Fortinbrass nodded, pensively. ‘Well, broadly, yes. You want me to see if I can arrange someone to come here?’

Ollie watched the vicar’s eyes move back to the doorway. The shadow was still there, lurking.

‘Tell me something, you seem a very rational man to me, Ollie. Are you sure you want to open yourself up to this? Might it not be preferable to close yourselves to whatever is bothering you, ignore it and wait for it to go away?’

‘You’ve seen that shadow out there, right, Vicar – Roland – Reverend?’ He pointed at the doorway. There was nothing now.

Fortinbrass smiled, amiably. ‘It could just be a trick of the light. A bush moving outside in the wind.’

‘There is no wind today.’

Fortinbrass cradled his mug and looked thoughtful.

‘I’m an atheist, Roland. I had religion drummed into me so much at school. All that Old Testament stuff about a vengeful, sadistic, egotistical God who would kill you if you didn’t swear undying love to him? What was that about?’

The vicar studied him for some moments. ‘How God presents himself in the Old Testament can indeed challenge all of us, I can’t deny that. But I think we need to look to the New Testament to find the true balance.’

Ollie stared hard back at him. ‘Right now I’m prepared to accept anything. We’re living a nightmare here. I feel like we’re under siege from something malign.’ He glanced up, warily, at the ceiling, then his eyes darted around at the walls, the doorway. He shivered.

Fortinbrass set his mug down on the table and placed the Penguin wrapper next to it. ‘I’m here to try to help you, not to judge you. Would you like to tell me exactly what has been happening?’

Ollie listed everything he could remember that had happened. His mother-in-law’s first sighting of the ghost. His father-in-law’s encounter with her. Caro’s sighting of her. Jade’s friend’s sighting. The spheres he had seen. The bed rotating during the night. The taps. The photograph of Harry Walters. Parkin then Manthorpe being found dead. The computer messages. The emails to his clients. He omitted only the curious déjà vu he had experienced over the vicar’s arrival this morning.

When he had finished he sat back on the sofa and stared, quizzically, at the clergyman. ‘It sounds mad, I know. But, believe me, it’s true. All of it. Am I insane? Are all of us?’

Fortinbrass looked deeply troubled. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I believe you.’

‘Thank God,’ Ollie said, feeling a sense of deep relief.

‘I’ll put in a request. I’m not sure of the formalities, but I will ask.’

‘There must be something the church can do,’ Ollie implored. ‘We can’t go on like this. And we can’t leave – if we could, we’d be out of here like a shot. But there must be something – something you can do to help us, surely?’

An hour later, as Ollie stood in the front porch watching the vicar’s car heading away, Caro’s Golf appeared.

‘Hi, darling,’ she said, as he opened her car door for her. ‘Who was that?’

‘The vicar,’ he said.

‘And – what did you tell him?’

‘Pretty much everything.’

She walked round to the rear of the car and opened the tailgate. The boot was crammed with white and green Waitrose carrier bags.

‘I’ll help you in with everything,’ he said.

‘So what did the vicar say? Was he sceptical or helpful?’

Ollie hefted out four heavy bags. ‘He saw something himself, while he was here.’

Following him into the house, holding a clutch of grocery bags herself, she said, ‘Did he have a view on it?’

‘He took it seriously.’

‘Great,’ she said, sarcastically. ‘That makes me feel a whole lot better.’

They dumped the bags on the refectory table. Ollie took her in his arms. ‘We’ll get this sorted, darling, I promise you. In a year’s time we’ll be looking back on all of this and laughing.’

‘I’m laughing right now,’ she said. ‘I was laughing all the way down the supermarket aisles. Just how much fun has our life become, eh?’

43

Saturday, 19 September

Early that afternoon Ollie glanced out of the tower window to the north, and for some moments watched Jade and her friend, Phoebe, standing at the edge of the lake looking playful and happy, throwing something – bread perhaps – to the ducks.

Throughout his own childhood, which had not been particularly happy, he had longed to be an adult and get away from the dull and stultifying negativity of home. But right now he envied them the innocence of childhood. Envied them for not having to deal with arrogant shits like Cholmondley. He knew childhood and growing up were fraught with their own traumas, but with everything that was bombarding him right now, he’d trade places in an instant.

What had the vicar’s first appearance been about? He’d seen him, he’d spoken to him, and yet – suddenly he was gone. Then reappeared. He thought back again to his conversation after tennis with Bruce Kaplan, trying to make sense of his theory. ‘We live in linear time, right? We go from A to B to C. We wake up in the morning, get out of bed, have coffee, go to work, and so on. That’s how we perceive every day. But what if our perception is wrong? What if linear time is just a construct of our brains that we use to try to make sense of what’s going on? What if everything that ever was, still is – the past, the present and the future – and we’re trapped in one tiny part of the space–time continuum? That sometimes we get glimpses, through a twitch of the curtain, into the past, and sometimes into the future?’

Had he been through some kind of time-slip earlier on? Or was his mind playing tricks on him, somehow reversing time inside his head?

Or was he cracking under the stress of everything?

Suddenly there was static crackle from the radio, which he had on in the background for company, and he heard the unmistakeable, deep, sonorous voice of Sir Winston Churchill.

‘Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be freed and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands.’ The static increased steadily in volume, drowning out some of Churchill’s words.

Shit, Ollie thought. Was he now inside some weird time loop?

Then he heard the voice of a radio presenter. ‘Well, Bill, can you think of any UK politician today, in any party, who would have that same quality of leadership that Churchill displayed? Anyone with those powers of oratory?’

Ollie switched the radio off then turned back to his desk and his most pressing problem. Cholmondley and Bhattacharya must know, like everyone, surely, that there were some weird and nasty people out there on the internet. Trolls. Facebook bullies. Malicious hackers. Did a disgruntled customer have a grudge against Cholmondley? Was a rival jealous of Bhattacharya’s success?

Or was it someone with a grudge against himself?

Who?

He really could not think of any enemies. Everyone had been happy with the sale of the website business. He was treating all the tradesmen at the house decently. He’d never screwed anyone over. Why would someone want to do this?

He stared, gloomily, at the screen. On it was the screensaver image of a close-up of Caro and Jade’s smiling faces pressed together, cheek to cheek. Normally, seeing it always made him smile, but at this moment he could find nothing to smile about.