parents were sitting at the refectory table in the kitchen, piles of unopened boxes still on the floor around them, drinking red wine, with the bottle on the table in front of them as they opened all the ‘Good Luck In Your New Home’ cards sent by friends and relatives. Sapphire was crunching dry food in a bowl close to the Aga.

  ‘Hi, darling,’ her mother said. ‘Are you ready for tomorrow?’

  ‘Sort of.’

  ‘Time for bed. Big day – your new school!’

  Jade stared at her glumly. She was thinking about all her time at school in Brighton. She had loved being in charge of the School Walking Bus. Making the phone calls every morning, starting off with one friend, collecting another, then another, so by the time they arrived at school there were ten of them altogether. Now the rest of them would be doing this tomorrow, without her. She would be going instead to bloody St Paul’s Catholic College in Burgess Hill. Nowheresville.

  And they didn’t even go to church regularly!

  ‘Where are Gran and Gramps?’ she asked.

  ‘They went home a short while ago, darling,’ her mother responded. ‘Gramps was very tired. They said to say goodbye and give you their love.’

  ‘Gran came up to my room.’

  ‘Good,’ her mother said.

  ‘But she didn’t say anything, and went out again. That was strange of her. She always kisses me goodbye.’

  ‘Were you on your computer?’

  ‘I was talking to Phoebe.’

  ‘Maybe she didn’t want to disturb you, darling.’

  Jade shrugged. ‘Maybe.’

  Her father looked up and frowned. But he said nothing.

  5

  Monday, 7 September

  Monday morning came as something of a relief to Ollie. The rain had finally stopped and a brilliant, warm, late-summer sun was shining. Caro had gone to work at her office in Brighton shortly after 7.30 a.m. and at 8.00 a.m., listening to the Radio Four news, he got out Jade’s Cheerios for her breakfast, while she busied herself, first feeding the cats, then switching on the Nespresso machine, which she loved using, to make her father a coffee. Amazingly, Ollie thought, she had actually got up early this morning! But even so they were running short of time and, anxious not to be late for her first day at her new school, he gulped down his muesli, then hurried her out to the car and checked she had belted up.

  As he drove, Jade, in her uniform of black jacket, yellow blouse and black pleated skirt, sat beside him in nervous silence. Neil Pringle was on Radio Sussex, talking to a Lewes artist called Tom Homewood about his latest exhibition.

  ‘Looking forward to your new school?’ Ollie asked.

  ‘LOL.’

  ‘What’s that meant to mean?’

  ‘Yeah, right. All my friends are still going to King’s in Portslade.’ She looked down at her phone. ‘St Paul’s, Burgess Hill. It sounds like a church, Dad!’

  ‘It seems to be a lovely school, and you know the Bartletts? Their triplets went there and loved it.’

  Ollie saw her checking her phone; she was back on Instagram. At the top of the display was Jade_Harcourt_x0x0. Below she had rows and rows of thumbs-down emoticons alternating with scowly faces.

  ‘Listen, lovely,’ he said. ‘Give it a chance, OK?’

  ‘I don’t have much choice, do I?’ she said without raising her head.

  He drove on in silence for some moments, then he said, ‘So your Gran came up to your room yesterday evening, but didn’t say anything?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Phebes saw her – we were FaceTiming.’

  ‘And your Gran didn’t say anything?’

  ‘No, she just went out again. Is she angry with me or something?’

  ‘Why should she be angry with you?’

  ‘Phebes said she was looking kind of grumpy.’

  Ollie drove the rest of the short journey in silence, thinking, while pinging and clicking noises came from his daughter’s phone. Thinking about last night. His parents-in-law had sat with him and Caro in the kitchen. He’d given Dennis a large whisky and Pamela, who was driving as she had to these days, drank one tiny drop of red wine. They’d seen them off, Pamela telling him to say goodbye from them to Jade.

  She had very definitely not gone upstairs.

  6

  Monday, 7 September

  Arriving back home thirty minutes later, Ollie parked alongside a battered-looking red van belonging to the builders, who had arrived early and were down in the cellar, starting work on the damp. He sat for some moments, listening to Danny Pike on Radio Sussex taking a Green Party councillor in Brighton to task over a new bus lane proposal that the presenter clearly thought was absurd. He always liked Pike’s combative but informed interviewing style.

  As he jumped down from the car, he caught a flash of movement to his right. It was a grey squirrel, darting up the trunk of the tall gingko tree in the centre of the circle of lawn in front of the house.

