The House With No Rooms

by Lesley Thomson

  Preoccupied with getting to grips with the job, it was only on Stella’s third trip to the yard that she thought about Tina. Her good mood plummeted. As water thundered into the bucket, she went over what Jackie had said and reassured herself again that the sister would be fussing. Tina wouldn’t want Stella turning up at her sick bed. Then again she had supposed Tina wouldn’t want Stella to see her dancing when instead she had asked her to join in.

  The bucket made a hollow clank on the tiles. The noise unnerved her. She wished again that Jack were here. No: if he were, he would see ghosts everywhere and fray her nerves to a rag.

  The mop in one hand and bucket in the other, careful not to spill water, she passed through the main gallery and into a central chamber. Two minutes and she would be done.

  The names of the countries where North had painted were lettered in gilt on wooden panels above her head. This little chamber depicted the Seychelles, Tenerife, South Africa and India. Illuminated by a solitary low-wattage lamp, it was to Stella’s mind dark. Here, the smell of stale smoke was stronger. Shame Kew Gardens didn’t sanction plug-in deodorizers.

  She dipped the mop into the water, twirled it about, lifted it out and leant on the bucket, her feet either side to stabilise it. She squeezed out the excess. She lowered the mop to the floor and began her scything motion, back and forth, her movements fluid. She worked from the rear of the chamber towards the doorway.

  Her boot caught something. She peered down and made out a hand, palm outstretched. Absurd. The job had got to her. She switched on her phone’s torch app. In the bright light she saw another hand, two legs, lace-ups. An elderly man, white hair around his head like a halo, was asleep in the corner. Trevor had said it was nigh on impossible to get locked into the gallery. Not true.

  ‘I’m sorry, but I need to clean here.’ Her line for when she found offices or rooms occupied. The man didn’t stir so she raised her voice: ‘Excuse me, but I have to do this floor.’ She heard how haughty she sounded. Concerned not to frighten the man, she bent and touched his shoulder. She met with solidity. Like wood. Hard and unyielding.

  The man lying beneath painting number 521, Mr Smith’s Garden, on the unmopped tiles wasn’t asleep. He was dead.

  Stella had seen few bodies. The first had been her father at the Royal Sussex County Hospital where he was brought after he had collapsed and died in the street. However, the daughter of a police officer whose bedtime stories for his little girl had featured sniffer dogs and bloodied fingerprints, Stella was versed in the stages a corpse goes through after death. She didn’t need a pathologist to understand that the man was dead.

  The bike ride in the foggy dark, strange sounds in the gallery and the silence of the gardens had made her jittery. But now, with a corpse at her feet, Stella switched into action. Calmly, she dialled a number on her phone. Not the emergency services or the Kew code, but the first person who came to mind. A number that, without memorizing it, she knew by heart.

  ‘All right, Stell?’ Martin Cashman asked.

  Chapter Twenty

  July 1976

  ‘Are you OK?’

  Chrissie was startled. Since Bella had forbidden girls to talk to her, she was unused to anyone who wasn’t a teacher speaking to her. She was sitting on the patch of grass in Kew Gardens where the girls had had their picnic, in what seemed another life. Close by was the White Greyhound: her favourite of the Queen’s Beasts. Warm air wrapped around her like a woolly blanket.

  Emily stood in front of her, a hankie balled in her hand. She rubbed vigorously at her nose with the flat of her palm, rubbing so hard that Chrissie thought she must flatten her nose into her face. Her eyes were red as if she had been crying. But one thing Chrissie had gathered about Emily was that, whatever happened, she never cried. She had hay fever.

  She looked about her, but couldn’t see Bella. Nevertheless, she whispered: ‘You’re not meant to talk to me.’ Suddenly she didn’t want Emily to be in trouble.

  ‘I don’t care. I like you.’ Emily blew her nose, making a squeaky sound like a dog’s toy. ‘I think she likes you really.’

  ‘I don’t care.’ This was true. When you were in charge you didn’t care if people liked you, only that they did what you told them to do.

  ‘We can go on being friends, if you like,’ Emily said.

  ‘You’ll get in trouble.’

  ‘I won’t. Bella’s quite nice really,’ Emily said. ‘She doesn’t mean to be mean to me,’ she added without apparent rancour.

