The House With No Rooms

by Lesley Thomson

  ‘Here you are.’ She gave Jack his milk and floated to the other end of the room where she concocted her ‘nippets’.

  ‘Sure I can’t tempt you?’ she asked merrily. ‘Do you goo-ood? Gin dashed with tonic – horrid stuff, it’s packed with iodine – garnish of lemon and chattering with ice. Bob’s your uncle and Charlie’s your aunt!’

  ‘Quinine,’ Jack said involuntarily; Lucie wasn’t great on corrections or feedback.

  ‘So what’s going on in the dark regions of your subterranean world?’ She breezed over, sipping her drink. Lucie never asked how he was unless she was on the sniff for a story. Tonight he knew what she was after.

  ‘I won’t ask Stella.’ He shook his head. ‘You’re looking smart.’ At this time of night Lucie was usually in slouchy leggings and a baggy jumper, ‘legacy of long-divorced hubby’. Smart was perhaps overstating it, but even though it was after four in the morning she was in full make-up.

  ‘A shindig at the town hall. Must impress the biggy-wigs or they think you’re dead,’ Lucie stated obliquely. Jack doubted anyone supposed her dead since her byline was in the paper each week and she had over a million followers on Twitter.

  ‘You’re not here for milk. What’s festering?’ She grabbed a plastic bottle from the top of the television and rapidly operated the spray lever. Clouds rose into the air and the strange smell got stronger.

  ‘What is that?’ Jack coughed.

  She read the label on the bottle. ‘“Placid Pet”. Natural calm for your pets.’

  The smell wasn’t unpleasant, yet not pleasant either. ‘Have you got a pet?’ He scanned the room. A dog or cat could easily be sleeping amidst the heaps of paper.

  ‘No!’ Lucie exclaimed. ‘How could I have a pet? I’m never here. They need company and fuss.’ Jack thought that described Lucie’s needs.

  ‘But the spray—’

  ‘It’s to keep me calm. I’m at the damn coal-face dawn till dawn. Wreaks havoc with the nerves.’ She eyed him beadily. ‘I spotted it online when I was researching a story about dogs being poisoned with sausage treats in Ravenscourt Park. It’s working – I don’t even want a fag. Chillin’ is us, man! The thing is, Jackal, you got to live in the present. Be in the “now”!’ She mussed up her mane of ‘blonde’ hair and gave her trademark corncrake cackle.

  ‘There are calming substances for humans. Incense, essential oils...’

  ‘I don’t want my house reeking of hocus pocus. With this, you know where you are.’

  No wonder Stella found Lucie baffling. Although to the casual observer, Lucie might appear frenetic, Jack did think her calmer. He undid his shoes and settled on the sofa cushions. He was probably Lucie’s idea of a pet.

  ‘Did Terry Darnell have a case in Kew?’ With Lucie there was no beating around bushes. ‘On Kew Green.’

  ‘The Cleaner’s Detective! Where is Miss Marple?’ Lucie embarked on a hoarse rendition of Betty Wright’s soul hit ‘Clean-up Woman’. Having Terry Darnell in common made her relationship with Stella prickly at best, although since their last case it had improved.

  ‘Are we moonlighting, Jackaroo?’ Lucie dipped into a bag of carrot crudités from Marks and Spencer. She was the only person Jack knew who looked cool nibbling a carrot.

  ‘Stella’s busy,’ he said gruffly. ‘I’m doing preliminary work on a case.’

  ‘What case?’ Lucie was businesslike, Stella forgotten.

  ‘I found this.’ He brought up Street View on his phone and passed it to her. Carrot between her lips, cheeks drawn in as if she was inhaling from it, accentuating cheekbones of which she was proud, Lucie grimaced at the screen.

  ‘That’s Terry’s car!’ She enlarged the image. ‘Where’s this?’

  ‘Outside a house by the pond in Kew.’ Lucie wouldn’t find it odd that out of over a thousand streets in London, Jack had lit upon Terry’s car. All the same he wouldn’t say he had found it while hunting a True Host.

  ‘August 2010. It was taken not long before Terry died.’ She pulled a face. ‘Who lives in this house?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Stupid not to check. Not least because around Terry Darnell, Lucie lost objectivity. Lucie and Stella were chalk and cheese, but it seemed that both were attracted to men in the CID.

