The House With No Rooms

by Lesley Thomson

  ‘They’ll kill me if they see me again and you’re not here,’ Bella said when they were alone by the roundabout.

  ‘Yeah, they might,’ Chrissie agreed. ‘What’re you doing round here anyway? You live by Kew Gardens.’

  Bella reddened. ‘We’ve moved. We live here now.’

  ‘Where?’ Chrissie probed.

  ‘Goldhawk Road. My mum’s found a flat. We were in Kew, but she owed on the rent and we left without paying.’ The words tumbled out. ‘We left the washing up. And Bruce the Bear.’ Her lip wobbled.

  ‘What about your dad with the wig?’

  ‘He lives with his “mistress”. He doesn’t pay bills. My mum says he has his cake and he eats it.’

  ‘Who made it? Is it chocolate?’ They were walking under the arch to King Street.

  ‘Made what, the wig?’ Bella was chewing the side of her thumb. The blotches on her face had faded.

  ‘The cake your dad eats.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Bella replied miserably. ‘I don’t think she meant a real cake.’

  ‘I see.’ Chrissie didn’t see. Bella hadn’t asked why she was in Hammersmith when she lived in Kew. ‘See you tomorrow then,’ she said before Bella could do so.

  ‘You can be leader if you want.’ Bella undid the band fastening her hair, retwisted the hank and pulled it tight.

  ‘No thank you.’ Chrissie shook her head. She had a fine sense of how to wield power. Bella Markham would have to ask her more than once.

  King Street shimmered in the haze. Melting tar fumes cut the air.

  ‘You’re better at leading.’ Bella gave a crooked smile; the braces on her teeth glittered in the sunlight. ‘Pleeease, Chrissie.’

  ‘OK.’ Chrissie sighed reluctantly. ‘’Cept you have to say it.’

  ‘Say what?’ Bella looked anxious.

  ‘Say I’m in charge.’

  ‘You’re in charge!’

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  October 2014

  As he moved along Priory Road, Jack sang a rhyme from his babyhood:

  ‘There were two birds sat on a stone,

  Fa, la, la, la, lal, de;

  One flew away, and then there was one,

  Fa, la, la, la, lal de.’

  He stopped at the house by the pond in Kew where he had seen the True Host briefly stop. He must establish whether he lived there. All but the attic window was in darkness.

  For years Jack had tracked True Hosts through London and found his way into their sanctums. The risk wasn’t being arrested for breaking and entering (he never broke in order to enter), but falling victim to his Host.

  A detective’s daughter, Stella played by the book – the law and her staff manual – and last year he had promised her to stop going out at night. But that left the innocent – and the guilty – to the mercy of a True Host free to own the night-time lanes and byways, to lounge in alleyways and meander across wasteland. After the One Under case, Stella had said Jack must be unfettered by the demands of others. Not that she had put it like that, but he had taken the gist to mean that she accepted that he walked at night. Yet, tonight, every bone in his body screamed that he shouldn’t be here.

  So, keeping in the shadow of a plane tree, Jack nearly shouted out loud when a man stepped into the lamplight.

  ‘Are you OK, sir?’ A police officer.

  ‘Yes thank you.’ Little over a century ago, Jack’s nocturnal outings would have made him a criminal, but not any more. He stood his ground.

  ‘Would you mind telling me what you are doing, sir?’ the officer persisted.

  ‘It’s a time when you can be on your own. No one bothers you.’ A bad start. Jack’s mouth was dry. He should have seen the policeman before the policeman saw him. He drew his coat closer around him and affected nonchalance. ‘It helps me wind down.’

  ‘I see.’ The officer did not see. He got out a notebook and flipped it to a fresh page. ‘Perhaps you’d tell me what you were doing in the early hours of yesterday morning, sir?’

  Jack got it. Since Stella had found the body in the Marianne North Gallery, police would be patrolling the area near Kew Gardens in case the murderer returned. They would be looking for anyone acting untowardly; in the eyes of most people, Jack acted untowardly on a daily basis.

  He explained what he did for a living and that after a shift in the cab he needed to stretch his legs. He admitted that he had been walking the night before. He had been on the other side of the river, in Richmond Park. There might be shots of him on CCTV.

