The House With No Rooms

by Lesley Thomson

  No one of the man’s height and build was reported missing in the 1950s and police believe that the man was a tramp sheltering in a house slated for demolition who was crushed by masonry.

  Police ask for anyone with information to contact Hammersmith Police Station.

  Jack discovered another cutting stuck to the paper, held by the tight fold. He prised them apart. The print had blurred, but was legible. Also from the Chronicle, it was dated 15 July, but wasn’t, Jack was surprised to find, by Lucie May.

  MURDER ON THE GREAT WEST ROAD

  By Malcolm Bennett

  A man found buried beneath the Great West Road, uncovered by the hot weather, was murdered, police have confirmed. Home Office pathologist Cornelius Jarvis emphasized that blunt-force injury to the skull was not the cause of death, but probably the result of being crushed during demolition of houses to build the road. Police have refused to reveal the exact cause of death.

  D.I. Davidson told a crowded press conference that the theory is that the man was part of a gang of burglars. He was probably killed in an argument over the loot. A gold signet ring found on his finger was engraved with the initials ‘GR’. (See inset picture.)

  Davidson confirmed that Judge Henry Ramsay reported a burglary at his home in St Peter’s Square in February 1956. The items stolen had belonged to Judge Ramsay’s late father Gerald. 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. None of these items has been recovered from the vicinity of the body. The locket is heart-shaped and, like the ring, is engraved with the letters ‘G’ and ‘R’.

  Davidson described the deceased as ‘too well built’ to have got through the Ramsays’ rear basement window, the robber’s entry point. The front door was double-locked, forcing any intruder to exit the same way. It’s likely that the dead man had an accomplice, a boy or boys: he was a 1950s’ Fagin. Such a boy would now be in his thirties.

  Jewellers have been asked to check records for the purchase of the silver locket and the Rolex watch in the last two decades.

  Police ask for anyone with information to contact Hammersmith Police Station.

  The print danced before Jack’s eyes. He had known the Ramsay family most of his life. Isabel Ramsay, the judge’s daughter-in-law and mother of three, had befriended his mother when she ‘didn’t know what to do with the baby’. Isabel had died days after Terry Darnell. The robbery must have been just before her time. Why had the owners of this house kept cuttings about a burglary that happened several miles away? Who lived here? The articles added to Jack’s conviction that he had stumbled on a mystery, a case for Clean Slate.

  He became aware of the silence. It was pure: no creaks, no floorboards flexing or firing of a boiler. No external sounds. The fear that had gripped him when he entered the house returned.

  The sides of the wardrobe were closing in. He was the man in the road, crushed by smashed beams and collapsed walls until all of life had gone.

  Jack reached out a flailing hand and pushed at the door. It swung open soundlessly. Whoever lived in this house had oiled every hinge.

  Jack crawled out of the wardrobe on his hands and knees. Locks of hair were saturated in sweat and stuck to his forehead. Again a voice in his head berated him for ignoring his instincts and entering the house.

  The atmosphere was dry and dead. More like a charnel house than a home where people lived happily or otherwise. It didn’t fit with the home of a True Host. Intent on a mission, True Hosts were nothing if not happy. The man from the sixth car had come here. Why? Was this his home?

  Google Street View didn’t lie. The images showed that Terry Darnell had watched Kew Villa in August 2010. Could his interest have been related to the robbery and subsequent murder in the fifties?

  Preoccupied with so many questions, Jack didn’t immediately notice a shaft of light cutting down the stairwell. Someone had come out of the top room. There was no time to hide in the bedroom. He shrank into the shadowy recess of the doorway. If the person switched on the landing light or wanted to go into the bedroom he was in full view. His body turned to liquid. He summoned up all his will to make himself invisible, to blank his mind.

  A man was coming down the stairs. He moved with the confidence of someone familiar with the space. He crossed a beam of moonlight slanting in from the landing window. Something flashed. A knife. On the landing, he brushed the wall inches from where Jack stood with his back to him. Jack could have put out a hand and touched him. It wasn’t a knife. It was a scalpel.

  ‘Coming.’ The man spoke quietly as if not to waken someone. Who? Someone must be sleeping in the room opposite.