  ‘Did he stay the night, we ask ourselves?’ Lucie bit on the carrot.

  Jack was quick to reassure her. ‘He’s not visiting anyone, Terry’s in the car.’ He pointed at the windscreen. ‘Could he be watching the house?’

  ‘Creepy!’ Lucie fell silent. She patted at her hair as if Terry could see her. Jack realized that he was banking on Lucie knowing the workings of Terry Darnell’s mind.

  Tentatively Lucie stroked the screen. It scrolled to a picture of a District line train berthed at Earl’s Court station. Jack retrieved his phone; Lucie would happily trawl through his gallery in pursuit of a story.

  ‘He never mentioned that house to me.’ She tossed the end of her carrot into a wastepaper basket beside her gin station. ‘Terry was a dark horse. Like his daughter.’

  Terry’s daughter. Jack felt a pinpricking. Stella once said that she wouldn’t date a married man, she wouldn’t collude in the betrayal of a partner, even if she hadn’t met them. She had met Karen Cashman. Jack was shocked by her volte face. In abandoning her principles, Stella had betrayed herself. She was his benchmark. He was filled with sand; like hitting an air-pocket in an aeroplane, he was falling and falling. Lucie May was ruminating aloud:

  ‘...he did say he was tying up a loose end, correcting something... Can’t remember.’ Lucie stirred her gin and tonic with a swizzle stick topped with a devil’s head, the tongue curling over grinning lips, horns pert. She took a long drink and the level in her glass dropped at an alarming rate. ‘I assumed he meant the Rokesmith case...’ She trailed off.

  Jack had met Stella during the Rokesmith case.

  ‘Sure you don’t fancy a nippet?’ She patted his leg. Lucie could surprise him with flashes of empathy. Her next question told him that the empathetic moment was brief. Lucie’s mind was on Terry. ‘He might have guessed he wasn’t long for this world and wanted everything done and dusted so he could die in peace?’ She ran her tongue along the length of the swizzle stick.

  ‘Maybe.’ Not an answer he would have given Stella, but she wouldn’t have asked the question. Sticking to facts, she would point out that if Terry had foreseen his death then he would have made a will, eaten better and not spent out on a new boiler. Stella would say her dad had lived as if, like the Louis Armstrong song, he had ‘all the time in the world’. Stella lived as if she might die at any moment. Not by appreciating life to the full, but ensuring there was nothing in the pending tray. She would leave no footprint. No stain.

  ‘He could have parked there and gone off moments later.’ Lucie hooked out a cube of ice. It glinted like a diamond as big as any hotel. She crunched it up.

  ‘True. Yet I don’t think so.’ Always avoid the boring explanation.

  ‘Have you asked “Clean-up”? She might know.’

  ‘I only found it a couple of hours ago. I didn’t want to wake her.’ Jack gulped the milk to hide his expression.

  ‘She might welcome you waking her!’ Lucie gave a wheezing cackle. ‘So, boychick, one good turn deserves another. Get Stella D. to talk to me.’

  ‘She won’t.’ Jack spoke with conviction. ‘And what good turn? You haven’t told me anything.’

  ‘That remains to be seen.’ Lucie tapped the side of her nose.

  ‘Do you know something?’

  ‘Time will tell.’ She regarded her glass with a quizzical expression as if unsure how it came to be empty. ‘I’ll give thought to it and that’s giving a lot, considering how much I have to think about.’ She scrambled off the sofa and pattered in stockinged feet to the drinks cabinet. ‘You should nab Cashman. He and Terry were best buddies. Get him while he’s down – the bloke’s at sixes and sevens since his marriage broke up.’

  ‘What?’


  ‘Him and Kaz the Snazz have called it a day. Hasn’t Stella told you? They were as thick as thieves in that café on the Broadway the other day.’

  ‘She was talking about Harry Roberts and how did you...’ Lucie May got everywhere. Useful if you needed something and not if you wanted a private life. The milk that he had drunk was a solid lump in his stomach.

  ‘Cashman’s having a second childhood. Works out, wears skinny-fit suits from River Island and goes to a hairdresser. He scrubs up well. Wouldn’t mind a spin around the wheel with him myself! Lah de dah!’ She waltzed about the room, brandishing the devil’s head swizzle stick. ‘Oh hey, here’s something! That solicitor – Tina Banks, the one you don’t like – she’s got cancer. We’re not supposed to know, but everyone does.’ She tinged her glass with the devil’s head.