  Chrissie had never supposed a person could do something they wanted because they liked someone. She had never paused to consider whom she liked. She suddenly wanted to reward Emily for being braver than she could be. Not counting the locket, she had nothing to give her. Then she considered that this wasn’t true. ‘Emily, shall I tell you a secret?’

  ‘I’m good with secrets,’ Emily remarked.

  ‘Come with me.’ Chrissie jumped up and set off past the Queen’s Beasts, unconsciously counting them off, like a colonel inspecting the rank and file. The Yale of Beaufort, the Red Dragon of Wales... the Griffin of Edward III fixed her with a diabolical expression that made her realize she was going the wrong way. Instead of retracing her steps – she didn’t want Emily to spot her mistake – she led them around the lake.

  Perhaps Emily guessed anyway because she asked, ‘Where are we going? Is this the way?’ Nevertheless she jogged gamely beside her.

  ‘You’ll see.’ Chrissie was going at a clip for fear of changing her mind. ‘Yes, it is the way.’ Glancing across the lake – a spread of bright steel in the remorseless light – she fancied the Griffin was still watching her.

  Mr Watson wasn’t in the Marianne North Gallery. Nor the gobstopper lady. Or the Cat in the Hat. Chrissie checked the middle chamber and the end one with the cupboard. Finally sure that they were alone she hissed at Emily, ‘I saw a murder!’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Emily gaped at her, hankie clamped to her nose.

  ‘I saw a murder!’ Chrissie said it again, struck that she had truly seen a murder. It hadn’t been Addled Brain. She tugged at her skirt and smoothed the fabric.

  ‘I don’t think you can have done, Chrissie.’ Emily embarked on a fit of sneezing.

  ‘I did,’ Chrissie said more to herself. She went to the middle of the room. The tiles where the lady had been lying were no different to the others. There was no red for blood.

  ‘Did you tell the police?’ Emily’s voice was muffled in the hankie.

  ‘I don’t know any.’ Chrissie reflected that she did know a policeman. There was the one who had a daughter who was exactly the same age as her who had come looking for Mrs Watson. ‘It was right here.’ She pointed at the tiles and then shrank back and banged against the cupboard. The gobstopper lady was back on the floor. She was staring at her with the Griffin’s eyes.

  ‘If you saw a murder you should have told the police.’ Emily didn’t believe her.

  For a flash of a second, Chrissie hated her. Then the feeling went away and she felt exhausted.

  ‘Are you sure you saw one? What exactly did you see?’

  ‘A lady and a cat,’ Chrissie said slowly. The lady was Mrs Watson. Chrissie clamped her hand over her mouth to stop herself shouting out the words.

  ‘A cat?’ Emily’s eyes were streaming. ‘What colour cat?’

  ‘Black. It had on a red bow tie and a tall hat striped red and white.’ The words tumbled out. ‘There was a fish that was cross because it had come out of its bowl and an umbrella. It had a tail – the cat, I mean.’ Mrs Watson had gobstoppers for eyes.

  ‘That’s The Cat in the Hat!’ Emily was jubilant. ‘You said about it at the picnic. I worried that the cat would visit me and my brother when my mum left us alone. Now when she goes out, it’s better because I don’t believe that the cat will turn up. But someone else could—’

  ‘The Cat in the Hat’s not real, stupid!’ Chrissie hadn’t meant to be unkind.

  ‘Did you dream a
bout the murder with the cat? I think my dreams are real and my mum sees things. Daddy can’t take her out in case she sees them. But he’s mostly at a war so it doesn’t matter.’

  ‘It must have been a dream.’ Chrissie had tested her secret on Emily and she had said that it was a dream. The Cat in the Hat was a story. The cat wasn’t real. The tiles were clean. If there had been a murder there would be blood. She had told the policeman that Mrs Watson had given her tea. She had given her tea.

  Still, if Mrs Watson were dead she couldn’t hand Chrissie in to the police for stealing her locket. Chrissie let herself relax.

  Then another thought cancelled the moment of relief. Had she murdered Mrs Watson but, like Emily’s mum, she couldn’t remember murdering her?

