The House on Cold Hill (30 page)

As he went back out onto the landing someone barged into him, sending him flying forward, crashing down onto the threadbare carpet.

‘Hey!’ he said angrily, thinking for a moment it must be Ruari.

Then, as he looked around, he realized there was no one there.

‘Lunch!’ Caro shouted out from downstairs. ‘Lunch!’

‘OK, darling!’ he called back, his voice shaky, hauling himself up onto his knees.

‘Tell Jade, Phoebe and Ruari to come down,’ she called back.

He stood up, looking around and up at the ceiling. ‘Yes, OK, I’ll get them.’

‘It’s on the table!’

Jade was full of excitement, at lunch, about the music video, showing them all a clip on her phone and talking about her party next week, and the labradoodle puppy they were going to go and see. Ruari, whom Ollie and Caro liked a lot, was his usual chatty self, talking about football and in particular Brighton’s bitter rivals, Crystal Palace. Ollie and Ruari both agreed that Crystal Palace looked like they were going to struggle to avoid relegation from the Premier League this season.

‘Jade says you’ve got a ghost here,’ Ruari said suddenly, with a grin. ‘That’s pretty cool.’

‘I think most old houses have ghosts of some kind,’ Ollie replied. His plate of food sat on the refectory table in front of him, virtually untouched. Roast pork and crackling was one of his favourite dishes, but right now he had no appetite.

‘Epic,’ Ruari said, nodding his head. ‘Just epic.’

Then Ollie saw a shadow moving in the doorway to the atrium. Hovering. Just as it had hovered before when he’d been in the drawing room yesterday morning with the vicar.

‘Excuse me a second.’ Ollie stood up abruptly and strode over to the door and out, across the atrium and into the hall. The hairs rose on the nape of his neck. A short distance along, at the foot of the stairs, facing away from him, stood the translucent silhouettes of a woman and girl. From behind they looked like Caro and Jade. He ran towards them and, as he reached them, they vanished. There was nothing there. He stood, shivering, looking all around and up the stairs.

Nothing.

Shaking all over, wondering again just what was going on in his head, he went back into the kitchen and saw Caro frowning at him. Jade, Phoebe and Ruari were giggling over some private joke.

‘Thought I heard a car,’ he said, lamely.

As soon as lunch was over, Ollie excused himself and went back up to his office, glancing around nervously with every step he took. Then, as he entered the tower room and looked up at the ceiling, he stopped and stood still in disbelief.

The cracks had gone. The ceiling was intact, as it always had been.

He sat down at his desk and buried his face in his hands.
Oh God
, he thought, again.
Oh God, what’s happening to me?

Then he looked at his keyboard, turned it upside down and shook it. Dust fell out.

Dust from the ceiling earlier? Or had it been there for a while?

He listened for some moments to the sound of rain pattering against the window. Then, opening his eyes, he saw on the display of his mobile phone that he had a missed call and a voicemail from Cholmondley.

He snatched it up and listened to it.

Cholmondley’s voice was terse and the message brief. ‘This is Charles Cholmondley, Mr Harcourt. One twenty, Sunday. Will you please call me and explain just what the hell’s going on now?’

He took several deep breaths, then pressed the button. The phone was answered after just one ring, as if his client had been sitting with it in his hand, waiting.

‘Charles!’ he said, as disarmingly as he could. ‘Just got your message.’

‘Perhaps you’d like to explain?’

‘You got the email from my IT manager?’

‘I’ve got an email from a Mr Chris Webb, signing himself as your IT manager, intended for someone else, I believe.’

‘Pardon? Someone else?’

‘Is your organization so inept – or should I say your IT manager – that you can’t even address an email to the correct recipient?’

‘I’m sorry?’ Ollie said, totally confused. ‘He emailed you to explain the problems we’ve been experiencing. You see—’

‘My name is Charles Cholmondley, Mr Harcourt. The email your man has sent me was written to a Mr Anup Bhattacharya.’

It took several moments for his words to sink in. Ollie shook his head.
No. No. They couldn’t have done. They’d been so careful, so incredibly careful.

‘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 some
thing
– 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?’