The House With No Rooms

by Lesley Thomson

  ‘It’s by George Watson!’ Jack was excited.

  ‘Should I have heard of him?’ Stella was used to Jack firing obscure names at her – usually of engineers and inventors – and expecting her to know them.

  ‘I’ve met him. Twice,’ Jack said after a moment. ‘He was on that train where the woman died. He got off without giving a statement to... the police.’

  Jackie had said a passenger had died on Jack’s train. Stella had meant to check he was OK, but she had forgotten. Before she could now, Jack went on:

  ‘I got a bad feeling about him. I was going to tell you – it might be another case.’

  ‘A bad feeling isn’t enough. Was that it?’ Stella immediately regretted her curt tone. Jack’s bad feelings were usually worth taking seriously.

  ‘Yes. No.’

  Now she was certain Jack was keeping something back.

  ‘Was Tina interested in botanical drawings?’ he asked.

  ‘She told me she had lessons as a kid, but was useless.’

  ‘Show me the drawing again.’ Jack wrapped up the mug and put it back in the Boots carrier with Tina’s things.

  Stella brought out the paper.

  Jack held it up to the light of the café lamp. ‘What are these numbers: 766, 764, 34425?’

  ‘No idea. The number of the print?’ Stella hazarded.

  ‘This is an original drawing.’

  ‘A telephone number?’

  ‘Why write it like that? The 766 and 764 are on separate lines when there’s plenty of space to put them together. Lumped together they make six numbers. Could be part of a mobile telephone number. But why split them?’

  ‘To hide their significance?’ Stella suggested.

  ‘A poor disguise since we’ve guessed it.’

  ‘Mobile numbers begin with a nought,’ Stella said.

  ‘True. Let’s assume that they’re meant to be in these groups,’ Jack said. ‘There’s probably a relation between 764 and 766. They might be from the same index system.’

  ‘I think 764 rings a bell.’ Stella held the paper up to the light and saw another set of figures a little apart from the others. ‘This must be a telephone number, “940” is the exchange for Kew: “940 2418”. It doesn’t have the London code.’

  ‘One way to find out.’ Jack dialled it on his mobile and put it on speaker. The number rang for a while and then cut off. He rang again. No answer. ‘Either they’re out and have no answer machine.’ He shook his head. ‘Or it’s not switched on.’

  ‘When was the other time you met George Watson?’ Stella tapped the drawing. Jack had said he had met him twice.

  ‘He works at the Herbarium. He was there when I was cleaning the other morning.’

  Stella hoped Jack hadn’t got into trouble with any scientists at Kew. Her concern was confirmed when he said in a faraway voice, ‘He really didn’t want me there.’ He had gone pale.

  Stella fitted the drawing back in the bag. ‘I can’t throw any of this away, yet what can I do with it?’

  ‘Got it!’ Jack clapped his hands as if scaring up birds.

  ‘What?’ It was properly dark now; cold crept through the padding of her anorak. In the distance the Palm House was a dark hulk against the city sky. People were filing out of the Elizabeth Gate.

  ‘Tina hasn’t left you these things because they have sentimental value. She wasn’t sentimental. She asked you to catch a murderer. She wanted you to have these because they are clues!’

  Chapter Forty-Two

  November 2014

  ‘...has given to our sister Christina

  her span of years and gifts of character.

  God our Father, we thank you now for all her life...’

  Jack tuned out of the service. He wasn’t religious in a strict sense. He believed that his mother kept watch over him, but didn’t trouble himself with the practicalities of how she achieved this. Occasionally, on night ramblings, he found a church that was unlocked and crept inside, slid into a back pew and, head bowed in a semblance of prayer, urged her to communicate with him. Sometimes she did. She did in many different circumstances: it was about making himself available.

  The man intoned the prayer in a sing-song delivery. He wore a studied expression of solemnity perhaps brought on by the long procession of black limousines that had filled the turning circle outside the crematorium. On the few occasions Jack had met Banks, she was dressed in a sleek black suit and scary stilettos. Stella could be daunting in suits of charcoal or grey, but ‘dressed by Jackie’ looked approachable. Not a word he had associated with Tina Banks. The funeral, with black-clothed mourners in wrap-around sunglasses, better fitted the Kray twins than a member of the legal profession.