  Chapter Twenty-One

  October 2014

  ‘Joseph Peter Hooker. Date of birth, seventh of November 1944. He was about to be seventy. Might mean something. Couldn’t face growing old, decided to end it here. I can think of worse places.’ Through the plastic evidence bag, Martin Cashman was peering at the dead man’s driving licence. In protective gloves – his own, although Stella had offered him a pair of hers – Cashman flicked at the bag with a forefinger. ‘Comes from Sydney. In Australia,’ he added as if those grouped around him in the Marianne North Gallery wouldn’t know where Sydney was.

  ‘Hooker! Could he be a relation?’ asked one of the two WPCs who had arrived moments before Cashman and had ‘preserved the scene’.

  The name rang a bell, but presuming it must be a client, Stella said nothing.

  ‘A relation of who?’ Cashman frowned. ‘Whom.’

  ‘Joseph Hooker, Director of Kew Gardens, sir.’ The woman, perhaps guessing it was unwise to outsmart a senior officer – especially CID – looked as if this information was a surprise to her too.

  ‘Good work, Hoxton. Give him a call.’ Cashman handed the bag to a young man in a suit, pointy lace-ups and a haircut slick with product who was a younger version of himself. ‘Tread lightly, our man here could be his dad.’ He told her.

  ‘Joseph Hooker died in 1911, sir.’ The WPC studied the tiles at her feet.

  Stella saw why she knew the name. Jack had said Joseph Hooker had collected plants for the Herbarium.

  ‘Still, there could be a link.’ Cashman laid the licence on the bench and, picking up another evidence bag, scrutinized a collection of plastic cards from the man’s wallet. ‘He’s called Hooker and he’s lying dead in Kew Gardens.’ Cashman jabbed a thumb at the antechamber where, under an arc lamp, the pathologist was crouched over the body. He snatched up a bag containing a deerstalker hat found next to the body. ‘Should be called Sherlock!’

  He moved on to a soft packet of cigarettes branded Winfield Blue. This explained the smell of the stale smoke.

  Cashman put the evidence bag next to a pocket London Underground map and some loose strips of Juicy Fruit chewing gum in their respective bags. ‘No suicide note.’

  ‘Martin.’ The pathologist, a woman space-suited in forensic overalls, beckoned to him from within the blaze of the arc lamp. She was as tall as Stella, which, although they were surrounded by police officers, made them the tallest in the room.

  Stella considered taking the opportunity to slip away, but Cashman indicated for her to follow him.

  The pathologist had turned the man over so that he lay face down. One trouser leg had twisted when the body was moved revealing a lizard-skin calf. Stella recoiled. There was a stain on the tiles. It was all she could do not to grab her mop and wash it off. There was another stain on the man’s jacket. Stella didn’t need to be any sort of detective to see what had happened to Joseph Hooker.

  Cashman had undergone a transformation. No longer tired or irritable, he looked little older than his boyish sidekick in the winkle-pickers. He turned to the PR woman from Kew Gardens who stood beside Trevor the Facilities Manager near the door of the gallery. ‘The Marianne North Gallery won’t be opening today.’

  ‘Will you cordon it off from visitors?’ Trevor asked.

  ‘There will be no visitors. Kew Gardens is shut until further notice.’

  ‘We only close on Christmas Day!’ the woman objected.

  ‘We can’t have the public hoofing about destroying evidence.’ Cashman was frowning at the body.

  Stella recognized Cashman’s quiet excitement: she had seen it in her dad. Her mum still grumbled that Terry had loved the fuss of a high-profile crime. But her mum was wrong; Terry hadn’t courted publicity, he was a detective who wanted just to do his job.

  Cashman looked up. ‘This is murder.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ The PR woman must be seeing the headline pinging around the world. Murder in Kew Gardens!

  ‘I am sure.’ Cashman rocked on his heels. ‘Although we do it to each other all the time, it’s actually impossible for a man to stab himself in the back.’

  The outer doors banged and a woman who looked every inch CID swept into the gallery. Shoes encased in protective plastic, she stood in the doorway to the antechamber. ‘Sir, the SIO’s broken his leg.’

  Stella was no stranger to acronyms. In her world, ‘S’ stood for stain, ‘I’ for intensive and ‘O’ for odour, but in police jargon, it meant ‘Senior Investigating Officer’. Terry had been one early in his career. His first case was the Rokesmith murder in Hammersmith.

  Cashman groaned. ‘How’d he do that?’

  ‘He fell off a horse.’

