The House With No Rooms

by Lesley Thomson

  Excitement that he might be the first to look at the delicate brown leaves since the late nineteenth century was dashed when Jack saw a bar code at the top of the sheet. The sheet had been digitized recently. His fingers hovered over the dried plant; he wanted to touch it, to make a connection with ‘Dr King’s Collector’ across time.

  The cabinets held specimens waiting to be named and assigned a place in a taxonomic order. Some would be lumped in with existing species as Joseph Hooker had so often done. Hooker might be dead, but his legacy lived on; the Herbarium was alive, ever growing and re-forming. Jack slipped the folder back into the compartment. He felt a tingling on his neck. He looked over the railing. A shadow passed across the parquet floor below. It would be the security guard.

  A cardboard strip, like a match book, lay on the floor by the radiator. Jack bent to pick it up and read the words ‘Do Not Touch’. Below these was ‘Insect Monitor’. Without touching, he peered behind the flap of cardboard and gave a start. A large spider was sitting beneath it. It was surrounded by six small spiders and a beetle. They had been caught on the sticky surface and all of them were dead. Rather like a scene of crime, each insect was circled by coloured dots. Three spiders had red dots; two green; and the large spider, the remaining small one and the beetle had blue dots. Crouching on the floor and twisting his neck, Jack read the back of the flap. The colours corresponded to inspection dates, three so far this year. Insects were the enemy of the specimens. They had to be lured into the trap. The trap monitored the threat level. Stella would approve. Despite his passion for the specimens, his dreams of working with them, Jack shuddered. Insects had their place too.

  He set to work. He vacuumed, he got into every corner, nosing the brush along the base of the cupboards. He worked around chairs and tables in the alcoves, taking care to disturb nothing.

  He didn’t see the man in the last alcove until he bent to untangle the cord from around the table leg. He switched off the vacuum.

  ‘I’m sorry to disturb you.’ Surprise made his voice tremble.

  The man didn’t respond although he must at least have heard the vacuum. Jack tugged the Henry out of the alcove. Slowly, the man looked up from his work and let his gaze rest on Jack. Jack dropped the vacuum brush; it clattered on the parquet. He never forgot a face. The man was smiling; it wasn’t the smile of a friend.

  ‘I’ll get out of your way,’ the man said pleasantly, but he didn’t get up.

  Jack saw Jennifer Day lying dead on the floor of his train. He saw the ghostly man behind the glass partition. The figure in darkness, inspecting a bouquet of flowers on the station platform.

  The murderer returning to the scene of the crime.

  It was the man from the sixth car.

  ‘I’ll come back later.’ Fear sapped him of strength.

  ‘Have we met?’ The man’s skin was smooth as if life hadn’t touched him. Only his hands, worn and wrinkled, put him in his sixties.

  Jack wouldn’t lie, but he knew how to avoid the truth. ‘I’ve never cleaned here before.’

  ‘I see.’ The man was toying with him. True Hosts didn’t forget faces. He knew Jack as Jack knew him. He smiled again as he said, ‘I never forget faces.’ He was strolling through Jack’s mind, picking out thoughts and threading them through his fingers.

  It was Jack’s practice, in the presence of True Hosts, to become invisible. He had been caught out this time; like an insect, he was stuck to the floor, dots all around him, marking his position. He glimpsed his reflection in the window, wraithlike and insubstantial.

  ‘I’ll come back.’ He moved towards the balcony railing. Then stopped. If he pitched over it, he would die; no one would hear him scream. In a reconstruction of the event, Cashman would presume Jack had been careless. Stella would know better, but would wonder if he had been distracted by botany and lost his balance.

  ‘No, I will go.’ The voice might have belonged to a man or a woman. True Hosts defied definition. ‘The dead can wait.’ He smiled as if it was a joke that Jack would share.

  Jack watched the staircase, but the man didn’t appear on it. He must have gone out another way.

  Jack completed the rest of his shift in a daze. When he returned to the foyer, a woman in her mid-fifties was sitting at the reception desk. She was fitting cards into the plastic holders of visitor tags.

  ‘All done?’ she enquired without looking up.

