The House With No Rooms

by Lesley Thomson

  On the ink-black river, a police barge chugged up from Barnes. Lapping from the wash carried on the night air. An officer on the deck scoured Hammersmith Bridge for some lost soul who might, in the blue hours before dawn, leap into the unforgiving waters. He saw no one.

  Chapter Two

  October 2014

  ‘...The river, on from mill to mill,

  Flows past our childhood’s garden still;

  But ah! We children never more

  Shall watch it from the water-door!

  Jack stopped chanting as he was deafened by a piercing whoop-whoop, rising and dipping and rising again. Coupled with a beep, it hurt his ears. A passenger had set off the emergency alarm. It was the soundtrack to Jack’s recurring nightmare in which he was driving an empty train through tunnels, thinking: Who pulled the emergency handle? But now he was awake and his train – the last one of the night – had been standing room only to Earl’s Court.

  He went into textbook mode. He didn’t brake – when the P.E.A. sounded, a driver should never stop between stations – but continued ‘down road’ to Kew Gardens. His watch read ‘11.43’. One, one, four and three. Numbers were signs. His head throbbed from the noise so that he couldn’t make sense of the meaning.

  Ninety per cent of emergency alarms, as Jack, a District line driver and trainer for London Underground, would explain to novice drivers, were due to accident or ‘malicious intent’. His last two had been a hen party dressed as meerkats who activated it outside Richmond station and an electrical fault at Barking. However, he instructed his students to ‘follow the drill because one day the emergency will be real’.

  The monitoring system flashed up that the alarm had been set off in the sixth car. This was in the middle section of the train, where regular commuters for Kew Gardens station tended to sit so as to alight by the exit. Pressing the talkback button, Jack spoke into the handset, talking only to those in the sixth car.

  ‘Hello, I am your driver. The passenger emergency alarm has been activated. Please could someone tell me what is happening there?’

  Quiet.

  ‘Can anyone hear me?’ The clatter of the train came through the handset. Possibly a fault or a lone passenger had pressed the alarm and passed out. In his ear, so close that he looked to see if someone was in his cab, was a whisper:

  ‘A woman is unconscious.’

  As the train slowed to berth at Kew Gardens station, Jack slammed his palm on the whistle-button and sounded a blast to alert station staff. Addressing all the passengers he told them that there would be a delay. His tone was warm because, as he reminded his trainees, ‘if you frighten passengers, you risk them becoming ill too’. He asked for any doctor on board to make their way to the sixth car. Jack was comfortable with emergencies.

  At the headwall telephone he updated the signaller at Richmond, the voice from the sixth car replaying in his head: ‘A woman is unconscious.’ Someone had used that phrase when his mother died. But he had been a toddler then so couldn’t trust his recollections.

  Most passengers had left at Gunnersbury. There was no one in his car; only three in the second; one man in the fourth had slept through his announcement. In time to his steps, Jack continued the rhyme in his head. The voice was his mother’s, as ethereal as the wind.

  ‘Below the yew – it still is there –

  Our phantom voices haunt the air

  As we were still at play—’

  ‘What’s happening?’ A man fell into step with him.

  ‘I’m about to find out, sir.’

  ‘Jack bloody Harmon! What are you doing here?’ the man exclaimed and, looking at him properly, Jack’s heart sank. Martin Cashman was the last man he wanted to see.

  A senior detective in the Met, Cashman had worked with Jack’s friend Stella’s father, Terry Darnell, and frequently declared that ‘Tel was my best mate’. Since Darnell’s death three years ago, Cashman seemed to think that it was up to him to look out for Stella. She didn’t need looking out for. Cashman made no bones about his dislike of Jack. The feeling was mutual, but when Stella was there, they kept it under wraps. She wasn’t here now. The two men bristled.

  ‘This is my train.’ Jack was the little boy who, some thirty years ago, had built railway tracks in the garden at his school using lolly sticks for struts and dampened earth for mortar. A boy called Simon had scoffed at him. ‘There’s nowhere for the passengers to get out.’

  ‘I’ve left the doors open; they can leave if they want,’ Jack snapped at Cashman.

  ‘What?’ Whisky-breath.

  ‘The Underground is the jurisdiction of the transport police.’ Go away.

