Half an hour later, Albert Fears left the pub without saying goodbye. Jason sat at a table and took a bite from his soggy roast chicken and bacon sandwich. It had been served up a while ago, but he hadn’t wanted to step away from the old man, who was in full flow. He ate slowly, barely noticing the taste as he mulled over everything Fears had told him.
A rock promoter with a young family had bought Cold Hill House in 1983. He had builders working there for months, discovering more and more what a money pit the place was. Eventually, part of the house had been made sufficiently habitable to move into, but on the morning he and his family arrived, part of the roof, which hadn’t yet been touched, collapsed, bringing down an avalanche of masonry on their car; an old, classic Cadillac convertible, crushing them all to death. It was witnessed by the removals men, who had pulled up in their lorry behind them.
It was a weird coincidence, he thought, that he’d seen an old, classic Cadillac barely an hour ago, turning into the estate, and followed by a removals lorry.
The O’Hare family.
The name inscribed, four times, on the family mausoleum he had photographed in the graveyard earlier, and which he checked now on his phone. Johnny, Rowena, Felix and Daisy.
Once again, Fears had told him, the partially condemned ruin had remained boarded up and empty for years. Because it was a listed building, and one deemed to be of architectural significance, a steady stream of developers who wanted to demolish it and build an entirely new house on the grounds were refused permission.
Finally, a property man with deep pockets bought it and began extensive renovations. He died in a paragliding accident. Then his company was wiped out in a big property crash. A few years later, in 2015, it was bought by a couple – he’d made some money selling a technology firm, his wife was a lawyer, and they had a young daughter. They’d only been moved in a short while when the mother and daughter were killed in a car crash – and he died of a heart attack on the same day.
The Harcourts.
On his phone, Jason flicked through to the photograph of the Harcourts’ headstone and family grave, which he’d also taken earlier. He read their names. Oliver, Caroline, Jade.
Fears told him the final owners of the house were a fund manager and his wife, Sebastian and Nicola Molloy. With a fortune close to a billion, Molloy had the money to do a proper job of the restoration. But he’d had a better idea, Fears had said with a sarcastic laugh. Molloy wanted to tear the old building down and put up a big, modern mansion. The local planning authorities told him he wouldn’t have a cat’s chance in hell of getting plans through to do that.
One night, soon after permission had been rejected, the house burned down. The fire investigation team believed, but could not prove, it was arson – almost certainly by the owner himself. But no one would ever know the truth, as the whole Molloy family had perished in the blaze. The gossip was that Molloy had planned it but must have miscalculated how fast the fire would spread.
He looked back at the photograph of Roland Fortinbrass. The vicar. Confirmed dead.
But the man had been in their house yesterday, talking breezily to himself, Emily and Louise, and trying to recruit them for the church choir.
He shivered suddenly, involuntarily. Someone walking over your grave, his mother used to call it. Was that a time-slip?
A shadow fell across the table, and he looked up to see Lester Beeson towering above him. ‘Can I get you anything else?’ he asked, warmly.
‘I’m good, thanks.’
‘Albert’s a funny old bugger,’ he said. ‘This is a pretty friendly village, but you know, you always get the odd one or two in the countryside who don’t like change.’
Jason smiled. ‘Or don’t like anything.’
‘Hope he didn’t spook you too much. But actually, you should feel privileged he talked to you at all. He never normally speaks to anyone who isn’t a local.’
‘Someone else said the same. So, how long do you have to live here to become a local?’
‘For old Fears to regard you as one? You have to be born here.’
‘Does dying here make you one?’
Beeson laughed, heartily. ‘I’d prefer if you didn’t, Mr Danes – we never like losing a customer.’
‘Sounds like you’ve lost quite a few in recent years.’
The landlord sat down opposite him. ‘Can I offer you a drink – on the house?’
‘Well, thank you – maybe an espresso would be nice, thank you.’
Beeson shouted the order out, loudly, to someone in a back room, then turned to Jason. ‘You know, country folk can be very superstitious. They can’t look at a coincidence without calling it a curse. All communities get their share of tragedies – they get twenty old folk dead in a coach crash on what should have been a jolly outing, or an entire village church choir wiped out in a minibus. That doesn’t make the place cursed, it’s just terrible luck and dreadfully sad. You need to maintain perspective. The village of Cold Hill dates back centuries, and the old mansion, Cold Hill House, was a very grand place, owning most of this village, and had a lot of land – over five thousand acres, once. Everyone in the village in former times worked for the estate. I’ll bet that if you took all the recent deaths here and up at the old house, plus all the historical ones, and then divided them up evenly over the past centuries, you’d end up close to the national average, maybe even below it.’
Jason stared hard at him. ‘Did you say church choir?’
‘Yes, sadly.’
‘Do you mean the church choir from this village was in a minibus accident?’
‘Yes. It was terrible. There were twelve of them, all from the village and around here, the youngest was eight. They’d been invited to sing in a festival of church choirs at Canterbury Cathedral. Reverend Fortinbrass was driving them in a rented vehicle and they broke down on the motorway on the way back, in pelting rain. He left them all in the minibus on the hard shoulder of the M25, to stay dry, and went off to find the SOS rescue phone. When he came back, there was nothing left of the bus – it was like matchsticks, I’m told. A lorry driver fell asleep at the wheel and veered off the road, hitting it at 60 mph. Dreadful.’
‘How long ago was that?’
‘Eight years – be nine, next March.’
‘Bizarre in a way,’ Jason said, ‘that he kind of escaped death by going to phone for help, only to be killed in a road accident some years later.’
‘Yes, you could say bizarre. But he was never right after that tragedy. He always blamed himself – and struggled with his faith. He was pleasant outwardly – but –’ Beeson fell silent for a moment – ‘inwardly, he was broken. From that night it happened, onwards, he was like a dead man walking. That choir had been his passion, he lived for it.’