The House With No Rooms

by Lesley Thomson

  ‘What text?’ He glared at her.

  Stella sniffed advantage. ‘Police never said throat was slit, how did he know? It was never reported that the soldier found in the crater in the Great West Road had been stabbed. The police said that he was crushed by falling masonry during the demolition. They embargoed the truth to give them advantage over the murderer. The “he” in Tina’s text was you. You had mentioned it to Chrissie when she was a child.’ Stella was making it up as she went along, but knew it was the truth.

  ‘You’re losing me, Stella.’ But she could see he had registered his mistake.

  Safety first: avoid being trapped with a person you suspect of murder. Don’t ask questions likely to inflame. ‘Inflammatory’ was her only option.

  ‘The day you murdered Rosamond Watson, you had a witness.’ Like a magician she flung open the cupboard doors. She almost expected to find Tina – Chrissie – crouched inside. ‘Your daughter watched you put Rosamond Watson in a bag and then bury her.’ She had hit home. Banks was rigid with shock. Not smiling now.

  ‘She told her friend Emily that the murderer was the Cat in the Hat, a cat in a bedtime book that you read to her when she was little. When she told me that, I was envious. My dad was never home before I went to sleep; we didn’t live in the same house. When she saw you, she couldn’t compute that her dad was a killer so she made up her own story. She lied to herself. You were the Cat in the Hat who calls at a house and causes chaos and stuffs people in bags.’ If Stella was going to be Banks’s next victim, the third he had murdered in the Marianne North Gallery, she would go down fighting.

  ‘Finished?’ Banks’s eyes were as blank as Harry Roberts’s.

  ‘When my dad came to Kew Villa, Tina told him she had seen Rosamond Watson because her tea had been left out as usual. She had convinced herself that she had just missed her. When she found her flip-flops in your taxi, you said she’d left them at the Watsons’. But Chrissie had taken them off outside the Marianne North Gallery. Had you lied? By then she was lying so much to keep her end up at school that she didn’t know what was true or whom to trust. When she was diagnosed with cancer Tina interpreted it as punishment for colluding with Watson, for turning her back on a crime. As she neared death, the scene here in the gallery came back to her. She tried to make a deal with death. If she handed over the murderer, she would live. The last time I saw her in the office, Tina asked me to help her.’ Stella stopped as she took on the full force of her lie. She had been preoccupied by Tina’s appearing to question her cleaning and hadn’t seen that something was wrong. When Tina had asked to see her, she had left it too late. Her voice thick, she ploughed on, ‘Only at the very end could Tina admit that her own father was a killer.’

  This knowledge seemed to have galvanized him. Banks snatched the cupboard door from her grasp. ‘Time to go.’ Again Stella was shocked by his strength. Any hope of overcoming him vanished as he pulled her out of the side entrance of the gallery into the cold night.

  Above her the lights of an aeroplane blinked. Beyond the gates puddles glistened on Kew Road. A car shot by, tyres swishing, the driver’s eyes fixed straight ahead.

  ‘Keep up, Stell!’ All pretence of friendliness gone, Banks frogmarched her along the path she and Jack had used that afternoon. The path that Banks had taken her along after Tina’s funeral. Japonica bushes shrouded the boundary wall, closing in on them. Suddenly Stella knew that the area around the Ruined Arch had significance. Cliff Banks had been looking for something on the ground. She had thought he was looking through the grille in the ruined arch. She felt a coil of pure fear rise up like a snake. No one would hear, but she had nothing to lose.

  ‘Help!’ She yelled so hard it felt as if a scalpel cut into her throat. He clutched her around the waist like a vice.

  ‘Shut up!’ he hissed.

  The bushes were thicker. Stella stumbled and Banks tightened his grasp. ‘Steady.’ He gave his odd giggle again.

  Tina had tried to warn her. Confounded by the paraphernalia of illness and the profound change in Tina, Stella had ignored her. Worse, she had assumed that the illness had warped Tina’s mind. She had seen one truth: Cliff Banks loved his daughter. Awed by his attachment to Tina and aware of what she didn’t have with Terry, she hadn’t seen that the love wasn’t mutual.

  They were under the Ruined Arch. Her face grazed against damp bricks. Clamping a meaty hand over her mouth, Banks hooked his thumb under her jaw to stop her biting him and jerked back her arm in a lock. Stella recognized the second action: the police used it as a restraint.