  ‘I was on my way home. I’m a copper; we’re never off the clock. What’s occurring?’ Cashman’s hair was short with a flick at the front and thick with product. He wore a sleek grey suit and pointy lace-ups. Jack had never seen the officer, who must be approaching fifty, looking so smart. His habitual style was the unstudied negligence of creased suits and unkempt hair.

  ‘Shouldn’t you be cleaning for Stella?’ Cashman kept pace with Jack.

  Cashman was a detective, nothing escaped him, so he’d remember that Jack sometimes worked for Clean Slate when he wasn’t driving trains. He was putting Jack in his place.

  ‘It would be helpful to have you along until the transport police arrive,’ Jack conceded. Cashman would stay regardless of his permission.

  A woman in a hi-vis jacket raced up the stairs and through the barriers. It was the station supervisor.

  ‘Hey, Jack!’ She greeted him like an old friend. Jack liked her, but, irked by Cashman, couldn’t think of her name.

  Before he could speak, Cashman gave her one of his winning smiles. ‘Detective Chief Superintendent Cashman. Met!’

  Jack hoped that the supervisor would tell Cashman her name, but she merely nodded as they stepped into the sixth car. Jack reset the alarm handle and took in the scene.

  A middle-aged woman in a beige mac and knee-high boots was crouched beside another woman who was sprawled across the aisle. The woman on the floor wore one black soft-leather loafer; the other shoe wasn’t on her stockinged foot. A blue wool skirt had ridden up her legs. Jack shrugged off his fleece jacket and laid it over them.

  The supervisor, trained in first aid, was checking the woman’s neck for a pulse.

  At the end of the car, a man sat behind a glass partition. He held a sheaf of papers, but stared ahead as if considering what he was reading. He appeared oblivious to the emergency. Jack was used to the blank expressions on the faces of people waiting as he brought his train into a station: the immobile, dull-eyed stare, like the sightless gaze of a corpse, detached from the dread reality of rush hour. This was different.

  ‘She’s gone,’ the supervisor said quietly.

  Jack was surprised to see that the detective appeared upset. He too took off his jacket and, exhibiting more tenderness than Jack would have given him credit for, laid it over her face. Gently, he addressed the woman in the mac now hunched on a nearby seat.

  ‘What exactly happened?’ Cashman had a notebook and pencil poised.

  ‘Gosh, it was quick. This lady was reading her book. Oh, where is it? There!’ She got up to retrieve a paperback lying spine up on the rubber flooring.

  ‘You can leave it there.’ Cashman was firm, but kindly. ‘Until we know cause of death, it will help if we don’t touch anything.’

  ‘Of course.’ She folded her arms as if to prevent herself touching anything at all.

  Cashman was the good cop, warm and coaxing.

  ‘The doors were closing at Stamford Brook and she jumped on. She asked if the train was going to Richmond or Ealing. I said Richmond. She said, “Thank you so much.” I’d had a rotten day in the office and that quite cheered me up. In that way trivial exchanges can.’ The woman gave a sudden smile and then pulled at the collar of her mac. ‘She said she had a stiff neck,’ she added in the whisper that Jack had heard through the handset. ‘She said, “My n
eck is stiff.”’

  Cashman was jotting busily.

  ‘She dropped her book. We were just outside Gunnersbury. I thought at first that she’d fallen asleep. Idiotic, but I was drowsy myself. Then she slid off her seat. I asked if she was all right, when clearly she wasn’t. That floor’s hard: it must have hurt.’ Tucking a strand of hair behind her ear, she lapsed into pensive silence.

  Jack was distracted by the paramedics hefting equipment along the car. Someone gave him back his jacket.

  ‘What time did the alarm go off?’ Cashman was pulling on his own jacket.

  ‘Eleven forty-three.’ Jack remembered the passenger at the end of the carriage. ‘Best talk to that man too.’

  ‘What man?

  The seat was empty.

  ‘He’s gone.’ Jack was uncertain. The glass partition reflected the paramedics. Had there been anyone?

  ‘Stella said you see ghosts,’ Cashman remarked in the tone of someone sympathizing that a person got migraines.

  Jack caught up with the woman passenger as she was being escorted out of the car by the ‘nameless’ station supervisor. ‘Did you notice a man over there?’ He pointed back into the car.

