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?’
‘Like you, Dad. I thought it was you. He said we should all have left, but it’s too late now.’
He hugged her again. ‘Is that how you feel?’
Jade shook her head. ‘I like it here now. This is where we belong.’
‘We do, don’t we?’
‘We do,’ she nodded, then moments later was fast asleep, standing up in his arms.
Gently, he eased her onto the sofa, beside Caro, who sleepily pulled the duvet over her daughter and put a protective arm round her.
Ollie lay down again on the other sofa, with the light on, listening to his wife and his daughter sleeping. Thinking again, as he had earlier. Full of guilt for bringing them into this.
What a sodding mess.
Ghosts.
Bruce Kaplan had no problem with ghosts.
Hopefully, after tomorrow, he would not either. There would be no ghosts here any more. Benedict Cutler would deal with them.
Lay Lady Matilda finally to rest.
And then they could get on with their lives.
It was going to be fine. Really it was. Exorcisms here might not have worked in the past, but hey, the past was another country, wasn’t that what they said? This was today, 2015. Peeps felt different about stuff, as Jade might say.
And this was their dream home. You had to try to live your dreams. Too many people went to their graves with their dreams still inside them. And that was not going to happen to him. Life presented you, constantly, with idiots. But, just very occasionally, if you opened yourself up to the opportunities, life presented you with magic, too.
They mustn’t lose the dream. He would make this house safe and happy for Jade and Caro. Somehow. They’d find a way. It would begin tomorrow. This house was magic. He listened to his daughter and his wife breathing. The two people who meant more to him than anything else on earth.
The two people on this planet he would die for.
52
The Monday-morning traffic into London was shit, with the M25 and then the Edgware Road clogged, and it was almost midday when Ollie finally arrived at the swanky Maida Vale premises of Charles Cholmondley Classic Motors.
As he pulled into one of the velvet-roped visitor parking bays, he stared, covetously, at the array of cars behind the tall glass wall of the showroom. A 1970s Ferrari, a Bugatti Veyron, a 1950s Bentley Continental Fastback, a 1960s Aston Martin DB4 Volante and a 1960s Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud. All of them gleamed, as spotless and immaculate as if they’d spent all their years wrapped in cotton wool and had not yet been exposed to a road.
On the way here he had managed to speak to his builder’s foreman, frustrated that his calls yesterday hadn’t been returned, and asked him, urgently, to have someone climb in through the tiny window to see what was there between the blue and yellow bedrooms, and left another voicemail for his plumber to investigate the sudden dampness of the walls in their bedroom. Then he spent twenty minutes on the phone trying to pacify Bhattacharya. He wasn’t sure he had succeeded, although the restaurateur had at least accepted the possibility of a malicious hacker — albeit one malicious to Ollie, not to himself. Someone with a grievance against Ollie, he told him. Very unfortunate, but was he willing to take the risk of someone whom Ollie had upset damaging his own business? He told Ollie he would think about it.
Seated in Cholmondley’s oak-panelled office, which was adorned with silver models of classic cars and framed photographs of exotic car advertisements from decades ago, overlooking the showroom floor, the discussion did not go so well. The car dealer himself was the very model of unctuous charm. He gave a reasoned explanation as to why he was not going to pay his bill, accompanied by expansive arm movements, and periodic flashes of his starched white double cuffs and gold links. However, he told Ollie, if he was prepared to waive this bill, in lieu of damages caused, he would be prepared to consider retaining his services going forward.
Leaving Maida Vale shortly after 1.00 p.m., having been offered neither tea, coffee nor water, Ollie was parched and starving. He’d barely eaten a thing yesterday, and he’d only managed to swallow a couple of mouthfuls of cereal for breakfast today. His nerves were jangling, his stomach felt like it was full of writhing snakes, and he was feeling light-headed from lack of sugar.
He pulled onto a garage forecourt, filled up with diesel, then bought himself a ham sandwich, a KitKat, and a Coke. He returned to his car and sat, listening to the news on the radio, while he ate.
The traffic was better than earlier but still heavy, the rain not helping, and it would be touch and go whether he made it to Jade’s school in time to pick her up. He decided to ignore the route the satnav was suggesting, which would put him outside the school ten minutes late, and short-cut his way down through Little Venice, White City and then Hammersmith, and cross the Thames there.
Suddenly his phone rang. He saw it was Bryan Barker. ‘Hi, Ollie, sorry I didn’t call you back yesterday, we’d gone over to my sister in Kent and I left my phone behind. How was your weekend?’
‘I’ve had better.’
‘Wish I could give you some good news now to cheer you up, but I’m afraid every time we look behind anything at the house, we find another problem.’
‘So what’s the latest doom and gloom?’
‘There are some nasty-looking cracks around the base of the tower, below your office — we’ve only found them since chipping away some of the rendering.’
‘What’s causing them?’
‘Well, it could just be slight movements of the earth — changes in the water table, the soil beneath drying out. Or it could be subsidence.’
‘Subsidence?’ Ollie said, knowing full well what that would entail. Cripplingly expensive underpinning. ‘Why didn’t this show up on the survey?’
‘Well, I’m looking at the relevant section of the survey now. It warned of possible movement but inspection wasn’t possible without removing some of the rendering. It says they brought this to your attention and you told them to leave it.’
‘Great!’ Ollie said, gloomily. ‘Just one thing after another after another.’
‘Should have bought yourselves a nice little brand-new bungalow if you wanted an easy life!’ Barker said.
‘Yeah, great.’ Ollie concentrated on the road for a second. He used to know this part of London well — his first job was for a small IT company down the skanky end of Ladbroke Grove, on the fringe of Notting Hill — and he cycled everywhere then. He drove along with the canal on his right.
‘Oh, and another thing,’ Barker said. ‘That window you asked us to take a look through — there’s a bit of a problem.’
‘What?’
‘I climbed up this morning — we put two ladders together — but I couldn’t see in — there are metal bars blocking out the light.’
‘Metal bars? Like a prison cell?’
‘Exactly.’
‘So is it a room?’
‘I don’t know — we’d either have to cut away the bars or go in through a wall.’