A Death at the Palace

by M. H. Baylis

  She was sitting in a high-backed chair in the tv room when Rex and Diana came in, her slender fingers softly brushing the green felt fabric as if they were searching for something. The nuns loved tv detective shows, and tonight’s viewing was an old episode of ‘Taggart’. She might have been following it – Rex couldn’t tell. Nor could any of the experts her family occasionally sent her to.

  As they drew up chairs in the warm, musty little room, she hiccupped and asked them if they had any biscuits. At least, that seemed to be what she had said. The various pins keeping her jaw together had eroded the gums, and those teeth that had been saved were now falling out. Her voice sounded rough, as if she might not have used it all day, but she was as slim and elegantly turned out as ever, her red hair tied back neatly, her favourite green cashmere cardigan done up to the neck. Rex could smell Mitsuko, a dab of which went on each wrist, every morning, as it always had. She didn’t need eyes to put that on.

  ‘There are two of you,’ she said, as if she’d caught him out in a deception.

  ‘I’ve brought a friend,’ he said, smiling at Diana. ‘Syb – meet Diana. Diana. This is my wife.’

  Every time he said those words, he remembered standing on a pavement in Marylebone, on a Friday night in December 2003, the smells of brake fluid and vomit in his nostrils. He was standing, but he couldn’t feel the pavement beneath him. A policewoman with grey hair and a double chin asked him who the passenger was, and he heard his own voice as though from a great distance, saying, ‘That’s my wife.’

  He’d said ‘that’ – not ‘she’ – and it was odd, because in the moments just before he’d crashed the car, Sybille had been berating him for not introducing her by her name and referring to her as ‘my wife’ all evening. They’d been on his newspaper’s table at a press awards bash, and Sybille had been sandwiched between a small, angry mother of twin autistic boys, whose production manager husband cheated on her, and the production manager husband. She had not enjoyed herself.

  That, and the business of Rex not calling her Sybille, and his drinking too much, had only been irritations. The real issue was the deputy editor bowling along, full of Scotch and soda, and asking her if she was excited about New York. Rex hadn’t told Sybille about New York. He’d told her that he was up for an award because of his big series of articles about ethnic London. He’d told her that the editor had made encouraging noises. He hadn’t told her he’d been offered a job in New York, though, because he’d known exactly what her first reaction would be.

  He had intended to tell her. He had intended to convince her, gently and with patience. He had planned to find apartments to show her on the internet, to book a crossing on a freighter because she had always wanted to make a long sea journey somewhere. But he couldn’t do any of it until they’d got Christmas with her parents and her sister out of the way.

  It was raining lightly, and they couldn’t get a cab after the awards, and Rex found he had left the umbrella in the back of the car outside the office, and by the time he’d gone there and unlocked the boot, the rain was coming down more strongly, and it seemed a reasonable idea to drive home the short way to Camden. Sybille had been too angry to challenge him about it, she just wanted to get home and slam the door and ignore him for a few days. Nothing goaded Rex as much as his wife’s silences, though, and he hadn’t yet made the long acquaintance with quietness that would characterise the next eight years of his life. So, as he drove, he forced her to argue with him, making what was said, on both sides, angrier and less forgivable all round.

  It hadn’t been a make-or-break kind of row, though, just the standard complaints between men and women when they spend their lives together. She over-reacted. He didn’t listen. He’d clearly decided they were going to New York, whether she wanted to or not. She’d clearly decided, in a split second, that she couldn’t leave the sweaty embrace of her family to go and live in one of the world’s most exciting cities. He didn’t think her job in London was important. She just wanted a dreary, suburban existence like her sister. And so the charges passed back and forth as rain pin-pricked the windscreen and the car’s inefficient heater burned their knees.

  In time, by the Sunday afternoon at the latest, they would have worked things out, because they loved each other, and they’d both forgiven far, far worse – and in any case, neither was wholly in the wrong. But by the Sunday afternoon, as it turned out, Sybille was in a coma and Rex was losing his mind. That came about, partly because his wife – convent school educated, the daughter of two Parisian lawyers – had this uncanny habit of saying things that were quite funny in the midst of very serious discussions.