  ‘Rosamond also thought she was smarter than me. You’re nothing but a cleaner. My Chrissie was only nice to you to make sure you did a proper job of cleaning.’ His breath was hot on her ear. ‘You was no friend to her. Mitch said she asked for you and you took your bloody time coming. It was her old mates from her posh school that she turned to when she knew she was ill, not a bloody cleaner!’ He pushed her through the arch and propelled her up the slope into the undergrowth above the arch.

  He shone a torch, wheeling the beam around as if searching for something and Stella saw a notice pinned to a tree trunk.

  ‘Eucalyptus gunnii’. ‘EG’. She caught her breath. RW @ EG. This was Banks’s burying ground. In the shadow of a eucalyptus tree. The torch swung down and Stella saw she had been right that Banks had a specific reason for coming here.

  At her feet was a rectangular hole about two metres deep. Six feet. She teetered, but Banks stopped her from falling.

  She was looking at her grave.

  Chapter Sixty-Five

  November 2014

  A thin line of light spread under the studio door. Jack had believed that he was a match for someone in the grip of evil. He knew all the tricks of a True Host. He could handle dark streets of glistening cobblestones echoing with distant footsteps, empty houses, rooms flitting with shadows. In the dead of night he was at his happiest dawdling in subway tunnels humming nursery rhymes or taking short cuts down alleyways and across cemeteries. After his mother’s death he was afraid of nothing. Only her favourite colour, green, could instil fear in him. And bright red when it was blood.

  Encircled in the light of an anglepoise lamp George Watson might have been asleep on the floor, his cheek resting on a hand. Blood was flowing from a deep wound in his neck. It spread over the floor. In one hand he clasped a scalpel. An empty glass lay beside him. Jack took it all in. It was no cry for help: there was no coming back.

  Heedless of the blood, Jack squatted down by Watson and placed a finger on his neck. The skin was pliant and warm. He felt a faint pulse. Watson looked at Jack, struggling to focus.

  Jack pulled his phone from his pocket and stabbed the keys. ‘Ambulance. Police.’ He reeled off the address. He took Watson’s hand in his and stroked it. ‘George, stay awake.’ Useless advice to a man intent on sleeping for ever.

  Watson trapped him with a stare as if he was hanging over a cliff edge imploring Jack not to let go of his fingers. Urging him to sink with him into the darkness. Jack held his gaze, blotting out the sight of the pooling blood that threatened to engulf him.

  ‘George, where is Banks?’ He repeated urgently: ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Eucalshsh... gun...’

  ‘What? George!’ Jack stopped himself from bellowing. A milky film descended over the man’s eyes. His gaze shifted beyond Jack to the far distance.

  Jack let go of Watson’s hand and got to his feet. A bottle stood on the table: ‘Kew Mix. Ingredients, Ethanol, Glycerine and Formaldehyde’. The last was toxic.

  Next to the bottle was a botanical illustration. Jack knew not to compromise a crime scene but, by craning over Watson’s body, he could look at it. The constituent dissected elements didn’t depict the character of a plant. In fine black pen, Watson had drawn vignettes arranged clockwise, each one contributing to the whole picture, creating a sinister depiction of impending death enhanced by the dramatic use of shadow and sunlight. The raw and uncompromising d
rawings reminded Jack of the work of Victorian illustrator Gustav Doré. He understood what he was looking at. An artist to the end, the intricately drawn plate was Watson’s ‘suicide note’.

  The police would be here any minute. He must see the drawing before they stopped him.

  The first drawing showed the silhouette of a wrecking ball against a dark sky. A full moon cast eerie light over a half-demolished house numbered twenty-five.

  Jack’s heart beat so violently that he began to sweat. Wild-eyed creatures, executed with finesse, beckoned to him, luring him into the monochrome world. The dead man at his feet was less real than the man – his throat slashed open – who lay in a contorted heap amidst smashed masonry, lath, splintered wood and plaster. The jagged line of a missing staircase jigsawed the image in two. Jack felt himself sliding into hell.

  Another drawing showed a road dug away to reveal strata: tarmac, soil, London clay and the same suited body. Jack shuddered. The face was a skull. He beckoned to Jack with a skeletal finger on which was a signet ring. His eyes were intact. Jack shut his eyes, but the ghastly image was burnt on to the inside of his lids. He felt the hairs rise on the back of his neck. His skin was clammy; he shivered. He rarely felt afraid, but he did now. The plate expressed an underworld that, like Orpheus, he courted in his search for True Hosts. Yet he was afraid of finding it. The drawing plunged him into the mind of a tortured soul.