  ‘Yes.’ Jack put in the time of his exit in the book. With dismay he saw that the botanist – the True Host – hadn’t signed in. He had hoped to learn his name.

  ‘Has anyone arrived since I was here?’ He tapped the time of his arrival. ‘Since six ten?’

  ‘Your colleagues have finished.’ The woman spoke without judgement that Jack was last.

  ‘The botanists...?’ Jack waved a hand airily.

  ‘Why do you ask?’ She was less friendly now.

  ‘In future I want to avoid getting in their way.’

  She relaxed. ‘Mr Watson is here.’ She tutted. ‘He forgets to sign in.’

  ‘Everyone here deals in life and death,’ Jack opined, struck by the notion. The woman was looking at him strangely. He grabbed the cart and hurried out to the car park. He shoved the cart into the back of the van.

  The lights of the Herbarium windows seemed suspended in the dark. A shadow crossed a window on the top floor. Jack was gratified. He had learnt that the True Host was called Mr Watson and that he was a botanist.

  Unbidden a voice whispered: ‘The dead can wait.’

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  November 2014

  Stella crossed the tiled floor in the Marianne North Gallery through to the back, belatedly noting that she was tiptoeing. In the glare of the lamp in the yard, she filled her bucket with freezing water from the tap. Beyond the wall, she heard a car go by. Traffic on the Kew Road would be picking up. Stella liked it here, closer to ‘civilization’. She hadn’t admitted it to Martin, or Jackie, but since finding the body she disliked coming here. She wouldn’t take Jack off the Herbarium even though he had offered, but she could do with him. Not for protection – she wasn’t scared – but Tina’s death had given her a jolt and she couldn’t get the dead man’s face out of her mind. She would like the company. Jack hadn’t answered her text asking where there was. As the days went by the more her reply struck her as sarcastic. She would catch him at the Herbarium this morning and put things right.

  Swishing the mop over the tiles in the main gallery, negotiating a cupboard by the doorway, she considered that Tina had been dead five hours. Soon it would be five days, then five months. She batted the idea away. How long Tina had been dead didn’t matter. All that mattered was that she was dead. Clasping the long mop handle, Stella pictured Tina foxtrotting, holding the mop and singing to ‘Rebel Rebel’ at the top of her voice.

  Stella finished. She squeezed out the mop. She looked at the tiles. One patch looked dry, but she had definitely cleaned there. She wouldn’t have missed a section.

  Stella Darnell never makes mistakes. She did make mistakes. She had kidded herself that Tina would be all right. Not all messes could be cleaned up.

  The dry patch on the tiles was shaped like a person. Stella tipped her head and then saw that there were other dry patches. She had barely dampened the mop to ensure quick drying and the method was working. It was Jack who saw the bodies of the dead everywhere. It was lack of sleep. Jackie would say it was because Tina had died, but if anything Stella blamed Cashman. If blame was the word.

  She went to the antechamber where she had found a real body. After cleaning the floor, Stella looked to see if the outline of his corpse was there, but the damp sheen on the tiles was unbroken.

  She couldn’t rid herself of a vision of the man’s eyes listlessly regarding her. The ‘dead gaze’ as Jack had once called it. Stella snatched up the bucket and began mopping the main gallery. She didn’t hear the porch doors open or detect a drop in temperature as cold air stole in from outside. S
he only knew that she wasn’t alone in the isolated Victorian building when she felt a hand on her shoulder.

  ‘What the—’ she shouted.

  Martin stopped her. ‘It’s me.’

  ‘What are you doing sneaking up like that?’ she stormed at him.

  ‘Your phone went to voicemail. You should keep it on when you’re here. You never know what might happen. Actually, you do know,’ he admonished her. ‘I was worried when you went off.’ He looked sheepish. ‘Are we OK?’

  ‘I do keep it on.’ She fumbled in her trouser pocket and produced her phone. The battery was dead. She always charged it when she went to bed, but with Cashman there had forgotten to. It was lucky that the battery had lasted for Michelle Banks’s call about Tina.

  ‘We’re fine.’ Stella breathed in his after-shave. She didn’t feel like explaining about Tina so she was relieved when, pacing the gallery, he began to speak.

