A Death at the Palace

by M. H. Baylis

  The girl sat close to him. Close enough for him to smell her hair. It smelt of Chinese tea. And she told him about her camera, which had been her Dad’s, but she’d never used it before. He didn’t know what to say, but the girl just talked and talked, in English, but in such a low, quick way, with such a funny accent that he sometimes missed what she was saying. It was comfortable, though, rather than confusing.

  As they went past the back of the North Middlesex Hospital, he said that her father must know a thing or two about cameras.

  ‘He is dead,’ she replied harshly. He gazed through a hospital window at that moment and caught a typical, clinical scene of screens and equipment. It made him shudder. ‘This is just some communist rubbish,’ the girl added, tapping it with a fingernail.

  ‘It’s not,’ he replied hotly. ‘You don’t know because you you’re too young. It’s a beautiful model. And if you’d had the film on the right speed, you’d have taken some beautiful shots.’

  She stared, and he felt his face going red. He never spoke to anyone like that. She took her spectacles off and wiped them on her dress, and he imagined droplets of steam from his face being rubbed off the lenses and onto the printed hem that rubbed against her bare, girl’s knees.

  ‘Can you teach me to make those beautiful shots, please?’

  A breathy, wispy voice, like a little girl’s. He knew he had to get off the bus. Luckily, the allotments were coming up, and he found himself jabbering about the patch of ground he had there, and how much work it took up. And all the time he was thinking of the crunch that came when he forced a spade into the thick, damp soil. He nearly fell down the stairs and his legs were trembling as he stood on the kerb watching the bus drive away. He had an idea that it had been stupid to tell her about the allotments, because they were real, and the girl could find him there, but by the time he reached the gates, he’d seen how unlikely that was. She was only a girl at a bus stop. People, strangers, spoke to each other all the time. He’d seen it happen.

  Later, he’d made a simple salad for Caroline with the bits he’d gathered at the allotments. After the last operation, she’d moved to a bed in the front room, and the place was filled with the smells of illness. It was hot in there, too, because she was always shivering, so they still had a radiator on low; and they couldn’t open the window at this time of year, because the smoke from the neighbours’ barbecues and the traffic fumes from the main road settled on her chest.

  The lettuce and the tomato had lain untouched on a tray next to a puzzle magazine and her reading glasses; he’d fancied he could see them wilting second by second. It would be another of the days when nothing passed her lips except morphine and lemon barley water.

  ‘I didn’t know you were going up the allotments,’ she’d said, out of the side of her mouth. She was so used to speaking while in pain that she talked that way all the time, even in moments of relief. He felt caught out, as if he’d done something wrong. And he’d also known, in that instant, that it was his wife who stopped him from doing wrong. If she were to stop eating, she might not be strong enough to carry on that job.

  ‘Eat some tomato,’ he’d said, switching on the local news. ‘Just half. It’ll be good for you.’

  It hadn’t been good for Caroline, of course. Not good enough. Nothing he’d done had helped her. And now he was here, in the darkroom in the autumn, developing a film that had been in its can since June. He knew what he’d find when he developed it, but even so, he’d never got over that sense of wonder as the chemicals went to work on the paper, and in the midst of that stark, hospital smell, a vision formed.

  In the tray an image appeared of the cranes. He’d only caught two, but that had been his intention, because both had their arms extended, in opposite directions, at almost the same angle, so they formed a letter ‘Y’. The drivers, in their isolation, were close together, and they were the magnetic centre of the piece. But in the bottom right hand corner, he’d accidentally captured a fragment of the girl. Just a shoulder and a slice of arm. Bare arm, bright blue plastic watch, and the shoulder of that old-fashioned dress she often wore.

  Did it spoil the picture, or add something to it? It might be just right for the title of the competition. The Changing Face Of Haringey. The hint of a girl in an old dress, but with a modern watch. Cranes behind her, chewing up the old marshes. And the two drivers, seeming to have a conversation in their separate cabs, so far above the scene. Maybe he’d keep her in.

  She might be annoyed, he thought. But then again, if he won, she’d be delighted.

