The House With No Rooms

by Lesley Thomson

  ‘Martin, could you do me a favour?’

  ‘Anything for you, Stell.’

  Stella explained what she wanted, poised for his refusal.

  Cashman’s reply was immediate. ‘I’m on it!’ He kissed her on the forehead and, escorted down the hall by Stanley, left the house.

  Later, with Tina’s locket on the table in front of her, in a voice that lacked conviction, she took a leaf from Tina’s book and dictated a text to Cashman. She didn’t compose it in a mood of revenge as Lucie had urged her to do. She was letting Cashman off the hook since he was obviously bad at endings. Her message was identical to one that she had sent to a previous partner on the day that her dad had died.

  Let’s call it a day. We know it’s not working.

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  November 2014

  A keen wind pushed at bare trees and rustled bushes; it raced across the lawns that were grey in the dying light. It was only ten to four in the afternoon, but the lowering sky was hastening the night. The muted roar of an aeroplane, lost in cloud, made the air throb.

  Taking the path from the Elizabeth Gate, Jack timed the interval between planes. One minute and fourteen seconds. Risk measurement relied on the premise that if something happened yesterday it might happen today. Yet there was much that had happened yesterday that no one knew about. Fred West had murdered for years before he was discovered, a True Host who had welcomed his victims into his home of ever-expanding rooms. Murders committed on a hundred yesterdays lay undiscovered in makeshift graves and beneath concrete footings. Unrecorded, they didn’t exist. While his visit to Kew Villa remained a secret, could it be said to be non-existent? However much Jack tried to be open and honest, secrets held him in a vice. He was in no position to judge Cashman.

  True Hosts relied upon most people’s cosy assumption that a bad thing was unlikely to happen.

  Jackie said: ‘We can’t live waiting for something bad to happen.’ She left the front door open when she put bottles in the recycling bins; she pulled the curtains after it was dark giving anyone in the shadows a chance to map her living room. She wouldn’t notice if someone was trailing her, learning her habits and routines. Yet Jackie wasn’t naïve; she feared for the safety of her sons, particularly Nick who rode a motorbike, but she expected only good of life. Jack lived in fear of something happening to Jackie. It was a ‘fact’ that the good die young.

  No wonder Bella had laughed when he had warned her about Watson. The man with the gerbera at Tina Banks’s funeral, who he now knew wasn’t Tina Banks’s father, wasn’t a True Host. He lacked the precision of step and the cold certainty; his hand had trembled when he laid the flower on the sleek black casket. True Hosts are psychopaths, unable see beyond themselves. Other people kill on impulse and out of desperation or cowardice. Watson mightn’t be a True Host, but had he killed his wife? Or had Matthew Ayrton committed an actual murder? Jack felt the case, already nebulous, drifting into fog.

  He shouldered through the doors of the Marianne North Gallery and was enveloped by the quiet. He gazed at the richly polished wood panels and the octagonal pattern in the tiles at his feet. His heart leapt at the beauty awaiting him in the hundreds of paintings on every wall. Thin morning light trickled down from the windows high above. He thought he was alone and gave a start when he saw Stella sitting on a bench facing the chamber where she had found the body, her rucksack at her feet. She was leafing through a bundle of papers.

  ‘All right, Jack?’

  Her tone gave nothing away. Had Cashman told her?

  ‘The police got an anonymous phone call about Rosamond Watson. The exact words were: “Ask Watson where his wife is.” Although it wasn’t a job for CID, Terry went along. We were right about one of those sets of figures on Watson’s drawing: it’s the telephone number for a public phone box outside the Kew Herbarium. It’s still there. I’ve just checked it and, apart from the area code, it’s the same number: 0208 940 2418.’

  ‘How do you know this?’ Jack was astonished. Stella must have asked Cashman to go on the HOLMES database. And he had agreed.

  Stella handed him the papers.

  Jack joined her on the bench and, fumbling for his reading glasses in his coat, put them on. The sheet was headed Enquiry Kew Villa – telephone call.

  ‘Martin Cashman emailed it this morning.’ Stella didn’t look at him. Jack blinked as the floor tiles seemed to reconfigure, merging and separating. Cashman hadn’t confessed that he had gone back to his wife. Stella had told him about their case.

