A Death at the Palace

by M. H. Baylis

  As he stepped out of the car and shook his foot back to life, Rex recognised a number of Terry’s fireman mates, along with D.S. Bond and a blond, broad-faced, somehow Dutch-looking D.C. whose name escaped him. The other, instantly recognisable thing about the scene was the smell of gas.

  ‘Waiting for the Gas Board,’ Mike Bond said, by way of greeting, as he moved his weight slowly from the ball of one foot to the other. The Dutch D.C. – whose name was Orchard – nodded coldly. He was taking a statement from a red-eyed girl in a Breton shirt and black dungarees. One of the squatters, Rex guessed.

  ‘Was the fire still going when you got here?’ Rex asked, glancing at the house. One of its metal shutters was dangling off, and all around it, stretching up to the open windows of the first floor, and across to the front door, the wall was blackened. A near-perfect map of Japan.

  ‘More of an explosion by the sounds of things,’ Bond said, blowing on his fingers. ‘Happens all the time – they’re always tampering with the meters.’

  Rex remembered the gang-banger with the decorative facial hair. His visceral hatred of the squatters. Nicking the gas – he’d said. Maybe some of that gas gonna blow up in their faces.

  ‘I just told to you, there were three men outside, banging upon the door!’ the girl shouted. She had fine features, and spoke with a faint accent. ‘I looked out, one of them told me piss off back to Russia and then they pushed something through the letter box.’

  ‘What like? A North Sea gas grenade?’ queried D.C. Orchard, clearly rather proud of his joke.

  The girl scowled.

  ‘Did he really say that?’ Rex queried. ‘Piss off?’

  ‘He shouted piss off back to Russia, and he made that… Winston Churchill sign to me and he walked off. And one of the others was doing something down there, and I couldn’t see it, but then he pushed something through the door.’

  ‘What’s the Winston Churchill sign?’ asked Bond, in a kindly voice. The girl made a ‘V for victory’ sign with her fingers. Everyone frowned.

  ‘You mean like that?’ Rex suggested, flashing the same sign in reverse. She shrugged.

  ‘Sir?’

  A young, Chinese-looking WPC emerged from the front door.

  ‘There are spent matches all around the front step. Like someone was trying to light something.’

  The squatter-girl nodded, vindicated, until one of the firemen said, ‘There’s no way a few matches could have set that off unless the hall was drenched in petrol, or it was full of gas.’ D.C. Orchard smiled, thinly.

  The Leak Response Team from the gas company called, to say they were a few minutes away. Terry snapped the damage from all sorts of interesting angles, and tried to do the same with the squatter, who wasn’t having any of it. In the meantime, Rex looked at the spent matches with Mike Bond.

  ‘Lucky she was the only one in, and right at the top,’ said Bond.

  ‘I didn’t know anyone still used matches,’ Rex said, looking down at the step. There were some in the weeds at the side, six or seven right by the door, and a few more on the path itself. More than anyone needed to light a cigarette.

  ‘I didn’t know anyone still said “piss off”,’ Bond observed.

  “Or flicked the V’s,” Rex added. Except that, as he said that, he remembered someone doing it to him, not long ago. The same person who’d been in a conspiratorial huddle with a pair of thugs in the pub toilet. And put up posters, telling Eastern Europeans to go home.

  “You know much about Keith Powell?” he asked Bond, as casually as he could.

  ‘The Nazi bloke?’ Bond frowned ‘What – you think he did this?’

  ‘Maybe,’ Rex said. ‘Maybe some of the people he knows. And he’s got a criminal record.’

  Bond looked at him. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘He’s on probation for something. I saw a letter in his house.’

  Bond’s unruly eyebrows rose. ‘Probation for what?’

  ‘I don’t know. But if we did – I mean – if you did, then it might…’

  ‘We’ll look him up.’

  Rex decided not to share his thoughts about Powell’s fondness for flicking the V’s, or his chumminess with the thugs in the Salisbury toilets. They’d sound silly. Or too obvious. But most crimes, in his experience, were obvious. That was why the police managed to solve them.

