The House With No Rooms

by Lesley Thomson

  The rest of the receipts ran until the middle of August and were for more junk food from the same shops. A taxi receipt was unexpected, because, as she had told Cliff Banks, Terry never took taxis; he had always preferred to drive himself. Next to this was a day ticket to Kew Gardens. She experienced the same astonishment as she had when she found the ‘Friend of Kew’ membership card and coaster. The Botanical Gardens were the last place she associated with Terry. He had no time or patience to wander in glasshouses. It was dated the same day as the Ferry Lane parking ticket. It seemed that once in Kew he had bought a pot of tea and two slices of cake. If his car was in the car park, why had he taken a taxi? And who was with him?

  She clipped the receipts together and tucked them into her Filofax. Knowing precisely when Terry had staked out the house by Kew Pond didn’t tell them why he had. Like the murderer that Tina had wanted them to catch, there was no evidence on which to build a theory. No victim. No murderer. Nothing but shadows.

  She fed Stanley, let him out in the garden, and left him snoozing in his bed. Jackie would bring him into the office.

  On the way to Kew, Stella realized with a shock what Terry had been doing on 12 August. He was with her. That day in 2010 had been the first time since she was little that Terry had treated her on her actual birthday. How could she have forgotten?

  He had bought her chocolate cake with hundreds and thousands, thinking it was her favourite, so she hadn’t admitted that, along with fizzy drinks, she had never liked chocolate cake.

  A text arrived as she was carrying her mop and bucket of water into the Marianne North Gallery. Not Jack.

  I can come to Banks funeral on 17th with you. Martin. Instinctively Stella glanced towards the doors, thinking Martin might appear. She had locked the door; no one could get in. Stella felt a frisson of annoyance. Another text pinged. Expecting Martin, she saw it was from Michelle. Funeral 2pm Monday 17th Mortlake Crem. Stella shivered; Jack held store in synchronicity, but this unnerved her. While a woman of action herself, Stella resented the speed at which Tina’s sister and father had organized her funeral.

  Tina had been Martin’s adversary, winning cases that allowed his suspects – and it seemed Terry’s – to get off. No one that Stella had gone out with had offered to support her like this. How did Martin know the date of her funeral? But then he was a detective.

  Stella texted: If free on Monday 2pm 17th, wd u come to Tina’s funeral? x

  The reply was instant. Yes. Jack x.

  Chapter Forty-One

  November 2014

  Stella and Jack walked up the broad stone steps from Syon Vista to the Palm House. An aeroplane rumbled above as they entered the glasshouse.

  Palm trees stretched upwards to the soaring glass roof. Drops of warm condensation plopped on waxy leaves and splashed their faces. A soundscape of twittering and screeching birds contributed to the subtropical atmosphere. After the biting cold air outside, the clammy heat was a relief, but they had taken only a few steps before their clothes hung heavy. Stopping on the metal fret-worked gangway, shrouded by fronds, Stella bundled her anorak over an arm. In her other hand she held a carrier bag.

  ‘The Palm House is a good place to eavesdrop on visitors,’ Jack whispered.

  Stella put from her mind that he could be speaking from personal experience. ‘I can’t stay long, I have to pick up Stanley before Jackie goes home.’ She didn’t add that she wanted to go back and change before Cashman came over. Again she promised herself that she would tell Jack about Martin, but not now. Besides, she argued with herself, Jack never said what he was doing.

  ‘I’m going to supper with Jackie this evening,’ Jack said, proving her wrong. ‘I’m sure she’d love you to come, unless you’re otherwise engaged.’

  He knew! Jackie knew about Cashman because he had rung the office to speak to Stella and Jackie had answered. She wouldn’t have told Jack.

  ‘Do you remember the drought in the summer of 1976?’ Jack asked, seemingly apropos of nothing.

  ‘The woman next door had her flat fumigated because fleas from her cat bred in the heat. My mum said her legs were black with them.’ She clearly remembered Suzie telling her that. Shame she didn’t have better recall of more recent events, like her birthday four years ago. And whatever it was about the morning she found the dead man in the Marianne North Gallery.

  Stella had suggested that she and Jack go to Kew Gardens for tea. Jackie had approved the idea. ‘You need to clear your head.’ Since Jack’s comment about eavesdroppers in the Palm House, she couldn’t shake the conviction that someone was crouching deep in the jungle-like foliage. Despite the heat, Stella shivered and, shrugging back into her anorak, when they came upon an exit she took it.

