The House With No Rooms

by Lesley Thomson

  ‘What?’

  ‘Stanley’s dropped the job sheet!’ He fished the paper out from the footwell. ‘No damage. He wanted our attention, didn’t you, Stanislav!’

  ‘Go on.’ Stella folded the paper in the glove box out of the way.

  ‘Tina said she wanted you to catch a murderer. Meaning that she knew of a murder, or specifically that she knew of a murderer.’

  ‘She defended murderers, she would have known loads of them.’ Stella didn’t know why she was arguing. She wanted Tina to have left them a case.

  Jack dismissed it. ‘Too obvious.’

  ‘She rambled about a cat wearing a hat. Like I said, it was the drugs.’ Perhaps Cliff Banks had gone to the flat. Michelle had said he would be ‘gutted’. Stella would never know how Terry would have reacted if she had died. He used to say his own mum – her nana – was in heaven keeping watch over Stella. Who was Tina keeping watch over? She doubted Tina had believed in an afterlife; like Stella, she would think that it defied logic.

  ‘There must be a way of finding out what she meant.’ Jack leant his head against the rest, long legs stretched out as far as the van allowed.

  ‘Tina didn’t believe in the afterlife.’ She must put Jack off any notion of a séance. Thinking of the afterlife she remembered Tina’s text. ‘I got this from her.’ She handed her phone to Jack.

  ‘Please never shed fruit was sleet, how dear hehe No Kesto Mar. Was Tina into crosswords?’ he asked.

  ‘She didn’t have time.’ Stella flapped a dismissive hand. ‘It’s nonsense. Her medication had probably addled her brain.’

  ‘“Hehe” means laughter in text language. Could it be a joke?’

  ‘Tina didn’t make jokes.’ Stella reread the text. ‘Maybe she wanted me to bring her fruit. I nearly took grapes, but she could hardly drink liquids, so it was pointless. “Dear” could mean “expensive”. She worried about money.’

  ‘Bring her some fruit and catch her a murderer.’ Jack pulled a face. ‘Could it be a code? Since she was literally dying, this text must have taken all her strength. I find texting hard enough at the best of times.’

  ‘Tina dictated everything,’ Stella said. ‘I do it when I’m alone.’

  Jack sighed. ‘It’s like number-nine buses.’

  ‘What is?’ Stella rubbed her face, stifling a yawn. Buses. Fruit. Hats. Cats.

  ‘We have no cases, then two come at once.’

  ‘Two?’

  ‘Look at this.’ Jack fiddled with his mobile phone and then passed it across to her. Quietly he said, ‘It might make you feel a bit strange.’

  She looked at a picture of a sunny road on Street View. Without hesitation, she exclaimed, ‘That’s Terry’s car.’ She tapped the screen. ‘He’s in there.’

  ‘Yes, he is.’ Jack was rolling one of the cigarettes that he never smoked because he had given up after they solved their first case. ‘Did Terry ever mention this house? It’s by Kew Pond.’

  ‘Not to me.’ Gingerly she reached out and touched the blue of the car. She did feel a bit strange. ‘I wonder what my dad was doing there.’

  ‘I suspect that Terry was staking it out.’ Jack snapped shut the cigarette case. ‘Our job is to find out why!’

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  November 2014

  Jack was on an ‘S Stock’ train, the sort with no doors between cars. He was dancing down the aisle, yellow straps, seats, glass partitions stretching into infinity. Cilla Black was singing ‘Something Tells Me’. Lucie May was dancing towards him, twirling and spinning to the music. He woke up.

  The music continued, swelling in volume. It was his phone. He flailed about in the dark and found it under his pillow.

  ‘Chop, chop, Jacko!’ The song was the ringtone that Lucie had programmed in for when she called. Jack scrubbed at his hair.

  ‘Hey, Luce,’ he croaked.

  ‘Tell me I didn’t wake you up.’ She sounded devastated.

  ‘You didn’t wake me up.’ There was an explosion on the other end of the line. It was followed by more. Lucie was eating a carrot.

  ‘What would you do without me?’ she mumbled through a mouthful of carrot.

  ‘I’d be at a loss,’ Jack replied. ‘Have you remembered what Terry meant when he said he had let someone get away with murder?’ Cilla Black was still in his head, singing that tonight something good would be happening. Lucie’s mantra.

