The House With No Rooms Read online

  THE HOUSE WITH NO ROOMS

  Lesley Thomson

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  About this Book

  About the Author

  Table of Contents

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  About The House With No Rooms

  The summer of 1976 was the hottest in living memory. Britain sweltered, trees and plants wilted, fire ripped through forests and rivers ran dry.

  In the Botanical Gardens at Kew, a lost little girl stumbled upon a deserted gallery deep in the undergrowth. Dizzied by the heat, she thought she saw a woman lying dead on the floor. But when she opened her eyes, the woman had gone.

  Forty years later, Stella Darnell, the detective’s daughter, is investigating a chilling new case: a man lies dead in Kew Gardens. What Stella uncovers will draw her into the obsessive world of botany, and towards an unsolved murder that has lain dormant for decades...

  For Mel,

  for that walk in Kew Gardens.

  And in memory of my mum, May Walker, for many childhood walks in Kew Gardens.

  Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew

  Botanical image

  Calamus jacobsii

  …visitors may, however, be glad to be reminded, that very many of the views here brought together represent vividly and truthfully scenes of astonishing interest and singularity, and objects that are amongst the wonders of the vegetable kingdom; and that these, though now accessible to travellers and familiar to readers of travels, are already disappearing or are doomed shortly to disappear before the axe and the forest fires, the plough and the flock, of the ever advancing settler or colonist. Such scenes can never be renewed by nature, nor when once effaced can they be pictured to the mind’s eye, except by means of such records as this... we have to be grateful for her fortitude as a traveller, her talent and industry as an artist and her liberality and public spirit.

  J. D. HOOKER, DIRECTOR

  ROYAL GARDENS, KEW,

  JUNE 1, 1882.

  (Preface to the first edition of the catalogue for the Marianne North exhibitions of paintings in the Marianne North Gallery, Kew)

  In a world driven by digital content, it must seem strange that botanical illustration is every bit as important now as it was before the age of photography. But an illustration is so much more than a photo – it is a distillation of the most critical features of a plant, selected to help the user understand the species and isolated on a page without the distracting clutter of the surrounding environment. A close collaboration between the artist and the botanist gets the best results...

  DECEMBER 2014

  DR WILLIAM BAKER,

  Assistant Head of Comparative Plant and Fungal Biology, the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew

  (From blog on Kew Gardens website: http://www.kew.org/discover/blogs/library-art-and-archives/gallery-talk-botanical-artist-lucy-t-smith)

  Contents

  Cover

  Welcome Page

  About The House With No Rooms

  Dedication

  Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew

  Botanical image

  Epigraph

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  Chapter Sixty

  Chapter Sixty-One

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  Chapter Sixty-Four

  Chapter Sixty-Five

  Chapter Sixty-Six

  Chapter Sixty-Seven

  Chapter Sixty-Eight

  Acknowledgements

  About Lesley Thomson

  About The Detective’s Daughter Series

  From the editor of this book

  An Invitation from the Publisher

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  March 1956

  The iron ball suspended from the crane, black against the night sky, was a reverse of the moon. To a nocturnal wanderer, wisping cloud above a chimney could be smoke from a hearth. A laburnum twisted around the windows of one house and a magnolia tree flourished in front of another.

  Rounding the corner of the L-shaped street, this rambler might stop short. The windows had no glass and the door of number 21 hung askew. Curtains at number 25 billowed like flitting phantoms. The houses were so many gap-toothed skulls.

  Behind façades, walls had been pulverized, the guts clawed out. Against a heap of rubble some wit had propped a door – number 17 – suggesting that our visitor could enter, hear a kettle whistling and smell dinner on the stove.

  Foot-scrapers, doormats and clipped hedges indicated a lost existence. A plaster gnome gazed balefully from beneath a laurel bush. Many front doors in the abandoned street were locked. Unable to absorb the uprooting from their homes, residents had secured against intruders and pocketed the key. Useless when intruders came armed with much more than a jemmy.

  Rose Gardens, once lively with children kicking balls, playing hopscotch and kiss chase, neighbours chatting, was a ‘ghost street’. Only eight houses were occupied, huddled behind a hoarding that offered no protection against swirls of brick dust and the insistent boom of demolition that shook walls, rattled windows and frayed nerves.

  The swathe of destruction stretched west towards Hounslow and east to Hammersmith Broadway as if a warring enemy, oblivious to civilian collateral, had bombed all in its path. Weltje Road, Riverside Gardens, Black Lion Lane, Rose Gardens: street after street had been cut in two or wiped from the map.

  This wholesale destruction of urban fabric wasn’t military: the ‘enemy’ was municipal. Leafy Victorian and Edwardian suburbia that had obliterated meadows and orchards were, in their turn, being erased for the extension to the Great West Road.

