The House With No Rooms

by Lesley Thomson

  With a shock Stella recognized where they were. They were outside the Brentford Gate to Kew Gardens. They must have passed the Estates Office, but there would be no one there. Stella pricked with fear. To her right was the River Thames, slick and black. Hidden behind the Herbarium, Ferry Lane was long and unlit. There were no houses nearby. If she called for help no one would hear.

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  November 2014

  Jack lowered the equipment bag to the floor and pushed the door to behind him. He didn’t shut it. When he visited True Hosts he made no changes as he moved about their homes. Tonight he had the uneasy conviction that George Watson was expecting him. It was nonsense of course.

  The hall was chilled by the night air. By the door the longcase clock was still stopped at 11.43. Its motionless face somehow accentuating the silence. When Stella had told him what rooms were where, Jack had listened, unable to say that he knew the layout of the entire house. Several times during her briefing, he had been tempted to tell the truth, but since at last they were working as a team again, he couldn’t bear to threaten it.

  There was the coat on the newel post. He caught a whiff of mothballs.

  ‘When did you last wear your coat, Rosamond?’ he whispered, his lips to the wool. He dipped his hand into the pocket and pulled out a plastic wallet holding an Oyster card. Jack knew that if he had online access to Mrs Watson’s journey history he would find that she had made trips up and down the District line. Mr Watson was a botanical illustrator: the man had an eye for detail. He would take the actions of a life, of his dead wife’s as well as his own.

  He began to climb the stairs. He had fitted his ancient but immaculate Crockett and Jones brogues with rubber soles and they were soundless. He was careful to keep to the edge of the tread where a stair was least likely to creak. This area was beyond the Clean Slate remit, but when Watson appeared, he could say that he was looking for him.

  I’m looking for your wife.

  It was colder on the landing. He touched a tubular radiator outside the Watsons’ bedroom and whipped back his hand. It was piping hot. The heating was on and yet the house was like a fridge.

  He tapped on the bedroom door, a minute sound that Rosamond or George Watson would hear only if they were inside. Hearing nothing, Jack eased open the door and went in.

  ‘Mrs Watson?’ He blinked into spangled darkness. He swept his hand along the wall and found the light switch. The bedroom was unchanged from his last visit. The heavy curtains were drawn; the silk quilt draped over the bed had no creases. No indentation suggested that Mrs Watson had recently lain down for an afternoon nap or to recover from the headaches that her husband claimed she was prey to. Perhaps Watson wasn’t quite as on it as Jack had supposed.

  He searched through the drawers in the dressing table. There was the jewellery and make-up, but of course the newspaper cuttings weren’t at the back of the drawer. He pulled the articles from his coat. Checking that the folds were correct, he snapped on a pair of plastic gloves and removed the drawer. He wedged the wad of newspaper into the back and replaced the drawer. A charade that restored the link between the house and the articles as if he had never broken it.

  There was a difference. There was a framed photograph by the bed. Still wearing gloves, Jack held it to the light. Two boys stood outside a house, one of those Victorian terrace houses found across the country. The boys wore shirts and trousers with snake-buckle belts. The older one must have moved as the shutter went because his face was blurred. His companion – grinning for the photographer – had those elastically mobile features that denote charisma. Jack’s heart chilled. The smile was too broad, too confident. Judging by the hairstyles – military-style short back and sides – the photo was taken in the fifties. The boy with the big smile was so vivid that Jack expected him to step from the frame. He turned the picture over and saw, written in precise and careful script, ‘Cliff Banks with GW, 1955. 25 Rose Gardens. W6’.

  The grinning boy was Tina’s father. Although he had seen Watson only once, from behind, descending the stairs in Kew Villa, and the boy in the picture was out of focus, still Jack saw the older Watson in the fuzzy image. His head was bowed down as if to fit into the frame. Watson and Banks had known each other as boys. Jack shut his eyes and pictured the inventory of items stolen from the Ramsay house listed in Malcom Bennett’s article.

  Aside from the ring, they were a Rolex timepiece, a significant sum of money and a silver locket containing a photograph of Gerald Ramsay and his wife Anne. Judge Ramsay confirmed that the watch, an early Rolex, was purchased by his late father in 1921.