  I spoke to Mr George Watson, the owner of Kew Villa, the address cited in the call. I explained that the police had received a telephone call that raised concern for his wife’s safety. I regretted that I wasn’t at liberty to say who had rung. I refrained from informing Mr Watson that the call was anonymous. I enquired if he could surmise who would initiate such a call.

  It is my suspicion that Mr Watson knew the identity of the caller but was unwilling to divulge a name. He assured me his wife was fine and invited me to stay for her to return.

  A girl was present during this exchange. Christina Banks, aged 9 years, was of a calm and honest disposition. She told me that Mrs Watson gave her milk and ‘chocolate cake with hundreds and thousands’ and then ‘popped out’. Her account and a reference to a locket worn by Mrs Watson was credible. On this basis, I considered it unnecessary to wait.

  Conclusion: hoax call intended to malign Mr Watson. Perhaps arising from a disagreement at Mr Watson’s place of work or a domestic issue now resolved. Unless there are further calls, no action required.

  ‘Lucie said Dad “let someone get away with murder”. Here’s the proof. On the basis of Dad’s report, the file was closed.’

  Stella played with the zip of her anorak. In the silence, Jack became aware of the drone of the air-conditioner. He glanced about him; they were alone in the gallery.

  ‘Something happened to change his mind.’

  Stella had got the transcript from Cashman. He couldn’t bear that she was being duped. Regardless of Jackie’s advice he began, ‘Stella, I need to tell—’

  ‘Later perhaps Dad saw that leaving without seeing Mrs Watson was a serious slip. He had taken the word of a girl – Tina – and the husband. Both unreliable sources.’

  Jack flapped the papers. ‘This suggests that Terry was swayed by Tina’s “testimony”, not the husband’s. It wasn’t Tina he saw, but you, his honest daughter.’ The Stella that Jack knew would never have asked Cashman for the file. Jackie was wrong; she must be in love. ‘Around summer 2010 something that you said made him review this visit in 1976.’

  Stella got up and went into the antechamber where the body had been. A disembodied voice replied, ‘He had an argument with Mum.’

  ‘I thought they didn’t meet after you got too old for access weekends.’

  ‘It was on the phone. Mum accused him of putting me on a pedestal.’

  Jack heard the scrape of a footstep. Behind him the doors to the porch were closed. The gallery, clad in glass, wood and tiles, played tricks with the acoustics. The sound was Stella.

  ‘She told him I hated the dolls he used to give me and had lied to please him.’

  Suzie Darnell was still tough on her ex- and now dead husband.

  ‘Dad had tried to get hold of me when he heard about that taxi driver going on a shooting spree in Cumbria. He was worried I was OK. Mum told me later: I think she felt bad for what she’d said.’

  ‘The second of June 2010.’ Days of death were burnt into his soul. ‘Were you in Whitehaven then?’ Stella seldom left West London.

  ‘No. Terry was just worried I might be. He got in touch after the Hungerford massacre in 1986. I’ve never been there either. He checked on me after any major incident. During the London bombings he was frantic. Mum says he was neurotic.’

  ‘More likely he was well aware that the unlikely can happen. It was proof that you were never far from his mind.’ Jack knew that in the face of a disaste
r he too would check that Stella was all right.’

  Stella was in the doorway of the antechamber. ‘I can’t see that it would prompt him to review his visit to Kew Villa in 1976.’

  ‘It might have. At the tea in Kew Gardens, you confirmed to him that when you were little you lied to keep the peace. He could well have faced the likelihood that Tina had lied to him so staked out Kew Villa to catch a glimpse of Mrs Watson.’

  ‘Why didn’t he just knock on the door and ask for her?’ Stella’s voice rang around the gallery.

  ‘Maybe he did. Or maybe he thought Watson would remember him. If he was guilty, he might have feared your dad would return. There’s so much about this that we don’t know.’ Jack looked about him. North’s paintings held their counsel.

  Stella went on: ‘Unless Tina was telling the truth and Mrs Watson was alive when Terry went round.’

  Jack told her about his conversation with Bella. How he had mistaken Ayrton for Watson and that Tina had admitted to stealing the locket when she saw them shortly before her death. ‘The hoax call suggests that someone knew she was dead or in danger. An obvious suspect is Matthew Ayrton, but if he was suspicious about Rosamond Watson he wouldn’t have stopped at one call. He’s sadistic, he would have terrorized Watson.’