  The Gas Board van finally arrived, and Bond ambled off to greet its occupant. Rex looked back at the house for a while, then eastwards along the row. Next door was a modest, legitimately-occupied home whose residents were up and moving about. A bird cage in the ground floor window and some stone ornaments on the lawn outside gave some clues. They’d be near, or just past retirement age, Rex guessed. Greek Cypriot, or Irish, here a long time, and hard, hard-working. They’d have pictures of gap-toothed grandchildren on the mantlepiece. Flintstones-style fireplace, tablemats with pictures of dray horses on them. What did they make of the squat next door? Night-long parties, thrown by kids who stole the electricity for their sound systems and never went to work?

  Maybe Powell’s mob had nothing to do with it. Maybe people like this old couple had sons. Maybe they were gangsters like the boys he’d run into at Newington Green. Or maybe they were mostly law-abiding, tax-paying, strapping great big sons, who didn’t want that going on next door to their old mum and dad, next door to the house they planned to inherit. He found himself suddenly thinking about Olivier and Sylvain, Sybille’s Parisian nephews. He’d last seen them six years ago, when they were twelve. They were all pleases and thank-yous and damp handshakes, yet murderously protective of their increasingly chaotic and alcoholic mother. When kids were asked to protect their parents, they took it seriously.

  He noticed to his surprise that the house on the other side of the smart one was also blackened with soot. It looked in an even worse state, as if it had been bombed in the Blitz and never repaired. So these people – Rex saw a stout woman with steel hair adjusting the curtains and peering out – these people were marooned here, on a road that had turned into a motorway, surrounded by houses that kept bursting into flames. What a way to live out your days.

  There was a moment of eye contact between Rex and the woman in the window, and he thought about going across and asking her some questions. Two things stopped him. The first was his realisation that the bombed-out house was the same house he’d seen from the other side on his last trip up here. It was, itself, next door to the house Milda lived in. Or, it seemed, no longer lived in.

  The second thing was an argument, between the girl in the dungarees, and a tall boy in a green tracksuit top, who had just shown up on a mountain bike with no saddle. The argument was in German, but none of the onlookers needed any knowledge of the tongue to understand that the girl was very angry with the boy, and the boy didn’t have a leg to stand on. She kept pointing at the pavement a few feet away, or more accurately, at the gas main situated there, which was being closely inspected by the man from the gas company.

  As Rex wandered over, the gasman held up a few links of a thin metal chain.

  ‘This is it,’ he said. ‘See – when we switch the supply off, we put a chain on, to stop anyone unauthorised switching it back. But they’ – he glanced meaningfully at the squatters – ‘can break them with a pair of bolt cutters.’

  ‘So they left the gas on?’

  ‘We didn’t,’ said the girl. ‘We switched it off when we moved in here last week, and we rang you’ – she pointed at the gasman – ‘to put the supply on the meter.’

  ‘You got a record of that call?’ asked D.C. Orchard. His tone made it clear that he suspected, and hoped, that they didn’t. The boy started scrolling through a flat, sandwich-sized computer he’d withdrawn from the pocket of his jeans.

  ‘You’re supposed to turn the stop-cock until it clicks, and the lever goes in,’ the gasman went on. ‘If it doesn’t click, you can’t be sure the gas isn’t still coming through. And some of these old meters have been mucked about with so many
times they’re about as tight as a cheese-grater.’

  The girl glared at the boy, who was still busy with his little organiser device.

  ‘The meter’s in that cupboard in the porch,’ D.C. Orchard mused, ‘so when the matches come through the letter-box…’

  At that moment the boy looked up from his screen and said, ‘I talked to Miss Adita Shah in the New Domestic Supply Team at 2.48pm on Wednesday.’

  ‘Tampering with a gas supply for any reason is an offence…’ began D.C. Orchard.

  ‘So is sticking lighted matches through someone’s letter box,’ said Rex.

  Bond cut in, addressing the two squatters. ‘Detective Constable Orchard is right. Regardless of what you say happened at the front door, you shouldn’t have fiddled with the gas main. Even if you had decided to go legit and pay for it. You should have left it to the experts.’

  ‘We thought, if the gas company saw there had been an illegal supply, they would know this place was a squat and they wouldn’t give to us it,’ protested the girl, her English suffering as she became agitated.

  Bond chuckled. ‘I reckon the tin shutters and the Fuck the Pigs sign would have given them a clue or two, love.’