  At number 25, light flickered through plaster-matted curtains. The parlour, once reserved for special occasions and respectable visitors like the vicar or the rent collector, was choked with dust and its waxed floorboards splint
ered. Two figures, their shadows grotesque in the light of a rubber torch, hunched by a gas fire as if warming themselves at the cold grey elements.

  ‘This is silver. It’ll fetch a few bob.’ A boy, stocky, bull-like, bit on the casing. ‘We’ve had a good night.’ He grinned at no one in particular.

  ‘You’ll break it.’ His companion ducked out of the light. ‘There’s someone out there! I said we shouldn’t of come.’

  ‘It’s my mum’s house. We can come when we like.’ The stocky boy swung the torch and revealed a zigzagging line of a missing staircase on the wall. There was no ceiling. Above, as if suspended, was a bedroom grate. It was a house with no rooms.

  Dangling the trinket from its chain, the boy with the torch crept with feline ease across smashed wood and plaster to the front window. The walls were papered with a pattern of daisies, his mum’s favourite flower. With slicked hair, denim jacket and jeans, his chiselled good looks were more James Dean than Cliff Richard. He twitched the curtain as his mum had done every night, waiting for her husband even after he was dead. He scanned the rubble-strewn street with the unblinking eyes of a psychopath for whom even rage is calculated.

  ‘Sweet sixteen, ready with a cheeky grin’, Smiler was the apple of his nan’s eye, and the bane of his mum’s life, ‘never here when I need him’.

  ‘You’re cray-zee!’ He shone the torch into the other boy’s face and giggled, a strangely girlish sound given his bulk.

  ‘There!’ The other boy pointed across the room. Tall and streaky-bacon thin, he made dipping motions as if he might hit his head on the ceiling that wasn’t there.

  There was a scuffle and groans. Smiler focused light on an old man with a grey beard and straggling hair. He lay collapsed on boards where there had once been a bed-settee on which the cat would preen itself. Closer inspection showed that his lined face betrayed experience, not years. He was in his forties, dressed in an ill-fitting single-breasted suit, rheumy eyes flicking about him. His body, although wasted, was taut. He was ready for action, if incapable of taking it. The demob suit and boots with gaping soles identified him as a soldier who, back on Civvy Street, had missed out on the spoils of victory.

  ‘I seen everything. I know the bloke you robbed. He fought at the Somme and at Dunkirk, not like you toe-rags,’ he spluttered. ‘I’ll set the law on you and you’ll hand that stuff back.’ Energy spent, he sagged against the wall.

  ‘Let’s go.’ The taller boy tugged at the curtain, peering out.

  ‘You heard, he’ll tell the police.’ Smiler giggled at the word ‘police’ as if it were rude.

  ‘Give him that silver thing. It’s got initials – it’ll be hard to fence.’ The reedy boy added plaintively, ‘I said we shouldn’t have gone and we shouldn’t be here.’

  ‘That’ll get at least a guinea,’ Smiler murmured.

  ‘I’ll see you get nothing.’ The soldier pointed at the thin boy grasping the curtain. ‘I know your dad.’

  ‘You better shut up!’ the thin boy jabbered, his fear palpable.

  The soldier was scrambling to his feet. ‘You’re a disgrace to your old man. A snivelling coward. That learning’s taught you nothing.’ He swayed towards the boy and grabbed his arms. In the crude light, they appeared engaged in a weird and ugly dance before the man crumpled to the floor.

  The boy stood above him. Something in his hand glittered in the torchlight.

  ‘You stabbed me.’ The soldier sounded astonished.

  ‘What you gone and done?’ Smiler played the torch over the man.

  ‘I tapped him!’ His voice reedy, the boy clung to the curtain as if to his mother’s skirts, eyes blinking, face chalk-white.

  ‘Help!’ The soldier’s voice rang out, surprisingly strong. A dark patch spread through his shirt front.

  ‘You did an’ all!’ Smiler sniggered through fingers clamped over his mouth. He took the knife off the taller boy and, with an easy action, stooped and severed the man’s windpipe, stepping away to avoid gouts of blood, black as oil, flooding from his neck. Gurgles carried into the rafters as air bubbled through blood and life ebbed.

  The silence was interrupted by a sound that both boys had known all their lives: a flock of geese honking as they flew towards the River Thames.

  ‘He’s dead.’ The taller boy’s own windpipe contracted, his voice reedier still.

  Smiler wiped the knife clean on the man’s trousers; the fabric was stiffened with dirt. He sucked on his teeth, making a kissing sound. ‘He was vermin. A nobody.’ He giggled as if the joke were a good one.

  ‘He fought for his country.’ The taller boy was shaking. ‘I tapped him,’ he said again.

  ‘Fought, my eye!’ Smiler kicked the dead man’s boot. ‘State of him. Couldn’t fight Hitler’s cat!’ He sniggered. A tinkling sound.

  The dead man’s eyes glinted through half-closed lids.

  ‘He’s alive!’ The taller boy tottered backwards, knocking the torch from the other boy’s hand. The light went out.

