The House With No Rooms

by Lesley Thomson

  ‘Can I help you?’ A woman with a bundle of files under her arm pushed through double doors.

  ‘No thanks.’ Stella made to pass.

  ‘Are you looking for someone?’ the woman persisted.

  ‘I’ve come to visit Tina Banks. She’s, um, she’s staying here.’ Stella looked beyond the woman, hoping that Tina might appear, phone clamped to her ear, and they could leave. Stell! My sister fusses over nothing. Got time for a cuppa and a bite? She was kidding herself; this was a hospice. Tina was ill. ‘Riddled with cancer.’

  ‘You’ve come in by the staff entrance.’ The woman smiled kindly. ‘Let me take you round to reception and I’ll check if Tina can see you.’

  ‘She’s expecting me,’ Stella countered and, stepping back, kicked over another hazard sign. Was Tina expecting her? Tina disliked the unexpected. ‘I should go,’ she said.

  ‘Let’s find out how she is.’ The woman was kindly.

  Stella followed her along what seemed a labyrinth of corridors. Keeping her nerve, she focused on the clean floors, coved skirtings, a Sluice Room, and she identified the smells: cleaning agents, polish, disinfectant and washing powder. The woman was speaking.

  ‘I didn’t take your name. Mine’s Laurel.’

  Stella blurted out, ‘Stella Darnell,’ as if she was an imposter.

  ‘This way, Stella.’

  More doors and they were in a reception area, bright with sunlight. Stella was ridiculously relieved to find a rack of confectionery and biscuits. Items from an everyday world. Bounty bars and KitKats, Mars bars and Digestives above boxes crammed with crisp packets, salt and vinegar, cheese and onion. She grabbed a bottle of Buxton’s mineral water and fumbled in her pocket for change.

  ‘Drop it in here. Our receptionist isn’t in yet.’ Laurel indicated a box on the desk beside a post tray and a hospice collecting pot.

  Stella shoved in all the coins in her hand, enough for at least six bottles of water. Then for good measure she added two more pound coins.

  The woman dialled a number on the phone. ‘Hello, Jean, Stella is here to visit Tina.’ Stella fixed on a poster advertising a ‘Sleep Walk’ that began at midnight, assembling on Kew Green. Vaguely she thought it was the sort of thing that would suit Jack.

  Laurel paused. ‘Oh, I see.’

  Sensing a problem, Stella whispered hoarsely. ‘I’ll come another time.’

  Laurel rested the receiver back on its cradle. She exuded an air of calm that Stella found inexplicable given she was working in a place where people were ill and dying.

  ‘She’s having her bedding changed. They’re nearly finished.’ She got up. ‘Meanwhile could I get you to sign in? For the fire regs.’ There was a visitors’ book on a table by the entrance, which had Stella come in through the front entrance she would have seen. Stella was surprised to see that her hand was shaking. She squirted out hand gel from a bottle beside the pad. Out of habit – when she visited companies she checked for possible business rivals – she scanned the visitor list for the day before. Michelle Banks and Cliff Banks. Tina’s family was the same size as her own, one parent and a sibling. She blotted out the idea of Dale and her mum visiting her in a place like this.

  ‘Come through.’ Laurel led her past a carousel rack of Christmas and greetings cards, a fire extinguisher and a fire assembly point notice. The familiar objects were like stepping stones across turbulent waters.

  Laurel stopped outside a door numbered twelve. The next room was fourteen. Many hotels didn’t have a number thirteen in case their customers considered it bad luck. Here, it crossed Stella’s mind, the precaution was unnecessary. She followed Laurel into the room.

  A diffused light trickled through a closed blind; the gentle glow picked out an armchair and a built-in wardrobe. Through a door she saw a toilet ‘caged’ within a frame of mobility supports.

  Michelle Banks was sitting by a bed with bars on the sides like a cot. Beside it was a tall metal stand with a bag of liquid attached. Michelle got up and signalled for Stella to take her place. Stella tried to refuse, but Michelle wasn’t looking at her. Stella sat down. Her knees touched the side of the bed and she whipped them back. She tried to shift the chair away, but it wouldn’t move and, turning around, she saw the door closing. She was alone.

  Not alone. A woman was propped up on a criss-cross arrangement of pillows, hands resting on the sheet. Shrunken, thin, her wrists bony.