  He watched the beautiful animal climb. Tree rats, Caro called them. She hated them, telling him they stripped off the bark, and, after seeing another one over the weekend, had told him to go and buy an airgun and shoot it. He watched it sit on a cross-branch and eat a nut that it held in its paws. There was no way he could shoot it. He didn’t want to kill anything here. Except maybe the rabbits, which overran the garden.

  There was a smell of manure in the air, faint but distinct. Some distance above him he saw a tractor looking the size of a toy crossing the brow of Cold Hill, too far away to hear its engine. He st
ared around at the fields, then at the front facade of the house, still scarcely able to believe that they now lived here; this was their home, this was where, maybe, hopefully, they could actually settle, and spend the rest of their lives. Their forever home.

  He pulled out his phone and took a series of photographs in all directions. He looked at the columned, covered porch, with its balustrading above, at the two sets of windows on either side of it, then up at the rows of windows on the two floors above, still struggling to orientate himself.

  To the left of the front entrance was a WC, then the door to the library. To the right was the drawing room. Further along to the left there was another toilet, before the long hallway opened out into the atrium. To the left of the atrium was the huge dining room. All these rooms had high, stuccoed ceilings. Through the atrium door to the right was the kitchen and, beyond that, the downstairs part of the extension; a pantry and scullery from which the stairs ran down to the cellar with its vaulted brick ceiling. Part of the cellar housed a long-disused kitchen with a range that had not been lit in decades, once the domain of the live-in household staff. The other end of the cellar contained dusty wine racks. One day, when their finances allowed, they would stock all those racks with wine, another of their shared passions.

  He’d checked out all the rooms, briefly and excitedly, on Friday, as they were moving in. God, he loved this place! He’d taken photographs of each room. Many were in a terrible state of repair and they’d have to stay that way for a long while yet. It didn’t matter; for now all they needed was to get the kitchen, drawing room and dining room straight, and one of the spare bedrooms. Their own bedroom, which had ancient red flock wallpaper, and Jade’s, were in a reasonable condition – some work had been done on them before the developers had gone bust and also before they’d moved in. The priority at the moment was the rot, the electricity and the ropy plumbing.

  He stared back at the porch, and the handsome front door with its corroded brass lion’s-head knocker, and thought back, as he had several times, to that moment on Friday when he was standing there with his mother-in-law and had seen, fleetingly, that shadow. Trick of the light, or a removals man, or maybe some bird or animal – possibly the squirrel?

  He went inside, through the atrium, and turned right into the kitchen. In the scullery beyond was a deep butler’s sink, a draining board and a wooden clothes-drying rack on a rope and pulley system to raise and lower it. There was also an ancient metal pump, fixed to the wall, for drawing water from the well that was supposedly under the house, but which no one had yet managed to find.

  The cellar door, at the rear of the scullery, had an enormous, rusty lock on it, with a huge key, like a jailer’s. It was ajar. He went down the steep brick steps to see if the builders were OK and to tell them to help themselves to tea and coffee up in the kitchen, but they cheerily told him that they had their thermoses and were self-sufficient.

  Then he climbed up the three flights of stairs to his chaotic office in the round tower on the west side of the house. It was a great space, about twenty feet in diameter, with a high ceiling, and windows giving fabulous views, one of them onto the steep, grassy slope of the hill rising out of sight. He waded through the unopened boxes and towers of files littering the floor, carefully stepping past a row of framed pictures stacked against a wall, reached his desk, and switched on his radio to Radio Sussex. As he heard the presenter grilling the Chief Executive of the Royal Sussex County Hospital over waiting times in A&E, his phone pinged with an incoming text.

  It was from one of his two closest friends, Rob, asking if he fancied a long mountain bike ride round Box Hill next Sunday morning. He replied:

  Sorry, mate, going to be spending time sorting out the house with Caro. And five acres of lawns to mow. Come over and see the place at the w/e.

  He sent it and moments later the single-word reply pinged back.

  Tosser.

  He grinned. Rob and he had barely said a polite word to each other throughout their fifteen-year friendship. He sat down, retuned the radio to Radio 4, and logged on to his computer, checking his emails for anything urgent, then had a quick look at Twitter and Facebook, aware that he had not posted anything on either about the move yet. He also wanted to post some pictures of the worst dilapidations in the house on his Instagram page to show before and after. He and Caro had discussed approaching the TV show Restoration Man, but decided against because of wanting privacy.

