Stella wouldn’t tarnish Lucie’s glory by admitting that she had worked some of this out. Lucie had filled in many gaps. She stopped under the Ruined Arch to get her breath.
‘I’d done roadside interviews with some rubberneckers sniffing about the crater for more corpses. One was a Mr Clifford Banks. Bingo!’ Lucie shone the torch at Stella. ‘Feel free to say it, “Lucille May, you are bloody brilliant!”’
Stella had been thinking something like this. But her throat was raw so she couldn’t speak. However, apparently Lucie didn’t expect her to.
‘Banks was aerated that the man had been in his mum’s house. “Made me sick how he was dossing down in her parlour like he owned the place.” Question: how did he know the man was in the parlour?’
‘It’s the obvious room?’ From Tina’s text, Stella knew that Banks had made another slip – about the victim’s throat being slit – to her.
‘I write what people say verbatim.’ Lucie’s voice boomed in the alcove. ‘He said “Made me sick”. He had known the man was there before 1976. And how did he know he was acting like he “owned the place”.’ Her voice dropped. ‘I missed that. Then, pissed off that my idiot editor took me off the story, I dropped it. Mistake.’
‘How did you know it was Banks who killed Rosamond Watson and not George Watson? Or James Hailes?’ Or Matthew Ayrton. Stella was astonished to hear Lucie admit to an error. She was faintly gratified too.
‘After you and I talked, I decided to pay a call on Watson. I told him that Banks had pointed the finger at him.’
‘Had he?’ Lucie had taken over the case. Stella told herself it didn’t matter if they revealed the truth.
‘It’s the oldest trick in the book – tell one villain that the other one has dobbed them in. I doubted Watson’d bite, but it might scare him. Seems you went there yesterday. You suggested that you’d been in touch with his wife. Since Banks had killed her, Watson knew you couldn’t have. So when I said Banks had done for him, he went as white as bleached knickers!’ She cackled happily.
‘I realized I’d said that.’ She had put Jack in danger. Lucie May too.
‘It’s all on here.’ Lucie pulled out her mobile phone from the Clean Slate trousers.
Stella breathed in damp moss mixed with earth and stone. Moonlight trickled down from the grille in the arch’s roof. Ivy leaves, black as pitch, curled around the bars. On the day of Tina’s funeral Banks had brought her to Rosamond Watson’s unmarked grave.
‘Posh school, law degree, down-payment on an office lease. Banks wanted his daughter to scale the social ladder to dizzy heights. George told me he stabbed the soldier. That put him in Banks’s clutches. Banks made him finance his daughter through her career. At some point Tina Banks found out. Seems like she didn’t stop him. As a lawyer she must have been shitting bricks. Her past was an axe waiting to fall. It’s like Great Expectations!’
‘She didn’t know.’ Stella was firm. ‘She buried the knowledge and it only returned to her when she got cancer.’ Stella’s tiredness after running was compounded by confusion.
‘She forgot that her dad had murdered his best friend’s wife? Easily done, I suppose.’ Lucie pulled a carrot out of her Clean Slate trousers.
‘We forget important things.’ After her parents separated, she had blotted out much of her life with her dad. Had Tina known that her success was founded on a lie? Stella would never prove it.
‘If I was dying guess I wouldn’t think straight,’ Lucie conceded to her carrot.
Stella ducked out of the arch on to the path. ‘She didn’t have time on her side.’ She paraphrased Tina’s words.
‘It seems Banks and Watson’s murders all went tickety-boo until Rosamond’s brother flew in from Madras in October.’
‘He was living in a Buddhist commune.’ Stella told Lucie what Cliff Banks had said about Banks being a hippy.
‘Om!’ Lucie rolled her eyes. Fiddling with her phone, she held it up to Stella.