  ‘Get a grip!’ From somewhere in the dark, words swallowed in a gale of merriment.

  ‘We could’ve talked him out of it.’ The bleating boy scrambled in the rubble for the torch.

  Smiler found the torch and aimed it at his friend. ‘Stop whining. You’ll get us strung up. You killed him.’ Serious now.

  ‘I didn’t mean it!’

  ‘This is your knife and, like he said – you heard him – you stabbed him. I put him out of his misery. You’re a murderer and a thief. You perpetrated two crimes. There’s a long word to stick up your jacksy with your highfalutin baloney!’ He held the light under his chin, which made him look more of a cadaver than the body at his feet.

  ‘I’ll explain to the police,’ the taller boy said.

  ‘Listen Swatty-Boy, you’re eighteen. You’ll hang by the neck until you’re dead. I’ll get Borstal and walk free.’ Smiler pushed the knife into a canvas air raid warden’s bag slung across his chest. ‘You did right. He was a liability and at this rate so are you. Come ’ere!’

  ‘We could implicate him,’ the eighteen-year-old stuttered.

  ‘Imp-li-cate? What a whopper!’ Smiler jammed the torch against his crutch and did a thrusting motion.

  ‘Leave something we robbed so the police think it was him.’ The reedy boy was urgent.

  ‘Like what?’ Smiler yawned, bored.

  ‘That watch.’

  ‘Where he’s gone, he don’t need to tell the time!’

  ‘Like you said, he’s vermin. The police won’t put themselves out looking for his murderer.’ The older boy blanched as if, despite everything, he hadn’t realized that it was murder.

  ‘It’s a bleeding Rolex!’ Smiler protested.

  ‘We’ve got the cash and the ring. And that silver thing. The watch is worth more as a decoy.’

  ‘OK.’ Smiler seemed to see the sense in this. ‘We’ll use the ring. It comes from your share.’ He fished in his bag and eventually found a gold signet ring. He thrust it at his friend. ‘You do it, since you’re so clever.’

  ‘Do what?’

  The other boy giggled, a whinnying. ‘Stick it on him!’

  Perhaps to get it over with, the older boy quickly grabbed one of the man’s hands. It was bony and wasted so the ring slipped easily on to his second finger.

  ‘Get his feet.’ Smiler was coldly efficient. ‘We need to shift him.’

  With trembling repugnance, his friend took hold of the corpse’s ankles. A boot slipped off revealing a foot netted in a threadbare sock.

  They hauled the man across the floor. The older boy dry-retched as a diabolical stench filled the air.

  ‘You shat your pants!’ Smiler laughed gaily.

  ‘It’s him!’

  ‘Get a move on, or the watchman will catch you!’

  The taller boy faltered. ‘When they level out the ground, they’ll find him.’

  ‘So you’re a road-builder now?’ Smiler snarled. ‘There’ll be nothing left of him. Like yo
u said, if they find him, he’s got the ring so they’ll think he did the house.’

  Neither boy could know that Smiler was right and that it would be twenty years before the body of the soldier was discovered, one summer’s afternoon in a very different world.

  Much in the scullery was unchanged from when the house had been lived in. A length of fabric was slung in front of the sink. Curtains – decorated with more daisies – framed a window in which there was still glass. Below a geyser was a scouring brush and a packet of Tide. A streak of lime ran from taps in a butler sink. Worn flagstones beat a path to a privy in the yard.

  ‘Be a laugh if Mum was here, cooking up tripe and onions, singing to Music While You Work!’ Sniggering, Smiler opened a door to cellar steps blocked at the bottom by masonry. The boys heaved the corpse into the cavity. Streams of mortar dust trickled out of cracks in the wall when they trod on loose joists. Shovelling with bare hands, they heaped bricks and wood over the body.

  They heard footsteps in the street.

  ‘The watchman!’ The older boy was paralysed with panic.

  ‘This way.’ Smiler shut the cellar door and went out to the yard. He had often entered and left his mum’s house by the back gardens; his knowledge came in handy now.

  They kept in the shadows past the Bemax factory and along the towpath. They climbed the steps to Hammersmith Bridge and, halfway along, stopped by the plaque for the dead soldier. Not out of respect or even irony, but because it was their meeting place.

  ‘Throw the knife in.’ The eighteen-year-old pointed at the river below. ‘Throw everything in. It’s evidence.’

  Smiler’s shoulders shook with laughter. Then he sobered and, eyes glittering, said, ‘If I have to tidy up your mess, you pay. I’ll hold on to the knife. Call it an investment. We’ll stick close, like brothers, yeah? I’m in charge. Agreed?’ When the other boy didn’t reply, ‘Agreed?’

  ‘Agreed.’

  *

  Around the corner from Rose Gardens the St Peter’s Church clock chimed three times. Sonorous notes, as if tolling for the murdered dead.