The House With No Rooms

by Lesley Thomson

  ‘My friend Tina left me these.’ Stella emptied out the Boots carrier bag and explained why she had it. ‘I found this in the book.’ She gave Lucie the photocopy of the newspaper articles from The Cat in the Hat.

  ‘Jack’s already shown me these.’ Lucie flapped the piece of paper impatiently. ‘I wrote this one so I have a copy in my files. C’mon, Stella!’

  Stella kept her face expressionless. Jack had told her that Lucie had shown the cutting to him. Or had he? Jack could be prudent with the truth.

  Lucie guzzled from a bottle of Evian mineral water; she dashed a drip from her chin with the back of her hand. ‘The robbery was from the home of that family in St Peter’s Square you used to clean for. Ramsay was the name. Obviously you weren’t cleaning for them then, you weren’t a speck in your pa’s eyes. Lah de dah.’ She gave a peremptory sniff and tossed her e-cigarette into a fruit bowl on the coffee table that was filled with packets of painkillers and cold-relief tablets. Stella picked up a strange, not entirely unpleasant smell in the room. Not the e-cigarette. She identified it as a dog-calming spray called Placid Pet and, looking around, spotted the canister on the mantelpiece. She hadn’t brought Stanley, thinking of the havoc he might cause with the papers in Lucie’s front room. Perhaps he would have gone to sleep.

  She updated Lucie with all that they had so far. ‘Tina’s friends told Jack that, in the seventies, Tina pretended to them that the people living at Kew Villa were her parents. In fact she was having botanical drawing lessons with George Watson. She had moved to a prep school from a state primary and couldn’t tell them her dad was a taxi driver or that her mother was a cleaner.’ Stella had been proud that her dad was in the police.

  ‘When I won the scholarship for a place at Burlington Grammar, as it was then, everyone was snooty poo. My sister hated me. I acquired a new accent along with the uniform.’ Lucie May rummaged in a bag of chopped carrots on the sofa and grabbed one, sticking it between her lips. ‘My old man was a prison officer; the girls I knew wouldn’t have seen the difference between him and villains in the Scrubs!’ She gave a shout of laughter.

  Stella realized she knew little about Lucie, she had no idea that she had a sister. She referred to the notes she had made before leaving her house. With Lucie it was easy to lose the thread. ‘Did you hear of a body in the Marianne North Gallery in the seventies? It would have been during the drought in June, around the time you think that Terry talked to this mystery girl.’

  ‘You don’t have to tell me when the drought was, I was there! The heat was crap for eye make-up, melted soon as you applied it.’ Lucie pinched a bead of wool off her jumper. ‘Deaths galore – the heat saw off the young and old.’ She pulled a face. ‘Nearly saw me off.’

  ‘Tina told her friend Emily that she had seen a murder.’

  ‘A murder in Kew? No chance. I’d have been all over that. Look at the fuss about that bloke you found. By the way, Agent Darnell, you owe me an exclusive on that!’

  Stella could not break Martin’s trust. Lucie was adept at turning fiction into fact. She did tell Lucie about her visit that afternoon, including seeing the coat on the banister and finding the boarding pass belonging to James Hailes. She told her about the Clean Slate contract and Jackie’s database entry.

  ‘You’re your daddy’s girl!’ Lucie used Tina’s old phrase. She embarked on another carrot, half shutting one eye as if screening smoke. ‘I’ve actioned your request for information and done some ferreting.’

  ‘And?’ Stella asked.

  ‘And nothing unless you cut me a deal. This better not be a waste of time for us both.’ Lucie May was steely.

  It didn’t pay to forget that Lucie was a ruthless reporter before anything else.

  ‘When the police investigation is over, I’ll tell you about finding the body.’ Martin couldn’t object to that.

  ‘You strike a hard bargain,’ Lucie huffed. ‘Cashman’s mind’s not on his job so it might not be over in our lifetime!’

  ‘Done!’ Stella could be ruthless too.

  Lucie nestled into the sofa. ‘OK, so this is the background check on the Hailes family that you asked for. Kew Villa has been in the Hailes family since the Second World War.’

  ‘I know that,’ Stella barked.

