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‘I gave him short shrift, I can tell you!’
‘I’m not surprised.’
‘Do this job for long enough and nothing will surprise you, I can tell you that! Although I’ve forgotten a lot. I told you on the phone that my memory’s not so good these days.’
‘It seems pretty sharp to me,’ Ollie said. ‘So what happened to the O’Hare family? How did they die? It looks as if they all died at the same time – was it a car accident?’
‘Well, of sorts, but not in the conventional sense.’ Manthorpe relit his pipe yet again, from a fresh match. ‘They’d just arrived at the house, pulled up at the front door, when part of the roof and front collapsed on them, crushing them – killing them all instantly.’
Ollie listened in shocked silence. ‘On the day they moved in? They all died?’
‘Yes. I’m afraid the house has had a few tragedies.’ Then he smiled. ‘But don’t be put off. Some of the older folk in the village used to talk a lot of rubbish about the place being cursed or damned. But the reality is any house of that historic age is more than likely to have had its fair share of deaths. The history of the human race doesn’t make happy reading, does it? I’ve seen a lot of sadness during my time, but I’ve seen a lot of things that have kept my faith in God and in humanity alive, too. If there were no bad things in the world, we’d have nothing to measure the good against, would we?’
‘I guess not.’ Ollie sipped his tea.
‘The light can only shine in darkness,’ Manthorpe said. He gave Ollie a quizzical look. ‘Perhaps you and your family will be the light the house needs.’
‘It’s not looking that way at the moment.’
‘Why is that?’
‘I feel we’ve moved into a nightmare.’
Ollie told him everything. From the first day and what he and his mother-in-law had seen in the atrium. Then the spheres he had seen. The young girl and the old woman that Jade had told him about. The episodes with the water. The voices he had heard last night and the bed rotating. And Caro’s confession to him about the woman she had seen several times.
When he had finished, Manthorpe nodded silently, and tapped the embers out of his pipe bowl into the growing pile of grey ash in the ashtray. ‘Oh dear,’ he said finally. ‘Oh dear.’ He looked at Ollie with a dubious expression. ‘Cold Hill House was empty during most of my time there. As I said, there were a lot of rumours about the place – you know, village gossip.’
‘What rumours?’
‘About it being cursed, if you believe in that sort of thing. And there was one particular rumour.’ He shrugged dismissively, produced a tobacco pouch from his pocket and began to refill his pipe. ‘The problem is, Mr Harcourt—’
‘Please call me Ollie.’
He nodded. ‘OK, Ollie, the problem is that in country villages people have time on their hands. Too much of it. They gossip, speculate.’
‘What did they speculate about Cold Hill House?’
‘How much of its history do you know?’
‘So far not much – other than what was in the estate agent’s particulars. Before the O’Hares bought it, the house was owned by a Lord and Lady Rothberg – he was heir to a banking dynasty, apparently. I believe they were there from shortly after the Second World War until they died.’
Manthorpe held his freshly filled pipe in the air. ‘Yes, that was a few years before I came to Cold Hill, but people were still talking about it. A terrible tragedy, but I suppose it was a blessing in the end, after all those years never leaving the house. You have a lake, right?’
‘We do, yes. The one where Harry Walters drowned.’
‘As I heard it, there was a particularly hard winter one year. Lady Rothberg was very fond of animals and she had some quite rare ducks she had bred on the lake. I seem to remember an island in the middle?’
Ollie nodded. ‘We call it Duck Island.’
‘Lady Rothberg trained the ducks to live on the island, to keep them safe from foxes, by putting some kind of duck feed – corn, I think – for them on it. She used to row over to it every few days with a sack of food to top up the supply. One morning the whole lake was frozen over. Instead of rowing she decided the ice was thick enough to walk on. She got halfway across with the sack of feed when the ice gave way and she fell in. Her husband tried to rescue her, and did apparently get the poor woman out, but because of her time underwater, starved of oxygen, she suffered severe brain damage, and spent the rest of her life confined to bed in a room in the house, in a persistent vegetative state. Then to compound the tragedy, the following year, on the day of his fortieth birthday, Lord Rothberg was apparently hosting a shooting party and there was a terrible accident – I believe the young son of a guest accidently discharged both barrels at Lord Rothberg, blowing away most of his face and part of his neck, blinding him and paralysing him.’
‘I’d no idea. How terrible.’ Ollie looked at him in silence for some moments. ‘Has anybody actually lived out their natural lifespan, without tragedy, at Cold Hill House?’
The retired clergyman smiled. ‘Oh, I’m sure plenty of people have. You have to understand, all great houses have their fair share of tragedy, as I said.’
‘This seems to be more than what I’d call a fair share.’
‘You need to put it all in the context of the long history of the place. But yes, there have been quite a number of tragic accidents. Hopefully now they’re over and done with.’
‘That’s what concerns me,’ Ollie said. ‘Which is why I came here to see you. I’m not at all sure they are over and done with. What do you know about the history of the house, before the Second World War?’
‘Well, that’s all very sketchy from what I can recall. The house was requisitioned by the government during the war, and a number of Canadian soldiers were billeted there. Before that, during the early part of the twentieth century, there was a bit of a mystery.’ He sipped his tea. ‘A bit of an odd family, I was told by some local gossip. A husband and wife. Can’t recall their names. She disappeared, apparently. The husband told his friends she’d left him and gone to live with a sister in New Zealand. But rumour had it he had a mistress and had murdered his wife and buried her somewhere in the grounds. The police became involved, but he died before it was ever resolved.’
‘How did he die?’
‘That I really can’t remember. I’m not sure I ever knew. But, actually, that’s reminded me. The very first owner – the chap who had the place built—’ He frowned. ‘Trying to remember his name. Bronwyn – no – Brangwyn. Sir Brangwyn something. Gallops? Bessington? Ah yes, now I remember. Sir Brangwyn De Glossope. There was a bit of a legend about him.’
‘Oh?’
‘Rather a ne’er-do-well. I think he was in the tea- or spice-importing business. He came from a wealthy land-owning family but gambled most of his inheritance away. Well, as I recall, he married a very rich woman – from the aristocracy, or at least landed gentry, and it was her money that paid the bills to have Cold Hill House built.’ He paused to relight his pipe, then blew another huge smoke ring, which rose steadily towards the ceiling, slowly dispersing. The retired vicar watched the ring, as if it was some kind of cloud in which his memory was stored. ‘If I’m recalling the story correctly, this woman was, not to put too fine a point on it, unfortunate-looking, by all accounts. There were rumours that she was what we might today call a medium – a psychic – or a clairvoyant. But back in those days she’d have been regarded as a witch. There was a persistent rumour in Cold Hill village that she put a spell on De Glossope to get him to marry her. Although there was another school of thought that he only married her for her money and had intended from the start to get rid of her as soon as convenient. It wasn’t long after the house was finished that this fellow, Brangwyn, had the whole place closed down for about three years while he went to India and then the Far East on business. When he returned, his wife wasn’t with him. The story he told people was that she had died of a sickness whilst over there.’ He puffed on his pipe again and blew another smoke ring, this one less perfectly formed.