  But before any of that he had an urgent job to complete, and although the internet connection wasn’t great, it was working, sort of. His Apple Mac geek – as he jokingly referred to his computer engineer – was coming over that afternoon to try to sort it all out, but in the meantime he just had to get on with it, with an urgent deadline for a new client, the grandly titled Charles Cholmondley Classic Motors, Purveyors of Horseless Carriages to the Nobility and Gentry since 1911. They traded top-end classic and vintage sports cars, and had taken several large and very expensive stands at a classic car show that was looming up in Dubai, next month, and for next year’s Goodwood Festival of Speed. They needed an urgent revamp of their very dull and old-fashioned website.

  If he got it right, it could open the door to the whole world of classic cars which he had always loved. He’d made a serious stash of cash from his previous website business, an innovative search site for people looking for properties. If he could repeat this success in the lucrative world of classic cars, they would be sorted. They’d have the money to do everything they wanted to this house.

  He harboured doubts about the provenance of Charles Cholmondley Classic Motors, as the company had only been registered nine years ago. Its proprietor was a diminutive, self-important man in his fifties. On the two occasions when Ollie had met Charles Cholmondley himself, he had been flamboyantly dressed in a cream linen suit, bow tie and tasselled loafers, with silver hair that looked freshly coiffed. It was exactly the image of him that fronted the website, the dealer standing between a gleaming 1950s Bentley Continental and a Ferrari of similar vintage.

  Personally, Ollie thought the message this gave off was, ‘Come and get royally screwed by me!’ He’d tried, subtly, to dissuade him from wearing the bow tie, but Cholmondley would have none of it. You have to understand, Mr Harcourt, that the people I am dealing with are very rich indeed. They like the feeling of dealing with their own kind. They see this bow tie and they see someone of distinction.

  Something really did not smell right about Charles Cholmondley, and Ollie even wondered if this was his real name. But hey, he was paying good money, which at this moment he needed badly, both for this house and, if there was any surplus, to finish the restoration of his beloved Jaguar E-Type which was languishing in a lock-up in Hove until he could clear out enough space for it in one of the garages behind the house. At the moment, with all the work needed on the house, that Jag was going to be, unfortunately, a low priority.

  Moments after he had settled down, Caro phoned to ask if the plumber had arrived to start work on their bathroom, and Ollie told her there’d been no sign of him yet.

  ‘Can you call him?’ she asked. ‘The bloody people were meant to start work at nine today.’

  ‘I will, darling,’ he said, trying not to sound irritated. Caro could never get her head around the fact that, although his office was based at home, he was actually working just as hard as she was. He dialled the plumber, left a message on his voicemail, then focused on his client’s website. The radio continued in the background; he listened to it all the time he was working, either Radio Sussex or Radio 4, and on Saturdays, after Saturday Live, he loved to listen to the football show, The Albion Roar, on Radio Reverb. When there was nothing on the radio he fancied, he tuned his computer to Brighton’s dedicated television station, Latest TV.

  He began surfing the sites of other classic car dealers, and became frustrated, in minutes, with the slow and flaky internet connection. Several times during the next hour he shouted at the computer in anger, a
nd wondered just how much of his life had been wasted waiting for the sodding internet. Then, at 10.30 a.m., he went downstairs to make himself a coffee.

  He climbed down the steep, spiral staircase, walked a short distance along the first-floor landing, then went down the stairs to the hall, turned right and entered the oak-panelled atrium that was the anteroom to the kitchen. As he did so he saw Bombay and Sapphire both standing in the middle of the room, their hackles up, watching something.

  He stopped, curious, wondering what it was. Their eyes were darting around, right then left, then up, then to the right again, in absolute synch, almost as if they were watching a movie. What were they looking at? He stood with them but could see nothing. ‘What is it, chaps?’

  The cats continued to stand there, ignoring him, hackles still up, eyes still moving together, utterly absorbed.

  ‘What is it, chaps?’ he said again, watching them, watching their eyes. It was giving him the creeps.

  Then suddenly they both howled, as if in pain, shot out of the room and disappeared along the hallway.

  Deeply puzzled, he walked through into the huge kitchen. It had a low, oak-beamed ceiling, an ancient blue four-oven Aga, a twelve-seater oak refectory table which had come with the property, a pine dresser, rows of pine-fronted fitted shelves and a double sink with a large window above it looking out across the rear lawn and grounds.

  He made himself a mug of latte on the Nespresso machine and carried it back into the atrium. And stopped in his tracks.

  Dozens of tiny spheres of translucent white light were floating in the air, moving across the room. They ranged in size from little bigger than a pinhead to about a quarter of an inch, and all had a different density of light. They reminded him, for an instant, of living organisms he had observed through a microscope in school biology lessons. They were grouped within a narrow band, no more than a couple of feet across and rising from the floor to head height.

  What on earth were they?