A Death at the Palace

by M. H. Baylis

  ‘Can I ask you something?’ Orchard looked up. ‘Did you find anything with her? I mean, like the glove that he left next to the third girl.’

  Orchard glared at him. ‘How do you know about that?’

  ‘I overheard it in the cop shop,’ Rex said. ‘Don’t worry. We won’t print anything. I just want to know. Did he leave any more clues?’

  Orchard shook his head.

  ‘Anything useful on the glove?’

  Orchard shook his head again. ‘Can I fill you in on any other aspects of our work?’ he added, sarcastically.

  ‘Since you mention it – yes. How was she found?’

  ‘Dog-walker.’

  ‘May I know when?

  Orchard considered it. ‘Early-to-mid evening.’

  ‘So a body is found by a dog-walker early to mid evening. Long after all the press deadlines and local news bulletins. And yet the BWAP have got the resources to knock this out in time for the morning rush hour.’

  He put the leaflet on the table. Orchard glanced at it, without touching it.

  ‘A lot of people have complained about it. Do you wish to?’

  ‘I’m not complaining. I’m asking you. How did they know?’

  Orchard gazed at him. ‘We imagine somebody tipped them off.’

  ‘One of your officers?’

  ‘However professionally you handle a crime scene like that, a large number of people is going to have access to certain details. The person who drives the ambulance to the mortuary. The person who finds the body. All sorts of individuals. We’re looking into it.’

  ‘We will be, too.’

  ‘Given your connection to the victim, I’d be careful what you do and say, Mr Tracey, professionally and otherwise.’

  ‘Are you threatening me?’

  ‘You’ve had problems with paranoia, haven’t you?’

  ‘Piss off.’

  ‘Tell me about your movements yesterday.’

  It was the way Orchard said it. The school bully voice gone, replaced by a neutral gravity. Rex realised that this was a real enquiry. He was a suspect. He swallowed, and as he did so, he felt as if a finger of ice was passing from his throat down to the centre of his pelvis. He shivered, and told Detective Constable Orchard exactly what he needed to know.

  ‘What about the day before?’

  Rex did the same for Tuesday, concluding with the nuns and his wife and the parting from Diana at the bus-stop. Orchard, to his credit, made no comments on it, in voice or gesture. He asked Rex to provide a DNA sample.

  While Orchard was sealing the sample of Rex’s cheek cells in a plastic bag, a phone rang and rang unanswered. This made Rex remember what he’d been talking about when he was last in a police station. ‘Have you asked Vadim where he was?’

  ‘Vadim Kozyrev?’ Orchard looked up. ‘Gold-plated alibi. Repairing Oyster top-up machines at various locations on the Northern, Jubilee and District Lines.’

  ‘So the fact that I’ve got photographs of him burning Milda’s stuff at the back of her house… You’re not interested in that?’

  ‘It’s not her house. Well – it’s no one’s house, is it? But the room she stayed in, in that squat, was Mr Kozyrev’s. In the early part of the year, Miss Majauskas borrowed the room from him while he was working in Frankfurt. When he returned at the end of July, a relationship between them ensued.’ Here, Orchard permitted himself a sardonic glance towards Rex. ‘Subsequently, on Monday this week, in fact, Mr Kozyrev went back to Lithuania to sort out a family crisis, and his wife and son announced their intention to return with him, leaving Mr Kozyrev, as he put it, with no choice but to destroy the belongings of Miss Majauskas once he returned, for fear that his infidelity should be discovered.’

  ‘Do you believe that?’

  Orchard leaned back, ignoring his notebook to emphasise the power of his memory. ‘A Captain Jonas Bendoraitis of the Lithuanian Police Foreign Liaison Office tells me that Mr Kozyrev’s brother-in-law was recently shot in an argument over a stolen Honda Civic. In addition to which, a Mrs A. J. Kozyrevna and a Master P. P. Kozyrev were on Wednesday evening’s flight RY3613 from Kaunas to Stansted along with Mr V. S. Kozyrev. So, yes, we do believe that, having little reason not to.’