  Bella had said that Watson wore an original Rolex. The shot had been taken before many of the houses in Rose Gardens were demolished for the Great West Road. Number 25 was the house that Stella had established was where the dead man found under the A4 in 1976 had been murdered. This picture placed Watson and Banks at the scene of a murder and it put them in the frame for the robbery. The article had said the window in the Ramsay house was too narrow for adults to have climbed though. Both boys looked small for their ages, Watson was skinny and wiry, Banks thick-set, shorter than his friend. Capable of entering through the narrow window. And the police were wrong – how many times had Jack insinuated himself through the tightest of apertures? Given that it implicated him in two crimes, why had George Watson put the photograph in such a prominent position?

  He scrutinized Cliff Banks. The shape of his eyes, dipped at the outer corners, was like Tina’s. But while the lawyer’s eyes had glittered with a metallic flash that laid low her enemies and won cases, her father’s were blank and without feeling. The boy had the eyes of a True Host.

  Jack nearly dropped the photograph frame. Banks had asked Stella to clean Tina’s flat. At the funeral, Stella said he had questioned her about what his daughter had left her. Her last words. Not the anxiety of a grieving father, the probing of a killer. Banks had wanted to know what his daughter knew and what she had told her best friend. Heedless of Watson hearing him, Jack fumbled with his phone and dialled Stella.

  ‘This is Stella Darnell, I’m sorry I can’t come to...’ Jack drummed on the bedside table as he waited for the message to finish and then shouted as if Stella might hear him:

  ‘Stell, it’s not George Watson. Cliff Banks is the True Ho— is the murderer that Tina wanted us to catch. I’ll explain. Call me as soon as you get this!’ He tore up the stairs to George Watson’s studio.

  Chapter Sixty-Four

  November 2014

  By half past nine rush hour had abated and those out for the evening had yet to return. But for the occasional lorry or bus and a few cars leaving London, Kew Road was quiet. Mizzling rain made a watercolour wash of the lamplight. In Kew Gardens, beyond the high brick wall, a blustering wind shook the trees and the darkness was complete.

  Inside the Marianne North Gallery a blue light cast a bleak glow over the paintings and across the tiles. No light penetrated from the windows in the roof. The doorways to the two antechambers were ghostly rectangles.

  ‘We shouldn’t be here.’ Stella’s voice was weirdly disembodied as if nightfall made a difference to the acoustics. ‘Security will see the tripped alarm.’

  ‘No worries, Stella, I killed the alarm. Security can carry on sleeping. Funny, Jimmy Hailes said the same thing. But he was stupid and you are not. Pity you had to stick your nose in where it doesn’t belong. I was getting to like you. He was dispensable, the money-grubbing little shit!’

  Cliff Banks was strolling around the gallery, hands behind his back, as if admiring the paintings. He paused by one. Stella saw that it was the Flame Tree. He moved on. He had let go of her, but both the doors into the vestibule and out on to the veranda at the front of the gallery would be locked. If she tried to run, he would catch her.

  No one knew she was here. When she didn’t meet him at Kew Villa, Jack would go to Rose Gardens North. When he got no answer, he’d try her phone and, getting the voicemail, he would
leave a message. He’d assume she was with Cashman. They didn’t have a history of keeping in touch. They didn’t have a history of being a proper team. When she didn’t come to work tomorrow, Jackie would try her phone. She would worry, but by the time they found the van outside Tina’s flat, it would be too late. Stella’s limbs turned to water.

  ‘I want you to catch a murderer!’

  ‘George’s got a thing about the lady who did this stuff.’ Banks waved a hand at the paintings. ‘Weird about her, he is.’ The heels of his shoes clicked on the ceramic. The precise sound made Stella’s skin crawl. ‘A person can yell like a stuck pig and no one comes. Your dad would have called it returning to the scene of the crime.’ He giggled girlishly. ‘Or he would of if he’d got close to proving there was a crime! Poor sod. You miss him?’ He contemplated her with apparent concern.

  ‘You killed Rosamond Watson and her brother James Hailes.’ Too late Stella remembered Terry’s advice:

  Safety first: avoid being trapped with a person you suspect of murder and if you are, don’t say anything likely to inflame.