  ‘There’s only so many times I can go for a walk in Central Park and eat a Cuban fucking sandwich.’

  She spat that out as they sped over some traffic lights in Beaumont Street. And she meant, quite reasonably, that she wouldn’t have a job in New York, and that the usual tourist diversions would not be enough to sustain a life there, but her way of saying it made Rex snort with laughter, and he glanced across at her as he accelerated, in that moment failing to see the motorcycle courier cutting right across in front of him through the drizzle. Memory turned into splinters of sensation after that point, like a tapestry scene pulled into its separate threads. Sybille screamed, everything lifted up in the air.

  Later, he would understand that the car had mounted the kerb, and hit some scaffolding, and an unattached pole had passed through the windscreen on the passenger’s side. At the time, though, there was only a crunch, a bang, a shaft of fluorescent orange light and a feeling passing up his left foot and leg so cold, so strong it was almost serene. So the last words Rex’s wife spoke to him, spoke to him, as her, as Sybille, the red-headed girl he’d loved since university, were ‘Cuban fucking sandwich’. Neither of them had ever eaten a Cuban sandwich. Rex wasn’t even sure what it was.

  An ad break took over from the Glaswegian detectives. Deftly, Sybille switched off the sound with one remote control, turned soft music on with another. She turned her head towards Diana and asked if she was comfortable sitting next to the radiator. ‘You can’t sit on the other side,’ she added. ‘Rex always has to sit on the broken side.’

  She’d said this before, and it was true. Rex did always sit on the side of his wife that was smooth and shiny and mostly not there. There was little hair on that side of Sybille’s face, nothing you could reasonably describe as a brow or an eyesocket – nothing but barren grafted skin. He’d started to sit there, he supposed, so that he’d become used to the way she looked. Or to show other people that he could do it. Or so that she knew he didn’t mind.

  But she knew, of course, that he did mind. Even though the old Sybille had been sieved through metal and glass, parts of her had retained their old form. The parts that were sharp, and clever. And angry. And that was why he sat there. Because he deserved to look at her, and deserved her anger.

  The music sounded ultra-modern: all bleeps and synths and sampled voices. A breathy French newscaster, a shouty American commercial, a fruity English poet with hectic drumbeats in the background. Rex had never heard it before. He wondered where on earth Sybille had got it from. Presumably not from the nuns.

  Having shown a corner of herself, Sybille retreated into the gnarled woodlands of her mind, and pretended that Diana was a small child. She asked her what school she went to, and what her favourite subject was. Diana, who was asked dozens of impossible and unreasonable questions every day, merely smiled and said it was P.E. Sybille said she hated running about, but the nuns didn’t make her do much. Everyone laughed at that – too long, too loud.

  Then Sybille turned her clear, sightless eye to Rex, and fixed him with a gaze he wanted to flinch from. ‘He’s been walking in the park for days and his mind is disturbed,’ she said.

  ‘Whose mind?’ Rex asked, knowing there’d be no answer, but unnerved by the comment all the same.

  The swing doors opened then and Sister Florence rustled in. Perhaps that was who
Sybille had meant – the person who would be found soon. A tiny, brisk and efficient Belgian, Sister Florence spoke French to Sybille, and for this reason alone, Sybille’s family trusted Sister Florence above all the other nuns. Tonight, though, because Rex was there, she spoke in English.

  ‘Tchah!’ Sister Florence cast a disappointed look at the tv screen as the programme began again. ‘Police again. Sybille, you are missing the Andrien film on the fourth BBC canal.’ She gave Rex a conspiratorial wink. ‘A Belgian director. Vairry good!’

  The arrival of this busy, friendly soap-smelling creature changed the atmosphere, and after a few pleasantries, Rex and Diana left, heading up a steep path through trees to the bus-stop at the top of the hill. They sat on the narrow red seat, close, but silent, with the marsh-plains of East London flickering below them like a console.