  They passed a row of statues called the Queen’s Beasts. Stella paused by a dog on its hind legs, posing like Stanley begging for a biscuit: the White Greyhound of Richmond.

  ‘There should be one called the Apricot Poodle of Hammersmith!’ Jack said gaily. ‘Magical to think that, after dark, the Beasts leap off their plinths and have free rein here.’ He stopped by one named the Yale of Beaufort. ‘The Yale’s horns can swivel in any direction.’ He sounded impressed.

  ‘Let’s have tea.’ Stella didn’t want to think of any creature having free rein in Kew Gardens after dark. She set off around the lake to the café.

  *

  Jack raised his eyebrows. ‘Is one of us eight years old?’

  They were seated at a table near the gift shop. Jack had managed to get a mug of hot milk and she was pouring extra hot water into a pot of tea. A slice of chocolate cake coated with hundreds and thousands with two forks lay on the table between them.

  ‘You don’t like chocolate,’ he added.

  Stella was gratified that Jack had remembered. It was strange that Terry had got her chocolate cake. Her mum said he had wanted to keep her as a little girl and couldn’t accept she had grown up. But one thing Stella did remember was that Terry had treated her like an adult from early on. It was her mum who objected to make-up and loud music. Terry had been surprised when, in her teens, she ordered a sundae; he had offered her a coffee. Yet on her forty-fourth birthday he had got her chocolate cake with hundreds and thousands. ‘Terry gave it to me. We came here for my birthday in 2010.’

  ‘A madeleine!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s a cake in Proust; the memory of eating it takes him back to his childhood.’ Jack beamed. ‘Are you hoping it will jog your memory?’

  ‘The afternoon we came here is a blank.’ As ever Jack had guessed right. She told him about the receipts. ‘Your hunch about Dad watching that house was spot on.’

  ‘My hunches generally are,’ Jack said peaceably.

  ‘The receipts show his movements over about five days in 2010.’

  ‘Lucie May told me that something you said to Terry in 2010 showed him kids could lie. Was it while you were here?’

  ‘Dad knew children lie. The police have no illusions.’ Stella dabbed at stray sprinkles with her finger and licked them off. She cut off some cake with the side of her fork and popped it in her mouth, grimacing in expectation of the sweetness. ‘This was the last place I’d have expected Terry to suggest for tea.’ She glanced across at a woman at the next table who was tackling a green salad. ‘He was a fry-up and doughnut man.’

  ‘Maybe he knew you’d prefer this?’

  ‘He was here for work.’ As she said it, Stella saw that it was true. ‘Terry bought the cake as a prop in a crime reconstruction.’

  ‘You think someone was murdered at a tea table in Kew Gardens?’ Jack was wide-eyed.

  ‘No, it’s an oblique reference. I do think cake features somehow. It was out of character for Dad to buy me cake, Mum would have told him off. It makes sense if it was a case.’ Stella was now sure Terry was investigating a crime.

  ‘But he’d retired by then.’

  ‘Officially, yes. But he didn’t stop being a detective.’

  ‘Lucie
said he was worried because he believed he’d let someone get away with murder.’

  ‘How come she’s kept it to herself?’ Stella bristled. What else did Lucie May know?

  ‘At the time I think she just thought it was a throwaway line. He didn’t tell her anything else.’

  Vaguely mollified by Jack’s response, Stella ate another forkful of cake. The sponge was moist; she found she liked the sweetness. That day over four years ago, she hadn’t liked to leave the cake, not wanting Terry to worry that he had got it wrong. Suzie said he was out of touch with his daughter. ‘The cake was part of his reconstruction and so was I.

  ‘We went to the Palm House. The heat made Dad short of breath so I suggested we leave. We came to the café.’ She exclaimed: ‘We sat at this table!’

  ‘Did you ever tell lies when you were little?’

  ‘I said “no” without thinking if that was true. I assumed I never lied, because Dad told me it was wrong to lie.’

  ‘Are you certain?’

  ‘It was like I was one of his suspects. He was casually questioning me. I should have asked why he wanted to know.’ She ate some more cake. Like Jack’s madeleine, it did prompt her memory.

