The House With No Rooms

by Lesley Thomson

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  November 2014

  From across Kew Green, St Anne’s Church chimed seven. A pigeon landed on the window sill, strutted up and down and then flew away. A plastic clock on the table read twenty-three minutes past eleven. The second hand jerked with each tick, but didn’t move forward.

  George Watson didn’t notice. When he needed to know the time he consulted his Rolex watch which, although nearly a century old, kept perfect time.

  In his studio at the top of Kew Villa, he contemplated the liquids with which he brought his dead materials back to life. The Copenhagen Mixture of alcohol and glycerine water and the Kew Mix, a lethal concoction that must on no account leave the Herbarium. George smiled grimly as he imagined Matthew Ayrton’s reaction if he could see the tumbler of Kew Mix beside his scalpel.

  Chin chin, Matthew!

  Methodically he finished the inking in. There was little blank space left on the sheet of acid-free paper. He executed final curves and flourishes. His hand had been steady as he traced the pencil sketch. He was the best artist in Kew, in the world. Ayrton could not do without him. He knew more about botany than Ayrton did.

  He had realized who made that telephone call in 1976 as soon as the policeman told him about it, but said nothing. He had understood, before it was laboriously explained to him, that it was an insurance policy. A warning shot across his bows in case he should feel tempted to confide in anyone else.

  ‘Get a grip, George. You must learn to keep secrets.’

  Then Jimmy Hailes had turned up and the nightmare started again. He could keep secrets. When he found the flip-flops outside the gallery he had kept to himself that the child must know and pretended she’d left them at his house. He had saved her life with his silence. But then even she turned on him at the end, after all he had done for her, threatening to reveal everything.

  He slipped a fresh blade out of a protective sheath of folded paper. He picked up the handle of the scalpel from the gutter of his drawing board and, with dexterous fingers, fitted the blade on to it. The fine steel caught the light from his lamp. He touched his finger to it and cut the skin. A light cut, so no blood. The slightest pressure and he could slice his finger in half.

  He drew a line along the bottom of the plate and wrote his name. He gave his drawing a name: Rosulabryum watsonii. He added the copyright sign. Copyright for botanical drawings was assigned to the botanist. The artist was the botanist’s amanuensis. But this drawing was his alone. He was the botanist. He had the knowledge. He should have been in Ayrton’s place. Instead of a corner of the Artists’ Room he should have had a large office with a curving wall in the Herbarium covered with specimens and accolades. The accolades were meant for him. Too late Rosamond understood the nature of his shackles. He laid the finished plate on the drawing board. It was his best. He looked at his Rolex. One thing he could say about it was that it kept perfect time.

  It was the perfect time.

  The air shifted in the room. Someone had opened the front door. George Watson picked up the scalpel.

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  November 2014

  This time when Stella smelled the stale tobacco smoke she knew it wasn’t Tina. It wasn’t the smell of a cigarette that had been smoked in the flat, but the residual odour on a smoker’s clothing. Cliff Banks was here. Her heart sank; she had wanted to clean alone.

  ‘Hello?’ There was no reply. But, as she knew well, the walls were thick. The fire doors didn’t allow sound to penetrate. She pushed the equipment cart along the corridor, making no sound herself as she approached the closed living-room door. Surely she wasn’t about to catch Cliff Banks doing the foxtrot, although Tina had said he was a star at the Hammersmith Palais when, as Tina had liked to imagine, their dads had vied for partners on the dance floor.

  The living room was empty.

  ‘Anyone here?’ Her voice resounded in her head. The words hung in the air. She crossed the hall to the little room that, in her day, had been her study. It was Tina’s study too. A state-of-the-art computer sat on a curving work station. She caught a fading whiff of Eau Libre and her throat constricted. The desk lamp was on; a pool of light accentuated shadows in the corners of the room. She shifted it to confirm that there was no one there.

  Stella was puzzled. She never left lights on. Perhaps Cliff or Michelle Banks had been sorting through Tina’s things. She heard a faint whirring, like a trapped insect, and, squatting on her hands and knees, traced the noise to a timer mechanism plugged into a four-gang socket. The light had come on automatically. The timer wasn’t there the last time she cleaned. Tina’s dad was, like Terry, security-conscious.