  ‘Shame you didn’t work that out till now. Like Detective Darnell, one step behind!’ He rubbed his hands together. ‘You did your homework down the library good as gold. Got to admit, you had balls to con your way into poor old George’s place. Gave him a right turn! You lied to me, Stella. I don’t like liars. Michelle said Tina did leave you keepsakes. Mitch never could keep a secret. I brought up my girls to tell the truth.’ He made a sucking sound through his teeth.

  The paintings closed in on her like a giant grid. She was chilled. They had been after the wrong man. George Watson wasn’t the murderer. They had found the clues, but come to the wrong conclusion. Terry had said keep an open mind, test each clue against other possibilities. Blinded by Tina’s death, Stella had seen a grieving father. Not a murderer. They had followed one theory at the expense of others.

  ‘Rosamond Watson married George to polish up the rough diamond. George could do lovely flower pictures, but she wanted him to be Darwin. She backed the wrong horse. Me and George go back a long way. I told her, I’m not going anywhere. When it comes to George, I keep him on track. I’m in charge.’ He giggled. ‘She loved that!’

  ‘Why did you kill her?’ Stella stuffed her hands in her anorak to avoid Banks seeing them trembling. It was a cliché to keep him talking – he would know the tactic – but she must buy time, however futile any delay might be.

  ‘When they found that soldier under the road in 1976, George goes and panics. He tells the lovely Rosamond about our little robbery when we was kids. Tears and all, stupid git. Says he killed the bloke. Best thing he ever did: the vermin was dossing in my mum’s parlour. She only decides they’ll go down the nick and tell them it was me that stuck the knife in. Their word against me. Money and class speak loudest. Men like your dad would lick her arse. She was going to lie!’ Banks was outraged. ‘I finished the bloke to put him out of his misery. All my life I’ve tidied up after George. Call me the Cleaner!’ He gave a high-pitched whinny.

  My mum’s parlour. ‘You’re the boy in the photograph!’ The boy grinning on the wall. She should stick to cleaning.

  ‘What photograph?’ For the first time Banks looked worried.

  ‘It’s in the Hammersmith Archives.’ She played her faint advantage. ‘I gave it to the police. You’re Ivy Collins’s son. You’re sitting outside her house. The picture links you to the site of the murder.’ She spoke rapidly.

  ‘I said we shouldn’t of let that bloke take our picture, but my mum made us.’

  Banks wandered into the antechamber where Stella had found the body. She edged towards the other chamber. If she could get to the yard and shout, someone beyond the wall, or even in the houses on the other side of Kew Road, might hear. Banks was back. ‘It don’t prove nothing.’

  He was right. The photograph proved that he had been outside a house that had stood on a spot where a body was found. Even when it was established he had lived there, it didn’t link him to the soldier’s murder.

  ‘A signet ring on the body was traced to a burglary in St Peter’s Square. The thief was a boy. They know a boy lived at twenty-five,’ she lied. Then she remembered a nugget of truth: ‘They have a fingerprint.’

  ‘Stella, you can do better than that, sweetheart!’ Banks was at the doorway to the rear gallery, where Tina must have seen him putting the body of Rosamond Watson into a sack. ‘I was wearing gloves. George left his at home. It’ll be his print.’

  She could do better. Fear had paralysed her thinking. ‘You stole a silver locket from the Ramsay house engraved with Gerald Ramsay’s initials with a picture of Ramsay and his wife inside. George Watson gave it to his wife. She would have assumed that the letters stood for George and Rosamond.’ Stella was gabbling. She should have given the locket to Cashman; he would have listened to her. ‘I gave the bag of things that Tina left me to the police.’ She heard how unconvincing she sounded. ‘If anything happens to me, they’ll connect it to you.’ If the police knew, Banks had nothing to lose: he might as well kill her.

  ‘Your copper boyfriend has only just worked out that old Jimmy Hailes isn’t Hooker! I collect stuff that’s left behind in my taxi. I planted the licence and the fags on him. Like lambs the police went for it.’ Another giggle. ‘George lost that locket years ago.’

  He knew about her and Cashman. A taxi had driven away the last time Cashman had visited. Banks had been watching her.