  ‘If a policeman asked you if you had seen someone when you hadn’t, would you lie and say that you had?’

  Even sitting down making no effort, his forehead had been damp with perspiration. In five months he would be dead. Tina had been able to recall the minutest detail about her dad. He had read Tina bedtime stories and called her ‘Crystal’. Stella felt a flicker of envy for Tina although she was dead. She felt sad for Cliff Banks. A child dying before the parent was the wrong order.

  ‘How did you answer?’ Jack pushed the cake plate closer to her.

  Stella jabbed at a morsel of sponge and ate it. ‘I told him I’d never lie to a policeman. But that I said anything to stop him and my mum arguing. He was grilling me about my honesty!’

  Jack shook his head. ‘He wasn’t testing your honesty. You’d have been his benchmark for children. I’m guessing that in June 1976 – during the drought – he interviewed a girl who reminded him of you so he believed what she said, as he believed what you said. Later – in 2010 – he suspected that she had lied and that her lie let someone get away with murder. That afternoon you confirmed it.’

  ‘Terry wouldn’t have been fooled by a little girl.’ Stella cut herself more cake.

  ‘His daughter always told the truth; it skewed his judgement. At the tea you told him that you had lied to keep the peace at home. You had taken it upon yourself to restore order. No change there then!’

  ‘We need to find out who lives at that house. I’ll look up the electoral roll.’ Stella jotted a note in her Filofax, cheered by the prospect of good old-fashioned legwork.

  ‘So many questions. Who was the child? Who was Terry asking about? Once we know who lives in Kew Villa we might get closer to that one,’ Jack said.

  ‘We need to know who lived there in 1976 and 2010.’ Stella added this to her action list. ‘From the receipts it looks as if after the tea Terry never resumed the stakeout. Maybe he got the answer he was looking for. This might be a dead end.’ She flung down her pen.

  ‘Or something more pressing got in the way. Here, I thought you’d be interested in these.’ Jack took two newspaper clippings from his coat pocket and spread them on the table. One of the articles was by Lucie May. Stella saw the name Ramsay. Isabel Ramsay had been her favourite client.

  ‘Did Lucie give you these?’ she asked when she had finished reading them.

  Jack made a non-committal motion with his head. ‘The body was found in what was then called Rose Gardens. When the Great West Road was built they knocked down about twenty houses. All those homes, rooms, pavements, ways of life wiped out so that we can get out of London quicker. Non-existent.’

  ‘Things move on.’ Stella couldn’t regret the loss of houses half a century ago. A clock on the wall said three o’clock. Tina was non-existent. Her appetite gone, she left the last bit of cake. Thinking of Tina, she said, ‘Michelle Banks gave me this the night that Tina died.’ She shoved the carrier bag across the table. ‘Tina wanted me to have these things.’

  Jack gathered up the bag. ‘OK for me to see? They must be personal.’

  ‘Not that personal.’ Stella had been taken aback by the contents of the Boots bag. She didn’t see why Tina had wanted her to have it.

  One by one Jack took out the items and laid them beside the cuttings. A paperback copy of The Cat in the Hat. A pair of pink flip-flops. A woman’s shoe, black with a silver buckle. A photograph of an elderly woman on a settee. On the back, in Tina’s handwriting, it said, ‘Nan (Ivy C.) three days before she died, 1970’. Tina couldn’t have meant her to have it; she must give it to Michelle. She stared at the next object, heavy and cold in her hand. A silver locket. Since Michelle had handed her the bag outside the hospice, she had given its contents only a cursory glance and had missed the locket. It was the one she had found in Tina’s office. The locket that Tina had insisted didn’t belong to her. Jack was examining a sheet of cartridge paper on which, drawn in black ink, were the parts of a tree.

  He read out the caption: ‘Eucalyptus gunnii.’ He became animated. ‘There’s a eucalyptus above the Ruined Arch near the North Gallery. It’s near here.’ He gestured at the door. ‘The bark is beautifully smooth. It’s one of my favourite trees.’

  Stella hadn’t realized that they were close to where she had found the dead man. Her early-morning rides across the gardens in the dark had given her a fractured grasp of the area.

  Jack contemplated the objects on the table. ‘Strange assortment.’

  ‘It’s a mistake. It’ll be what Tina had with her in the hospice and Michelle Banks was confused.’