  ‘Patience! I can’t work without context. The daughter Rosamond was born and grew up there as did an older brother James. She married George Watson in 1962. No kids. So it wasn’t their little girl who put a spell on Terry. The mum died having Rosamond; the death certificate is dated the day after Rosamond was born. Says “Cause of death: pneumonia”. Old Harold Hailes – the dad – shuffled off in 1962 and, according to his will, left his son a hundred pounds. Sounds OK until you see that little sis, the fair Rosamond, got Kew Villa. Jimmy must have been incandescent. I haven’t made a will – God knows who’ll get this – my sister, unless I pull my finger out.’ Lucie May essayed a sketchy wave taking in the living room cluttered with books and files. ‘You could preserve it for posterity. Over-awed visitors could troop in to view the sit-up-and-beg Remington on which the Great One bashed out her stories.’ Lucie’s corncrake laugh halted mid-flow, perhaps picturing the cold reality of life after her death. ‘Jimmy does a vanishing act – it’s as if he doesn’t exist. If he went to India that explains it. Here’s my take: Rosamond Watson was done away with by the big brother.’

  ‘If he’d murdered her, would he have inherited the house?’

  ‘It was left in trust to Rosamond. After her death it would go to Jimmy, not Watson. Motive!’

  ‘Not if he was in India in 1976 when we think she was murdered.’

  ‘Who says he was? I’ll chase that up.’ As Stella had feared, like a rugby ball detached from a scrum, Lucie had hold of the case and was off down the field.

  ‘But he didn’t inherit in 1976,’ Stella pointed out.

  ‘Maybe he was playing a long game,’ Lucie said, looking fleetingly deflated.

  An idea struck. It was a leap across an abyss with no accompanying evidence. ‘Was the little girl that Terry spoke to Tina Banks?’ A blurred jigsaw picture was emerging. ‘Tina had drawing lessons at Kew Villa in the mid-seventies. If Terry went there, perhaps he saw her.’ Stella argued with herself: ‘Why would he have gone there? For the same reason he had staked out the house decades later.’

  ‘Easy enough to find that out,’ Lucie muttered to her carrot.

  Stella changed tack. ‘Terry took me to Kew Gardens for my birthday in 2010, just after he’d been staking out the house. I don’t believe he chose the Botanic Gardens because he thought I’d like it there; he was working.’

  ‘I got to claim credit, Honey-Bee. I warned Terry not to be like my dad, a stranger to his daughter. If you don’t put the work in, you die alone. I dare say I’d have popped in on him in some care home. You enjoy the outing? The dogs at White City were more my dad’s thing, not that he took me.’ She looked briefly pensive.

  In that instant, more of the afternoon in Kew came back. Stella had trodden on a goose dropping. Terry had offered to clean her shoe. She had refused. She shifted to the edge of the sofa as her thoughts clarified. ‘From what you say, something in 2010 made Terry change his mind about an interview or conversation with a child in 1976. It can’t have been what I said at the tea in Kew Gardens because by then he was already staking out Kew Villa.’

  Lucie was working her way through the bag of carrots at a scary rate. ‘If I could get my hands on Mrs Watson’s bank account, I’d lay a big bet that we’d find it’s in regular use.’

  ‘So you don’t think she’s dead?’

  ‘I do think she is. But our George is playing us. With a flick of his wand he gives the impression that Rosamond has just “popped out”, whipped up a chocolate cake or laid down her knitting needles.’ Lucie seemed to have forgotten that moments before she had her money on the brother, Jimmy Hailes. ‘So your prime suspect is George Watson.’

  ‘Possibly.’ Stella was cagey. ‘Jack thinks Clean Slate was
hired to ensure that Rosamond’s name was on the client database. Watson told me the cleaning is his wife’s domain; he has nothing to do with it.’

  ‘Listen, Stella Darnell.’ Lucie looked stern. ‘Jack refused to get you to lean on Cashman to interrogate the HOLMES computer. But seeing as Scotland Yard’s gone back to his wife – and don’t they all – I’m guessing you’ll be up for twisting his arm a little?’ She did a half-Nelson gesture and bared brilliant white teeth.

  Stella gaped at her. No words would come.

  ‘You didn’t know!’ Lucie May looked genuinely shocked. ‘The Shit-Bird!’ She tossed the half-eaten carrot across the room. It landed in the wastepaper bin.

  ‘How do you know?’ Stella’s voice was weak.

  ‘I’m a reporter, it’s my business to know.’

