Sweet Heart

by Peter James

Genres: Ghost; Financial Thrillers

Synopsis

Sometimes death is not the end....

Charley has a strange feeling when she sees the idyllic mill house with its cluster of outbuildings, the lake and the swirling mill stream—a powerful sense of recognition, as if she has been there before. Except she knows she hasn't.

After Charley and her husband, Tom, move into Elmwood Mill, sinister memories of a previous existence start to haunt her. Despite both their attempts to dismiss everything with rational explanations, the feeling turns to certainty as the memories become increasingly vivid and terrifying.

Charley is persuaded to undergo hypnosis—but in searching deep into her past, she unwittingly opens a Pandora's box of evil...and now the terror is free.

Release date: November 4, 2010

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 352

Sample

The dog scampered under the rotting gates.

‘Peregrine!’ the woman called. ‘Peregrine! Come back at once!’

No one ever went in there, except for a few local tradesmen who privately admitted it gave them the creeps. Not even her dog, which was nosy and inquisitive and was always going in places he shouldn’t, had ever gone in there before.

‘Good boy! Come back!’

But her voice was drowned by the weir below. She waited a moment. ‘Come on!’ she called once more. ‘Peregrine!’

Most of the days of her life she walked the dog down the lane, across the iron footbridge and up into the woods, always speeding her pace a little past the property and rarely even looking down at the derelict mill below, with the garden and house beyond with its strange old recluse.

She pushed open one of the tall gates and peered down the drive. Her Yorkshire terrier was running up the steps to the house. Without stopping at the top he nosed his way in through the front door, which was ajar.

‘Peregrine!’ she bellowed, appalled. ‘Come back here! Peregrine!’ She hurried down the drive.

The roar of water from the weir made the silence of the house all the more menacing, and the gravel that scrunched under her feet felt as if it must have been put there to make a silent approach impossible. She stopped at the bottom of the steps, perspiring from the heat of the late summer morning. The house seemed larger from here, rising up the bank above her.

‘Peregrine!’ her voice was more conciliatory now. ‘Peregrine!’

The terrier was barking inside the house, a steady insistent yapping, and she sensed eyes watching her from behind one of the dark mullioned windows; the eyes of the old woman with the hideously burned face.

She climbed the steps and stopped at the top to catch her breath. The dog yapped away inside. ‘Peregrine!’ she hissed, peering past the oak door into the gloomy hallway.

Then she noticed the milk stacked on the doorstep — five bottles, and a carton of eggs. Newspapers and letters were scattered over the floor inside the door. The house seemed still, felt still. She pressed the bell, but heard nothing; she tried again but it was dead. She rapped the brass hoop of the tarnished knocker, gently at first then harder, the full thud echoing, the dog’s barking becoming even more insistent.

She pushed the door open wider with difficulty, the perished draught excluder jamming on the mountain of post, mostly junk mail, that had built up on the oak floor. She stepped in.

The hallway was small, dark, with a low ceiling and stone walls, and smelled unpleasant, of something that had gone off. There was a staircase ahead with a passageway beside it, and doors to the left and right of her. A sinister winged bust stood on an ornately carved table, and her reflection stared back through the dust on a spangled mirror on the wall. The dog was in the gloom at the end of the passageway; she could hear him barking, but could not see him.

‘Hello?’ she called up the stairs. ‘Hello?’

She glanced around, seeking movement, a shadow, and noticed the framed photographs covering the walls. Photographs of elegant women in fine dresses. Except their faces had been carefully burned away, leaving their elegantly coiffed hair, forties and fifties styles, around charred holes. She looked closer, startled. Horrible; the old woman was even barmier than she’d thought.

They gaped down at her, the walls of the passageway solid with them, all faceless. The terrier was pawing and scratching at the door at the end.

‘Come here, damn you!’ she whispered.