  Jack battled with the horror that was overwhelming him. In the half-light, Jack couldn’t tell if the man was the True Host. He should be able to tell. The man continued down the stairs without looking behind him.

  Jack ducked back into the bedroom and went to the window. Cautiously he drew aside the curtain. The window overlooked the duck pond with an oblique view on to Priory Road. Parked where Terry’s Toyota had been was a taxi, the engine running, the ‘For Hire’ lamp off.

  The man he had seen on the stairs crossed the pavement to the taxi and spoke to the driver through the window. Then he climbed in the back. The taxi did a tight U-turn and chugged off towards Kew Green.

  Jack had to prevent himself rushing out of the front door. He made himself leave the way he had come in.

  *

  Tonight the statuary in Mortlake Cemetery unnerved him. Angels pointed fingers at him, cherubs and gargoyles fixed him with their stares, laughing and grimacing by turn. He leant on a mausoleum. He had been so close to being discovered. He hadn’t seen the man properly, either on the landing or in the shadow of the taxi. He had failed to establish if he was the man from the sixth car.

  Jack shrugged into his coat and something rustled in his pocket. He had forgotten to put the newspaper back in the drawer. A stupid mistake. Jack hesitated; then he went down a barely visible track between the gravestones. He couldn’t return to the house. He wouldn’t be lucky twice.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  November 2014

  ‘I’ve never seen anyone dead before.’

  Stella was about to say that nor had she, then remembered that she had seen several dead people, starting with her dad and ending with Joseph Hooker – or whatever his name was – in Kew Gardens. She made a non-committal sound, but Michelle Banks wasn’t listening.

  They were sitting in what was described as a ‘Place of Peace’: a bench on a bed of gravel picked out in LED lights beneath the fronds of a willow tree. Opposite the bench, in a pool of water, was a stone sculpture with holes like cheese and a chunk of driftwood. The night was freezing, but Stella was no more willing to go inside the hospice than it seemed was Michelle, since she had been waiting in the car park when she arrived.

  Stella felt she was a spare part. When Michelle Banks had rung, she had flung on clothes and driven through the empty streets, Michelle’s words repeating in her head.

  Tina has died. Tina has died.

  The truth dawned. Her friend wasn’t there. Tina wasn’t anywhere. Tina has died.

  ‘How was she?’ Stella saw that she shouldn’t have believed Tina. She should have listened to Jackie. Even Cashman had known Tina wasn’t going to get better. She should have come when Tina first asked for her, when they might have had a meaningful conversation – at the least she would have got to the bottom of the murderer thing. She had let Tina down. The lights washed over the smooth stone sculpture. A slight breeze ruffled the water, making the reflection of the stone bend and warp.

  ‘It wasn’t peaceful, if that’s what you’re asking.’ Michelle dug her boot into the gravel, making a dip. She pushed the stones back and then did it again. Unable to watch the futility of the action, Stella looked away.

  �
�Yes.’ It wasn’t what she had meant. She didn’t know what she had meant.

  ‘So much for people turning into saints on their deathbed. Tina was spiteful, she said Dad would be upset that his favourite child was dead, as if that pleased her. True, my father has – had – no eyes for anyone but his beloved “Crystal”. He let us think he worked day and night to send her to expensive schools and get her through law school. The state system was good enough for me.’ The scuffing intensified, gravel flew up and splashed into the pond. The garden was far from peaceful. ‘It was a lie!’

  ‘Tina didn’t go to law school?’ Involuntarily Stella scuffed the gravel too.

  ‘Yes, of course she did. But – Chrissie told me last week – Dad didn’t pay a penny. His friend George covered the lot. What was special about Tina?’ She made an odd sound that made Stella think of the way Stanley howled when he had nightmares. ‘Ignore me. I know what was special about Tina: she was the best sister I could ever have.’ Michelle glared down at the water as if Tina might be there.

  ‘I suppose it was the drugs.’ Stella found herself confirming that the pale shape reflected in the water was the sculpture and not a face.

  ‘She kept going on about you. I didn’t know you were so close.’ It sounded like an accusation.