  ‘Get here in five.’ Lucie cut the line.

  Lucie lived around the corner. One minute to dress and splash his face. It would take him three minutes and fifteen seconds of smart walking. Five minutes if he went by Rose Gardens North. Jack decided not to torture himself; he didn’t need to confirm that the black Audi would be outside Stella’s house. He knew it would be.

  A taxi was parked in British Grove outside Lucie’s house. There was someone in the back. Jack faltered. The True Host. He had a name for him now. Mr Watson. But drawing closer, he saw that it was empty. No True Host would be so conspicuous. If he was being watched, he wouldn’t know it. But then he didn’t know it.

  ‘You’re losing your touch, Jack.’ Voicing his thoughts, Lucie May was chiding him as she beckoned him in with a finger. ‘Where’s Detective Darnell?’

  ‘Asleep, I suppose.’ Jack’s stomach took a dive. He was filled with the urge to tell Lucie. To open his heart to her. He sat down on the sofa and, to stop himself, grabbed a carrot from a bag of Marks and Spencer crudités on the coffee table and crammed it into his mouth.

  ‘Here’s what I’ve got.’ Lucie May was in reporter mode. ‘When Terry said he’d let someone get away with murder, I supposed he meant it metaphorically. He didn’t elaborate and we were – how can I put this? – in a delicate position at the time. I was narked that he didn’t have his mind on the job. Except he did have his mind on the job, just not... Oh well, water under the proverbial.’ She regarded her carrot as she had once ruminated at a cigarette from within an aureole of smoke. ‘It came back to me today while I was in court listening to an interminable case about a man whose cat was run over. I get the big stories these days. Terry said that, and I quote, “Stella opened my eyes. I’ll never trust what kids say again.”’ She snatched up the bottle of Placid Pet and squirted it about in the air.

  ‘Stella lied to him?’ Stella never lied. Although thinking of Cashman, it seemed she didn’t always tell the truth.

  ‘I was more than happy to believe the prodigal daughter wasn’t perfect; it got tedious hearing about his gorgeous girl. Sometimes in the throes of – I won’t call it passion – he even called me “Suzie”. I bumped into Terry with Stella once in the Wimpy Bar on Hammersmith Broadway when she was a sulky teenager. She was working through an ice-cream sundae and looked like life was a drudge. I said so later and Terry wouldn’t have it. Girls Stella’s age used energy for growing and she would be a stunner like her mum. That told me. So I was well pleased that any scale had fallen from his eyes!’

  Jack tried to steer Lucie back to the point. ‘What had Stella lied about?’

  ‘She hadn’t lied. I think it was because of her that he’d let some other child pull wool over his eyes. Frankly I wasn’t that interested.’

  ‘And?’ Jack prompted.

  ‘And nothing. That was it. You want all of me?’ Lucie cackled and flew to her gin station where she chopped up a lemon, the blade whizzing so fast it was blurred. Thin slices fell into a heap on the wooden board.

  ‘It’s amazing that you’ve remembered so much,’ Jack tried to mollify her.

  ‘It came to me out of the blue. Terry told me on the first of September 2010. I remember it as clear as day because it was my birthday – still is – and he took me to the Ram. A real date, God save us! Anyway, what’s the drama, Terry will have documented his inquiry: he was a meticulous policeman.’

  ‘He retired in 2009. There won’t be documentation.’

  ‘I know that! But Terry never stopped being a detective. Not until...’ She waved the knife in the air.
‘But the “Lying Child” happened years earlier, in 1976. Terry said it was during the drought, which makes it around June time. I was covering deaths from the heat, old people and infants, while practically expiring myself. Sure I can’t tempt you to a nippet?’ She shunted the lemon slices into a dish and began assembling her drink. ‘Get your partner in crime to beguile her tame policeman into nosing about HOLMES.’ Another throaty cackle. ‘All roads lead to the detective’s daughter!’

  ‘Stella won’t do it.’ Jack was firm. Stella wouldn’t ask Martin to look at the police database. Actually he was unsure what she would not do.

  Flourishing her freshly concocted gin and tonic, Lucie May cast herself on to the sofa. ‘Had to be when Terry was at Richmond, because that big old house on Street View is in Kew. I’m surprised that Stella doesn’t remember because until she went to secondary school and got into make-up and Duran Duran she worshipped her pa. He was a good dad, whatever Suzie Darnell would have us think. Your best bet is for Clean-up Woman to ask her boyfriend.’