He turned to her, whined, then pawed again at the door. She knelt, grabbed his collar furiously, then felt a shadow fall over her shoulder. She spun round, but it was just the front door moving restlessly in the breeze. The smell was stronger here, vile. The dog whined again and tugged, as if it were trying to tell her something. She wanted to go, to get out of here, but the dog’s insistence bothered her. She let go of him and knocked on the door with her knuckles. The dog yapped furiously.

She turned the handle, the door opened and the terrier bolted through. The smell rushed out. Strong, pungently strong. A stench of sour milk, unflushed lavatory and meat that had gone badly off.

‘Struth.’ She pinched her nose with her fingers. She heard flies buzzing and saw a whole haze of them as she walked in, and heard another sound, too, a faint rustling like expensive silk.

The room felt alive, yet at first there did not seem to be anyone in here. An old drying rack hung above the Aga; an ashtray filled with lipsticky butts lay on the table; an open tin of stew with hair growing out of it sat on the draining board. The fridge door was ajar. That explained the smell, she thought, relieved.

Then she saw the old woman’s legs.

At first she thought that she was breathing. She was lying face down through the doorway into what looked like a boiler room. The muscles of her legs were moving, and her mouth and left eye, which was the one she could see, were moving too. So were her hands. Her neck rippled like a wheatfield in the wind.

She staggered backwards in shock and retched, but the horror held her throat so tightly nothing came out. The dog stood in front of the corpse barking excitedly. She slammed into the doorway in her panic, then ran down the passage, out through the front door and down the steps.

She could feel them on her own flesh, feel them rippling, chewing, as she hurried back up the drive, brushed them off her thighs, off her wrists, millions of imaginery white wriggling maggots tumbling on to the gravel as she hurried home to the telephone, gulping down the air, trying to flush out her lungs, hurrying because she could see in her mind the old woman staggering out through the door after her, maggots writhing, dropping from her eye sockets, her cheeks, her hands, like white rain, and could hear her screeching, ‘Leave me alone! Let them be. Let them eat. It’s only my body, my foul scarred body. My prison. They’re freeing me. Can’t you see, you old cow? They’re freeing me!’

Charley’s bike had fallen over earlier in the day and the pedal now caught the chain guard with an irritating clack … clack … clack as she pedalled in her sodden clothes, head down against the fine June rain that hung like orange gauze over the sodium streetlights. A stream of cars sluiced past, then a lorry, too close, its filthy slipstream shoving her like an unseen hand in towards the kerb; she swerved.

A thumping beat of music rose up through the rain as a river boat, draped in bunting and lit up like a Christmas tree, churned through the inky water of the Thames and slid out of sight beneath her.

She rode across the roundabout, then up into the quiet of the Tonsleys and turned left into the Victorian terraced street, past the silent parked cars, smart GTIs and BMWs and a couple of Porsches. When they had first moved here, fifteen years ago, it had been a rundown area with derelict cars and mostly elderly people. As first-time buyers with no capital it had been all they could afford. Now it was Des-Res London, with sandblasted façades and smart front doors and satellite dishes pinned to the rooftops like badges of an exclusive club.

As she dismounted she saw Tom’s car parked a short way down the street and felt a beat of excitement. She still looked forward to seeing him at the end of each day; looked forward to seeing him as much as she had when they had first met, twenty years before, when she’d been sixteen; more, she thought sometimes. Especially after some of their arguments, increasingly frequent these days, when she was frightened she might come home to find a note on the table and his clothes packed and gone.

Rain lay on the dark pavement like varnish. She wheeled her bicycle up to the front door, unlocked it and parked the bike on the oak flooring of the hall.

Ben greeted her with a rubber dummy of Neil Kinnock’s head in his mouth. ‘Hallo, boy!’ she said, kneeling and rubbing the golden retriever’s chest vigorously with both hands. ‘Good to see you boy! Yes it is! No, don’t jump!’ She shut the door. ‘Hi!’ she shouted. ‘Hi!’ Tom called from upstairs.