  At length, the crowds departed: the firemen to the café down the road, the gas man to a call in Enfield, the police with their two sullen charges.

  Terry had offered to hide the boy’s bike safely in the back garden, and Rex went with him down an alleyway at the side of the house, which led onto a flat, muddy garden. He felt truly terrible now, the rush of energy having given way now to a full, body-and-soul type of hangover. His foot was grumbling too, and he needed codeine. He didn’t have any, and the only way to get a decent dose would be to make an appointment with his G.P. Who wasn’t talking to him.

  ‘Why did you offer to stash it for him?’ Rex asked irritably, as Terry pulled a muddy blue tarpaulin off a barbecue set and covered the seat-less bike with it.

  Terry winked. ‘So I could see if they had any weed growing out back.’

  ‘In England? In the autumn?’

  ‘My mate Terry grows it all year round in Consett.’

  ‘You’ve got a mate called Terry?’

  ‘I’ve got two,’ Terry said, poking hopefully in a bush with an old chair leg. Rex gazed out over the landscape – a flat, unhappy plain of washing lines and huge satellite dishes. The air smelt of smoke and wet concrete.

  ‘Doesn’t your bird live out this way?’ Terry said, peering distractedly into a tiny, green-painted garden shed on a dangerous lean.

  ‘She’s not my bird,’ Rex said. ‘But yes. She lives three doors down, actually.’

  ‘The one that’s on fire right now?’

  Rex turned and followed the direction of Terry’s finger to see thick palls of dark smoke swirling away and upwards from the back of Milda’s house.

  They ran towards it, across the gardens. Only the elderly couple had a fence; no one else’s boundary was marked by anything beyond a bit of netting or a few blackened stumps in the earth. In the yard of the junkie squat next to Milda’s, there was, inexplicably, a large, plywood Wendy-house. Rex and Terry took cover behind it from the flames and the fumes.

  When the wind changed direction, it rapidly became apparent that Milda’s house was not on fire. Instead, someone had lit a huge bonfire in the back yard. Rex and Terry stood, momentarily transfixed by the primal drama of a roaring blaze. A man came out from the house with more fuel in his arms.

  It was Vadim, and he was burning Milda’s belongings in the back yard. Rex watched in horror as he threw a pale-blue, William Morris print file on the flames. It was followed by a pile of sketches, and a scarf Milda had sometimes worn around her head.

  As the smoke blew back towards them, Rex motioned for Terry to take some pictures. The photographer obliged, eyes narrowed, mouth set in a grim, contented line, as if he’d finally been drafted to the war-zone of his dreams. More of Milda’s clothes went onto the pyre and the smoke thickened. Vadim appeared in profile, vanished then appeared again, a spectral figure in combat trousers and a short pea-coat.

  The scene didn’t ignite Rex’s worst fears. It gave him fears he’d never had before. He reported on crimes every day – rapes and stabbings and robberies – but he always arrived in the aftermath. This was different. A crime – he was sure it must be a crime – was actually happening before his eyes, involving people he knew, people he’d loved and slept with. It felt as if a character on the television had suddenly turned to the camera and spoken his name, the removed become impossibly near in an instant.

  Why was Vadim in the garden, early in the morning, burning Milda’s belongings? Why had nobody seen her for so long? He remembered Vadim’s taxi to the airport when they’d first met. Isn’t that just what a killer might do? First bolt for home? Then calm down, go back, and cover his tracks?

  And intimidate the only person who might get close to the truth.

  * * *

  Two hours later, Rex was at the Police Station on St. Ann’s Road. They would be moving soon, Detective Sergeant Mike Bond told him, from this ornate red-brick and sandstone HQ to something steely and modern on the Seven Sisters’ Road.

  ‘This was my first nick,’ Bond said, glancing up from his cluttered desk to the corniced ceiling and the panelled walls. It was an oddly elegant place, with a glass-tiled hallway, and it always smelt of felt and wax polish, like a museum. ‘My two best mates at Bramshill got West End Central and I thought I’d got the shit sandwich coming here.’

  The shit sandwich. Rex suddenly remembered his trepidation as he’d opened that envelope in the office yesterday. After everything else, it had crossed his mind that there might be shit inside the jiffy bag. He’d have been almost relieved to have found a turd. A turd was a simple insult. Journalists were always getting turds. At the Telegraph, he recalled, they’d had special bags and gloves for them. But there were no special procedures for the stuff coming his way now. But could it really be Vadim behind it all? And why rubber handcuffs?