  ‘We worked together.’

  ‘I thought you were her cleaner.’ Michelle was seemingly as capable of spite as her sister, but Stella didn’t consider it an insult, so didn’t notice. ‘You can’t argue with someone when they’re dying,’ she murmured more to herself.

  ‘We had coffee sometimes.’ Stella didn’t mention the foxtrot session. Her foot tapped to David Bowie’s ‘Rebel Rebel’. Ghost music, Jack would have said.

  ‘I’m overwrought. I haven’t slept for weeks. And now Tina’s died without seeing Dad. They say you can control when you die so why didn’t she wait? He’ll be gutted, he’s hardly left her side. I’ll have to deal with him without her. Ignore me,’ she said again.

  Whoever ‘they’ were, they had been wrong about her dad too. Terry wouldn’t have chosen to have a heart attack in a street. Stella stood up. ‘What did Tina say about me?’ She regretted the question. It sounded as if she was only thinking of herself. She shouldn’t have come. She had come to see Tina. Stupid, since Tina was dead.

  ‘Like you said, she was high on morphine. Something about cake being from a shop. Oh, and she left these for you.’ She reached down beside the bench and produced a plastic bag. ‘She made me go to the office for this. Would you believe that it was in the safe! Looks like rubbish to me, feel free to chuck it out.’ She passed the bag to Stella.

  Stella realized that she had been hoping for a sign of the old Tina. A cleaning instruction or an explanation of a legal technicality. When she had seen her, Tina had rambled on about murder and her last words were about a fork and a cat. Tina had truly gone. She didn’t look in the bag because it seemed rude with Michelle Banks complaining that her sister hadn’t thought of her. But inwardly Stella felt faintly gratified that after all Tina had left some of herself for her.

  ‘She left instructions for her funeral – seems she wrote them years ago. No flowers and everyone in black.’ Michelle’s voice cracked.

  A distant rumbling grew louder. Spears of light cut through the willow. A taxi was chugging up the drive.

  ‘Shit, it’s Dad!’ Michelle spun on her heel and, tramping out of the Place of Peace, chased after the taxi.

  Stella remained by the pond. This wasn’t the time to offer Cliff Banks her condolences. She should leave the Bankses to grieve by themselves. Her phone buzzed with a text. Martin. She had forgotten about him.

  Bed’s too big. Coming back?

  Unable to think of a reply, she closed the app. A breeze rustled the willow. She imagined the feel of Martin’s body, his smell, a mix of after-shave – Gillette like Terry – and beer. Last night had been good, but it belonged to a different life. A life where Tina was alive. It was three in the morning and she was sitting in the garden of a hospice. Her routine was in pieces.

  By the time she reached the car park, Michelle Banks was walking up to the hospice entrance, her arm through her father’s. Mr Banks’s taxi was parked next to her van. She waited until they had gone inside before opening the van and climbing in.

  There was a ‘1’ next to the message icon on her phone. It should have gone when she opened Cashman’s message. She dabbed the envelope icon and nearly dropped the phone. The ‘1’ was beside Tina’s name.

  Please never shed fruit was sleet, how dear hehe No Kesto Mar.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  November 2014

  The Herbarium at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew was originally in an eighteenth-century mansion outside the Elizabeth Gate. Over two centuries, initially under the auspices of Kew’s Director William Hooker and then his son Joseph as the collection of specimens grew, it was extended several times. In 2010 an air- and temperature-controlled building opened. Cylindrical-shaped and clad in wood, it housed the library, botanists and artists with a roof terrace commanding a sweeping view of the Botanic Gardens, the Thames and the misty reaches of West London.

  Jack was cleaning in Wing C, the Victorian building. Wendy and the rest of the team had been allocated the modern complex.

  He approached the desk, the wood rich and mellow in the light of a lawyers’ lamp, at which stood a wooden office chair upholstered in cracked leather. It was empty, although a mug of steaming coffee testified that the occupant couldn’t be far away. Given the receptionist was absent today, Jack hesitated over the visitors’ book: he preferred to arrive and leave unnoticed. But Stella, Queen of Risk Assessment, stipulated that operatives must sign in. He scribbled his name, noting that, not counting Clean Slate people, he was the first visitor of the day. He was pleased; he wanted to be alone with the specimens.