  ‘No! I’m sorry. But, like I say, I nearly nodded off. I’ve had a horrible day!’

  ‘Leave it.’ Cashman was by his side. ‘No talk of headless horsemen, OK?’

  Had Stella said that he believed in ghosts? Jack was exasperated with Cashman, yet rather pleased that Stella took it seriously enough to have told the detective. A knot of passengers was milling around by the barriers. Jack told them that the train would be going out of service because someone had been taken ill. He waited as they dispersed.

  ‘Speaking of Stella, how is she?’ Jack had hoped that Cashman had gone while aware that this hope was absurd.

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘Tucked up in bed asleep, let’s hope.’ Cashman rocked on his heels.

  ‘Hmm.’ Jack doubted it; Stella worked into the small hours, but he wasn’t going to say this.

  The paramedics carried the woman on a stretcher shrouded with a blanket to the ambulance on the street. A shadow crossed a pool of light on the pavement.

  ‘Hey!’ Jack called. But by the time he had got through the barriers, there was no one there. The shadow had been the man from the train. Not a ghost.

  The foot tunnel stretched ahead bleak and empty. Jack ran the length of it, his rubber-soled brogues making no sound, and up the other side. Outside the station entrance three of the passengers from his train were getting into a taxi. There was no sign of the man from the sixth car.

  Jack returned to the westbound platform.

  ‘Chasing rainbows, Jack Harmon?’ Cashman rattled change in his pocket.

  Jack had a caustic response, but resisted it. Stella liked Cashman. As Jackie, Stella’s PA and one of Jack’s favourite people, said, it wouldn’t help Stella if he and Cashman sparred with each other. Not that Cashman had such qualms.

  ‘...thinking it’s an aneurism. A time bomb that goes off without warning. The End.’ Cashman drifted to the barrier. ‘Tell Stella hello.’ He stopped by a newspaper vendor’s box and read the headline. He aimed a kick at the box. The metallic clang rang along the platforms. He hurried down the steps to the footbridge.

  There were two ways to cross the platforms at Kew Gardens station: a tunnel and a bridge. Although he loved bridges, Jack always chose the tunnel. Like Stella, Cashman chose the air and the light of the bridge.

  ‘That fellow from the Met stepped up to the plate!’ The station supervisor joined him. Polly. That was her name. With the name came some key facts. Polly liked dogs and took her holidays in Norfolk where she was doing up a barge.

  Jack agreed that Cashman’s professionalism couldn’t be faulted. Jackie said it was one reason why Stella liked him.

  ‘According to her driving licence, the casualty was fifty-six, same as my mum.’ Polly puffed out her cheeks. ‘No age at all. Scary, how easy it is to die.’

  Jack, whose mother had died in her early twenties, thought fifty-six some kind of age. Had his mother lived to fifty-six, he would remember her. He didn’t say that he already knew how easy it was to die. One day you’re there and then you’re gone.

  ‘Jennifer Day,’ Polly said as he was getting into his cab. ‘That was her name. I pity the poor sod sent to tell her partner. Have a safe one, Jack. There’s a hot milk for you anytime you’re passing.’

  Picking up speed at Gunnersbury Jack drove through darkened stations to the Lillie Road depot where he stabled the train.

  At three in the morning, he was walking along the Fulham Palace Road. Somewhere an engine accelerated; closer a door slammed and a dog barked. A fox slunk across the street and vanished behind dustbins outside a kebab shop. When he reached the bins, Jack couldn’t see the animal, yet it must be there. Ahead were the lights of Hammersmith Broadway.

  The passenger had worried that the floor was hard. Someone had cared for Jennifer Day in her last moments. There had been no one for his mother. Jack hadn’t been there.

  When Stella had been told that her dad was dead, Jackie said shock had made her super-efficient. She had taken notes and asked pertinent questions. ‘You know our Stella, all over the practicalities!’

  A psychotherapist had used dolls to explain to the three-year-old Jack that his mummy wasn’t coming back and to encourage him to talk. The Mummy doll had the wrong hair so he knew it wasn’t true. She would come back. In his thirties he still found himself hoping this. He saw her in the street, in a passing car and on station platforms. Hers was the figure walking away on the driver’s monitor or alighting from the last car. She was always walking away.

