The House With No Rooms

by Lesley Thomson

  The taxi was parked beside her van in a visitor bay. Stella shoved the cart into the back of her van. In the driving seat, she fitted her phone into the dashboard cradle. It was eight o’clock; Jack would be finishing at Kew Villa.

  ‘KV’. She flooded with hot panic. Keeping an eye on the lobby door for Cliff Banks, she cursed herself.

  ‘My wife took out the contract; I had nothing to do with it. My name shouldn’t be on your database.’

  ‘Your wife probably told our operative your name. Having a rounded picture of our clients helps us do a good job.’

  Watson had murdered his wife, so he would have known that she was lying. She couldn’t have spoken to Rosamond Watson. He would know that Jack wasn’t there to clean. Jack was alone at Kew Villa with George Watson.

  Stella fumbled with the key in the ignition. Nothing happened. She had turned it the wrong way. There was only one way to turn it. The van wouldn’t start in drive. The automatic gearstick was at neutral. She tried again. Dead. The battery was flat. How could that be? She hadn’t left the lights on. She hadn’t left anything on that could have drained it.

  ‘What’s occurring?’ Cliff Banks was at the window.

  ‘My battery’s flat,’ Stella shouted through the glass. ‘It’s fine,’ she added stupidly.

  ‘I’ll jump start her.’ Banks pulled open her door. She was enveloped in cold air and spattered with drops of rain. She was tempted to pull it shut again and lock it.

  Banks reached into his car and sprang the bonnet. He bent down and tweaked the lever under her dashboard. She caught a whiff of stale smoke. He had her bonnet propped up and was attaching his jump leads to the battery points by the time she climbed out. He gunned the taxi’s motor. The noise of the cab’s diesel engine carried across the grassy slopes.

  The morning she had found the body in the Marianne North Gallery she had heard a diesel engine start up and drive away. She had supposed it was a delivery van. Who was delivering to the gallery at that time?

  Frantically, she turned the key in her van. Still nothing.

  Banks gave a strange giggle, high-pitched like a woman’s. ‘No point. Your battery is shot.’ He detached the leads, gathered them up and slammed shut the bonnet. ‘Hop in, I’ll take you.’ Another giggle.

  ‘I can get a bus.’ Rain stung her cheeks.

  ‘It’s freezing and wet. Chrissie would never forgive me.’

  ‘I want you to catch a murderer!’

  Mechanically, Stella got into the back of his taxi. ‘Please could you drop me in Kew? I’m meeting a friend.’ She spoke through the gap in the glass partition, her voice a monotone.

  ‘Make yourself at home.’ Cliff Banks slid shut the panel. In the dark, the rear-view mirror reflected nothing so Stella couldn’t tell if he was looking at her. Strains of music seeped through the rear speakers. Mantovani’s ‘Dancing with Tears in My Eyes’ had been her nan’s favourite. Had Ivy Collins liked it too?

  On Kew Bridge lights from the traffic strobed over Banks’s registration certificate above the jump seats. Stella read the number: 34425.

  ‘I want you to catch a murderer!’

  She sat forward in her seat.

  ‘All right, Stell?’ The speakers were close to her. In the reflection of the windscreen Cliff Banks was a distorted Harry Roberts. The robber’s lank hair fell over his forehead, dark eyes betraying no feeling.

  Those numbers: 34425. Tina had scribbled them on the eucalyptus drawing.

  ‘My dad was my hero.’ When had Cliff Banks stopped being his daughter’s hero?

  ‘Drop me here!’ Stella looked up and was appalled to see no lights outside. No traffic. Only impenetrable darkness. The music swelled in volume. ‘I’ll get out.’ Thinking that she mustn’t sound scared, while knowing she sounded very scared. She wrenched at the door handle, but black cabs locked automatically when the vehicle was moving.

  Mantovani rang in her ears. She delved in her anorak for her phone. Her fingers closed over nothing. She pictured her mobile in the dashboard cradle. She had left it in the van.