‘I should have told Jimmy about Rosamond. I should have gone to the police and told the truth. But there was watsonii. I wouldn’t let Cliff ruin that too. Cliff said he would just have a word with Jimmy and send him back to India. We went to the gallery. Cliff said he would warn him, rough him up a bit so he got the message. He sent me out to keep a watch for the cleaner, she was due soon. He chose Marianne’s gallery to implicate me if it went wrong. I should have realized. The police questioned all the Kew Gardens staff. Cliff was my alibi, he said I’d been in his taxi at the time of the murder. I knew if they found out Jimmy’s real name, they’d be back. I gave Christina the drawing of the tree where Rosamond’s buried. I hoped that one day she’d realize it was a map. I suppose I wanted her to see the truth and stop the nightmare.’ The voice subsided into a prolonged cough. Then he started speaking again. Stella thought Watson sounded different. Like a boy whose voice is breaking,
‘Cliff didn’t care if I went to prison. He said he’d do Borstal and walk free. He said I’d hang by the neck until…’
*
He gave a strangled sob. Lucie switched off the phone.
George Watson had let three people die to preserve his reputation and ensure his name would go down in botanical history. A soldier who had fought in the war, his wife and her brother. Like Tina’s, Watson’s life was a lie.
Ahead of them the Marianne North Gallery was again a Psycho house against the blustering sky. Clouds raced past the chimneys. The seven windows were black as eye sockets. Shuddering, Stella was glad to have Lucie there.
‘I knew that Terry’s handcuffs would come in handy one day!’ Lucie remarked apropos of nothing.
‘How come you have his handcuffs?’ Surely her dad wouldn’t have kept police-issue equipment. If Lucie replied, it was lost as an aeroplane flew low above them. Stella left it there. Sometimes a lot of knowledge was a dangerous thing.
There were police vehicles outside the Marianne North Gallery. Blue lights lit up the red brickwork. Figures were going in and out through the porch and around the back. She pictured a criss-cross of muddy footprints on the tiles.
‘How did you know Banks was here, in Kew Gardens?’ It was easy to dismiss Lucie as a door-stepping hack. Perhaps she was a better detective than either of them.
‘You didn’t answer your phone.’ Lucie parted the branches of a japonica bush and headed towards the gallery.
‘I left it in the van.’
‘I called your office not expecting to get a live person and got Belinda. Is she real?’
‘Beverly. She shouldn’t have been there so late.’
‘She’d diverted the office phone to her mobile. She said she had to practise talking to people. I thought I got the weird ones in my job!’ Lucie bit the end off her carrot. ‘Jackie Rottweiler Makepeace would have seen me off. But Beverly said you were cleaning your old flat. She said that she shouldn’t have told me, but had done so since I sounded worried. Don’t tick her off: the kid saved your life.’
Stella had no plans to tick Beverly off. Except for working outside office hours.
‘When I got to the flat, there was your van with your phone on the dash. I leant on all the door buzzers. A bloke answered and said he’d seen you leave in a taxi. From then on it was two and two make four. The cabby had to be Banks. Watson had said that the Marianne North Gallery is his killing field. I dropped in on Mrs Rottweiler, she lent me this costume and here I am!’
‘Uniform,’ Stella muttered. ‘That card wouldn’t have got you in. Security know the hours that the cleaners do.’
‘I always get in.’ Lucie finished her carrot. ‘No wall too high, no river too deep. All hunky dory until you started racing about the gardens, in and out of those horrible beasties. Lost you for a bit by the Palm House. My lungs are string bags!’
‘Banks could run fast,’ Stella marvelled. ‘I’ve worked out, he’s got to be over seventy.’
‘Seventy’s not old,’ Lucie barked. ‘You did the running. He waved his torch about like
a dick, giving the impression he was chasing you.’
‘I heard his footsteps.’ She remembered the mechanical plods closing in on her.
‘That was me.’
‘Why didn’t you call out?’
‘I didn’t want Banks to know I was there.’ Lucie produced another carrot from her trousers. ‘I jumped him as he was about to clonk you with a spade.’ She approached the steps to the gallery. ‘The self-defence training worked a treat. Banks went down like a ninepin. I cuffed him and tossed the toad in his hole. Job done!’ A hearty corncrake laugh.
‘What self-defence training?’ When Stella was seven and no longer living with her dad, he had taught her to fell a six-foot man in five seconds.
‘Terry showed me how to overpower a six-foot man in five seconds.’ Lucie looked dreamy. She roused herself: ‘Oh and I forgot to tell you, Watson’s dead!’
‘Dead?’ Jack had killed George Watson. Stella felt her world end. Lucie’s voice came from a long way away.