  The last few nights Cashman had been too busy to come over. It was a high-profile murder; the bosses were on his back. Lucie and her fellow hounds were snapping at his heels. Stella had never doubted Cashman was telling her truth. She observed, more to herself: ‘He could have told me.’

  As if on cue, she got a text. Martin’s name was on the screen. Can I see you? Dazed, she let Lucie take the phone off her.

  ‘Speak of the Horned Devil! Is he going to give you the happy tidings after all? Listen, Stell, here’s a plan. Dump him before he dumps you. You got to come away with your pride.’ She scooted across the room and set about assembling a gin and tonic. ‘A nippet or three for the road? ’

  Stella refused the drink and began texting Cashman.

  ‘Don’t reply now, make him sweat!’ Lucie brandished her lemon-slicing knife.

  Stella wasn’t a games player. Tomorrow. 8pm? She sent the message.

  She pulled an envelope out of her bag and emptied it on to the coffee table next to the bowl of pills. Photocopied pages fanned out. The photographs she had taken in the archive including the boy outside number 25 Rose Gardens; the details of the electoral roll for Kew Villa and Rose Gardens; her Filofax notes and her report of the stakeout of Kew Villa. ‘You’re good at jigsaws,’ she told Lucie. She zipped up her anorak.

  ‘I’m the best,’ Lucie remarked, possibly in response to Stella’s comment, but more likely because the idea had just occurred to her.

  ‘See what you can make of this stuff.’ Stella slung her rucksack on to her shoulder and left.

  ‘Make him pay!’ Lucie cried after Stella as she went down the path into the darkness of British Grove.

  Stella didn’t reply. By then she had decided what she would do.

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  November 2014

  ‘George Watson has been murdered,’ Bella said.

  Jack dropped his spoon. It clattered into his bowl, splashing tomato soup across the table. He dabbed ineffectually at the stains spreading across the white cotton cloth. ‘How?’ Watson was dead. This changed everything. Every True Host had an enemy.

  He was having lunch with Bella in a French restaurant near Kew station. The only other diners were a middle-aged man and woman eating in silence a few metres away and a young man in a corner who, between mouthfuls of food and slugs of beer, was absorbed with his phone, his finger whizzing over the screen. A waiter, a windblown-looking man, brooded out of the window at the street. No one appeared to have heard Bella.

  ‘When did this happen?’ Jack pushed his bowl away, his appetite gone. Someone had taken revenge on their prime suspect.

  ‘Just before I left to meet you.’ Bella was tucking into her smoked salmon roulade.

  Jack had told Stella that he would meet up with Bella and Emily to see what else he could learn about Tina’s claim to have seen a murder. Emily couldn’t come and as Jack walked with Bella across Kew Green from the Herbarium, he was pleased. He rather wanted to see Bella again for herself. Bella Markham had, by her own admission, been an unkind child and, he suspected, wasn’t always a kind adult, but he liked her energy and honesty. They had ordered their food and begun to eat. Then she had made her announcement. Bella worked with dead plants; maybe dead people didn’t faze her.

  ‘I should have seen it coming.’

  Jack had told Bella to be careful of Watson. It hadn’t occurred to him that the True Host himself was in jeopardy. ‘Did you call the police?’

  ‘Unfortunately it’s not a crime.’ Bella drank her wine.

  ‘How is murder not a crime?’

  ‘No one’s actually been murdered, or not yet. Only a matter of time – that Matthew’s a psychopath.’

  ‘Who’s Matthew?’

  ‘You met him.’

  ‘When did I meet him?’ Jack was reeling.

  ‘When you came to the Artists’ Room. The sadistic botanist, remember?’

  ‘The man who wanted you to redo the plate?’ The tomato stains on the cloth appeared to grow, to join up. A haze of red.

  ‘Yes! Thought my memory was dodgy!’ Bella flashed him a smile. ‘You warned me about George but it’s Matthew who is likely to slit your throat and fix you in a jar of Kew Mix. Old George is harmless, spineless even.’ She dabbed at her mouth with her napkin, leaving lipstick kisses on the fabric.