  Stella sensed a movement and wheeled around in time to see the door swinging shut. The latch clicked. Someone had oiled the hinges since she lived there, a task she had never got around to.

  She checked Tina’s bedroom. Tina’s bed had been stripped; the little cupboard where she kept her make-up and hair products was empty. Tina’s clothes were gone from the wardrobe and the drawers of the cupboard. Nothing remained that might distract a buyer from imagining how to make the flat their own. Stella hadn’t expected the Bankses – Cliff and presumably Michelle – to act so quickly. But Tina used to tease her for taking so long to sell her dad’s house. She never had sold it. If she made a decision, Tina wasted no time actioning it.

  Having established that she was alone, Stella went to the kitchen and began to clean. She couldn’t have foreseen how calming it would be to go through the familiar actions in a flat that had been hers, but now felt very much Tina’s. Her friend seemed closer. For the hour that it took to move through the rooms – still clean from the last session – Stella allowed herself to believe that Tina wasn’t dead, but at her office. She would return soon, kick off her high heels and be pleased to see the windows sparkling and the surfaces gleaming. She would appreciate the scent of lavender oil.

  Stella had another go at the stain in the living room that Cliff Banks had pointed out. It was her ‘loose end’. After fifteen minutes she thought it might be fainter and admitted defeat.

  It was seven o’clock. Jack would be arriving at Kew Villa. After tonight, they would go to Cashman with their suspicions that James Hailes was the body in the Marianne North Gallery and that George Watson had buried his wife by the Ruined Arch. If he dismissed it, they would have at least done all they could.

  She hadn’t brought Stanley. She realized that it was years since she had been in the flat without him. The sight of the square of lamb’s wool that Tina put out for him was unsettling. The sealed quiet had an uncanny quality: not the quiet of being alone, but of muted presence. No longer calming, the stringently cleaned rooms accentuated the abandoned air. Tina wasn’t coming home later. She wasn’t coming home at all.

  Abruptly Stella was gripped with the conviction that she must leave. Job sheet in hand she hurried from room to room, confirming her checklist.

  Her mobile rang. On a cleaning shift Stella usually kept the ringer on silent and only took emergency calls. But it could be Jack and there was no one to mind if she answered. She raced back to the living room and fished it out of her anorak.

  The screen said Tina Banks Mob.

  Stella felt as if she was deep underwater, the pressure building and her senses dulled. At her feet the stain grew, filling her vision. She put the phone to her ear.

  ‘Stella Darnell?’

  ‘Hey, Stell, fancy a coffee and a natter!’

  ‘It’s Michelle. I’ve found Tina’s mobile. It was in her coat.’

  Stella had forgotten she had wanted to know about Tina’s early-morning call in the office and had asked Michelle Banks about Tina’s phone. The weight of reality returned. She lowered herself on to the sofa, her energy sapped.

  ‘You wanted Tina’s phone log? I’ve no idea how to send it to you, but if you’ve got a pen, I’ve transcribed the calls. There aren’t many because Tina mostly used her work phone.’

  On automatic
pilot Stella pulled her Filofax from her rucksack. Her hand was trembling. ‘I only need the ones for the day that Tina was admitted to the hospice,’ she said, pen poised.

  ‘That’s easy. Tina phoned to tell me she was being admitted. Mad – I didn’t even know she was ill. An hour later she called again and asked me to call you.’ There was a pause, but when Michelle spoke again she gave no hint of judgement that Stella hadn’t gone to see Tina as soon as she got the message. ‘Looks like Dad phoned her too.’

  ‘Was that it?’ Perhaps Tina had received the early-morning call on her work phone, but Stella didn’t think so.

  ‘No. There are two more. One at six for ten minutes and then again at a quarter past six for one and a half minutes. I thought at first they were on the previous evening, but it looks like someone rang her early on the day she went into the hospice.’

  ‘Who is the caller?’ Stella breathed in the scent of the lavender air freshener to steady herself. She had a hunch that what Michelle told her next would be the key to the case.

  ‘It’s an unregistered number.’