  ‘I knew.’ Jack didn’t want Lucie May going on one of her tangents. Especially this tangent. He got up. ‘So you think Terry was following up on a failed case.’

  ‘A loose end isn’t a failure. He was a good detective, one of the best.’ Lucie May squatted at her mini-freezer – kept in the sitting room to save a trip to the kitchen – and drew out an ice tray. She twisted it in her hands; the action put Jack in mind of a chicken’s neck being broken. Ice flew across the top of her gin station.

  ‘You said he had to correct something,’ Jack reminded her.

  ‘So, we all make mistakes.’ She was fractious. ‘If we’re sensible we keep them close to our chest.’ Lucie swept a couple of ice cubes into her glass and jammed the rest back into the tray. ‘Not you, darling, we’d know if you piled into the buffers at Ealing Broadway or opened the doors before the train was in the station. Not that you would – we’re safe in your lovely hands.’

  ‘It’s not possible to open the doors if the... What mistake did Terry make?’ With Lucie it paid to be patient. A mine of snippets of fact and fiction, eventually she would retrieve the salient detail.

  ‘There was one time he turned up, late at night.’ Lucie arched her eyebrows as if Terry Darnell visiting her in the small hours was exceptional. ‘He said something about not following stuff up. No, that wasn’t—’

  ‘Lucie! What were his actual words?’ Jack forgot to be patient.

  Shutting her eyes, Lucie batted the devil’s head against her lips. Then she adopted a gruff voice as if she were channelling the dead detective: ‘I’ve let someone get away with murder.’

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  November 2014

  Stella was the first to arrive in the office. This was unsurprising since it was 7 a.m. and the business opened at nine. However, Jackie was often in by half past seven. This morning she had a hygienist appointment so would be later.

  Stella planned to stay an hour and then go to Kew Gardens and meet the Herbarium team as they came off shift at nine o’clock. She wanted to see Jack. The rest of the gardens were still closed as the police searched the grounds. She had slept fitfully and before getting up had answered his text asking if she was there with another question: Where is ‘there’? She felt uncomfortable about this now. Jack had probably meant Rose Gardens North, so she could have said yes. Martin’s visit had thrown her. The truth was that she wasn’t ready to tell Jack that he had called, although she wasn’t sure why.

  She ran up to the women’s toilet and filled the kettle from the tap marked ‘Drinking Water’. Despite the notice, she didn’t trust it – she had a horror of dead birds in water tanks – but there was no other option. She poured some into Stanley’s bowl and, leaving the kettle to boil, went through to her office.

  By 8 a.m. she had finished two long quotes for potential commercial clients and emailed them off. Her tea undrunk, she settled to read her mum’s customer report. Suzie Darnell continued to update the customer database from Sydney. Every month she provided a breakdown of customers over the domestic, commercial and public sectors. Clean Slate had a mix of clients in all three areas with Kew Gardens the largest. With no debts Clean Slate was, Suzie reassured her, ‘economically robust’. Stella gazed at the figures for Banks Associates without absorbing them. It wasn’t that Cashman had kissed her and asked her for a drink that had kept her from sleeping. It was what he had said about Tina. ‘She’s riddled with cancer.’

  She was just preparing to go to Kew Gardens when she heard the outer door open. The tell-tale floorboard by the photocopier creaked. It couldn’t be Jackie and Beverly was never in this early. A lost courier. Stella tutted. Someone in the insurance company had left the street door off the latch again; she had locked it on her way up. Stanley let off a volley of shouty barks and rushed into the main room.

  ‘Is anyone here?’ A woman’s voice. Then in a tone that lacked authority and so would have no effect on the dog: ‘Down please!’

  Tina!

  The woman backed up against the photocopier wasn’t Tina. Stella made a fleeting assessment as disappointment sank in. Long hair, quilted jacket, tight jeans and ankle boots.

  ‘Are you Stella Darnell?’

  ‘Speaking.’ Then Stella remembered she wasn’t on the phone. ‘Yes I am.’

  ‘Please could you come with me?’

  Stella did a ‘down’ command with her fist and was faintly gratified to see Stanley obey.

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘To see Tina. I’m Michelle, I’m Tina’s sister.’