  ‘Surely that would be valuables like a watch or a purse, maybe a washbag. These flip-flops are small, even for Tina. And a woman’s shoe? Why just one? Ooh, I love The Cat in the Hat.’ Jack began to leaf through the pages.

  ‘So did I,’ Stella said more to herself. She had never told Tina so that didn’t explain that it was here. ‘Michelle should have this picture of their nan.’ She didn’t say that the locket wasn’t Tina’s to give away. ‘It’s a mistake,’ she said again.

  ‘Did you?’ Jack looked surprised.

  ‘Did I what?’

  ‘Like The Cat in the Hat?’

  ‘Dad gave it to me on my first access weekend. I was seven. Mum told him I was too old for picture books.’ She paused and said, ‘I didn’t like the Things.’

  ‘Thing One and Thing Two, the friends of the cat who wreak havoc in the house watched by two horrified children while their mother is away.’ Jack was dreamy. ‘I wished I was Thing One and could turn our house upside down, break crockery, tip up furniture and whirl up and down the staircase shrieking until my father came out of his study. I suppose that the Things made you anxious?’ he said. ‘The cat too. They made such a mess.’

  ‘I liked the machine the cat uses to clean up,’ Stella said. ‘I wanted to use it to put everything back in our house so my mum and dad would stay together.’ She puffed out her cheeks. ‘Stories aren’t real, they make no difference.’

  ‘You’ve several of those machines now!’ Jack clapped his hands. ‘The story did make a difference – it inspired you to start a cleaning company.’

  ‘It encourages lying.’

  ‘Cleaning?’

  ‘The mum asks her kids how they spent their day and they have to decide whether to lie because they don’t think she’ll believe the truth.’

  ‘Yes, it ends with something like, “What would you tell your mother?” I used to tell my mum what I did every day. I didn’t lie,’ Jack said. ‘We had to write letters from boarding school. Since my mum was dead, I had to write to Dad, but I wrote to her because I had nothing to say to him. I wrote that I hoped that she was happy. Wait a minute!’ He dropped the book and grabbed the locket from the table.

  ‘It says here that
a locket was stolen from the Ramsays’ house in the fifties. Silver, heart-shaped. Like this. Could this be the same one?’

  ‘There must be lots of silver lockets.’ Stella finished her tea and crushed the paper cup.

  ‘True. But it might be a link between the robbery in the 1950s and Kew Villa and of course with Tina,’ Jack said.

  ‘Why should there be a link between it and Kew Villa?’ Jack’s brand of logic could leave her bewildered.

  ‘Oh!’ Jack stared at the locket as if he hadn’t seen it before. ‘No reason.’

  Stella suspected that there was something Jack wasn’t telling her. Mindful of seeing Martin, she decided that, whatever it was, for now she preferred not to know.

  They tossed their cups and the plate in the bin and went through to the shop. Fingering the fridge magnets, Stella said, ‘If the kids in the story always told the truth their mum might have trusted them.’

  ‘It’s not every day that a cat in crazy headgear ransacks your house.’ Jack was holding a mug decorated with botanical illustrations, turning it around between his hands. ‘We draw conclusions based on probability. If it happened yesterday, it could happen today.’

  ‘Pretending the cat hadn’t visited would have been lying.’

  ‘It would have been less complicated than trying to convince her. Oh!’ Jack dropped the mug. It smashed on the floor at his feet.

  Stella stooped down and began shovelling the pieces together, avoiding cutting herself on the shards of china. A man appeared with a dustpan and brush. Apologizing, she got to her feet and saw with horror that Jack had picked up another mug. ‘I’ll buy it.’ He nodded to the man with the dustpan. ‘I’ll pay for that too.’

  When they got outside it was dusk and the gardens were closing. The air was brittle with cold. Their breath was like smoke in the café lights. Jack unwrapped the mug.

  ‘Careful,’ Stella cautioned.

  ‘Look.’ Jack held it up. ‘This was what I’d seen.’

  ‘Eucalyptus gunnii,’ Stella read the italic Latin. In smaller letters the copyright was attributed to a George Watson. ‘It’s the picture Tina left me,’ she exclaimed. Then again, this was Kew Gardens so it wasn’t a coincidence to find a mug depicting a eucalyptus.