  ‘You mean “Withheld”?’ Stella was stunned with disappointment.

  ‘It’s not in her contacts list. It has no name.’ Michelle was patient. ‘Do you want it?’

  ‘Yes.’ Crestfallen, Stella would take it anyway.

  ‘It’s 0208 940 2418. Does that mean anything to you?’

  ‘No.’ But it did. Stella thanked Michelle, told her she had cleaned Tina’s flat and would get the key to her as arranged.

  Stella prepared to leave. The living room, lacking many personal items, looked much the same. Probably the Bankses had decided that the two pictures by Marianne North would convey a sense of home to any buyer.

  Now more familiar with North’s work than she had been when she first saw the prints, Stella wandered over and looked at them properly.

  At the bottom of the print of the tree was the label, ‘Study of the West Australian Flame Tree or Fire Tree, Marianne North’. The number in the corner of the print was 764. She looked at the other print, a detail of one of the flowers from the fire tree. It was 766. Stella felt a return of the prescience that she was getting closer to the truth.

  She brought up the photograph of the botanical illustration from Tina’s bag. Scribbled on Watson’s drawing of the eucalyptus were ‘764’ and ‘766’. She was about to swipe the photo closed when she saw the telephone number for the call box outside the Herbarium at Kew. Her hunch was not misplaced. What she had told Michelle was untrue; the number did mean something to her: 0202 940 2418 was the number in Tina’s call log. She had received two calls from someone in the telephone box early that morning.

  She had written the number on George Watson’s illustration. It wouldn’t have been because it was the nearest thing to hand; as Stella had said to Jack, everything Tina had done was deliberate. It would be because she wanted to point Stella’s attention to Watson. He worked at the Herbarium. Jack had said he arrived at work early; it was why he had mistaken him for the botanist Matthew Ayrton.

  She remembered what she had heard Tina say before she went out of the office – Stella had come in on the end of the first conversation. Tina had left the office to take the second call. She had referred to Stella as the cleaner. She tried to recall the first conversation, but it wasn’t a case of recalling: adept at tuning out to clients’ business as she cleaned, she hadn’t listened in the first place. She did remember that Tina had said ‘Twat!’ because although Tina used to lose her temper with bits of equipment, she never swore.

  She shut her eyes and tried to re-create the morning. It wasn’t a pleasant memory. Tina had been angry and impatient. When she found the locket she had accused Stella of suggesting she was lying. Stella heard Tina’s voice: ‘This is about truth and lies. It always has been.’ She had supposed she was talking to a client. But what client rang at six in the morning from a phone box? They might ring at that time, but why not from a mobile? Unless they didn’t want the call to register on their phone. She had no hard proof, but Stella was now certain that the caller had been George Watson. ‘It’s a bloody name. It means nothing.’ Jack said a plant didn’t exist until it had a name. Tina was wrong. A name was important. Watson had hoped to have a plant named after him.

  Stella opened her eyes and the phrases that Tina had uttered in the office echoed in her mind.

  ‘Time is not a luxury at our disposal... Everything must come out...’

  Tina had told Watson that she was going to say what he had done. She had been going to catch a murderer.

  Without Stanley to alert her, and preoccupied, Stella had no idea if she was still alone in the flat.

  She grabbed her Filofax from her rucksack and flipped to the page where she had written down what Tina had said to her in the hospice.

  ‘Cat in a hat. Two things. Fork. Bag. Look behind the fire.’ Jack had said he doubted that Tina was ever rambling; everything she said made sense. Look behind the fire.

  She looked about the living room. Of course there was no fire. She knew that. Her eye fell on the only colour in the room, the Marianne North prints, and she felt a flash of guilt. She hadn’t cleaned them. She lifted the tree print down, took it to the dining table, laid it carefully face down on the glass top. A card was tucked into the edge of the frame. Look behind the fire. Tina hadn’t finished her sentence. Look behind the Fire Tree.

  Stella prised it out. It was a photograph of a teenaged boy sitting on a wall outside a house. Above his shoulder on the wall of the house was marked either a ‘5’ or an ‘S’. Stella knew it was a five and behind him would be a two. It was a copy of the photo in the Hammersmith Archives. She had believed the boy to be Ivy Collins’s son because he was outside 25 Rose Gardens. Now another thought occurred.