  ‘What a place,’ Diana said, twisting back to look into the trees. ‘What is it – a nunnery?’

  ‘Religious orders often look after people,’ said Rex. ‘Nuns were the first nurses, you know.’ He thought he’d better explain that – Diana being Jewish – but she replied sharply that she knew all about the first nurses.

  ‘I suppose they’re too busy praying to do anything about the cobwebs.’

  Rex smiled. It was a warm, damp, cave-like place, forever prone to visitations of silverfish and spiders.

  ‘They sweep them out,’ he said. “But they always come back.”

  ‘Not if you open the odd window.’

  He couldn’t work out if she was being critical of the place because it had unsettled her, or if she was trying to be helpful. At any rate, a young Polish couple came along and sat, busily entwined at the other end of the seat, and Rex and Diana fell into an embarrassed silence. Rex had hoped at various points during the day that he and Diana would be ending their evening like this couple. He knew now that they wouldn’t.

  ‘I’m guessing you were both in an accident,’ Diana said finally, as the bus arrived.

  ‘I had the accident,’ said Rex. ‘But it happened to her.’

  Actually, it had happened to a lot of people. Sybille’s father had had a stroke eight months later. Her big sister Aurelie had divorced within a year, checked into a drying-out clinic within two. Her nephews, twin boys called Sylvain and Olivier, had moved from the Lycee on the end of their street into a series of boarding schools. And as the bus sank back down towards Turnpike Lane, to the kebab shops and the Thai sauna and the swaggering packs of boys, Rex told Diana all about it.

  The Sisters of Saint Veronica of Jumièges didn’t seem to believe in miracles. They just said their prayers, and they tried to make Sybille and the handful of other broken humans in that house as comfortable as they could. Rex didn’t believe in miracles either, but he knew the supernatural had intervened in his life that one, wet December night.

  They had breathalysed him at the scene, and the breathalyser said his blood alcohol level was very low. He’d tried arguing the point, but in the wreckage of the car, Sybille died – the first of three deaths – and amid the drama of bringing her back to life, he was forgotten. He’d tried to stand up from where they’d settled him on the kerbside, but his leg wouldn’t work, so he’d looked down and seen the bone coming out of his suit trousers and fainted then.

  Later, it emerged that the motorcyclist was full of amphetamines, and had had a near-miss with another car ten minutes earlier, and so everyone – policemen, nurses, mental health workers, Sybille’s parents – said it wasn’t Rex’s fault that his wife was blind and brain-damaged, and would never walk again. Sybille’s sister, eventually, came round to the same point of view, or at least, said she had when she was sober. Sybille never said anything on the subject, even when she was able to.

  Even at half-nine, the traffic was crawling around the junction with Green Lanes, so Rex and Diana joined the general exodus from the bus at the stop by the Wetherspoon’s instead of waiting to reach the modern, steel and glass terminus over Turnpike Lane tube station. An assortment of rheumy, battered-looking men and women was supping at the tables outside the pub, taking in the diesel fumes and the damp. A few nodded at Diana.

  ‘Patients?’ asked Rex.

  She ignored him. ‘You could have been in New York, and you’re here. And once a week, you go up that hill and… crucify yourself in a nunnery. You hardly got off scot-free, did you?’

  ‘I didn’t get what I deserved.’

  ‘That’s what that creepy little… temple thing in your front garden’s all about, isn’t it?’

  ‘It’s a shrine. You said you found it interesting.’

  ‘That was before I knew what it was there for. It’s all crap, Rex!’ she said, causing a pair of brightly-robed, bible-clutching Africans to look up as they flapped by towards the church on Duckett’s Common. ‘It’s all just random. A lot of people are happy with that. I am. The ones that aren’t… they have to find some way of making sense of it all. Go to church. Visit little old ladies. Give all your sodding money away.’

  ‘Do you want it? You could get some new lino for the Surgery.’