  ‘This means that we have two suspects: Ayrton and Watson; and a likely victim. Still nothing concrete.’ Stella sighed.

  ‘Tina had stolen the locket from the Watsons. Maybe Watson found out and that was why Tina lied for him.’

  ‘Bella told you that Ayrton bullies Watson. He could have been blackmailing Watson all this time.’ Stella sniffed the air. ‘When I found the man in here, I had smelled stale tobacco smoke. When they found the pack of cigarettes on the body I thought that was the source, but the killer could have been here when I arrived, or just left.’

  ‘Watson gets into work early. That’s how I came to mix him up with Ayrton. He could easily have been in the North Gallery and then come to the Herbarium. The receptionist commented that Watson often forgot to sign in. Ayrton hadn’t either. Less an oversight than a deliberate intention to mislead.’ Jack was still cross with himself for mistaking Ayrton for Watson. He went back to Stella’s observation. ‘Apart from smelling smoke, was there anything else you noticed?’

  ‘Cashman asked me that. There was, but it’s gone.’

  Jack was piqued that Cashman had got there first. He noticed that Stella hadn’t called him ‘Martin’.

  ‘Odd that Dad didn’t tell Lucie,’ Stella said. ‘He only dropped hints. He didn’t even tell Cashman.’

  ‘It was a basic error not to have waited to see Mrs Watson. Perhaps he wasn’t keen to admit that to Lucie and maybe he didn’t trust Cashman as much as Cashman likes to imagine.’ Jack bit his tongue to stop the sniping.

  ‘Cashman could easily establish if Rosamond Watson’s dead or alive,’ Stella said. ‘The locket Tina gave me has to be the one that was stolen from the Ramsays. I think the man who died in here was James Hailes. Lucie said Kew Villa was left in trust to Watson and if Rosamond died it was to go to Hailes. That gives Watson the motive to kill him. And he has the means to enter the gallery after hours. We should tell Cashman.’

  ‘If we give him a bunch of screen grabs from Street View, tell him about a boarding pass and show him Tina’s bag of odds he’ll send us packing.’ Not true. Cashman would listen to Stella. He would take over the case. He would keep Stella involved, but would cut Jack out. He would see Stella and his wife. ‘Have you said anything?’ He was torturing himself.

  ‘Of course not. It’s conjecture. You and I need to agree before I speak to him. And there are lots of silver lockets.’ Stella didn’t sound convinced.

  Not with ‘G’ and ‘R’ on the back, Jack thought, but didn’t say.

  Stella went through to the back gallery where Tina had told Emily she had seen a murder. Jack followed her.

  A dull glow emanated from a screen on which was scrolling Marianne North’s timeline. A grainy photo of the artist in voluminous skirts painting on a veranda appeared with the caption Marianne North in Ceylon.

  Stella was peering into an old wooden cupboard opposite the rear exit. ‘This must be where Tina hid.’

  One side of the cupboard was given to shelves, but on the other side was a compartment with enough room for a child to crouch. Bella had boasted that she would have found Tina if she had looked for her. Successful concealment, as Jack knew, relied on a person not properly looking. The space was now crammed with plastic signs. He flipped through them: ‘Cleaning in Progress’, ‘Marianne North Gallery’, ‘Shirley Sherwood Gallery’. He felt a tingling and looked beyond the signs into the shadows. He imagined whispering to the frightened girl that it would all end happily. But it wouldn’t be true. There was no such thing as a happy ending. Yet, he suspected that even at nine, and since she had read The Cat in the Hat, Chrissie Banks had known that.

  ‘Chrissie told Emily that she saw the Cat in a Hat carrying a box with two things,’ he remembered Bella scoffing that it must be a lie.

  ‘Pages twenty-eight and twenty-nine,’ Stella said. ‘The Two Things wreak more havoc.’

  ‘You remember the page numbers.’ He was thrilled.

  ‘Because I found a copy of those cuttings you showed me in Tina’s book. It was tucked between those two pages. Everything that Tina did was deliberate.’