  She grabbed her phone and brought up the snaps she had taken of the contents of Tina’s Boots bag. She found the photo of Tina’s nan. She had also photographed Tina’s writing on the back of the photo. ‘Nan (Ivy C.) three days before she died, 1970’. Stella had dismissed its inclusion in the bag as a mistake, thinking it was meant for Michelle. Now she saw that Tina had definitely meant it to be there. Ivy Collins was Tina’s grandmother. That meant the boy in the picture was Tina’s father. She knew from Tina that her father had been an only child.

  Stella fetched down the other print, the flower of the flame tree, but found nothing behind it. Yet Tina had noted the number on the illustration. She was about to return it to the wall when she saw something on the carpet by the skirting. She rested the print beside the Fire Tree against the wall and picked up the slip of paper.

  It was a blank receipt, identical to the one that Cliff Banks had given her, with a four-leaf-clover motif in the top right corner. And, she realized, it was the same as the taxi receipt in Terry’s desk drawer. She went to the table and, her back to the living-room door, abruptly sat down, her thoughts rushing in. Had Terry been in Cliff Banks’s taxi? This receipt wasn’t blank. Scrawled in Tina’s hasty hand were the letters: ‘JH – KV, RW@ EG’.

  There were too few characters after the at sign and no domain name so it wasn’t an email address. A code? Too easy.

  Outside was darkness. There were no lights on the River Thames or on the far bank. The pane reflected her black-silhouetted figure in the white-walled room. She didn’t notice that the smell of stale tobacco smoke was stronger.

  Stella quickly decided that ‘K’ stood for Kew and that ‘KV’ could be Kew Villa. It was a short hop to conclude that ‘JH’ were the initials of James Hailes and ‘RW’ stood for Rosamond Watson. ‘G’ might be George, yet it came second. What was the ‘E’? It needed two minds; she would show Jack.

  ‘All right, Stell!’

  She hadn’t heard Cliff Banks come in and nearly shouted with fright. The reek of stale smoke was overpowering. He was grinning. Stella dropped the slip and it sailed to the floor and landed at his feet. Cliff Banks snatched it up.

  ‘Let me put these up for you?’ Scrunch
ing up the receipt, he grabbed the prints from the skirting, carelessly wielding one in each hand, and hung them up. He had swapped them around, but Stella didn’t say so.

  ‘What’s this?’ He was smoothing out the receipt.

  How had she not heard Banks arrive? One law of being a detective was to be aware of your surroundings. ‘You gave it to me,’ she lied, her head spinning.

  ‘What does this mean?’ He jabbed a finger at the writing. He had the same look in his eyes as when he had asked about Tina’s keepsakes. She had lied then too.

  ‘They’re, um... It’s a file reference. In my office,’ she floundered.

  ‘Funny file reference.’ Still grinning, Cliff Banks flicked the paper across his fingers. He didn’t give the receipt to her. ‘Your problem is you work too hard. You and Chrissie. She never knew when to stop either. Don’t make the same mistakes as my girl.’

  It sounded like a threat. But Jackie often said the same to her.

  ‘If I was you I’d come up with a more logical filing system.’ He handed her the receipt.

  ‘If you’re happy with everything, I’ll be off.’ She put the slip in her trouser pocket. He knew she was lying. She felt herself redden. She could have told the truth. Yet if Tina had wanted him to know about what was behind the pictures, she would have told him. Why hadn’t Tina told her dad?

  ‘Very happy.’ Banks put up the collar of his denim jacket. ‘Don’t worry about locking up, I’ll do it.’

  Stella wheeled the cart along the passage and at the end glanced back. Cliff Banks hadn’t followed her out of the room.

  Out on the landing she waited for the lift. Her heart thumped as she willed it to arrive. She smelled stale tobacco smoke here too. She listened for the mechanism inside the shaft. Nothing. The flats had been acoustically engineered to dampen sound. The silence was complete. Stella felt uneasy. She was just about to lug the cart down the stairs when the lift door slid aside.