  * * *

  Dr Diana Berne knew enough about alcoholism, saw enough, every day, of its beacons and its wreckage, to know that wanting a drink was not, in itself, something to worry about. Nevertheless, every afternoon, just between the departure of the penultimate patient and the arrival of the very last, she wished she kept something in a drawer.

  She wished it tonight. On Tuesday, after being stood up on the Monday night, another grim day in the Surgery and that awkward, unhappy pub-session with Rex, she’d come home to find her flat had been burgled. She’d tried not to take it personally. Almost everyone else on her road had been burgled. But this person had thrown her clothes and her underwear all over the flat and scratched over the Polaroid of Tigger, her first cat – and that, somehow, had troubled her much more than what had troubled the two young policemen who’d turned up.

  That nothing had been taken.

  Her first suspect was the taxi-driver. He’d known she wasn’t going to be in, after all. But he was an old man. And he’d left all the IKEA stuff so neatly and carefully in the porch. It was still there, in fact, two days later, because she couldn’t bear to bring any of it into the flat. It was all new, in its packaging. The intruder hadn’t touched it. She still didn’t want any of it now.

  She glanced at her screen, and saw that Mrs Trail was due in next. Now she wanted that drink even more. With a chaser shot of morphine. Mrs Trail was a silly, fussy, sheep-faced woman in her late fifties, employed as a school cook, and constantly in pursuit of a large compensation package. She always insisted on the last appointment because then she could unburden herself in a slow, unhurried fashion, beginning with the unhelpfulness of the doctors’ reception staff, moving on to the laziness of her largely African colleagues at work, followed by the physical and mental stresses of living in a house whose garden wasn’t big enough and having a daughter with a weight problem.

  Dr Shah routinely prescribed her antibiotics: given a fair wind, he said, Mrs Trail’s immune system might be compromised and finally finished off when some deadly new superbug landed in Haringey from the Third World. Diana, on the other hand, tried to listen and give support. In return, while not listening to a word of her advice, Mrs Trail did a ghastly impression of bosomy, big sisterly concern for her.

  Found a nice young man yet? Mrs Trail would no doubt ask. And then, before Diana had replied. Shame. Still…

  Concern, fake or otherwise, was something Diana could take no more of. On Wednesday, reluctant to be alone in the flat, she’d gone up to Temple Fortune to see her cousin Avital. Or Abigail, as she’d been known before a muscular form of Zionism had seized hold of her in her first year at Manchester University. Now married to an Israeli mathematician, Avital wore a headscarf, and seemed to have children attached to every limb and garment. Amidst the smell and the clamour and the shiny trails of snot, she herself seemed to shine with fulfilment: a woman who loved sex, loved her husband, and simply loved having babies. The fact that God had given the thumbs-up to the enterprise was merely the icing on the cake. However much Diana shuddered at her cousin’s lifestyle, she couldn’t help but examine her own and find it wanting.

  When the kids were in bed, Avital and Diana had sat in the conservatory, shared pizzas and some wine and giggled about men, just as they’d done when they were fourteen and living at the opposite ends of what Lawrence Berne, Avital’s father, proudly called Finchley’s longest street. Avital had reeled off a
list of eligible suitors for her cousin, and was threatening to invite them all to her husband’s forty-second birthday party in November. Diana had agreed solely to make her cousin shut up, and ever since that evening, Avital had been sending her links to various Facebook pages and Twitter profiles.

  She’d looked at one of them. Already knowing, down to the last mole, what “@MarcusGreen333” was going to look like before the picture downloaded: handsome and dark, clean-cut but running slightly to fat. She saw the words ‘Senior Partner’ in his profile and harrumphed to herself, almost pleased to be disappointed. But then she saw the word ‘Paris’, too. She was even more pleasantly surprised to find a link to an architectural history group, of which the aforementioned Marcus Green was a founder-member. He couldn’t be dismissed as just another successful Garden Suburb Jewish lawyer. Possibly none of the men Avital knew were the sort you could write off in a sentence.