  A little girl and a man stood in bright sunshine; black shadows slanted down the path of a house that was Kew Villa. Another drawing replicated the octagonal floor tiles in the Marianne North Gallery. On these a woman’s corpse lay sprawled, eyes bulging. The paintings crowded in on her. She was looking at Jack as if he was her killer.

  He didn’t hear the wail of sirens. Faint, but growing louder.

  A cleaning sign showed a stick figure slipping on a wet floor. A tall thin woman, her face shrouded within the hood of an anorak, carried a mop. The handle rested on her shoulder like a scythe. Watson had drawn Stella as Death.

  Another illustration swam into focus. A eucalyptus tree anchored one side of the plate. Eucalyptus gunnii. Beneath was a headstone engraved with the names: Rosamond Watson and James Hailes. Jack saw another name. Stella Darnell. The beam of light that revealed the stone came from the headlamps of a black taxi cab. Serial number: 34425.

  Blue light flashed across the ceiling. The lurid pulsing added dimension to the drawing. The eucalyptus tree shifted with a dry rattle. Jack recoiled as the characters began a strange and terrible dance towards him.

  He lunged towards the door, slipping on Watson’s blood. The room was crowded. Jack yelled, ‘Stella’s in trouble!’

  ‘So are you! ’ Cashman clamped handcuffs on to Jack’s wrists. Obliquely Jack saw he still wore the plastic gloves. ‘Jack Harmon,... do not have to say anything. But it may harm your defence...’ His voice came as if from underwater: ‘...if you do not mention when questioned something you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence...’

  The handcuffs cut into Jack’s wrists. Cilla Black sang ‘Something Tells Me (Something’s Gonna Happen Tonight)’. Jack was past understanding that it was his phone ringing. The vibrating handset gyrated lazily on the floorboards moving closer to the blood.

  Cashman answered it. ‘Lucie! Sorry, Harmon can’t talk. I’ve arrested him for murder.’

  Chapter Sixty-Six

  November 2014

  Rain stung her cheeks. It caught Banks unawares: torch in one hand, he let go of Stella and dashed water from his face.

  It was only a second, but Stella didn’t waste it. She elbowed him with all her strength. Banks staggered backwards towards her ‘grave’. She charged down the path. With no light, she had to rely on her sense of direction. It was usually good, but darkness and fear had bewildered her. She cast about for her bearings. She couldn’t afford to hesitate. Behind her she heard Banks smashing through the foliage. Crazy shadows swung about her as he searched her out with the powerful beam of his torch.

  Stella tried to tread lightly, but this slowed her progress. She was deafened by the drumming of blood in her ears. She left the path and was impeded by snarled undergrowth. Thorns tore at her trousers. He would hear the snapping twigs and crushing brushwood. She tripped and pitched forward on to the ground, grazing her palms. The pain was remote. She rolled over and, clambering up, tumbled on to short springy grass. She was in the open. Lit by silver moonlight was a ghostly palace, curving glass merging with the moonlight. The Palm House.

  Stella sped off across the grass, skirting the lake, keeping low as if dodging bullets. However fast she ran, the Palm House got no closer. Like a mirage, it shifted and shimmered, the glass incandescent in the sweeping beam of Banks’s torch. Bright darts like fireworks danced across the curving roof.

  He was gaining on her. He ran with no attempt at stealth, his steps plodding like a robot, a measured tread that ensured he would inevitably catch his prey. Sick with fright, Stella was exactly where he wanted her. Like a beater at a shoot, he had driven her from her cover.

  The Queen’s Beasts, strange creatures ranged along the front of the Palm House, took on an awful reality. She flattened herself against the plinth of the giant dog on its haunches. Light raked the lawn. It stopped by the dog and moved up, then down. It took Stella too long to grasp that the rhythmic movement was because Cliff Banks was strolling over the grass towards her.

  She raced on past the Beasts; horns and wings seemed to surround her. Limbs leaden, she powered around the lake. A stupid decision: Banks could cut her off from the other side. Her muscles and lungs burned and the cold rain smacked at her like tin tacks.

  She was in a blaze of white. Her shadow was elongated on the path before her. Caught in the torch beam as if between the crosshairs of a sniper’s gun.

  Stella cut through bushes on her right, or on her left. She had no sense of where she was. She should be at the Victoria Gate by now. She had gone the wrong way. Finally spent, she rolled under a tree and hunched in a ball against the trunk. The bark was smooth.