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  November 2014

  Jackie was alone in the house. Graham was at a surveyors’ conference in Cambridge, Nick their eldest son was in a show and wouldn’t be back until the early hours. He lived at night and slept by day. Her other son Mark lived in Manchester. She made herself a cup of camomile and, while it was steeping, began to lay the breakfast table for the next morning. Absently she laid four place settings and then remembered it was just her. Mark had left home and Nick would go as soon as he and his mates had found the right place. Then it would be her and Graham. She would relish the peace. She wasn’t like some women she knew who dreaded being left alone with their partners after the birds had flown. Jackie never tired of Graham’s company and if anything she loved him more now than when they had met. She would welcome Nick leaving. While he was under their roof she knew where he was, or rather where he wasn’t. She couldn’t properly go to sleep until she heard him come in at some unearthly hour and set the downstairs alarm. If he was in his own place, like Mark way up north, he could get up to all sorts and she needn’t know. Not that she’d be without someone to worry about. There would always be Stella and Jack.

  Jackie was startled out of her reverie by a knock on the door. Who could be calling at this hour?

  Hurrying to the hall, she went through a roll call of loved ones who might be injured or worse. Nick would still be on stage, but he had that terrible leap from a cupboard in the second half. Graham had been the victim of a freak accident, a bus crash or flash flood. Or Mark...

  Without hesitation she opened the door and Lucie May swept past her into the kitchen. Cobwebs fluttered in her hair and she was flecked with a dusting of grime.

  ‘You have to help me,’ she trumpeted.

  ‘Do I?’ Lucie May was not on Jackie’s list of loved ones. ‘Coffee?’ She flicked the switch on the kettle. ‘Or a shower perhaps?’

  ‘There isn’t time!’

  Refusing to be ruffled, Jackie leant against the sink, sipping her camomile tea. She had the measure of the reporter and her tendency towards drama and catastrophe, but she wasn’t ready for May’s reply.

  ‘I want a job with Clean Slate.’

  Chapter Sixty

  June 1976

  The silence was all-encompassing, as if the heat had absorbed sound as well as moisture. No flies buzzed; no birds sang. No breeze stirred the dried stems and grasses browned as if scorched by fire. All was devastation. Even aeroplanes didn’t penetrate the deathly quiet. Evening was approaching, but it was so hot that it could have been the middle of the day. The stifling temperature obliterated all sense of time.

  Chrissie emerged from a tunnel of pines and japonica bushes into intense sunshine. She raced across the grass to an asphalt path. It was swollen and blistering; cracks where weeds had forced their way up had opened wide. The weeds had wilted and died. The soles of Chrissie’s flip-flops stuck to the tacky bitumen and, tripping, she yelped when the ground burnt her foot.

  Thirty metres away, amidst grasses of brown and faun, was a house. Palatial Victorian red brick, it was better suited to the leafy suburbs of Epsom or Ascot than the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew. A mantle of ivy, shrivelled to raffia, trailed across the walls and entwined rusting drainpipes. A veranda skirting three sides of the building was topped with a glass canopy thick with dirt and bird droppings. The canopy was supported by wrought-iron uprights with exuberantly curling supports. Steps led to an external porch. Paint on the window frames above the veranda was flaking; the sashes were rotten.

  The house had seven windows and two big chimneys. The heat warped the air and it seemed to the girl that the house was made of jelly.

  Although drenched in hot sun, the house had a desolate aspect that sent a shiver down the child’s spine. With a swoop of shock it dawned on her that she was lost.

  Dizzy and thirsty, she made her way across scrubby grass to the villa. She gra
sped a metal handrail beside the steps to the porch; it burnt and she snatched her hand away.

  A papery pile of leaves lay outside the porch. It was as if the seasons had telescoped. Everything was parched and dead.

  The quiet wasn’t absolute. Chrissie felt a trickling at the back of her neck and smacked at it. Her hand came away wet. Even in the shadow of the canopy it was like an oven.

  She shuffled out of her flip-flops and placed them side by side by the porch. One of the doors was open and without pausing to consider if it was wise or if she was allowed to, the girl insinuated herself through the opening between the doors. She called out, ‘Hello?’

  Light spilled through dirt-encrusted windows on either side of the porch. Chrissie ventured further in. Her dad had told her often enough that she was better than everyone, and had nothing to be frightened of. She was lost so she would ask the people who lived in the house to tell her the way home.