  Rex moved towards her, but she stepped back, into the aura of a lamp-post, and was suddenly illuminated.

  ‘I need time to take it all in.’

  ‘So it’s all just a random part of life, I should stop making such a big deal out of it… but you need time to take it in?’

  His tone had been bitter, and he regretted the words as soon as they were out. Diana’s eyes flashed. Exactly as his wife had been, he suddenly thought. Beautiful when angry; least touchable when most desirable. ‘What are you doing?’ she asked.

  ‘Going home on my own, I’m guessing.’

  ‘That’s not what I meant, Rex. You knew I was going to react. You wanted me to react, or you wouldn’t have made that big song-and-dance about taking me up there…’ She glanced round and saw the 41 bus to Archway turning the corner into Turnpike Lane. Its arrival seemed to make up her mind. ‘Look – I’ve got an early start – I’ll see you around, okay?’

  She ran across the road to the bus-stop by the Tube entrance. Rex wondered if she would turn around, but he knew he wasn’t going to wait and see.

  * * *

  When his phone woke him at 5.30 am, his first, forlornly hopeful thought was that Diana was ringing him. Unable to sleep. On her way round.

  His second thought was that it might be his persecutor.

  His third thought was that Diana had received strange calls. The same as him. Had she received any unwelcome gifts? Surely she would have mentioned it.

  He fumbled for the phone, summoning a live image of his sitting-room onto the screen before answering the call. He swore.

  ‘Language. I’ll be outside yours in ten minutes,’ said Terry’s hoarse voice.

  Rex rubbed his face, and averted his eyes from the raki bottle on the coffee table. He’d passed out on the sofa, and now he didn’t feel good.

  ‘Ready for what, Terry?’

  ‘One of them squatter houses on the North Circular’s burnt down.’

  He clicked off and Rex hauled himself up, glad, in a way, to have something else to fill his thoughts.

  Ten minutes later, he was outside, trembling in the orange half-light under the lamp-post with two steaming mugs of coffee, watching Terry reverse down the lane. They covered a lot of fires in the paper, partly because the area was rammed with old, overcrowded, barely-managed properties, but mainly because Terry was in a football team with several members of the fire brigade. Whenever something was burning down, they rang him up, and the paper went along to snap it.

  Terry was talkative, chewing and sniffing constantly as they drove up to Palmer’s Green along the deserted Lanes. As the morning light bled into the sky above North London, it looked angrier and angrier, combining with the dull, shuttered buildings to give the place a lonely, forbidding look, like a mountain pass just before a storm. Rex let his forehead rest against the cold glass of the passenger window.

  ‘Seen the paper?�
�� Terry grunted. He motioned with his head to the back seat where a brand new edition of the Gazette lay next to all his camera equipment. The headline read: Three Attacks In Three Weeks.

  Ellie had done well: a timeline, and a map of the attacks, with the names of the victims and what scant descriptions they had been able to give. Susan had kept true to her word and included his interview with Keith Powell – right next to the column Lawrence Berne was now calling a ‘blog’ – and edited to around a third of its rightful length.

  ‘He smokes and he’s a short-arse. All they need to do is arrest every Turk in Haringey,’ Terry opined.

  Rex groaned. ‘Ilona Balint said she thought he smelled of fags. Maggs said he seemed small, and the Krelkina girl hasn’t said anything.’

  ‘He strangles them and he yanks their hair out,’ Terry argued. ‘Or scalps it out. Any way you look at it, that’s someone who hates women.’

  ‘I’d agree with that. But why does that mean it’s a Turk? Most Turkish guys I’ve met worship their mums and their sisters.’

  Terry pondered this for a while. ‘Suppose it’s got to be a Red Indian then.’

  ‘I’m booking you on Haringey Council’s next Diversity Workshop, Terry.’

  It was that hour when London’s traffic is a rumble instead of a roar, and the vehicles on the North Circular were mainly lorries. They sped on past the fire engine and the police cars and the blackened house.