  ‘Our man was definitely killed in there.’ He nodded at the antechamber. ‘A botanical pathologist has identified pollen and soil samples specific to Kew Gardens. John Doe walked to his death. No signs of a struggle, no defensive marks on his hands, or soil in his nails. Suggests he knew his killer. Stupid place to commit a murder: this locale has its own fingerprint. No other soil like it in London.’

  ‘Since he was found here, you’d have tied it to Kew Gardens anyway,’ Stella pointed out crossly.

  ‘Why did you head off like that?’ Martin was treading on her clean tiles, his voice echoing in the strange gallery, every wall lined with paintings and samples of wood.

  The little light that there was seemed to be sucked into the walls. Stella found she was looking at the picture of the tree with orange flowers, the original of the one in Tina’s flat. ‘Tina has died.’ She used Michelle’s words to her on the phone. She sploshed her mop in the water and squeezed it out.

  ‘You’re kidding!’ Martin stopped his pacing. ‘I am so sorry!’ He made as if to cross the tiles to her, but Stella put up the broom handle and he stopped.

  ‘Want me to come with you to the funeral?’

  Stella went blank. ‘I... er...’

  ‘Sorry, Stella, it’s too soon to be thinking of that. When the time comes, I will be there.’ He ran a hand down his face.

  ‘Best I go on my own.’ Stella hadn’t thought about a funeral. Or that she would go to it.

  ‘Want me to wait for you to finish?’ He seemed at a loose end.

  Stella did want him to stay, but that would mean she couldn’t talk to Jack afterwards. ‘I’ll be fine. I’ll see you later.’ She crossed the tiles as if a Rubicon, and kissed him.

  When she had finished the Shirley Sherwood Gallery Stella packed the bucket and mop in her equipment cart and mounted the bicycle. She switched on her head torch. The unlit path was black, like a chasm tapering into mutable darkness. She regretted that Martin had gone. Glancing back at the Marianne North Gallery, with its opaque windows and chimneys black against the sky, she felt a surge of terror. A scream pushing up inside her, Stella pushed hard on the pedals and rode away. Past the Temple of Bellona, past the lake with the Palm House duplicated on its mauve-black surface, past the Elizabeth Gate and past the Unluckiest Tree that had twice been struck by lightning and hit by a light aircraft. Not that Stella took in any of this. When she arrived at the Herbarium, her lungs on fire, her eyes stinging with trickles of sweat, it was to find that again she had missed Jack.

  Frustrated, Stella ran to the van. She let Stanley out to pee and then clipped him back on his seat and plugged her phone into the dashboard jack. It came to life. No texts. Halfway down Ferry Lane, the Thames on her right, she veered on to the verge and cut the engine.

  Where are you? she texted. Jack wouldn’t answer for ages, if at all. She let out the handbrake.

  Ping!

  Here.

  She wound down her window. In the thinning darkness a figure stepped away from the river wall. The scent of soap powder and apple shampoo sliced through the cloying odour of river mud.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  November 2014

  Jack was paler than his normal pale with dark raccoon circles under his eyes. Early mornings didn’t suit him. Unlike Tina and herself, who were larks, he was a night owl.

  It was a quarter past nine; the day was pewter grey. Rain clouds hung over the Thames.

  Stanley clasped Jack’s trouser leg as Jack fussed him. ‘He’s cuddling me,’ he crowed.

  ‘It’s because you give him treats,’ Stella retorted.

  ‘I don’t suppose it’s just that.’ He scratched the dog’s ears; Stanley gave a growl of contentment.

  ‘He’s missed you.’ Stella looked across the river to the north bank and realized they were opposite Thamesbank Heights; in the dull flat light the block was insubstantial, unreal.

  When she had lived there, she had thought that the towpath was too far away for anyone on it to see into the flat, but she could make out Tina’s living-room window. A light was on. Tina! No. Tina was on a rack in the hospice fridge.

  Twigs, rubbish and brown scum raced downstream. Twisted rope patterns on the water betrayed powerful currents. Stella shuddered – currents that could drag a person under in seconds.

  ‘Jackie told me about Tina.’ Jack lifted Stanley on to his shoulder. The dog settled, paws dangling like bagpipes, regarding the river with inscrutable hawk-eyes. Jackie said that Jack was the one man of whom Stanley approved.