  But then criminals and lawyers, like criminals and detectives, were two sides of the same coin.

  ‘...for every memory of love and joy,

  for every good deed done by her...’

  Jack wasn’t here to mourn Tina Banks. He had been pleased when Stella asked him to come. Jackie said that she had put off Cashman from coming. He wouldn’t miss the lawyer, but was sorry that she was dead. She was in her forties, too young to be meeting her maker or anyone else.

  The sleek black coffin resting on the catafalque seemed large for a diminutive woman. Lucie’s private nickname for the solicitor had been ‘short and brief.’

  Jack had lost Stella when they entered the crematorium. He had sat on the end of the last pew hoping to catch her when she appeared. After the coffin was carried in, an elderly man had made his way unsteadily over to it. His jacket bagged and his trousers had been pressed, but not in this decade. When he had reached the bier, with a shaking hand he laid a gerbera on the lid. He stood back and, with a mechanical movement, bowed to the coffin. Jack felt he was familiar, but perhaps it was his grief that he recognized.

  Tina Banks had a father; her mother was dead. The opposite of Stella. Jack presumed the gerbera man was her father. Despite his mistrust of the ‘deceased’, Jack was sad; unknowingly he echoed Stella’s thought that no parent should have to bury a child. The man had looked blown apart.

  His mistrust of Tina had been mutual. This made him feel better as he sat at her funeral feeling only sadness for Stella who had lost a friend.

  It had begun at their first encounter when Tina Banks had turned up at Stella’s flat in Thamesbank Heights one evening when he was there. Somehow she had heard the flat was going on the market and she wanted it. Jack had fretted that Stella, no games player and liable to trust that, like herself, people did the right thing, might be a pushover.

  That Banks had removed her stilettoes to protect the carpet won bonus points with Stella. But he guessed Banks was thinking of when the carpet would be hers.

  Tina had offered Stella the asking price and paid extra for some of her furniture. Jack had warned Stella that what is too good to be true is usually not true. Yet as he watched the casket trundle along the catafalque towards the furnace and the curtains jerk closed, Jack admitted that he had misread the lawyer. As Jackie had said, Tina Banks was like Stella; what you saw was what you got.

  ‘We thank you for Christina,

  The years we shared with her,

  The good we saw in her,

  The love we received from her.

  Now give us strength and courage

  To leave her in your care,

  Confident in your promise of eternal life

  Through Jesus Christ our Lord.’

  Jack mouthed, ‘Amen.’ He regretted that he hadn’t tried to get on with Tina, not for the sake of getting to like her, or even for Stella’s sake, but because it might have given him insight into her deathbed request.

  No sign of Stella. With muted shuffles and coughs mourners were getting to their feet. The organ struck up and the congregation embarked on a straggling rendition of the 23rd Psalm. Something white floated before Jack. The woman next to him was holding out her copy of the funeral service sheet with the words to the psalm for him to share. He k
new the words by heart, but nodded thanks and began to sing in what came out as a whisper. Gradually, as if coming from a distance, he became aware of the sweetest, melodic voice. He hadn’t heard such a voice since he was a boy. The notes, clear as spring water, carried across the span of years. It was his mother. Mummy. Jack’s singing subsided until he was only moving his lips and making no sound. He let the singing surround him.

  She had communicated with him at Tina Banks’s funeral.

  Jack’s image of his mother was fashioned from a gossamer of half-spun memories and snatches of dreams. A composite of qualities he held most dear.

  ‘...Yea, though I walk in death’s dark vale,

  Yet will I fear no ill;

  For Thou art with me, and Thy rod

  And staff me comfort still.’

  He put a hand to his cheek; it was wet. Lovingly, as she would have done, Jack smoothed away the tear with the flat of his finger.

  Something touched his arm, light and soft. Looking at the sheet while continuing to sing – although from her singing it was obvious she didn’t need to see the words either – the woman beside him passed him a tissue. He took it and dabbed at his eyes.