  Jack felt his way as the fog in his mind thinned. ‘Tina saw a man not a cat. He had a box holding two things. As in items.’ He crouched beside the cupboard and, with a child’s eye view, surveyed the room. The vanilla and terracotta tiles fanned away. The pictures seemed to crowd around him. ‘Read the notes from your visit to Tina in the hospice.’

  Stella flicked through her Filofax. ‘Forward Hammersmith Road, Forward Hammersmith Broadway, Left Butterwick.’ She stopped. ‘Cliff Banks told me this is one of the runs taxi drivers learn for the Knowledge, so Tina wasn’t rambling.’

  ‘I doubt she was ever rambling. Skip the street names then.’

  ‘“Cat in a hat. Two things. Fork. Bag. Look behind the fire,”’ Stella read with Tina’s halting speech.

  Jack scrambled up. He knocked against one of the signs. ‘Fire Exit’. It depicted a stick figure running. ‘From her hiding place Chrissie had seen the murderer enter the gallery through the rear door. He carried two things, a fork and a bag. Assuming the fork wasn’t cutlery, but a garden fork, he was going to bury the body.’

  ‘So why couldn’t she have said that?’ Stella pinched the bridge of her nose ruminatively. ‘I suppose she was too ill.’

  ‘Too painful. I didn’t speak for weeks after my mum died. Tina – Chrissie – saw Rosamond Watson being murdered by her husband. It must have made no sense. She wiped it. Only when she was dying did it return and she knew she must tell you. She needed to tell you; she hoped it would save her.’

  ‘How could telling me cure the cancer?’

  ‘It couldn’t, but people do a lot to avoid death.’

  There was a ping. Stella had received a text. Jack guessed it was Cashman. ‘Is that Cashman?’ He could have kicked himself.

  Stella read the text. ‘Cliff Banks wants me to clean Tina’s flat tonight.’

  Jack hadn’t seen Banks at Tina’s funeral; he had mistaken Watson for her grieving father. From Stella’s description, he sounded devastated by Tina’s death. Stella missed her father. If each could assuage the other’s need, that could only be good. Especially now that Stella had lost a friend too. No one could replace Jack’s mother, but Jackie came close. Not that Jackie needed a son; she had two already.

  ‘George Watson doesn’t look as if he’d hurt a fly,’ Stella said as she replied to Banks’s text.

  ‘Reginald Christie looked like a bank manager, but he strangled at least eight women before he was hanged at Pentonville in the fifties.’ Jack thought back to Tina’s words. ‘Odd to bring the fork in here. He would have had to lug it out with the body.’

  ‘Murderers make mis
takes,’ Stella said. ‘A small error given he got away with murder.’ She opened the back door and made her way out of the disabled exit. Jack went after her. ‘We need to get inside Kew Villa again,’ she said over her shoulder.

  Locked gates gave on to the Kew Road. Evening rush hour was in full swing, with traffic nose to tail in both directions. They took the path that ran past the galleries and went deeper into the gardens. They stopped beneath the Ruined Arch.

  ‘Are you free this evening?’ Stella pushed aside tresses of thickly growing ivy and went into one of several bricked cavities within the arch. Daylight was fading; she was an indistinct shape.

  ‘What had you in mind?’ He pictured shepherd’s pie at Stella’s, but she was going to Tina’s flat. Jack got out his phone and switched on the torch app. Patches of lichen and moss on the crumbling stone shone vivid green and brown in the bright light.

  ‘I want you to clean Kew Villa. I’ve taken Donette off the job. The remit is only downstairs, but do what you can.’ Stella stepped into the light. ‘We need hard evidence before we tell Cashman.’

  Jack felt a leap of excitement. This was a new side to Stella. The wishes and needs of the client came first – within reason; to arrive late or unannounced was, according to her manual, a No. It seemed the rules for investigating cases were different.

  He saw a hidden advantage to her plan. He could say that he had found the cuttings while cleaning. He could show Stella the link between the burglary, the body beneath the Great West Road and Kew Villa. Then he saw that he could never do that. It would be a lie.

  ‘A good place to bury a body close to the Marianne North Gallery would be up there, off the beaten track.’ Stella pointed at a steep slope beside the Ruined Arch covered with dense foliage.

  From the mass of bushes a tree trunk rose skywards. Jack aimed the beam at a notice nailed to the bark. ‘Eucalyptus gunnii!’ he breathed.