  A woman appeared. A ghost. Chrissie gaped at the face floating before her. Then the apparition solidified to a head and shoulders on a block of stone. Telling herself that she wasn’t scared, Chrissie strode across the vestibule. She opened one of the two doors ahead of her. Out drifted the deadened air of a tomb. Confounded by heat and, although she couldn’t admit it, fear, Chrissie crept inside.

  It wasn’t absolutely dark; light seeped in from grimy windows in the pitched roof. Gradually shapes of light and shade resolved into a balcony. There were no walls. The house had no rooms. Across the tiled floor was a doorway with no door.

  ‘Hello?’

  Chrissie stopped in amazement. Every wall was covered with paintings framed in black wood. They hung so close together that her impression was that they were the walls. The glass in the frames reflected paintings on the other walls.

  In one painting was a tree with bright orange flowers. She had thought that flowers and trees were different things. She fumbled with the title, her lips working silently. Study of the West Australian Flame Tree or Fire Tree. It was numbered 764 and was painted in 1882. Chrissie did a sum and worked out that it was painted ninety-four years ago. She didn’t know anybody that old. The white-blue sky in the painting was the same as the sky outside. Near the tree was a mound of smooth rocks that would be too hot to lie on. The only shade was under the tree. She could shelter there, her back to the tree trunk.

  There was someone lying there already.

  Chrissie went closer. Holding on to a wooden rail, she peered at the picture. A woman was lying on the ground. One hand was stretched towards Chrissie. She wasn’t on the grass and stones beneath the tree; the painter had put in tiles for her. The tiles were like the ones that Chrissie was standing on. She whirled around.

  The woman was lying in the place with no door behind her. Chrissie went over to the doorway. White teeth, white eyes, white hair. Chrissie clamped a hand to her mouth to stop herself screaming.

  ‘Are you all right?’ she tried tentatively. She kicked something. A shoe, black with a silver buckle. The other shoe was on the woman’s foot. She leant on a tall cupboard to get her breath. ‘Do you need help?’ she asked in a quavering voice.

  The lady’s face and neck were pink as if she had been in the sun too long without her sun lotion on. Chrissie knew the lady. She looked like Mrs Watson.

  There was a noise. Without stopping to think, Chrissie wrenched open the cupboard door. There were shelves piled with books, with nowhere to hide. Then she saw that the shelves were only on one side. There was a space on the other side. She pushed herself inside and, twisting around, hauled the doors shut. It was a stupid hiding place because if Bella and Emily looked they would see her straight away. Her dad told her off for acting without thinking. There was a hole in one of the doors; she poked her finger in and held it shut. She should have run out the way she came in. Her dad would be cross that she was hiding in a stranger’s house when she should be outside playing with her new friends.

  She squinted through the slit between the doors. It didn’t matter where she hid. The Mrs Watson lady was angry that Chrissie had stolen her silver thing. She would tell her dad. After that nothing would matter.

  She heard footsteps and shut her eyes as if by not seeing, she wouldn’t be seen. Bella! When Chrissie dared look again, she saw that it wasn’t Bella. She made no sense of who she saw.

  Her dad was carrying a bag. He took out two things. Chrissie blinked. One thing was a fork for digging and the other thing was a bag like a tent. Chrissie’s finger clutched at the door; it shifted and the crack widened.

  Her dad was helping Mrs Watson into the bag. Chrissie expected Mrs Watson to mind, but she didn’t. It couldn’t be Mrs Watson because she would mind. Chrissie shut her eyes again, tightly this time. Her lips working soundlessly, she recited Run 82:

  ‘Leave by left Gloucester Road, Right Elvaston Place, Left Queen’s Gate, Right Kensington Gore...’

  When she opened her eyes there was no one there. She clambered out of the cupboard and ran across the tiles. She flung herself at the doors and, tumbling out on to the veranda, she was instantly met by a bluff of heat.

  Her dad read her The Cat in the Hat without turning the pages. She would try to stay awake because he got cross if she went to sleep while he was taking the trouble to read to her. In the waking dreams that followed she mixed her dad up with the cat. The Cat in the Hat drove a huge taxi, big enough for his tall hat. He drove too fast and didn’t care what got in his way.