Charley shook water out of her hair, pulled off her cape, slung it over the newel post and glanced in the mirror.

‘Shit!’ Her streaky blonde hair was partly matted to her head and neck and partly sticking up in spikes, and her mascara had run down her right cheek. She pulled a face at herself, a charging Apache warrior expression, then prodded her hair with her fingers. ‘Not great, huh?’ she said to the retriever.

A trickle of rainwater ran down inside her pullover as she went upstairs, followed by Ben, and down the corridor into Tom’s den.

The room was dark, cosy, lit with a single pool of light from the Anglepoise bent over the tidy desk. Tom was studying a sheaf of documents bound together with looped pink ribbon. He looked round. ‘Hi.’

He was wearing a navy V-neck pullover over his striped shirt and had removed his tie. A tumbler of gin and tonic was by his right hand. He had open, uncluttered good looks with a hint of brooding temper simmering below the surface that rarely flared with other people, only with herself. A temper that could frighten her with its sudden rages, with the distance it put between them, frighten her because it could stay, like unsettled weather, for days. The way it was now.

‘Working late?’ she said, walking over and kissing him on the cheek.

‘Someone has to earn the money.’

‘Hey!’ she said. ‘That’s not fair.’

He stared back down at the documents.

She watched him, flattened. ‘Did you play squash?’

‘No, had a crisis with a client. Husband’s grabbed the kids — had to get an injunction. How was your day?’

‘OK. I went to acupuncture, helped Laura in the shop, then we saw Shirley Valentine.’

‘We’ve already seen it.’

‘Laura hadn’t. Anyone call?’

He yawned. ‘No. How was the acupuncture?’

‘Unpleasant; as always.’ She sat on his lap and crooked her arm around his neck. ‘Don’t be bad tempered.’

He put his hand against her stomach. ‘Does your acupuncturist think it’s going to work?’

She shrugged. ‘Yes, he does.’

‘At thirty quid a go he would.’

She looked at his clean, manicured nails. He had always been meticulous about his appearance; even when they had no money at all he had always managed to turn out looking smart. She stole a glance at her own nails, bitten to the quick, and wished she could find the willpower to stop. He used to chide her about it constantly, now he only did when he was irritated by something else.

He wriggled. ‘God, you’re sopping!’

‘The forecast was wrong.’

‘I don’t think you should be biking.’

‘That’s daft. Helps keep my figure.’

‘Your figure’s fine. Cycling’s not very relaxing in London and you’re meant to be relaxing.’ She felt a twinge of anxiety as he yanked open a drawer, pulled a book out titled Infertility and tapped it. ‘It says here that too much physical exercise worsens infertility problems. It dries everything up inside, or something. I’ll read it out, if you like.’

Please don’t let’s row again tonight, she thought, standing up and walking across the small room. She gazed at the bookshelves, at the toy Ferrari she’d put in his Christmas stocking, at a copy of Inner Gold. She picked up a Rubik cube and gave it a gentle twist; dust flew off.

‘Did you discuss it with the acupuncturist?’

A car hooted in the street outside; the cubes rotated with a soft crunch. ‘He had some pretty crackpot theories,’ she said.

‘So do you.’

‘They’re not crackpot.’

‘What about the crap therapy thing you went to with Laura. Rebirthing?’

‘Rebirthing was good.’

‘Great,’ he said. ‘One session of rebirthing and no sex for two months.’ He rocked his drink from side to side, rattling the ice. ‘You don’t make babies without screwing — or didn’t anyone tell you that?’

She was silent.

‘You ought to get on and do this regressive hypnotism you keep talking about. You’ll probably find you were a nun in a previous life.’

‘Laura says —’

‘I’m not interested what Laura says.’ He drank some of his gin. ‘Do you really discuss our sex life with your friends?’

Three yellows lined up down one side. She twisted the cube again. ‘Don’t you discuss it with yours?’

‘There’s not much to discuss. We don’t have a sex life these days, we have scientific experiments. When did you last enjoy sex?’

