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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 liked 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, gri
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?’
He kissed her neck. ‘You.’
She turned to face him. ‘That was the right answer!’
As they went back downstairs, Caro said, ‘It’s such a beautiful evening, let’s take a walk down to the lake and see the ducks. I was talking to one of the partners who lives out in the country and has ducks on his lake. He said the way to encourage them to stay is to feed them – at least once every day. He keeps an old metal milk churn at the edge with duck food pellets that float. He’s given me the name of the stuff to get and a place you can order from online. He said if we throw them a few scoops of food every day we’ll soon have a large colony in residence.’
‘Milk churn?’
‘It stops rats getting the food. You can find them on the internet, apparently.’
‘Great, I’ll have a look tomorrow.’
‘I’ll go and put some jeans on.’
Whilst she did so, Ollie unplugged his clock radio alarm, took it up to the attic room, and reset it.
Ten minutes later, holding hands and wearing wellies, Ollie and Caro walked up to the edge of the lake. A solitary coot paddled coyly away from them, its head nodding like a clockwork toy, towards the little island in the middle. A pair of mallards eyed them warily and also moved away, to the far side of the lake.
They walked around, behind tall reeds, then stopped and stared over the wooden rail and post fence at the overgrown paddock, and at the hill rising steeply beyond.
‘This would be ideal for Jade’s pony,’ Caro said. ‘But if we got one, we’d need to put up a stable.’
‘She seems more into dogs at the moment – a labradoodle,’ Ollie said. ‘She’s not mentioned a pony since we came here.’
‘She asked me to book her a lesson for this Saturday. There’s a good riding school, apparently, at Clayton – I’m going to see if they can fit her in. I hope she takes to it again – she’s not ridden in a while.’ She shrugged. ‘I was madly into ponies – until I started dating, then I lost all interest. Do you think that’s what’s happened with her?’
‘I don’t think her seeing Ruari is exactly dating,’ Ollie said. ‘Going for milkshakes in the afternoon is more a kind of play dating.’
‘I hope so. I don’t want her to lose her i