  Perhaps because he could make sense of a train driver behaving in such a way, the young man seemed convinced. But since Jack lacked an alibi – he had been in the vicinity of the murder at the time – he made a big thing of taking down his details. Jack regretted not going to Jackie’s when she had invited him, then she could have vouched for him, although not of course for the whole of the night. He considered saying that he knew the detective in charge of the Kew Gardens murder. No point, because Cashman would be happy to have him as the prime suspect.

  Allowed at last to continue on his way, Jack walked around the pond, hands behind his back, aware that the constable was watching him. When he reached the far side of the pond the young man turned and went off down Priory Road, his footsteps echoing in the silent street. Jack waited until they had died away and strolled back to the tree.

  He hadn’t heard back from Stella about his having found a case. He regretted the text, sent on a whim, because his evidence was flimsy. A woman dead on his train and a True Host who had left the scene without identifying himself amounted to little. Jack had come now in the hope of gathering more facts.

  There was a light at the top of the house. Was someone reading in bed? Was the light in a bedroom? The encounter with the constable had shaken him. He shouldn’t have been seen and, worse, the policeman had recorded his name and where he lived and worked. Jack had as good as put himself in the frame for a murder. He would resume his investigations at home. Pulling up his coat collar, Jack set off briskly towards Hammersmith.

  *

  Google Street View had introduced a new feature which Jack dubbed ‘the Time Slider’. By sliding a marker along a bar he could explore a street, a path or lane in other time zones, back to 2008. Jack would have liked the Time Slider to take him back decades and show his mother strolling around St Peter’s Square, clasping his hand – fuzzy figures caught on camera as they examined beetles crawling up walls and blackbirds perched on branches – but six years would have to do. He was used to ‘walking’ London on Street View in a parallel existence, now he could go back in time.

  The embers of a fire in the grate sent faint orange flickers across the ceiling. As the heat died, the chill reasserted itself. Jack was in his room at the top of his house. His eyrie was next to what had been his parents’ bedroom; it had been his mother’s private space and he felt her presence most strongly here.

  Unwilling to risk another encounter with the Met, Jack was now restricting his initial detective work to online. Cloaked in invisibility, he ‘journeyed’ along Priory Road in August 2010, the time zone a random choice. Kew Pond looked dry, a basin of mud. He zoomed in and saw that the surface was green with algae. He returned to Priory Road and focused on the house where he had seen the True Host. It was daytime and he could read a name fashioned in the wrought-iron gates: Kew Villa. The curtains were open. He paused the cursor by the tree where the constable had accosted him.

  There was someone at the front window. His heart thumping, Jack peered at the screen. Like all figures captured on Street View the face was fuzzed out. A phantom hovered behind glass that reflected wispy cirrus clouds in the sky. It could be a man or a woman. A man, he thought. Regardless, Jack was certain that the person was not the True Host.

  He stopped in his virtual tracks. The mouse jerked in his hand. He didn’t need to see the marque on the car’s radiator grille to identify it. The Toyota Yaris Verso was parked by the gates to the house. Jack directed the curs
or closer to the car. He was dexterous, aware that a clumsy dab could propel him up the road or into a tree. He went a little to the right and enlarged the image.

  Like faces, the number plate was fuzzy. But this didn’t extend to the rest of the vehicle. The sun had shone brightly on the day in summer 2010 when Google photographed Priory Road. The image was so sharp it showed a dent on the driver’s side wing and flecks of metal where the paint had been scratched. There was a shadow behind the steering wheel. Jack pressed the magnifying tool. He had only met him twice and then only for minutes, but he was familiar from newspaper photographs. The man in the Toyota Yaris Verso was Detective Chief Superintendent Terry Darnell, Stella’s father.

  Jack hadn’t noticed that the fire had gone out. The room was as cold as a fridge. He huddled in his coat. The only light was from his computer’s screen. To ward off demons that were never far away, he soothed himself, singing softly:

  ‘The other flew after, and then there was none,

  Fa, la, la, la, lal de.’

  ‘Why was Terry outside Kew Villa in August 2010?’ Grabbing a pencil Jack jotted down the question on a slip of paper by the keyboard. By the angle of the sun, it was morning. Inconveniently, Google didn’t provide times of day.