  Jack wove between the stanchions supporting Hammersmith flyover, avoiding cracks on the bird-shit-encrusted pavement. He caught the headline on a newspaper in the gutter outside Hammersmith station: Copkiller Walks Free!

  On Black Lion Lane he paused by the sculpture of the Leaning Woman before going into the subway tunnel under the Great West Road.

  As he brought his train into stations, Jack made up stories about the people on the platforms. The woman whose ruddy complexion suggested she drank to manage her days; the elderly man with the seventies-style hair who wore shorts regardless of the season. The man whose delicate features were riven by a scar from his scalp to his chin giving him simultaneous expressions: placid and surprised. He didn’t need to make up a story about the man in the sixth car. He knew who – or rather what – he was. He was a True Host.

  A True Host was Jack’s term for a man or a woman who will murder or has murdered. He had first seen a True Host when he was a child and the qualities had burnt into his soul. Cold penetrating eyes, neat and tidy, ruthless and a chameleon, a True Host gained trust and murdered with methodical care. A psychopath who felt nothing. Jack’s mother’s death had equipped him to recognize a True Host in any guise. Unable to stop her dying, he would save others. He couldn’t rest. Without the True Hosts’ knowledge, he used to hide himself in their homes and be their guest. These days, for Stella’s sake – the daughter of a police officer, she was a stickler for the law – he was no longer a guest. He had to find other ways to enter their minds, second-guess their actions and merge with their darkness.

  He had once saved a woman from a controlling partner by removing the claw hammer that would have split her skull, but mostly True Hosts already had blood on their hands. He had to prevent more. He might yearn to belong in the light with Stella and Cashman, but his fate was in tunnels not on bridges. Jack’s home was the subterranean land of Death. Murder was always on his mind.

  In the foot tunnel, his mother sang in his head, soft and melodic:

  ‘How many miles to Babylon?

  Threescore miles and ten.

  Can I get there by candle-light?

  Yes, and back again.

  If your heels are nimble and light,

  You may get there by candle-light.’

  Chapter Three

 
; October 2014

  A gust of wind whipped a lock of hair into Stella’s eye, making it water. Blinking, she slid open the side door of the van and unclipped the dog’s seat belt. Instead of jumping down, Stanley clambered on to her shoulder. Bending to avoid banging his head on the door frame, she banged her own head. At the same time her phone buzzed and beeped from her anorak pocket.

  Stella had parked the van in a visitor bay outside Thamesbank Heights. The rectangular block of steel and glass sat atop a grassy slope at the end of a winding drive. The developers had gone bust before the marble steps to the foyer of the ‘gated community’ and the ‘Meditation Garden’ on the river side of the building could be constructed. When it rained, water collected in the pit beneath the foyer door. Instead of a seated Buddha in a pond, there was a cumbersome old Sony Trinitron television with wires spilling out, and a fridge without a door colonized by wild flowers: nettles, groundsel, clover and creeping ivy. The wasteland was scattered with drinks cans, food wrappers and other rubbish that had somehow crossed the undulating lawns from the road below.

  Stella put Stanley down and he trotted beside her to the back of the van. She mouthed, ‘Sit!’ and was gratified to see him obey promptly. Last week’s obedience class had covered silent commands and Stanley was progressing. She lifted out the cleaning cart and heaved her rucksack on to her back. Miming for Stanley to ‘heel’, she wheeled the cart along a salmon-pink path of compacted rubber (non-slip, no weeds, boasted the brochure) to the glass-plated lobby.

  Stanley lifted his leg with a balletic swing against a chunk of granite into which ‘Thamesbank Heights’ was carved. Jack said it was a tombstone for the defunct company, but he saw death everywhere. Jackie said this was because he had lost his mother so young.

  Thinking of this, Stella considered that she hadn’t heard from Jack for weeks. She tended to hold him responsible for the patches of ‘radio silence’ but, as Jackie had carefully pointed out, Stella could contact him. Jack saw signs in everything, about which Stella was sceptical, but his going to ground – aside from going literally underground – couldn’t be a good sign. She would offer him a cleaning shift. Stella had firm faith that cleaning was a cure-all.