She put the cube back on the shelf, walked over and kissed him again. ‘Don’t be like this, Tom. I always enjoy it. It’s just that’ — she bit her lip — ‘time’s running out.’

Tom’s voice became a fraction gentler. ‘Darling, everyone says you didn’t conceive before because you worked too hard, because of tension. That’s why you gave up work. No one said you have to give up sex.’ He took her hand and squeezed it. ‘Listen, there’s a house I like the look of. The particulars arrived today.’ He flipped open a file with a wodge of estate agents’ particulars.

As she looked at the coloured photograph in the centre a fleeting sensation of familiarity rose inside her, then sank away like a shadow underwater. The photograph was fuzzily printed and the view of the house was partially obscured by shrubbery. Tudor, more a large cottage than a house, the lower half red brick and the upper plaster with wood beams. It had small mullioned windows and a steeply pitched roof tugged down over it like a hat that was too large. It seemed tired, neglected and rather melancholic.

ELMWOOD MILL, ELMWOOD, SUSSEX. A delightful 15th-century mill house in outstanding secluded position, with outbuildings including the original watermill and large brick barn. In need of some modernisation. About 3 acres. For sale by private treaty or auction at a date to be agreed.

‘I think I — I’ve —’ Her voice tailed away.

‘You’ve what?’ Tom said.

She shook her head. ‘Nothing. I — I thought for a moment I knew the house.’

‘What do you think of it?’

‘It’s very pretty.’ She glanced through the particulars. ‘Doesn’t say a price — it’s probably way out of reach.’

‘I rang them up.’ He smiled triumphantly. ‘They’re asking two-fifty, but they might take two twenty-five.’

‘How come?’

‘It’s a complete wreck.’

‘Just what we want!’ she squealed, and Tom was suddenly touched by her glee and enthusiasm, by something that seemed rekindled inside her. A drop of rain water fell on his cheek, but he barely noticed. Even soaking wet she smelted nice. She always smelled nice; it was one of the things that had first attracted him to her. Her face was pretty with an impish toughness behind it, and there was an element of tomboy in her that had always appealed. Her body was slim, but strong and she could look dynamite in a mini and just as good in jeans. She wasn’t beautiful, but she had a raw animal sexiness about her that was part of the chemistry between them. It had barely dimmed in all the time they had been together. Until now.

He should be patient and understanding, he knew; he should be sympathetic and caring. Instead he felt chewed up inside. He was guilty about his resentment against her childlessness (when maybe it was his fault — or at least partly his fault). Moving to the country. That was what they had both decided to do. Get out of London, out of the Big Smoke and the Big Hassle. It would be different in the country. It would come right there.

‘I’ve made an appointment for tomorrow. There’s someone else keen, apparently,’ he said. ‘Three o’clock. OK?’

She nodded and looked down at the photograph. The sense of familiarity returned.

‘Have you fed Ben?’ she asked.

‘Yup.’

‘And Horace?’

‘Rats, I forgot.’

‘You never remember Horace.’

‘Teach Horace to bark and I might.’ He yawned and closed the file. ‘I must get on.’

‘How was the lasagne?’

He was already reading his documents. ‘Fine.’

She went downstairs. Ben ran after her and over to the front door. ‘Sorry, boy, I’m, not going out in that rain. I’m going to have a hot bath. You can go into the garden on your own.’ She walked through to the kitchen and unlocked the back door. ‘OK, boy!’

Ben sat down and sighed like an old man.

‘God, you’re a wimp!’ She went to the dresser. ‘Hi Horace, you don’t mind getting wet, do you?’ She pressed her face against the glass bowl. The magnified red carp swam over and watched her as if she were a good movie, mouth opening and shutting. ‘Had a good day, have you?’ She opened the lid of its food. ‘How do you feel about moving to the country, Horace? It’s a shitty old place, London, don’t you think?’ She dropped a pinch of food in and it spread through the water like a cloud of fallout. The fish swam unhurriedly to the surface and took its first glum bite.