  ‘Crowd control?’

  ‘Dressage.’ Her face was blank.

  ‘A detective on crutches. Perfect.’ Cashman made a sucking sound through his teeth.

  ‘It’s a bad break, sir, he’s not mobile. He’s not available.’ She paused. ‘And nor is anyone else.’

  Stella made sense of this exchange. In a rare conversation about his work, Terry had told her that senior investigating officers were appointed from a central pool. The SIO built a team from detectives in the locality of the crime. This would be Richmond station where Cashman had just been transferred. As Chief Superintendent, he was too senior to lead an inquiry. He was here now because she had called him.

  ‘What about you?’ Cashman was asking. ‘Have you done the training?’

  Stella started to shake her head but then realized that he was talking to the officer in the suit.

  ‘Not yet, sir,’ the woman said.

  No one spoke. Then Cashman cleared his throat. ‘Listen up. The press will be all over this. Kew Gardens is an iconic site in the UK. It’s a key tourist attraction and has international botanical renown.’ He adjusted the knot of his tie. ‘A murder could jeopardize public confidence, causing economic and reputational damage. This case needs a detective with considerable experience and expertise.’ He twitched the lapels of his suit. ‘I’m the Senior Investigating Officer.’ He raised his voice. ‘I’m in charge.’

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  July 1976

  Chrissie clutched at the wire on the sagging link fence. She was outside her old school. It was after home time so everyone had gone. She looked at the little garden which the children planted to give them a feel for living things. Sweet peas, nasturtiums, straggling honeysuckle and sunflowers were drooping and shrivelled in the heat.

  After a bit, she trailed across Glenthorne Road into Ravenscourt Park. In the shadow of the viaduct for the Piccadilly and District lines, the path was gloomy and barely cooler than in the sun.

  That morning at breakfast she had broached the possibility of stopping the drawing lessons. She began with her mum, a sensible way in to get her dad to change his mind about anything.

  ‘...since I don’t want to do drawing when I’m grown up.’ She had been the last one at the table; Michelle had left to get the bus to the big school.

  Washing up, Jenny Banks had been singing the chorus of ‘Never Going to Fall in Love Again’ to the radio. ‘Ask your dad,’ she had said at last.

  ‘Ask him what?’ Clifford Banks had come in and, tossing his car keys on to the tabl
e, reached around his wife and poured himself a glass of water. He drank half and threw the rest away, splashing the draining board. ‘That man gets on my wick!’ He indicated the transistor on the worktop, from which Noel Edmonds’s voice was bantering.

  ‘Nothing.’ Chrissie was gruff.

  ‘Don’t give me cheek, girl.’

  ‘Don’t mind him, sweetie.’ Jenny Banks had spoken in a stage whisper to Chrissie. ‘Your dad’s been in a mood since that the crater opened up in the Great West Road.’

  ‘So would you be if you had to go out of your way for airport runs in this heat. I’m a broiled lobster in that cab.’

  Pushing the dishcloth into a plastic grab suctioned to the wall, Mrs Banks said under her breath: ‘Poor man, no place to die.’

  ‘What man?’ Chrissie had piped up. Surely her dad wouldn’t die in his taxi?

  ‘Now you’re not to get nightmares—’ her mum began.

  ‘They found a dead man in a hole a week ago. The heat melted the tar and the road gave way. Rumour is that he was a burglar and he’d been there since the houses there were demolished.’ Her dad had no compunction about telling his daughter how it was.

  ‘Don’t matter what he did, no one should die like that. Under all those bricks – it doesn’t bear thinking about.’ Suddenly aware that her nine-year-old daughter was all ears, Mrs Banks turned up the volume on the radio.

  ‘Ask me what?’ To Chrissie’s dismay her dad returned to what he had overheard when he came in.

  Dorothy Moore was singing about her world being turned ‘misty blue’. Chrissie felt her own world fog over. To distract him, she blurted out, ‘I love this song,’ although she didn’t know it.

  ‘She’s wanting to stop those classes. She might as well since she’s not getting on with them.’ Her mum swayed to the music. ‘Face it, Cliff, she’s not Leonardo da Vinci!’

  ‘Not if she doesn’t stick to it.’ Clifford Banks swung around to his daughter. ‘D’you want to end up cleaning like your mum?’