  ‘She expected to get better,’ Stella said pointlessly.

  ‘Some people can’t accept that they are going to die. When the time comes I hope I’ll welcome it,’ Jack said.

  ‘No one else would welcome you dying.’ Stella was sharp. Lucie May had once called Jack her Prince of Darkness and there was a kind of glamour about Jack’s gaunt features, but there would be nothing glamorous about him being dead. She stared at the yellow light in the window of Thamesbank Heights and let herself think that Tina was foxtrotting around her living room. ‘Tina wanted us to solve a murder.’

  ‘She what?’ Jack’s face was buried in Stanley’s coat, his voice muffled.

  ‘She was hallucinating.’ If she had binoculars she could see into the living room. Then she would see that it wasn’t Tina in her flat.

  ‘If she meant the Kew Gardens murder, forget it. Cashman is all over it.’ Jack jiggled Stanley on his shoulder like a baby.

  Stella wasn’t ready to tell Jack about Martin. What would she say? She hardly knew what she felt for him herself. She was seeing him later.

  ‘What did Tina say?’ Stanley regarded Stella beadily from Jack’s shoulder and Stella had the odd notion that, like a ventriloquist’s dummy, he might speak for him.

  ‘It was why Tina wanted to see me.’ She looked back at Thamesbank Heights. The light had gone out in Tina’s window. ‘She asked me to catch a murderer.’ She batted off the image of the hospice room crowded with the props of illness: grab handles, supports, canisters of wipes and cardboard sick bowl. She breathed in the smell of river mud to block out the olfactory memory of faeces and stale urine and another odour that she now knew signalled death. An odour that, given her preternatural sense of smell, no amount of antiseptic cleansing could dispel.

  ‘Stella?’

  Stella couldn’t keep her mind on their conversation. It began to rain.

  ‘Don’t discount what she said because she was dying.’ Jack opened the sliding door of Stella’s van and Stanley leapt on to the jump seat. He clipped the dog in. ‘When a person’s dying they don’t waste time playing games. Not once they realize they can’t control their death. It seems to have taken Tina some time to see that. Oh no!’ he groaned.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Don’t look!’

  ‘Why?’ Stella’s heart missed a beat.

  ‘Stanley’s got your job sheet. Pretend you haven’t seen him or he’ll shred it.’

  ‘I haven’t seen him.’ Stella caught Stanley’s reflection in the wing mirror. Clamped between whiskery j
aws was a piece of A4-sized paper. Over the top of it she could see the whites of the dog’s eyes. He was waiting for her to notice, then the game could begin. A game that only he could win because taking the sheet off him risked losing a finger. Despite knowing better, Stella darted a look at him and true to form, this precipitated a blood-curdling growl. The paper slipped from his mouth. With a snap he retrieved it and the stakes went up a notch. He wouldn’t have been in the van if she hadn’t rushed out in the middle of the night.

  ‘He’ll drop it if we ignore it.’ Jack had been to a couple of dog-training classes with her and was a canine expert.

  ‘Act like we don’t care.’ She didn’t care. Before Tina’s death, a ripped-up job sheet would have been a disaster.

  ‘Tell me what Tina said,’ Jack said.

  ‘She wanted us to solve a murder. I had to leave because she was unwell. I went back, but couldn’t talk to her.’

  ‘That’s not what you said the first time.’

  ‘What wasn’t?’ Stella replied evenly.

  ‘What were her exact words?’

  Stella often wished Jack would be more precise and not so airy-fairy, but this wasn’t the time to start. However, she should encourage him. She tried to conjure up the morning in the hospice when, briefly, Tina had sounded her old self. ‘I want you to catch a murderer!’ The rain intensified. Stella took shelter in the van, ignoring Stanley although she had given up on the job sheet. Jack got in beside her.

  ‘Before you said she wanted us to “solve a murder”.’

  ‘It was “I want you to catch a murderer.”’ Stella was sure. ‘What’s the difference?’

  Jack rubbed a porthole in condensation on the glass and peered out at the river. ‘If Tina had said she wanted us to solve a murder, it would imply that she knew of a murder, but not who did it.’ He steepled his hands under his nose. ‘We win!’