  Jack had said that in a chase fantasy, it was impossible to imagine a scenario in which you died. Stella supposed that it was the survival instinct. But Jack was wrong. She could imagine that she wouldn’t be around to see how this chase ended.

  ‘My dad has the Knowledge; he’s a living compass. He never gets lost. Leave on left King Street, Right Weltje Road, Left Great West Road, Right Hammersmith Bridge Road, Forward Hammersmith Bridge...’

  Tina hadn’t been boasting about her dad, she had been trying to tell Stella the truth about him. Or to come to terms with the truth herself.

  Pale orange clouds bundled across the sky; it had stopped raining. She was leaning against a eucalyptus tree. The eucalyptus. She had run in a circle and was back at the Ruined Arch near the Marianne North Gallery. Metres from her was her burial hole.

  She scrambled around the tree. Beyond the plastic cordon were two people. The torchlight swung wildly about. It must be George Watson. Stella gazed in bewilderment. Like Cliff Banks, the other person was wearing a green polo shirt. She made out a logo on the shoulder. George Watson was wearing a Clean Slate uniform.

  Abruptly Cliff Banks appeared to rise into the air and drop to the ground. The other person loomed over him. Stella heard a clink and a snap and with a thump Banks fell into the hole and disappeared. The torch beam cut the sky and her hiding place was flooded with light.

  ‘He won’t be pointing Percy at the porcelain for a while.’ A corncrake laugh. ‘I rather took out my feelings for my ex-hubby on him. Hope I didn’t dazzle you, Stell.’

  Dazzled, Stella stumbled to her feet. If she was in one of Jack’s escape fantasies, she had conjured up the wildest of happy endings.

  Lucie May was prancing around the hole, waving the torch like Rumpelstiltskin. She wore a Clean Slate uniform and looped around her neck was a Kew Gardens access card on a lanyard. As she capered, it swung back and forth like a pendulum. ‘Talking o
f those whose genitals we might damage...’ She was cheery. ‘Cashman and his merry men are on their way. Once I persuaded him that Jackanory isn’t London’s latest serial killer. Are you up to seeing Cash-for-Questions?’ Now she sounded concerned, as if she would prevent Cashman coming if Stella wasn’t up to it.

  All Stella could think was that she wasn’t going to die. Not today anyway. She stumbled to the edge of the hole and looked down. Banks lay still at the bottom. His hands were cuffed behind his back.

  ‘Is he...?’ Lucie May had never made a secret of her philosophy of an eye for an eye.

  ‘Much as I’d like to see him swinging from Kew’s Unluckiest Tree, I’ve spared him for the justice system. Not smiling now, are we, Smiler!’ Lucie aimed a kick and sent loose soil and stones down into the hole. ‘Let’s bury you with Rosamond Watson. What happened, did she reject you after you and she did it?’ She turned to Stella. ‘It’s always about the bedroom in the end.’

  ‘I’ll get you.’ Banks spluttered soil from his mouth.

  ‘Fighting talk, Cliffy-Whiff!’ Lucie scoffed.

  It had never occurred to Stella that Cliff Banks had had an affair with Rosamond. ‘Afterwards Rosamond acted like I was something off of her shoe.’ Some detective. ‘Look!’ She directed Lucie’s torch towards the hole. Poking out of the impacted earth was a shoe. A silver square buckle glinted dully. ‘It’s Rosamond Watson’s.’

  ‘You and Rosamond together again!’ Lucie’s expression had grown serious, her eyes cold.

  Cliff Banks tried to struggle to the other side of the cavity. More soil fell as he kicked and scuffed.

  ‘C’mon, I need a pavement.’ Lucie May scrambled down the slope to the Ruined Arch.

  ‘How did you know it was Banks?’ Stella asked when they were on the path.

  ‘You’re not the only one with files in the attic.’ Lucie May was referring to the Rokesmith murder, Stella and Jack’s first case, which Stella had found in her dad’s attic after his death. ‘I’ve spent all day amongst cobwebs, excavating the treasures of my past work. I found stuff on that soldier in the Great West Road in 1976. Your hunch about the boy living at 25 Rose Gardens was spot on. Ivy Collins née Banks had a son, Clifford, “out of wedlock”. I couldn’t find a trace of a Mr Collins. Ivy and Clifford were rehoused in Westcroft Square, where she died in 1971. By then Banks was married with two kids.’