  ‘Thanks. For. Coming.’ Weak, halting speech.

  Tina’s eyes had retreated into their sockets, the cheekbones that she had claimed were her best feature jutted out, her skin was translucent, lips cracked and colourless. Black lines outlined her eyes as if she was bruised. Her head was like a skull. There were strange red blotches, like a doll, on the centre of both her cheeks. She had changed drastically in only a couple of days. Her eyelids fluttered shut.

  ‘I meant to come sooner...’ Not true. But for Michelle Banks she wouldn’t have come. Hazily supposing she must keep the patient conscious, Stella said brightly, ‘She seems nice, your sister.’

  ‘She’ll do,’ Tina murmured. ‘Mitch did my make-up in your honour!’ She gave a crooked smile. ‘Bloody awful: she uses the eyeliner like a crayon. Thinks it’s frippery. I told her, when they say you look young for your age, they mean twelve, even a corpse looks better with make-up!’

  Stella was sure Michelle had been wearing make-up. She knew that Tina took half an hour to ‘put her face on’ because she did it in the office while Stella cleaned around her. It seemed to her that Michelle Banks had done a good job: Tina’s make-up looked fine. Tina herself did not.

  ‘She’s been brilliant. When this rubbish is over I’ll treat her to a spa day.’ Tina licked her lips slowly as if searching for something with her tongue.

  ‘Over?’ Stella echoed, bewildered.

  ‘When I’m out of here.’ She moved her head robotically and stared at Stella. ‘Going to beat this. You. Get. That.’ She heaved a sigh and shut her eyes. She didn’t speak for so long that Stella decided she had gone to sleep. Then, her eyes still shut, she whispered, ‘Got a job for you.’

  One of Tina’s hands moved across the sheet, her fingers grabbing at the material as if for purchase, the effort seemingly monumental. ‘Stuff. To. Sort.’ She succumbed to a cough thick with phlegm that didn’t clear her throat. This seemed to rob her of what energy she had mustered.

  ‘It can wait.’ Stella’s voice was hoarse. She bit her tongue and the pain summoned up saliva, but made no lasting difference.

  ‘It can’t.’ Tina fixed her with a glare.

  ‘OK, what’s the job?’ Talking about work returned a vestige of normality to the situation. She patted down Tina’s covers until there were no creases. ‘Cleaning can wait until... until you’re out.’

  Tina became agitated. She raked her hair from her forehead and stared wildly at Stella as if she had just seen her and was outraged that she was there. It was exactly as Stella had feared. Tina hated being seen like this.

  ‘No!’ Tina’s eyes were bright and her voice strong. ‘Not cleaning. I need to pay. God. Forgives.’ Her tongue clacked against the roof of her mouth. ‘Make good.’

  ‘Have a drink.’ Stella picked a plastic beaker of water with its straw off a bedside locker and brought it to Tina’s mouth. She nudged the straw between her lips.

  Liquid climbed the straw and dropped. It rose again as Tina applied every ounce of strength to suck on it. Were it possible, her cheeks became more sunken. At last water reached her mouth and dribbled in. She swallowed with the sound of a drain. Stella was reminded of her nana drinking her morning tea, sitting up in bed.

  At last Tina shut her eyes and with fluttering fingers signed that she had had enough.

  ‘Before you leave, please tackle the dishes. They’re piling up.’ She was fierce. ‘Wash them all up or that man in the conical hat will have words.’

  ‘I don’t think—’ Stella looked about the room, but the only things that could be washe
d up were the beaker and a jug of water. There were no dishes. And surely they had staff to wash up.

  ‘Tell him to go.’ Tina Banks stabbed a finger towards the end of her bed. ‘Gobstopper...’

  Stella looked where she was pointing, but there was no one there. No gobstoppers either. Horrified, she realized that Tina was hallucinating. She was talking gibberish.

  ‘Tina, there’s no...’ Stella looked desperately at the door. She should call someone. She had heard somewhere that it was better to go with a person’s hallucinations or they got anxious. Or was it the other way around and you should put them right?

  Tina coughed and spluttered, ‘Cat in a hat. Two things. Fork. Bag. Look behind the fire.’ She jerked her head and then spoke normally: ‘No point calling for nurses, one sniff of smoke and they get out.’