Elmwood Mill.

Something stirred deep in her memory. Like a forgotten name on the top of the tongue it hung there, tantalising her, then slipped away.

She went upstairs and into the bathroom. As she turned the taps and water splashed out she felt, for some reason she did not understand, afraid.

The property was by a lake at the end of a mile-long lane that sloped continuously downhill. They had passed only three other houses, the last over half a mile distant. Charley saw the green and white estate agent’s board through the trees beside a crumbling brick wall which had jagged glass cemented along the top. Daylight glinted through the slats of the rotting wooden gates.

The appointment was for three o’clock. The car clock said 3.44.

‘He must have buggered off,’ Tom said.

Charley let Ben out. The golden retriever hurtled clumsily past her, shook himself, then bounded over and cocked his leg against the wall. Eight months old, still a puppy. They had got him when she’d given up full-time work.

The car ticked and pinged and smelled of hot oil. She stretched, feeling flat suddenly, and silently annoyed at Tom for picking her up so late. Always something. For over a year they’d been house-hunting, and every time something was not right. The rooms were too small or the neighbours were too close or someone else got interested and the price went too high. Both of them knew, but rarely spoke, of their need for a fresh start.

Black clouds like locomotives shunted through the blue sky. Gusting wind tugged at the roots of her hair. The foliage, lush from a long spell of heavy rain, bent in the wind and the sodden grass sparkled under the coarse sunlight. Moisture seeped into her shoes.

The lake stretched like a grubby carpet between the walls of trees around it, slapping its creases out against the banks. A solitary upturned skiff lay on a patch of grass in front of them under a faded sign nailed to a tree. ‘PRIVATE. NO FISHING. MEMBERS ONLY.’ Beyond it was a metal footbridge over a weir, and a path leading up into the woods.

A flock of starlings flew overhead. She felt the chill of the wind, more like March than June, and hugged her arms around herself. She heard the rattle of branches, the woodsaw rasp of a crow, the roar of water from the weir. Behind the sounds was an odd stillness after the bustle of London. Strange not to hear any traffic, or voices.

There was a sharp clank as Tom pushed the gate open, the metal bolt scraping through the gravel of the drive. He was unchanged from court, in his pinstriped suit and Burberry mackintosh. They must look odd together, she in her jeans and baggy pullover and bomber jacket.

Then her heart skipped as she stared down the sweeping drive at the cluster of buildings nestling in the hollow a hundred yards away, between mossy banks that rose up into the woods on either side. The house — a different view from the estate agent’s photograph — a brick barn, and a dilapidated wooden water mill.

There was little sign of life. The windows were dark. Water tumbled from the weir into a brick-walled sluice pond below them. It frothed angrily around the motionless wheel and slid in a fast narrow stream through the garden, under an ornamental wooden bridge, past the barn and into a paddock beyond.

Excitement thumped inside her, although the house was smaller than she’d thought it would be, and in worse condition. Shadows boxed on the uneven roof as the wind punchballed the trees; an L-shaped single-storey extension seemed as if it might collapse at any moment on to the coal bunker and an oil tank beside it in a bed of nettles. Then she stiffened.

Something was missing.

She stared around, noticing something new all the time. A bird bath, a shed, a wheelbarrow, a hen run. Two uprooted oak trees leaned against one another on the front lawn, their branches interlocked like fighting dinosaurs.

The hollow had once been the river valley, she realised, before the river had been dammed to make the lake. Apart from the grass, which looked as if it had been cut, it was wild. There were some rhododendron bushes, a few desultory clusters of wild flowers, a small orchard.

Something was missing.

Her eyes were drawn to a level patch of scrub grass halfway up the bank above the barn, between the mill race and the woods. Her armpits were clammy; she felt dizzy and held on to Tom’s arm.

‘Are you OK?’ he said.