‘...seems our little chat tipped the artist over the edge. He topped himself with a scalpel and quaffed a noxious cocktail that botanists use to preserve specimens. His last bid for immortality!’
‘You’re sure it was suicide?’ Stella managed to ask.
‘Jack said Watson left a drawing that showed it all.’
‘You OK, Stell?’ Cashman was beside her.
‘If she is, it’s no thanks to you, Detective Chief Superman,’ Lucie May snorted. ‘You need to take your fairground along to the Ruined Arch, that’s where the action is.’ The corncrake laugh carried across the lawns.
Stella realized that she was all right. ‘Cashman, you’ll find the body of Rosamond Watson buried by the Ruined Arch.’ She turned away from the gallery. ‘Clifford Banks killed the man in the gallery, whose name is James Hailes. He’s George Watson’s brother- in-law.’
‘I know about Hailes. We just retrieved the dental records. Hey, Lucie, stop!’ Cashman broke into a run after Lucie May. The reporter had taken the opportunity to slip under the cordon and was making for the gallery, notebook at the ready.
As the chain of strobing lights moved towards the Ruined Arch, a man stepped from the shadow of a japonica bush. He was tall, dark and gaunt.
‘There you are,’ he said.
‘Come back to mine. We need to take stock.’ Stella linked arms with Jack. ‘I bought fresh milk.’
Chapter Sixty-Seven
November 2014
Kew Killer Charged.
Stella read the headline on the Evening Standard vendor’s box outside the mini-mart. A plastic carton of milk dangled from her fingers. She frowned. Although it had been Tina’s dying wish that her father be caught, Stella was grateful that she couldn’t see his face plastered all over the front page. Cashman had told her that Banks would get life.
‘At his age, life really will mean life.’
Jack said that if Banks was alive when he came up for parole he’d be unlikely to get it. A psychopath with no care for others, he would show no remorse.
Passing fruit and vegetables displayed on the sloping fake grass, Stella pushed on the door to Clean Slate’s office above the mini-mart. The insurance company had left it on the latch. Jackie had lined up three new office premises to look at. Tina would say, Move on.
There was a man on the landing.
‘Fancy a coffee, Stell?’ It was Cashman.
‘No thanks.’ She eased around him. ‘Unless it’s urgent.’ But then she relented; his eyes were like Stanley’s when she had to leave him at home.
‘I wanted to tell you that me and Karen are giving it another go,’ he said brightly. ‘I saw her in Sainsbury’s yesterday evening. Think she clocked the pizza and beer in my basket and took pity. One thing led to another.’
‘Lucie said she saw you with Karen last week.’ Stella couldn’t help herself. Now Cashman would think it was why she had sent the text.
‘Lucie May could make a story out of what I had for breakfast!’ Cashman reddened. ‘Mind you, have to hand it to her, she’s been brilliant over this case. Terry rated her.’ He wiped a hand down his face. ‘I did see Karen last week, bumped into her in Kew. We saw Jack Harmon – surprised he didn’t say.’ He had stopped using product in his hair. Stella decided that he looked less attractive. She admitted that she was lying to herself. If anything he looked more attractive.
‘When I got your text, I was gutted. But, like you said, it couldn’t work. Maybe in a different—’ He clenched his jaw.
‘I’m pleased for you both,’ Stella managed.
‘I’d like it if we could get back to how it was.’ Talking to a dent in the plaster on the wall, Cashman smoothed his tie against his shirt front.
Stella nodded. ‘I would too.’ This was true. Their paths would cross and she didn’t need awkwardness between them.
‘You were key to solving this case. We wouldn’t have got Banks without you. Maybe sometimes I could pop round after work and chew the cud?’
Stella shook her head. ‘Best not.’
‘No. Best not.’ He lingered on the stairs as Stella carried on up.
‘Stella?’ he called up to her as she reached the Clean Slate door. She looked over the banister. ‘Would you give apologies to, um, to Harmon? He had blood on him and was trying to run out of Watson’s room. It looked bad so I was a bit tough on him.’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘I’ll be sending a formal apology, but you have a way with words...’ He gave a tentative smile and seemed about to come up the stairs.
She knew from Lucie that Jack had been arrested and handcuffed. Jack hadn’t told her. Nor had he said he’d seen Cashman with his wife.