  ‘There isn’t a fire.’ Stella wasn’t going to humour Tina about such a serious thing. ‘There would have been an alarm.’ She hoped she was right.

  ‘You’ll take me with you?’ She clutched at Stella. ‘Don’t leave me here.’

  She must bring Tina back to reality. ‘I’m due at your office tomorrow, shall I leave your flat until you’re back?’

  ‘Dust gathers. Did you get the contract at Kew?’ Tina was herself. Talk of cats in hats seemed to have passed.

  ‘Yes.’ Stella slumped back in her chair. ‘We started this week.’

  ‘Did it go well?’

  ‘Yes. Actually no.’ Tina was a lawyer, she dealt with the truth. ‘I found a man in the Marianne North Gallery.’ She took a breath. ‘He was dead.’

  Tina raised herself up on her elbows but then collapsed back on her pillows. ‘It wasn’t a cat!’ She began to chant. ‘Forward Hammersmith Road, Forward Hammersmith Broadway, Left Butterwick, Right Talgarth Road, Right...’ She snatched at the sheet as if trying to pull it off. Then she was still.

  For some time there was silence, broken only by a murmur in the passage. Stella checked her phone and was surprised to find she had only been in the room seven minutes. She tidied the top of Tina’s bedside cabinet, threw away a scrunched-up tissue and lined up the jug with the beaker and a box of tissues. She moved a copy of The Cat in the Hat out of the way of the water. The well-thumbed pages were crinkled as if water had already been spilt on them. It explained Tina’s going on about the cat. She supposed that illness had caused Tina to regress. She knew that, aside from client briefs and legal documents, Tina didn’t read. She was startled by Tina’s voice, loud and clear.

  ‘I want you to catch a murderer!’

  Tina started to cough. Stella offered water, but Tina waved the glass away. The coughing got worse. Stella pulled the emergency cord.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  November 2014

  Over the next days, the weather grew colder as autumn gave way to winter. Biting winds ripped the last of the leaves off the deciduous trees in Kew Gardens and pelting rain reduced them to mulch.

  Two days after the discovery of the body of Joseph Hooker in the Marianne North Gallery, Martin Cashman sanctioned the reopening of the gardens. At the end of the week, crime-scene tape was removed from the gallery and the public were allowed in. Stella resumed her cleaning shift.

  Contrary to fears, visitor numbers to Kew Gardens and to the gallery rose dramatically. Interest was less in Marianne North’s pictures than in the antechamber where Hooker was found. Martin had withheld the cause of death from the press. This created a vacuum that seethed with speculation (the dead man’s name was a gift for journalists keen to draw links with his nineteenth-century namesake): Was Joseph Hooker murdered by a frustrated botanist?

  Sightseers took surreptitious snaps, although no one knew the exact place where the body was found. One enterprising girl from a local prep school was filmed by a classmate sprawled on the floor. This earned her some notoriety on Instagram and suspension from school for a week.

  Armchair sleuths speculated the victim had been poisoned. They researched toxins from rare botanical species such as Physostigma venenosum which caused death by asphyxiation and was obtainable at Kew. The elegant Victorian tiles – terracotta being the colour of dried blood – were examined by those steeped in Dexter and Silent Witness for ‘blood spatter’ and ‘human traces’. Consensus was that the gardens, suffused with history, demanded a fictional detective from the past, Lord Peter Wimsey, Sherlock Holmes or Miss Marple, not the Met’s present-day besuited CID.

  Two days after the murder, it had emerged that Joseph Hooker was alive and not so well. Jane Church returned from her trip into the bush and said that Hooker was her father. He was living in a care home in Sydney. When the police questioned him, he admitted that he had lost his wallet on a visit to London a year ago. Anxious to disguise suspected dementia, which would disqualify him from a room in the care home, he hadn’t reported it.

  Stella’s hunch that the victim had a false ID was right, but Martin didn’t applaud her because now the victim had no name or confirmed nationality. Despite the tan, given the licence was not his, he might not even be Australian. His features, apparently in repose, were issued to Interpol and published in the foreign press, including the Australian media. So far the only people to come forward were those complaining about seeing a dead man’s face in their paper. No one had identified him. Stella’s mum, keen to help, sent a lengthy text detailing that she had no idea who he was. By the end of the week, other news pushed the murder to the inside pages and Marianne North’s marble bust, in the porch of her gallery, was left in comparative peace. An elderly man with a rucksack resumed his daily vigil on a bench in the gallery. He had been hospitalized with pneumonia at the time of the murder so, frustratingly for Martin, had an alibi.