  If Jack had wanted to pass as bereaved, he had succeeded. Trembling with emotion, he worked the tissue into a damp ball in a clenched hand. He was the only one crying. From the pulpit, a succession of Tina Banks’s colleagues and employees testified, as if giving evidence in court, to a woman who was hard-working, had a zero tolerance for failure and anything less than the best. Her mourners were dry-eyed.

  Belatedly Jack resumed his seat and stole a glance at the woman. Of course she wasn’t his mother, but, indulging his fancy, he imagined that she looked as his mother would have, had she lived into her forties. She would have grown more beautiful with time. Jack had lived more years than she had. At forty-eight Tina Banks had been on this earth twice the years that his mother had.

  Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale

  Her infinite variety...

  It wasn’t lost on Jack that, aside from supporting Stella, he was a ‘funeral-chaser’. Unable after thirty years to comprehend his mother’s death, he was drawn to coffins, of wood, of wicker, caskets of steel in low-slung hearses or carriages drawn by majestic horses. To coffins burnt in crematoria or lowered into graves. He was searching for an answer. Why did you leave me?

  *

  Jack made his way through the throng of mourners in the Marianne North Gallery looking for Stella. He had never seen it so crowded. Muted chatter and occasional laughter bounced off the walls; it lost definition and was like a chord sounded without pause or break. White winter light diffused by the opaque windows reflected on the glass protecting the paintings so that they resembled hundreds of tiny windows. Jack had to quell outrage that he wasn’t alone in what was his true idea of a church.

  In the van and on the walk to the gallery, Stella had been silent. Finding a gap in the throng in the Australian corner of the main room, Jack had turned to speak to her and she wasn’t there.

  It was unfortunate that Tina Banks’s wake was at the gallery. Stella disliked mixing the personal with work, never mind that she had found a dead body here. Yet she was an equable soul and what could upset some passed her by, so perhaps she was sanguine. This observation prompted a burst of affection for her, and Jack stood on tiptoe to try to see her in the crowd. Jack had rather supposed that Stella was Banks’s only friend, but the place was packed; cynically he guessed most of them worked for Tina or were her clients. He couldn’t see Stella.

  Absently, he plucked a glass of champagne from a tray proffered by a waiter dressed in a discreet black T-shirt and slacks. Tina had told no one she was terminally ill, a discretion that didn’t seem to have extended to her funeral arrangements, for which no expense had been spared. It wouldn’t be cheap to hire the gallery in Kew Gardens on a weekday. From where Jack stood, he had a view of both antechambers so had some chance of spotting Stella. The crowd was denser in the middle chamber. Many crowded around the gold-framed doorway, letting curiosity overcome grief to see where the Kew murder victim had been found.

  ‘Huge turnout!’ It was the woman from his pew at the funeral. Jack had looked for her outside the crematorium, but like Stella she had vanished. On a reflex, he handed her his champagne.

  ‘Thank you. Don’t you want it?’

  ‘I don’t drink. It was for you.’ As he said this, Jack realized that this was true. He felt himself redden, but she didn’t seem to have noticed.

  ‘Chrissie’s sister told me that Chrissie planned this years ago. I haven’t even made a will. Stupid since that we will die is the one certainty!’ She drank some champagne.

  ‘True,’ he agreed. The woman’s voice was deep and gravelly like Lucie’s; it gave no hint of her angelic singing.

  ‘I’d prefer to sit in silence at these things and reflect on the loss. More meaningful than small talk with strangers.’

  Nothing else about her was like Lucie, who favoured clothes that showed off her too-thin figure: short skirts, tight trousers, low-cut shirts and tottering heels. This woman was lost beneath layers of black: a long skirt, topped by a mid-length jacket cut in at the waist with a Gandhi-style collar, over which was draped a black woollen shawl. Jet-black curly hair framed a face done up in startling black kohl. The scent of patchouli oil topped off the trappings of a seventies hippy. Patchouli was Lucie May’s perfume – no one was less like a hippy. A shadow passed across Jack’s mood. It was the smell in the bedroom of the house at Kew Pond. ‘I’ll leave you,’ he said.