  ‘What?’ The room tipped.

  ‘Jackanory, we both know that right now Detective Darnell will be lying in the long arms of the law.’ Lucie took a slug of her drink. ‘Smarty-Marty’ll do anything for Terry’s girl. Get him to interrogate the HOLMES database and you’re skippy lambs.’

  ‘I found a story you did in the seventies.’ Jack hadn’t planned to show Lucie the articles he had found in the house, but he had to stop her talking about Stella and Cashman. He thrust the newspaper at her.

  ‘Bloody man!’ Lucy waved the cuttings in the air, spilling her drink on the sofa. ‘Malcolm bloody Bennett, that goat of an editor. He saw the meat on this story and stole it. He went on to the News of the World, fast cars, girls and chasing up white lines in the loo. Now he’s in the Scrubs for something unpleasant. Fiddle dee dee!’ She gave a raucous laugh. ‘This was one of my first jobs.’

  Lucie claimed many pieces as her ‘first job’ so that it was hard to pinpoint her actual age. Again Jack marvelled that, considering the quantity of nippets she consumed, her memory was prodigious. However trivial the story, she could summon up apparently irrelevant detail.

  ‘Rose Gardens was Terry’s street. Not that he was there in the fifties when the murder happened,’ Lucie said.

  ‘Could there be a connection between Terry being outside Kew Villa and that he lived in the street near to where the robbery happened?’ Instantly Jack saw his mistake.

  ‘Why should there be?’ Lucie narrowed her eyes. She hooked an ice cube out of the glass and slid it off her finger into her mouth. She crunched it up.

  Flustered by Stella and Cashman, he had made a slip. The link was that he had found the cuttings in Kew Villa, but he couldn’t tell Lucie he had gone into the house illegally. Not because, like Stella, she would disapprove, but because she would insist he took her there now. Any minute she would ask him where he found the cuttings and he couldn’t lie.

  ‘Did the police catch the burglars?’ he deflected her.

  ‘No. They found a fingerprint on the back window ledge as reported in another article by Convict Bennett. The perp had no record so “didn’t exist”. And since he was buried in an unmarked grave under the slow lane of the A4, he didn’t exist, did he!’

  ‘They suspected that the robbers were boys,’ Jack reminded Lucie of what was in her article. She carried on as if she hadn’t heard.

  ‘The Ramsays never got their loot back. Those boys are no doubt middle-aged pros by now. That fingerprint’s never shown up again. Then again, they could be pushing up the daisies. If they were robbing in the fifties, they’d be into their sixties now.’ Her tone implied this made them far older than her. ‘The link between the robbery and Kew Villa is what?’ Lucie’s nippets didn’t befuddle her.

  ‘There may not be one,’ he hedged.

  ‘Who was living there when Terry was pretending to read a newspaper outside? Did you check?’ She was on a roll.

  Legwork was more Stella’s line. ‘No,’ he confessed, feeling himself grow hot. Hearing about Tina’s death and finding out about Cashman had put it out of his mind.

  ‘Clean-up should wangle her mop in there and snout about.’ Lucie tipped her glass back and downed the watery dregs. ‘Stella’s your woman. By the way, Jacko, where did you find these articles?’

  Chapter Forty

  November 2014

  Lucie May was wrong. At the moment that Lucie was asking Jack about the newspaper cuttings, Stella wasn’t with Cashman. She was in her old bedroom in Rose Gardens North scrutinizing the computer screen. Not counting Stanley, outstretched on the mat behind her, she was alone.

  At the last minute Cashman had cancelled their meal at the Ram; he needed to stay at work.

  She was studying the image on Street View that Jack had showed her that morning. That day in August 2010 had been sunny. But then every day on Street View was sunny.

  She zoomed in on the Toyota Yaris. There was the scratch on the driver’s door and the dent on the off-side wing from when Terry was broadsided by a car jumping the lights on King Street. It had happened in June 2010. He had gone to Charing Cross Hospital with minor whiplash. Jackie had met him in A and E. She had been there with her younger son who had broken his ankle skateboarding. Stella was down as Terry’s next of kin, but he hadn’t called her. Jackie had mentioned that Lucie May was there. Stella had assumed May was covering a story, but since supposed that Terry had called her.