  The lawns shimmered in the haze. There was no one there. Dazzled by sunlight and stupefied by the heat, Chrissie’s mind worked fast to protect herself from the enormity of what she had seen. It wasn’t Mrs Watson on the tiles in the house with no rooms. It wasn’t her dad with the bag with Two Things. It was the Cat in the Hat whose tricks were very bad indeed.

  She leapt down the steps on to the grass. She tore along a path, oblivious to stones lacerating the soles of her feet, until, crippled by a stitch, she skidded to a stop beneath a crumbling arch. A faint track went up a steep bank. Chrissie scrambled up and collapsed in scrub in the shade of a tree. In the bright sunshine she saw that the tree had a name. A notice was nailed to the bark: ‘Eucalyptus gunnii’.

  She crawled deeper into the shadows and, exhausted by fright and dazed by the heat, she fell instantly to sleep.

  It seemed to Chrissie that it was hours later that she was woken by a bell ringing. She rolled over and peered through the branches of a bush. Her dad was digging. The metal fork kept catching on stones. Ting. Ting. The hole must be deep because she could only see his middle. He vaulted back up to her level and began to drag a bag up to the hole. The bag was like a giant Christmas stocking. He shoved it in. Chrissie heard a thump. She covered her face with her hands and saw a fish bowl balanced on the tip of an umbrella. The fish was mouthing something at her through the glass.

  Help!

  There was no one there. Gingerly she crept out from behind the eucalyptus. There was no hole. She was lying to herself now. Bella said that her lies would catch up with her. Her dad was drawing dead plants. She rubbed at her temples. Liar! Her dad was driving his taxi. Snatching at the spectre of truth she intoned:

  ‘Run Twenty-seven, Leave on left Addison Road, Right Kensington High Street, Forward Addison Bridge, Forward Hammersmith Road...’ She stumbled down the bank. Her dad didn’t let anyone else call over the runs, not even Michelle. She was his Crystal. When he asked if she loved him more than anyone else in the world, she said that she did.

  In the shadow of the arch, nestling in the grass, was a black thing. Chrissie stooped down. It was a black shoe with a buckle.

  Chapter Sixty-One

  November 2014

  When he switched the engine off, Jack saw that the car in front of his van was a Toyota Yaris Verso. It was the same make and model as Terry’s car, even the same blue. He got out. The Toyota had no dents; the paintwork was gleaming as if it had recently been valeted. It wasn’t Terry’s car, but Jack knew better than to ignore it. The blue Toyo
ta was a sign.

  Across Kew Green the bells of St Anne’s Church struck seven. Lugging the equipment bag, he unlatched the gate to Kew Villa. The windows were dark. But as before when he had ‘visited’ there was a light at the top of the house. Watson was home.

  Jack was on edge. He approved of Stella’s tactic that he should arrive unexpectedly, but he had never done this before. He was used to entering the homes of True Hosts with what he liked to consider was tacit invitation and settling in. He was used to cleaning for Stella’s clients. But he had never crashed in unannounced at a time when most households would be eating supper or watching television. Watson would be within his rights to ask him to come back at a more convenient time. Stella’s brief was that Jack must gain entry and do the job come what may. At the time, he had done a hop and a skip to hear her talking this way. Now that he was on the doorstep, he felt less confident. Hugging the bag to his chest, he gave the door two taps with the knocker. The door shifted. He would have no trouble entering Kew Villa. The front door was already open.

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  November 2014

  ‘I want you to catch a murderer!’

  Tina hadn’t told Stella that the murderer she wanted her to catch was her own father, the man whom Stella had understood Tina adored.

  There was a click and the door-locking indicator went off. Stella flung herself out of the cab and straight into Cliff Banks. She smelled the rank odour of stale smoke, on his clothes and on his breath, and was hit by a wave of revulsion before fear kicked in.

  ‘All right, Stell?’ His laugh was high and fluty. He linked her arm through his and pulled her to him. He began to walk fast, forcing her along with him.

  ‘Let go of me!’ she shouted. Her voice was lost in the wind.

  ‘Wouldn’t dream of it, so far from home.’ His breath hot on her ear, he gripped her more tightly.

  The ground was uneven. Stella tripped, splashing into a puddle. In places the darkness was solid and she couldn’t see her feet. It seemed they walked for hours when they stopped in front of towering iron gates.