  ‘Mike. I’ve seen something,’ said Rex, waving aside the mint Bond was offering him.

  He told the policeman about Milda, who was still missing, and clearly hadn’t gone home. Then about Vadim and the bonfire. Bond took it all in, in a grave yet inscrutable way.

  ‘You need to file a Missing Person’s Report,’ Bond said, reaching into his drawer for some forms. ‘But I have to tell you. We’ve got a Latvian woman who works here. She speaks all those languages: Lithuanian, Estonian. And even before these attacks started, she’s been in here twice a week, talking to some mum or dad back in the old country, who thinks their son or daughter’s disappeared. Nine times out of ten, they’re in a new squat. Or they’ve just gone to Leeds. Or Paris. Or their phone’s run out of credit. They’re just… kids. It rarely comes to anything.’

  ‘But her boyfriend was burning her stuff on a bonfire. I’ve got photos.’

  ‘I can’t act on that, Rex. Unless Milda filed a complaint about her missing stuff. Or one of the neighbours didn’t like the smoke.’ Bond took another sweet. ‘So, you want to do this report?’

  Rex shook his head. Bond was right: what it looked like to him was not what it looked like to the police. They needed more. But he had nothing else to give them. Yet.

  ‘People are pessimists,’ Bond said, crunching his mint. ‘They’ve got reason to be, sure, but this place isn’t half as bad as people think. I’m not saying it hasn’t been. Back in the Eighties. Broadwater Farm and all that…’ He proffered the bag again.

  Bond was a calming presence, Rex thought, as he unwrapped a mint and put it in his mouth. Yet in the whole time he’d known the man, only two things had ever given him cause for concern, and they’d both occurred in the last few days. There was his strange, crass comment about Eastern European girls looking for trouble. And then that book on Brenda’s desk. Living With A Violent Man. Mike Bond wasn’t a violent man, surely. Then again, he’d been a copper in Tottenham for a long time. Who
wouldn’t be a little on the violent side?

  ‘What made it so bad back then? Unemployment?’

  Bond chuckled wheezily. ‘People have never worked round these parts. Not the tax-paying kind, anyway.’ He stretched back in his chair, displaying a billowing striped paunch. He’d put on a lot of weight. And had he always looked quite so tired? ‘The racial thing was really bad. Pakistanis. Blacks. National Front. Police.’ As he mentioned each group, Bond slapped a hand on his belly, like a series of incoming blows. ‘Compared to back then, we’ve been living in a multicultural paradise.’

  A police civilian staffer, a young, skinny, white boy with huge, tribal holes bored through his earlobes, put some forms on Bond’s desk, occasion for the old detective to roll his eyebrows at Rex.

  ‘Keith Powell doesn’t seem to think it’s the Garden of Eden,’ Rex said, seizing the opportunity.

  ‘Well…’ Bond unwrapped another mint and sucked thoughtfully. ‘Brenda and I saw this nature thing the other night. You know, the coral reef. It’s got eight thousand different life-forms all swimming around there. Your crab eats the sand-worms, and the sand-worms need this special plant to lay their eggs in, but…’

  ‘Global warming.’ Rex caught the odd nature documentary, too.

  ‘Exactly. The sea heats up, the worms die, and the crab dies, and then the… whatever it is that feeds on crabs goes kaput too. It’s a finely-tuned engine. And this place has been a bit like that, the past twenty years. Turks here. Kurds there. Caribbeans doing this, Africans doing that. It’s worked. But then, suddenly, umpteen thousand new people fly in from Stansted, and on top of that, you’ve got a recession, inflation, all these cuts…’

  Rex frowned. ‘So Powell’s mob have a point?’

  Bond shrugged. ‘I’m not saying we should do this or that. I’m just saying, it’s going to change things. It’s like I said. This manor’s been okay since the bad old days. But I worry it might not be for long.’

  ‘So you’ve gone from saying I shouldn’t be worried about my ex-girlfriend because this is a lovely place… to saying I should be, because it’s all changing, and we’ve got too many immigrants arriving in the middle of a recession?’