Peter James: The House on Cold Hill

‘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.

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.

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 stared 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.