  The heavier ‘footfall’ after the murder had meant that Stella increased her mopping to three times a week. Against the advice of Martin and Jackie, she continued to do this by herself.

  ‘Take Dan the Man, not that he’d be protection.’ Martin drained his pint of Fuller’s London Pride and rapped the glass down on the table.

  Stella suspected that Jack would be the best person to protect her from a murderer, but didn’t say so.

  Tonight, their third outing to the Ram, they had graduated to food. Cashman was doing long hours on the case and had got into the habit of coming around to Stella’s around midnight to update her on progress. Tonight, the case having reached an impasse, he had awarded himself a meal in the pub. His late-night visits had put Stella off inviting Jack over. Since Tina had said the odd thing about a murderer – not to mention the cat in the hat – she hadn’t spoken to Jack.

  ‘We think the murder was premeditated. The killer could come back. I’m worried about you.’ Martin squeezed her hand. ‘You may have seen something incriminating that puts you at risk.’

  ‘I didn’t see anything.’ Again Stella had the feeling that this wasn’t true, but whenever she tried to conjure up that morning, it was a blank. Aware of Martin’s hand covering hers, she couldn’t think.

  The Ram had been her dad’s local. Stella didn’t believe in ghosts, but in this pub she would catch his shadow on the wood-panelled walls as if he had passed there on his way to the toilet and would come back any minute. Perhaps Cashman had felt this too because he added, ‘Terry would say this too.’

  This had the effect of steeling Stella’s nerve. Terry had never waited up for her when she was a teenager because she had lived with her mum in Barons Court. He had once said that the ‘thing about you Stell, is you can handle yourself, no one pulls the wool over your eyes’. She sipped her ginger beer. ‘The killer might be anywhere in Kew Gardens. We can’t stop cleaning altogether. It’s hard to hide in the gallery; there are no rooms. Besides, you don’t think the murder was random.’

  Cashman had to agree with this.

  Each time Cashman left Rose Gardens North, he had kissed her. Not the passionate kiss that Jack thought he had seen, but a peck on the cheek.

  Contemplating her hand, still in his, Stella said, ‘You don�
�t need to look after me.’ She liked the feel of his hand though.

  ‘It’s what your dad would have wanted.’ He clasped her hand in both of his.

  ‘You’re married,’ Stella said abruptly. She pulled her hand away.

  ‘We’re getting a divorce. I’ll have one of your “fresh starts”, please, Stell!’

  Stella cleaned for many single men who had lost partners through death or divorce. She put them into two groups. There were those who were crushed by the loss, grew beards and lived off takeaways. They left a trail of cartons, cans and bottles around their homes. When a third party recognized crisis point Clean Slate was brought in and restored order while the man’s friends and relatives took him to the barbers and made him wash. After a series of blind dates and city breaks he landed a new partner and Stella’s job was done. She preferred this type to the other sort, who were bent on substituting the partner ASAP. They saw Clean Slate as a dating agency, there to provide a match who would segue into their routine as if it had never been interrupted. Adept at fending off unwanted attentions, Stella handled these jobs. Once she had broken her rule and had a relationship with ‘Type Two’. She wouldn’t make the mistake again. Cashman was in this group. She would steer clear.

  Since Stella had found the dead man she had seen Martin Cashman every day.

  ‘This case is beating me, Stell.’ Martin took her hand again and began counting through fingers, one by one. ‘We’ve interviewed everyone at Kew. Nothing. Someone’s hiding something because it has to be an inside job. It’s virtually impossible to climb that wall and certainly to get into the gallery.’

  ‘They could have hidden until the gardens closed.’ Stella had contradicted her earlier argument. Luckily he didn’t notice.

  Martin ran his hand up her arm, under the sleeve of her jacket. His fingers were warm.

  ‘How are your kids taking the split-up?’ she heard herself ask.

  Martin let go of her hand and raked through his hair. ‘They’ve got their own lives. It’s good for them to see another side of us both. Life’s not all discipline and routine. It’s messy too.’ He teased a lock of hair off her forehead.