  He wheeled his equipment cart to the lift. It contained only a Henry vacuum. No chemicals for this job, nothing must damage the integrity of the dried plants. Already Jack thought of them as his friends.

  He watched the lift light descend and wondered how Stella was doing in the Marianne North Gallery; he had offered to clean it with her, but she had refused. Instead of going home from Kew Villa early that morning, he had stopped at Stella’s house in Rose Gardens North.

  Cashman’s car had been parked outside. Lucie May had said that Cashman had left his wife, but Jack didn’t trust him. He hadn’t yet told Stella about seeing Terry on Street View. Since seeing her kiss Cashman he feared she would dismiss the idea that he had found a new case. Stella was moving with real detectives now.

  He looked again at the lift light: it was still descending; yet he didn’t see why it had gone up. Wendy and the others were starting at the ground floor. He was the first visitor. It would be the security guard doing a final round, he decided as, at last, the lift arrived and the door slid aside. Stepping in he was intrigued to find that the interior had been padded with canvas quilting. A notice was stuck to the material: ‘Caution Mirror Behind’.

  A message for Medusa! Jack imagined telling Stella. Although she might not have got the reference to the gorgon who turned people to stone with a look. Perseus had vanquished Medusa by looking at her in the reflection of his shield. Stella didn’t have time for myths, she faced life head on.

  ‘Everything is a myth,’ he said as the lift rose upwards.

  He entered the old Herbarium on the top floor and stopped by a balcony that ran around the sides of the building. There were two more balconies below. All were linked by spiral staircases at each end of the vast hall. The staircases and railings were painted a cheery post-office red. Jack could sense volition in the twisting metal and imagined the botanists – Joseph Hooker, George Bentham and Charles Darwin – who, over the centuries, had worked here.

  On the other mornings Jack had worked with another operative, a young man called Sam. But Sam had called in sick that morning so Jack was on his own. This gave him time to properly appreciate the
place. A vast palace filled with treasures.

  Within alcoves on each level were row upon row of cupboards painted an institutional cream gloss. Between these were alcoves. Jack set down the Henry vacuum and went into the nearest alcove. A column radiator beneath a window pumped out heat. On a government-issue table that looked as if it dated from the 1940s was a microscope, a measuring scale, an anglepoise lamp and a ‘sharps’ box for used scalpel blades. Files and paper were stacked on a table at which stood a wooden stool with a leaf-shaped hand grip cut into the seat and an office chair. The window reflected the alcove; it would be dark for two hours yet. A strip lamp slung from chains cast a bleak light.

  Without the other cleaner there, Jack tingled with excitement. The Herbarium was all his. He opened a cupboard labelled ‘Lamiaceae’. He knew enough about botany to recognize the genus that included the species lavender and rosemary. An indentation inside the door read ‘F Coote VR’; the joiner’s mark dated the cabinets to before 1901 when Queen Victoria died. The smell of naphthalene and mercury chloride, the Victorians’ noxious choice of preservative, wafted out. He felt a surge of excitement. The shelves were packed with files of specimens stored according to their characteristics. A sheet of yellowing paper was stuck above the joiner’s stamp. Jack read the faded type: ‘Visitors studying in the Herbarium are requested to observe that the removal of specimens, or any portions of them, from the sheets is absolutely prohibited without the permission of the Keeper. No flower, fruit, or leaf is on any account to be detached for analysis without his approval.’ The author was ‘Joseph D. Hooker, Director. June 9th 1882’. The notice was itself a specimen, its order still held true. The Herbarium was filled with phantoms, human and botanical.

  Jack slid out a file and laid it on the table. Stuck to the sheet was a scrap of brown stuff, shrivelled and nondescript. He read a sepia-stained typed label: ‘Flora of the Malay Archipelago’. The label was as illegible as a doctor’s prescription: he gleaned that the plant was a ‘something triflora’. The specimen had been found by ‘Dr King’s Collector’ in ‘1881’.