  ‘Even after I sorted Rosamond, George didn’t learn his lesson. It took a visit from your daddy to make him see sense.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Stella hadn’t meant to ask anything. It was vital that she appeared to know.

  He grinned and dimples appeared in his cheeks. ‘I called the police from a box near George’s work. I suggested they ask George about his wife.’

  ‘They could have arrested you. Watson could have told the truth to my dad.’ Stella had let herself be drawn in.

  ‘I knew George would clam up. It was Rosamond who had the bottle. The odds were stacked against him. He killed that soldier. He lured his wife here. She liked it here, she had been when she was a kid. He’s not so smart, it never occurred to him that this place would risk putting him in the frame. He was shitting himself when, after you found Jimmy’s body, the cops interviewed everyone working at Kew. If I go down, he goes down. Then he won’t have some plant named after him. That’s a laugh – should be a weed by rights!’ He whinnied again. ‘No, our George knew to keep his mouth shut. Lucky for him it was your dad that showed up. Wasn’t much of a detective, was he!’ He snuffled into his hand as if the joke was rude. ‘My daughter lied to him and he swallowed it.’ He stopped smiling. ‘Don’t know why she did that.’

  Fear had made Stella lose the thread of her argument. ‘The police will work out who killed James Hailes.’

  ‘You’re scaring me, Stella.’ He wandered into the rear chamber. In the low light, the cupboard that she and Jack had looked into earlier that day was a hulking shape. With no other escape route, Stella had to follow him.

  ‘Like I said, George isn’t so clever. He gets to university and nabs himself some rich girl, but he’ll never win the Nobel Prize. Drawing flowers isn’t like the law, or cabbing. He’s a lackey for those odd-bods in Kew Gardens. I’m my own boss.’ He whistled a snatch of ‘Three Blind Mice’. The notes carried around the gallery, rising up towards the roof. ‘Fickle bitch! Afterwards Rosamond acted like I was something off of her shoe.’ Fury twisted his grin. ‘As for her whining brother... Hippy Jimmy came back from India finding that having a few quid comes in handy after all. He’d come back to get his share from his sister. She and George had done the dirty on him. After his dad had caught him pawning the family silver. “Borrowing” was what he called it.’ His shoulders shook with suppressed laughter. ‘Georgie was all for telling him his sister was pushing up daisies in Kew Gardens! I told him, “Come with me, Uncle Clifford’ll sort it.”’ He swivelled on a he
el. ‘This new to you, Stell? Maybe stick to washing floors!’

  Although his comment chimed with her earlier conclusion, Stella was angry. Fury cleared her mental fog. ‘Watson didn’t lose the silver locket that you stole.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Tina – your Crystal – stole it when she was there for a drawing lesson. She gave it to me one morning in her office and told me where she found it.’ Not true, but he didn’t know that.

  ‘My Chrissie wouldn’t... steal,’ he faltered. Bullseye.

  ‘Not ordinarily, but you sent her to an expensive school and instructed her to lie about her background to fit in. She claimed to her friends that George and Rosamond Watson were her parents. She stole the locket to back up her story. When he found out, Watson told her to keep it. It was his insurance policy. She would never tell on him.’ The truth was unfolding. ‘He had to protect his career so he co-opted your daughter to bolster up the fiction that his wife was alive. Each had something on the other. In the end though, Tina played you both.’ Stella didn’t believe in ghosts or she would have supposed that Tina was in the gallery, feeding her lines.

  ‘The morning she was admitted into the hospice, Watson rang her from that phone box outside the Herbarium. I was with her when she took the call.’ Stella opened her mouth and the words flowed: ‘Tina told Watson she was going to tell the truth. He would be arrested for murder, and so would her dad. Matthew Ayrton had asked Watson to draw a plant that he claimed to have discovered in the Herbarium. It would be a new species. Watson implored Tina to think again. She said she told him that, and these were her actual words, “time is not a luxury at our disposal”.’ Stella paused. When she had heard Tina say that, she hadn’t supposed she meant it literally. ‘Tina was a diligent lawyer. She had gathered hard evidence. Her last words to me were in a text. The police have it.’