  There behind the wheel, a phantom, was Terry. She clicked on the zoom. This broke the picture into pixels, but by screwing up her eyes, she restored some clarity. A silver smudge on the dashboard morphed into a flask cup and a slash of red was a KitKat wrapper. She moved the cursor to get a better view, but her hand jerked and the picture swept back to normal size and she was at the rear of the car. Jack was better at this.

  This time when she enlarged the windscreen, the flask cup had gone. There was a KitKat wrapper, but it was in the dip behind the steering wheel, not on the dashboard. There was something else; Stella zoomed in. She needed no more focus to recognize a bag from Tesco. Nor did she need to see inside to know there would be a pork pie, likely two.

  She glanced at the date. It was still August, but the disappearing flask cup indicated a different day. Frustratingly Street View didn’t give the whole date so she couldn’t know if it was the next day after the first image or a week later. It did tell her that Jack’s hunch was correct: Terry hadn’t parked on Priory Road on just one day. He was outside the house on at least two occasions. He had been on a stakeout.

  Terry was dead so she could never ask him why he was watching Kew Villa. Wrong. She could know. Stella dragged open a drawer in the desk. It was stuffed with receipts; one sprang out and floated to the carpet. It was for patio furniture bought from Homebase in Ealing in 2006. Terry had never been freelance so he didn’t need to keep receipts to claim tax, and after he retired from the force, he couldn’t claim expenses. But he believed in paper trails, a habit Stella had picked up from him, and he never threw anything away.

  In the days after Terry’s death Stella had systematically shredded documents of no value for probate or the Inland Revenue. Ancient bank statements and council tax bills. Then, diverted by the Rokesmith case, she had stopped. After she and Jack had solved the case, Stella saw the wisdom in keeping everything. She had stowed Terry’s papers and books in the attic, but hadn’t got around to emptying his desk.

  She emptied the drawer on to the carpet. Sensing a game, Stanley was on his feet, tail wagging. He nosed at a stray paper.

  ‘Leave!’ Stanley sloped back to bed.

  Stella lifted a wad of receipts from the pile. They had been in Terry’s wallet and were held together by the fold. She set about arranging them in date order.

  The first receipts were for 2009. She stapled together each month’s worth. As the night wore on, she worked methodically: receipts ranged from big-ticket items like the computer on the desk through to a suit from Mark
s down to a bar of chocolate. That Terry had kept receipts for chocolate had made her impatient in the days after his death, now she was depending on his adherence to detail.

  It was nearly five o’clock, she hadn’t slept, but she was fizzing with energy. Soon she must leave for Kew. She didn’t need to clean the gallery, she had mopped it only yesterday, but Stella found she could not keep away from the strange house on the outskirts of the gardens.

  A receipt dated at the end of August 2009 for patchouli oil puzzled her until she remembered that the strong-smelling oil was Lucie May’s perfume of choice. She had a vague memory that May’s birthday was in September. Suzie used to complain that Terry never remembered her birthday. People change.

  Washed-out blue ink swam before her eyes. On Sunday 8 August 2010 at thirteen minutes past eight Terry had bought a Sunday Mirror, two KitKats and three cans of Diet Coke from the newsagent in Kew station. Stella had bought a bottle of water from there herself after seeing Jack in Ferry Lane that morning.

  Six minutes later, at nineteen minutes past, he was in the Tesco Express metres from the station. The receipt detailed a packet of mini Melton Mowbray pork pies and a cereal bar. Stella guessed that the latter was Terry’s nod to healthy eating. The next receipts were replicas of the first two and continued until Wednesday 11th. There was a ticket for three hours’ parking on the morning of 12 August for the car park in Ferry Lane, metres from the entrance to the Kew Gardens Estates Office where she was due in an hour. She felt a frisson of surprise that Terry had been there. Before parking he had got a coffee and chocolate croissant from the Starbucks on Station Approach. Why had he relocated from Kew Villa to Ferry Lane car park?

  Stella’s phone beeped. Jack! Perfect timing because she had something concrete to report, but snatching up her phone she saw it was her alarm to get up for work. Since she was already up, she had fifteen minutes to spare.