‘If it hadn’t been for you and him, and for Lucie, Banks would be driving his taxi and getting away with murder.’ Cashman cleared his throat. ‘You and Jack, you’re good together.’ He took the rest of the stairs to the ground floor two at a time. Stella heard the outer door slam.
‘You just missed Detective Chief Superintendent Cashman!’ Beverly looked fit to explode with suppressed excitement.
‘Bev, make us a nice cup of tea.’ Jackie was leafing through the morning’s post. ‘Then I’m letting you loose on some follow-up calls with your new natural approach!’
‘I’m on it!’ Holding the kettle as if it were a precious object, Beverly glided out of the room.
‘You OK?’ Jackie picked up a reinforced envelope from the pile.
‘Yes.’ Stella was OK. She had a day at Clean Slate, drawing up contracts, writing letters and reading her mum’s ‘Customer Report’ just in from Sydney. Later she and Jackie would view office space. Definitely business as usual.
‘Got an Instagram picture from Suzie this morning. She says she’s back next week.’ Jackie slit the reinforced envelope open with a letter opener and withdrew a gilded card. She nodded at a colour print on the heap of post. Stella looked at it. It was a picture of her mum sitting in an armchair with a cat on her lap. The caption read, Home on Wednesday, can’t wait to see you all. Sx.
‘This is normal,’ Stella said.
‘Normal? What do you mean?’ Jackie asked absently. She was reading the card in her hand.
‘Mum’s not in some weird costume or wearing a silly hat. In the pictures she sends me, I hardly recognize her. It’s like she’s someone else,’ Stella grumbled. ‘She sent me a photo of herself dressed as a frog this morning saying, Hopping to see you next week love Me xx.’
Jackie laughed and flapped the card. It flashed gold. ‘Thing is, Stella, your mum lets herself be adventurous with you. She dares to try out other selves because she trusts that you’ll get her,’ she said peaceably. ‘Seems she lets her hair down with you and Dale.’
‘I don’t get what’s adventurous about wearing a deerstalker.’ But Jackie’s explanation had mollified her.
‘I take it you won’t be going to this.’ Jackie handed Stella the gold-edged card. ‘We ought to have a presence. I could twist Graham’s arm again.’
Stella read the card
. In a by-the-way voice, she said, ‘I’ll go.’
Chapter Sixty-Eight
November 2014
The first thing Jack noticed when he walked into Stella’s living room were the pictures on the wall.
‘Those are the Marianne North prints!’ He couldn’t disguise his astonishment.
‘Tina left them to me in her will.’ Stella sat in her armchair with Stanley on her lap.
‘You don’t like art.’ Jack was grateful that Jackie wasn’t there to hear his lack of tact. He sat on the sofa and took a sip of his hot milk with honey.
‘I like these.’ Stella’s gaze rested on the Flame Tree. ‘I was reading Mum’s client report this morning. The Royal Botanic Gardens is our 764th commercial customer.’
‘Right.’ Jack gripped his mug. Stella had put art on her wall and now she was waxing about numbers.
‘And 764 is the number of North’s Flame Tree painting.’ Stella was patient, although she had clearly expected him to get it immediately.
‘So it is!’ Jack felt a flood of happiness. Sometimes signs revealed their meaning in retrospect. This one signified a return to order. In the bright centre light – Stella wasn’t a fan of mood lighting – the orange flowers were vibrant. ‘What is client 766, the number of the Flowers of the Flame Tree?’
‘No idea.’ Stella shrugged as if his question was peculiar.
Jack wouldn’t test her limits of fanciful thinking further. ‘I’m having botanical-illustration lessons!’ he said. ‘With Tina’s friend Bella.’
‘I’m not sure they were ever friends,’ Stella remarked.
‘Bella regrets being unkind to Tina. I told her, “Don’t be hard on yourself.” At any age we knock corners off each other and Tina Banks was tough. She thinks it’s Karma that she’s working for a botanist with the mind of a killer!’ If one day Matthew Ayrton strayed beyond taxonomy to take an actual life, Jack would make sure that it wasn’t Bella’s. He didn’t give all the credit for George Watson’s suicide to Lucie May’s visit. The ‘extinction’ of watsonii had killed him.
The House With No Rooms Page 40