  ‘Anyway, Matthew told George that he’d found a new plant species and that he planned to name it after George. It was a secret, but George couldn’t resist telling me. Never seen him so exercised. Matthew asked George to draw the specimen. He’d found it in the Herbarium – as you know many of the plants in there are yet to be identified. Botanists don’t need to be hoofing off to distant parts of the world, just a rootle in those cupboards could make their name.’ She cackled happily. ‘So, as per, when Matthew saw the plate, he had George redo much of it. Unlike me, George never complains. Matthew was feeding his ego, going on about how Rosulabryum watsonii, the new species, would be accepted by the botanical community and entered in the taxonomy. A lasting tribute to George – and his wife – her name is Rosebud or some such.’

  ‘Rosamond.’ Too late Jack remembered he wasn’t supposed to know. He morphed the name into a sneeze. Luckily Bella didn’t seem to have noticed his slip. He reached over and toyed with the remains of his soup, stirring the spoon about in the bowl.

  ‘The specimen was among the bryophytes, non-vascular plants – mosses and liverwort to you.’ Bella paused for some more wine.

  ‘What happened?’ Jack tried to breathe evenly. Two seconds in, two seconds out.

  ‘Matthew slinks into the Artists’ Room, all smiles. First clue. He only smiles when he’s about to twist the scalpel. He tells George, loud enough for us all to hear, although it was supposed to be their secret, that: “Our hard work has been in vain.” Pompous and puffed-up like a cockerel. “Blame Rosulabryum andicala (Hook.) Ochyra. The species was approved for Kew’s Plant List on the eighteenth of April 1892”.’ Bella tipped up her glass and drank the last drop. ‘In other words, what George had bust a gut drawing wasn’t a new species – it had existed over a hundred years.’

  ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘People dream of achieving immortality through botany. Your name on the Royal Botanic Gardens database and published in botanical journals all over the world. For George, Rosulabryum watsonii was the pinnacle of his ambition. Some artists, and I’m one, get pleasure from bringing dead material to life through drawing. George is a good artist, but it means nothing because he sees himself as a failed botanist.’

  Jack tried to gather his wits. Watson was a botanist.

  ‘...sits in his corner, following orders, at the beck and call of the botanists and good as gold. Keeps himself to himself, doesn’t hang out with the rest of us artists.’ She drank some mineral water and went on, ‘George once let slip that his wife is disappointed in him. So I guess watsonii – having his name immortalized – would have been ample compensation. Ayrton is a bastard!’

  ‘Matthew Ayrton was the man I met?’ Jack gripped the edge of the table.

  ‘Yes, ol’ Fishy Fish Eyes. He’s dead material!’ Bella did the Lucie May laugh and Jack saw what Lucie would have
been like when she was younger.

  ‘Isn’t Ayrton something to do with Kew?’ Jack racked his brains. ‘I mean a long time ago.’

  ‘Yes, Acton Smee Ayrton was the first commissioner of the Office of Works in the Victorian times. He tried to turn Kew Gardens into a park and bundle everything off to the Natural History Museum. He and Joseph Hooker fought tooth and nail. Hooker won. Probably Matthew’s ancestor.’ Bella nudged Jack’s arm away from the tomato soup stains on the cloth.

  ‘It must often happen that a species exists already. Joseph Hooker was constantly lumping plants into one species and wiping out the mooted names of his poor old collectors,’ Jack mused.

  ‘Listen to you, Mr Botanist! Yes, it does happen. But in this case Matthew raised George’s hopes expressly to dash them.’

  ‘You’re saying that he deliberately chose a specimen knowing that it existed?’ Jack was dismayed. ‘No botanist would do that.’ Yet this was the second occasion that Bella had suggested such a thing.

  Bella raised her eyebrows. ‘Ah to live in your world, Jack. I imagine that London Underground drivers don’t try to derail each other. But in the sweet-scented gardens of Kew, it’s dog eat dog! No one could prove it, and if they could, they’d probably bury the evidence because Matthew’s a brilliant botanist.’

  ‘What a waste of time and money,’ Jack murmured.

  ‘You can bet Matthew never submitted George’s invoice for the drawing. George won’t have chased it because he was focused on watsonii. Plus he needs work from Matthew. So lose-lose.’

  ‘There’ll be other plants and other chances.’ Even Bella seemed to have lost a sense of perspective. More serious was that in a few hours Stella was meeting Cashman. Although surely Cashman didn’t hold all Stella’s hopes and dreams.

  ‘It is death!’ Bella insisted. ‘Once your name’s been allocated to a specimen it’s made a taxonomical footprint. It can’t be reused. George can never have a species named after him. Watsonii is extinct. Matthew killed him!’