  ‘I didn’t mean you! I’ve only seen Chrissie once in the last forty years. I’m sad, naturally, but we weren’t close. I’m not going to sit about contemplating her loss, she’d have a blue fit!’ The woman gave a raucous laugh.

  ‘I didn’t know her. I’m here for a friend,’ Jack said, aware that the friend he was ‘here for’ was nowhere to be seen. ‘Funerals bring back other losses,’ he added by way of explanation for his earlier tears. ‘I agree about sitting quietly though.’ Stella would hate silently reflecting on a loss with strangers. She would prefer to get on.

  ‘I’m Bella.’ The woman put out a hand.

  ‘Jack.’ Her grip was firm. ‘How did you know, er, Chrissie?’ The name suggested a warmer, more immediate woman than the no-messing Tina Banks.

  ‘From prep school. Chrissie joined in 1976 from a state primary school in Hammersmith. She teamed up with me and a girl called Emily. She was supposed to come today. Oh, speak of the devil!’ She raised her glass to a woman who appeared beside them as if by magic. Bella lifted up her cheek to be kissed. The woman called Emily obliged.

  ‘Meet Jack,’ Bella said. ‘I was saying how we were all friends when we were kids.’

  ‘In another life.’ The woman sounded as if she meant it literally. Pale, with long hair floating about her face, she wore a scuffed mac and sturdy walking boots, not the outfit for a funeral.

  ‘Where were you?’ Bella demanded.

  ‘I got the time wrong.’ Jack was intrigued that Emily didn’t seem bothered by a mistake that would have mortified Stella, and even him.

  ‘When we saw Chrissie last month, she looked fine, didn’t she?’ Bella drank some more champagne. ‘Everyone says that when people die. Idiotic!’

  Jack was about to contradict that Tina had been ‘fine’. Stella had described her as irritable when she last cleaned her office. Stella never judged people’s moods so this would have been an understatement. Jack knew from Jackie that Banks had respected Stella, so being unpleasant would have been a sign of something amiss.

  ‘None of us ended up doing what was expected of us,’ Emily said without preamble. ‘You were going to be a barrister like your father and now you’re a botanical illustrator like Chrissie’s father and she went into law like your father.’

  ‘You wanted to be a teacher and you are,’ Bella said flatly. Jack suspected that they had had this exchange before and had found it no more stimulat
ing that time.

  ‘I didn’t think I’d be alive,’ Emily said obliquely.

  ‘She told my friend she was no good at the drawing lessons she had as a child,’ Jack said.

  ‘Pinches of salt for much of what Chrissie said then. Fancy her ending up doing law! The truth was a stranger to her at school!’ Bella tossed back her hair and laughed. Bangles stacked up her arm jangled noisily.

  ‘That’s unfair!’ Emily said, but without conviction.

  Jack was keen to ask Bella what she meant, but reckoned that he would learn more by keeping quiet.

  ‘She lied about where she lived and she lied about her dad.’ Bella looked quickly around her, presumably aware that Tina’s dad could be close by. ‘Her dad wasn’t a botanical illustrator, he was a taxi driver! We lost touch after we left that school. We went to the local comp; Chrissie went to some snooty boarding school.’

  ‘How do you know she was lying?’ Jack remembered the picture by Watson in Tina’s bag. He hadn’t found a way to tell Stella that Watson was a True Host who might be responsible for a death on his train. Jennifer Day had died of an aneurism. A True Host’s perfect murder.

  ‘I followed her home once. She lived in a flat in Hammersmith and the man who had collected her from school a few times wasn’t a taxi driver, he was her dad! Or rather he was a taxi driver. What he wasn’t was a botanical illustrator. I knew she was lying.’

  Even after forty years Bella’s triumph was palpable.

  ‘She was only going for lessons with the man she claimed was her dad. I found out his name. And...’ She tinged the side of her glass, ‘in the most ginormous coincidence, I work in the same studio as the chap that Chrissie claimed was her dad. I tested my theory by telling him that I was friends with his daughter when we were small. He and his wife didn’t have kids, which I suspect was an issue. Gaffe!’ She made a cutting motion across her throat. ‘If a person’s committed a crime, like lying, doesn’t that stop them being a lawyer?’