Strands of hair thrashed her cheek. A bird chirruped.

The slapping of the waves on the lake. The tumbling water of the weir. The wind in the trees. The quiet. It was touching something, stirring something, like snatches of an old tune.

‘Charley? Darling?’ He shook her arm. ‘Anyone home?’

‘What?’ She came back to earth with a jolt and felt disoriented for a moment. ‘Sorry, I was just —’ She smiled. ‘It’s wonderful.’

‘Don’t get your hopes too high. There’s someone else interested, and we might hate the inside.’

‘We won’t!’

Ben tore down the drive and loped across the grassy bank.

‘Ben!’ she shouted.

‘It’s OK, the house is empty.’

‘Why don’t we phone the agent and tell him we’re here now?’

‘Let’s go and have a look first.’

The sluice pond was deep and cold. Slime coated the wall. The thunder of water grew louder as they walked down and she felt a fine spray on her face.

‘We’d be wanting to pee all the time,’ Tom said.

Further on clear water flowed under the ornamental bridge and Charley thought how on warm summer evenings they could have supper, the two of them, by the stream. Bring her mother down on fine days. Convert the barn and maybe Tom’s father could live there. If Tom and his father could stop hating each other.

The house seemed larger as they neared it, partly because it sat up above them. The front was the pretty view in the particulars. Elizabethan, one end slanted and the other square. The plaster of the upper floor was crumbling, the wooden beams were rotten and the brickwork of the ground floor was uneven. The windows were small and differing sizes.

They heard a car door. Ben ran back up the drive, barking. A man hurried in through the gates, short and purposeful, a blue folder tucked under his arm, hands and feet pointing outwards like a penguin. He paused to pat Ben, and was rewarded with muddy pawprints on his trousers. He hove to in front of them, puffing, a plump, dapper man in polished black loafers with shiny pens in his breast pocket and alabaster skin.

‘Mr and Mrs Witney? I’m sorry, so sorry to have kept you.’ He leaned slightly backwards. Wind lifted the hair off his bald pate.

‘We were a bit late ourselves,’ Tom said.

‘Ah yes, tricky to find the first time.’ A Rotarian badge glinted smugly in the lapel of his grey suit. ‘Budley, from Jonathan Rolls.’ His fleshy fingers gave Charley’s hand a sharp downward tug, as if it were a bell-pull. ‘Moving out of London?’

‘Yes.’

‘Something like this comes on the market once in a decade.’

‘Windows look bad,’ Tom said.

‘Reflected in the price. So little’s been done for years.’ He gave his signet ring a twist. ‘Dates a long way back — to the Domesday Book. Been added to since, naturally.’

Charley stared up the mossy bank at the level patch of scrub, at the woods, at Ben playing happily, then at Tom, trying to read his face, but it was blank, giving nothing away.

‘Wonderful place for children,’ Mr Budley added.

Charley caught Tom’s eye.

Tom tied Ben to the boot scraper at the bottom of the steps and they followed Mr Budley. The front door was oak with a tarnished lion’s head knocker. The wind billowed Charley’s jacket.

‘How long has the house been empty?’ Charley asked.

‘Only about nine months. Miss Delvine passed away at the end of last summer,’ Mr Budley said.

‘Here?’ said Charley. ‘In the house?’

‘Oh no, I don’t believe so.’

‘I always think it’s a bit creepy when someone’s actually died in a house,’ Charley said.

‘You know who she was, of course?’

‘No.’

‘Nancy Delvine.’ He said the name in a reverential hush.

Charley repeated it blankly and glanced at Tom. He shrugged.

‘The couturier,’ Mr Budley said, making them feel for a moment they’d let him down. ‘She was very famous in the forties.’ He leaned towards them and lowered his voice. ‘She made for royalty.’ He allowed them time for this to sink in before pointing to a brass plaque above the door with a crude etching of a sun. ‘The original fire insurance plaque from 1711. Steeped in his. . .