  And yet, she’d kept thinking, throughout today’s parade of headaches and eczema flare-ups, none of them was Rex Tracey. This crumpled-looking reporter with the limp and the odd, quiet way of talking that seemed forever half-sad and half-amused. He’d come to her by way of a clerical error, when one practice in the area wound up, and the patients were divvied up among the others by alphabet. She had got surnames J through to R, and she’d been envisaging a magnificent six-foot transsexual hooker called Tracey Rex, when instead, one day at the end of July, this face, the sort of face that belonged in a French comedy film, just came in and said it wasn’t sleeping too well. Without going over his records much, she’d asked all the usual questions about appetite and bowel movements and stresses at work, and at the end of it all, he’d said that, in his opinion, it boiled down to two factors.

  ‘I’ve got new neighbours. Colombians, I think. They’re having sex all night, with the windows open. And I can’t get Okocim Mocne in any of the shops at the moment.’

  ‘Can’t get what?’

  ‘Okocim Mocne. It’s a Polish lager I drink. Quite a strong one.’

  She’d laughed and told him lager never helped anyone to sleep. It turned out that, like a lot of her male patients, Rex Tracey was in a lot of pain, but expecting the Doctor to guess it, rather than to need to be told. The arthritis clinic at the Middlesex had washed their hands of him after too many missed appointments so she referred him to Chase Farm, aware that he’d probably do the same thing there, and that even if he didn’t, the arthritis clinic wouldn’t do much for him.

  Two days later, she’d been in the Marks and Spencer on the High Street buying some underwear in her lunch-hour, when he’d appeared holding a basket of things from the sandwich chiller cabinet at the back. Startled, and blushing because of the intimate apparel in her hand, Diana had accepted his invitation to share a sandwich, and then done so, on Duckett’s Common, amid the alcoholics and the gang-bangers on the basketball court and the listless clutches of Balkan men.

  She’d known from that first meeting, that he was getting over some recent relationship. She hadn’t minded that, because he was a patient. And then, over the course of a few drinks and Turkish dinners, he was a friend. She ignored the wisdom, tested and learnt long back in her life, that told her men and women could not be friends. She found herself looking out for the articles he wrote in the local paper, then looking up the things he said he’d written for the national press on the internet, and one day, not long ago, she’d actually touched the screen of her monitor as she printed up a repeat prescription for him. She knew then that Rex Tracey wasn’t her friend any more. She felt something else for him.

  That ought to have been a cause for celebration, but for the fact that he often showed up late for their meetings, or didn’t come at all, and declared his phone to be out of juice with suspicious regularity. And if she ever sent him a jokey text, there’d always be a long, unnerving delay before he replied. She didn’t expect him to wear her scarf wrapped round his wrist – they weren’t kids. But everyone she’d discussed this with – not just Avital, but her two best friends – had drawn the same, blunt conclusion. The ex was still on the scene.

  ‘Or she isn’t, maybe,’ Avital had said, mirroring her husband’s irritable Israeli way of speaking. ‘And there’s something or somebody else. But either way. Come on. You haven’t gone to bed with the guy after a whole summer? It’s not happening. Look somewhere else.’

  She was right. There was a wife with half her face missing. Some hideous accident that had left her in fairyland, him lame and doubled up with guilt. In his notes there was a single oblique reference from his old GP, from years back: Traffic accident. Left foot injury. Post-traum. arth.?

  Diana rubbed her eyes as she looked at the clock on her computer. It was 5.50. Half an hour, if she was lucky, at the hands of Mrs Trail, half an hour on paperwork. She’d promised Ina, the receptionist, whose nephew worked at the police station, that she’d get a cab home, because there’d been rumours of a fourth attack, and if she stuck to that, she could be back in Upper Holloway by seven. Ten minutes in the Tesco Metro. Half seven and she’d be drinking wine in the bath. Except maybe she shouldn’t lie in the bath drinking wine if Avital really was going to introduce her to a bazaar-load of bachelors in just under seven weeks’ time. Maybe she’d be better off going to the gym. Was she still a member of the gym? What gym was it?

  There was a polite knock at the door.

  ‘Come in.’ Diana was surprised. Mrs Trail must be learning some consideration for others. It was about time.

  The door opened. ‘You’re not Mrs Trail,’ Diana said.

  ‘Well observed,’ Rex said. ‘I can see why you became a doctor.’