  The position of Terry’s shadow suggested that he was reading, perhaps a newspaper. It could be that Terry had been waiting for a friend. Jack didn’t think so. Like Cashman had said at Kew Gardens station, police officers were never off the clock.

  There were few reasons why someone sat for long periods in a car. Terry had the typical stance of a detective on a stakeout. ‘Who was he watching?’ Determined to be methodical – Stella would approve – Jack wrote down the question. He had respect for the Met detective in whose footsteps he and Stella were tentatively treading. The newspaper wasn’t a clumsy prop; Terry was hiding in plain sight, a trick at which Jack was proficient.

  Jack couldn’t know how long Terry had been in the Toyota. He could have parked moments before the Google car captured him and only glanced at the newspaper. Or he could have been there hours. He had retired in 2009 and by August 2010 had only months to live.

  Jack sat in the darkness, the gentle glow of the screen making hulking creatures out of the desk and the cupboard, and faced the truth. He wasn’t an armchair detective, he would have to go and see for himself.

  Outside he stopped to stroke the door knocker, a short-eared owl who was his friend, and, without a backward glance, he hurried down the steps into the night.

  *

  There was no sign of the policeman. Nor were there cars of any colour outside Kew Villa. The camber where the Toyota had been was cross-hatched by shadows of branches. Terry’s absence was palpable. On his night walks through the empty streets of London, Jack felt not just the absence of those in bed asleep, but of the dead. Avoiding cracks in the pavements, he sensed his own mortality.

  He was certain that Kew Villa had been the focus of Terry’s interest. He looked up at the house. The window where he had seen the face was blank, the curtains drawn. The light was still on in the topmost window. A child’s bedroom perhaps; more likely a study. No child would be awake now.

  Not true. As a child he had lain awake watching the hands on the clock drag around.

  Jack continued around the pond into Bushwood Road and behind the house found a door in the garden wall. It was unlocked and swung open on oiled hinges. He took a step back. That shouldn’t have happened. It was like an invitation. The True Host was expecting him. He went numb. There was no garage and the bins were by the front steps, yet someone used the back door regularly.

  Through the opening, instead of the Palm House, was an overgrown lawn. In the shadow of the wall, he checked his watch. He was due at the Herbarium at a quarter to six. Being situated outside Kew Gardens, it was open as normal. He pulled the door closed. He felt the same unease as it moved too easily and shut with the minutest click.

  Jack told himself it had been a good night’s work. Google Street View had given him evidence for Stella. Apart from Jennifer Day’s death on his train, a man acting suspiciously at the scene had gone to a house that four years ago her father had staked out. Not a lot to go on, but no less than for their other cases.

  The Kew Gardens Estates Office was at the end of Ferry Lane. As Jack trudged along the long single-track road, he glimpsed the river, a black ribbon through the trees. On his left was the wall of the Herbarium and then Kew Gardens. He didn’t look behind to confirm that he was alone as he sang. His voice lilted on the dawn breeze:

  ‘And so the poor stone was left all alone.

  Fa, la, la, la, lal, de.’

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  July 1976

  ‘How are you liking your school?’ Cliff Banks called through the open glass partition in his taxi. He watched his daughter in his rear-view mirror.

  ‘It’s nice.’ Chrissie slid along the seat to avoid her dad’s eyes. She leant on the armrest and gazed despondently out of the window at the dusty streets. She would like to be walking home on the path by the viaduct with Janice and Geoff sharing penny snakes and sherbet fountains. She didn’t want to be pretending to go home in a taxi driven by a man who wasn’t supposed to be her dad. The bit about going home in a taxi was true, a notion that didn’t raise her spirits. The locket, secreted in her skirt pocket, weighed her down like a boulder.

  Her dad echoed her thoughts. ‘You’ll go up a notch after this! Bet most of the girls don’t go home in a taxi cab!’