  Michelle Banks was a less-expensive-looking version of Tina: the clothes were smart, but not designer. She was softer somehow. Stella snatched a duster from a pile of samples on Beverly’s desk and began wiping the surface. She caught herself and put it down.

  ‘Tina asked to see you.’ The woman spoke without Tina’s energy or conviction. ‘I told your secretary.’

  ‘I’ve had a lot...’ Even murder wasn’t an excuse. ‘Is – is she all right?’ She heard how lame the question sounded.

  ‘Fine apart from that she’s dying.’ The woman shook her head in hazy apology.

  ‘I meant...’ Stella didn’t know what she meant. Tina won her battles; her vocabulary didn’t include failure. She said that she and Stella tackled life head on, they focused on solutions. Cancer was another battle that Tina would win.

  ‘She’s asking for you.’

  Stella retreated towards her office. ‘I’ve got a meeting at nine, I’ll go after that.’

  ‘There may not be an “after that”.’ Michelle Banks looked at Stella. She had Tina’s eyes.

  *

  Stella parked in the same space as on her first visit to the hospice, facing the exit. Through trees, the Thames glinted silver in the autumn sunshine. When she turned off the engine she was startled by the ping of an incoming text on her phone.

  Are you ok? Jackie asked.

  Unsheduled mtg. Forgetting how to spell ‘unscheduled’, Stella made three attempts before it looked right. If she told Jackie she was visiting Tina, it would make it true. She wasn’t ready for it to be true.

  *

  Less than two miles from the hospice, Jackie was sitting in her husband Graham’s car.

  ‘Was I right to tell Michelle Banks where Stella was?’ she wondered aloud.

  ‘I doubt it.’ Graham Makepeace gestured ‘thanks’ to a woman in a Fiat 500 who let him out of their street on to the Chertsey Road.

  Jackie smoothed her safety belt, pulling it loose and letting it go. ‘But how would Stella feel if – when – Tina Banks dies and she hadn’t said goodbye?’

  ‘Terrible. But not your business.’ Graham took the Great West Road exit off the Hogarth Roundabout. ‘Stella will have to live with her mistakes. Look at Nick with Clare: we saw that disaster a mile off, but you warning him made him dig his heels in. The relationship lasted months beyond its expiry date.’

  Jackie wasn’t convinced. It was her job to protect Stella, not to expose her to her worst fear: death. Stella hadn’t been able to say goodbye to her dad; he was dead when she got to the hospital. Jackie didn’t want it to happen again. It was a risk because while Stella faced reality hea
d on, around death – not counting detective cases – she faced the other way.

  ‘To be fair, you’re always spot on, Jax.’ Graham flashed her one of his looks that reminded her why she had married him thirty years ago. ‘The net result of your actions is happiness!’

  Jackie reached over and fluffed her husband’s hair. Then she stroked the disarrayed locks back into place. ‘I’ll text her.’

  ‘Is that wise?’

  ‘No.’ The murder in Kew Gardens had taken the shine off winning the contract, and now this.

  Are you ok? Jackie pressed ‘send’.

  A cacophony of tinny church bells heralded Stella’s reply: Unshedulled meeting.

  ‘She’s spelled “unscheduled” wrong,’ Jackie murmured. ‘That means she’s at the hospice.’

  ‘Mission accomplished.’ Graham eased the car around Hammersmith Broadway.

  The trouble was, Jackie Makepeace reflected sadly after Graham had dropped her at the office, sending Michelle Banks to find Stella wasn’t the issue. What mattered was that Stella didn’t make friends easily and she was going to lose a good one.

  *

  Stella passed colour-coded recycling bins and went up a ramp to a door. Inside she was confronted by the steamy smell of school dinners. The cabbage aroma might have dampened the spirits of some, but Stella inhaled deeply and a calm descended. She had looked forward to lunches at the schools she had attended. Lunch was the time in the day when the little girl had understood what was expected of her. She had appreciated the process of queuing for dinner and receiving fixed portions of food, circles of Spam, mounds of potato, blocks of ice cream and squares of chocolate pudding.

  Her mood was further strengthened by a yellow plastic sign: ‘Cleaning in Progress’. Rounding a corner, she caught a whiff of stringent disinfectant laced with the powerful air freshener she used to dispel unpalatable smells. Surrounded by the smells and apparatus of her world, Stella picked up pace.