  At around half-past eight – just an hour later than she’d predicted – Diana was in her bath drinking wine. And she wasn’t the only one.

  ‘Why are you smiling?’ he said, as he soaped her left breast.

  ‘Because tomorrow I’ll have to move you to Dr Shah’s list,’ she said. ‘And he’ll want to know what treatments I’ve been prescribing.’

  ‘Please don’t,’ Rex said, kissing her deeply. ‘Sharing a bath with Dr Shah just won’t be the same.’

  She gave herself up to the steam and the heat and the taste of the wine and the feel of him. His hand slipped between her legs – it felt cool and dry even though they were in the bath. Her breaths became shallow. His phone rang.

  ‘Ignore it,’ he whispered. It wasn’t difficult. She listened to the gentle splashing of his hand in the water, moving faster between her legs. She felt light-headed, heat in her stomach, a gentle, delectable ache. Then his phone rang again.

  ‘Sorry, I’m going to just switch it …’

  She breathed in deeply through her nose and opened her eyes slowly, trying hard not to lose the moment and the exquisite, promising sensations that came with it. But she lost it all the same, when she saw that he hadn’t switched the phone off. He was pale, open-mouthed, listening to a message.

  Just a foot away in one sense; a universe in another.

  ‘They found a body in the park at Alexandra Palace,’ he said quietly. ‘It’s Milda.’

  Chapter Five

  Rex had seen a film once, a dream sequence in some kooky American, made-for-tv affair, in which the character found himself in Heaven’s waiting room. It was a no-frills reception area, with block-foam seating, a functional coffee table and a humming vending machine in the corner. The vending machine dispensed cans of Coke every time someone back in the land of the living said a prayer for the dead person’s soul. Apart from that detail, the waiting room in the Hornsey Public Mortuary was exactly the same. Regardless of the fact that this low, Eighties-built compound housed the recently-dead of Haringey, its interior boasted pale carpets, pine-scented air freshener and copies of the council’s free community magazine, entitled, ironically enough, @Live! In Haringey.

  Eventually a wheezing, moist-looking Bond, wearing jeans with the dark grey jacket from his everyday suit, led him through a pale door at the back and down a sharply-sloping, brig
htly-lit corridor. No Coke machines here, just narrow doors off to left and right, two with slits for windows, two, more worryingly, without. Now the smells were of rubber and chemicals. One of the windowless doors was opened and there, with a certain sense of theatre, a rheumy-eyed, elderly man in surgical scrubs lifted a sheet which matched his outfit perfectly. Milda was under that sheet, on a slim trolley, her eyes closed.

  He expected to feel overwhelmed. Perhaps he was. Perhaps that explained why he could only stare down at her, noting every detail, patiently and numbly. She looked less ‘at peace’ – or any of those other terms often used to describe the dead – more as if someone had made a model of her, a model that was all right, but not great. Her skin looked as if it was made of millions of tiny grains. A chunk of her hair was missing – smaller than what he gathered had been pulled from any of the other victims - and her scalp was still intact. He noticed the small, tea-coloured blemish on her left temple and remembered stroking it. Now the feelings came back. He nodded to Bond, who nodded to the man in the scrubs, who pulled the sheet back over. ‘Sorry for your loss,’ he commented, before he started to wheel the trolley away.

  Rex turned to Bond. ‘Mike – what happened to her? Did she just… die…?’

  Bond put an arm on his. ‘It all looks a bit iffy.’

  The floor see-sawed beneath him. ‘What do you mean iffy?’

  ‘They haven’t done the PM yet, but…’ Bond seemed to be struggling with something. ‘I’ll see if he’ll speak to you now.’

  ‘If who will speak to me now?’

  Bond didn’t reply. More time in the waiting room followed. Rex bought a can from the vending machine, just because he found the money in his pocket, and flipped through the pages of @Live! In Haringey. It was like one half of a local newspaper. The touchy-feely, ‘one big happy family’ half, full of tales of Residents’ Associations organising park clean-ups and African drumming workshops on various benighted estates. The other half, the headline half – Seven Sisters Man Stabbed In Eye – that wasn’t in there. Nor was Beautiful Girl Found Dead In Park.