  Chrissie was on the verge of retorting that she wasn’t the only girl collected in a taxi, but that would upset him. Recently Bella had started to take the train and Emily always walked. Since Bella had moved to Goldhawk Road, Chrissie had to go right down the platform and get in another carriage to avoid her. When Bella had confessed that she lived in a rented flat and that her dad didn’t live with her, Chrissie sniffed an advantage that confessing the truth about her own life would nullify. So far as Bella knew, Chrissie lived in a huge house and rode about in a taxi. Chrissie felt uncomfortable, because if she could tell the truth Bella could have come in the taxi too. Her thoughts went on in this way as her dad’s taxi wended through the sun-drenched streets of West London, the open windows making no difference to the static heat in the cab.

  ‘Who were those girls you was with?’ Her dad was chatty, but Chrissie wasn’t fooled. Her mum said he was anxious for her to get on and not have his sort of life. Chrissie couldn’t see what was wrong with it. Her dad had more fun than Mr Watson, who only smiled when he was doing his drawings and hardly even then.

  ‘My friends. I’m in charge,’ she reassured him. They were passing Kew Gardens. She would rather be in there making a daisy chain. Through the bars of a gate she glimpsed a chimney. The house with no rooms. She shivered.

  ‘You all right, sweetie?’ Her dad was watching her in the mirror.

  ‘I’ve been there.’ She pinched herself. Mr Watson hadn’t said that the field trips were a secret, only his drawing of the eucalyptus tree. She guessed her dad wouldn’t think looking at other people’s pictures was proper work. She fixed on the notice with her dad’s cab number fixed between the jump seats opposite: ‘34425’. She knew it off by heart. One day she could have a taxi number of her own.

  ‘Where?’ her dad was asking. He didn’t sound at all cross.

  ‘There’s a house in there with paintings all hung up next to each other. They were done by a lady in the Victorian times. Mr Watson took me.’

  ‘Was it useful?’ His eyes were twinkling.

  ‘Yes.’ Useful? She didn’t know what that meant. ‘Mr Watson told me not to do them like that though. He says botanists don’t want pretty pictures, they want drawings that make them decide the name of dead plants. But he loves her.’ She considered telling her dad about her visit there by herself, but that would mean explaining about running away from her friends and worse about Mrs Watson on the floor. Last Thursday Mrs Watson had made country cake with raisins. Chrissie did
n’t like raisins, but with Mrs Watson having just popped out, she hadn’t had to eat them.

  ‘Loves her? His wife better watch out then!’ He laughed.

  Before she had time to consider the wisdom of it, she said, ‘Mrs Watson was with us.’

  A cyclist cut across the taxi’s path. Cliff Banks braked. Something slid out from under the seat. ‘Try going in a straight line, mate! What was that, sweetheart?’

  ‘Mrs Watson came too.’ Chrissie wriggled around on the seat. It was too hot to breathe in the cab.

  ‘She keeps a weather eye on him.’ Cliff Banks slowed to let a car come out of a driveway on to the road.

  Chrissie hunched into the corner of the cab. The visit hadn’t been useful because it meant that she couldn’t drop the locket behind the settee. She reached into her pocket and touched it. She had come to like the locket and didn’t want to give it back. If her dad asked Mr Watson about the field trip he would find out that she was lying. It seemed she couldn’t stop herself lying.

  Her dad drove over Chiswick Bridge. Waiting in traffic Chrissie saw a boat with men rowing on the river. A man on a bicycle was shouting at them from the towpath through a megaphone. The men must be glad to be on the water where he couldn’t reach them. She wished that she was there, floating down the river in the sunshine.

  On the Great West Road, traffic had slowed to walking pace. Chrissie peered out of the window at a line of wooden barriers protecting a hole so deep that she couldn’t see to the bottom.

  ‘Have they found more dead men?’ she said, trying to forget the locket.

  ‘Just that robber. He was buried under the demolished houses long before you was born.’

  ‘Were you born then?’

  ‘Yes, I think so. It was in the fifties.’

  ‘I feel sorry for him being crushed by bricks.’ Chrissie was telling the truth; she did feel sad for the man. She would hate her flat to fall on top of her.

  ‘Don’t. Some of us do an honest day’s graft for a living, we don’t steal off of others.’ He strained over the luggage space to see into the hole. ‘Would you credit it, the man was wearing a ring from the robbery, bold as brass! Anyway, that’s not how he died. He was murdered.’