  * * *

  It was a grey day now, proper London autumn, breezy with the threat of rain. He caught a bus back to the office, again sitting at the front on the top deck. In Milda’s seat. There, so high up, so detached from the street below, he had a sudden, brief, powerful sense of being just one small soul on a teeming planet in an even vaster, empty universe. Below him, a young Chinese man was locking his bicycle to a lamp-post. Two headscarved girls went, laughing, into the newsagent’s. All this could be going on, all these separate streams of experience, and just a few feet above, another one: a man whose former girlfriend had been found dead in the park. A man who already had one life on his conscience. A man suspected of murdering his former girlfriend and the child they had made, not to mention a string of other attacks on young women.

  He felt numb, but as if he was thawing, too. As if there were strong feelings, and they might start to pour out, like the melting of the Alpine snows, and once they started, they would drag bridges and cars down. He got off, one stop before the bus joined up with Green Lanes. Green Lanes, once the route to the slaughter houses, he remembered. Milda and the life inside her had gone the way of the cattle.

  Had it been at the hands of the man who’d attacked the other girls? If his behaviour was escalating, why progress from pulling out their hair to scalping them and then go back to the sort of half-hearted tug that must have removed part of Milda’s forelock? Unless, perhaps, something else was taking over from the hair. Something that gave him more excitement – like squeezing their throats. Perhaps the bliss he got from that, from doing it until he extinguished life, cancelled out all his other techniques. The thought made Rex shiver.

  In front of the bus a trim, neatly-dressed Hasidic man crossed the road. He was probably about Rex’s age, encircled by small boys in skullcaps. There were little religious study-houses and schools tucked away all around South Tottenham, active only in the daytime, behind the dusty panes of neglected villas. And while some of the Hasidim in these parts looked otherworldly and wild, this man radiated confidence and dependability. He was a father to some of these boys in his charge, undoubtedly, probably also to some other children somewhere else, and it was a role he relished and took pride in. Rex had never looked upon fatherhood like that. Even with Sybille, it had been a future prospect he’d dreaded: bad news that was sure to come one day, like arthritis. Then, suddenly, he’d begun to see it differently. When it was too late.

  It had been his baby inside Milda. He was certain of that. Certain, too, that Milda hadn’t wanted him to know. How frightened must she have felt – here, in a squat, on a waitress’ wage, with that life growing inside her? And how convinced must she have been that it was better not to tell the father of the child? It wasn’t a child to him. Not at sixteen weeks. He could not mourn a number, a date. He could feel ashamed, though. And he did.

  The junction of St Anne’s Road and Green Lanes was directly opposite The Good Taste Café. As Rex drew near, he saw Keith Powell leaving with a newspaper under his arm. He was wearing a bright red fleece with the KP logo on it, and it made him look stockier than usual. Rex ran across the traffic and caught up with him just outside the O’ Pentadaktylos Social Club. It was a relief to be able to turn some anger away from himself, if only for a moment.

  ‘What was all that shit with the leaflets, Powell?’

  An old West Indian lady with a shopping trolley backed into the doorway of the bank, as if sheltering from Rex’s outburst. Powell looked startled and red-eyed. Had he been crying?

  ‘I just – I just wanted to do something.’

  ‘Like exploit a murder to whip up a bit of racial hatred?’

  Powell zipped his red fleece as a breeze stirred polystyrene burger cartons and the cellophane ribbons from
cigarette packets. ‘I was fond of Milda, and I don’t… our organisation doesn’t want any more girls to get hurt.’

  ‘Funny that your organisation was calling it a murder before anyone had even done a post-mortem. Funny you even knew about it, for that matter. You remind me of Neil Addison.’

  Powell frowned, networks of fine lines appearing across his ruddy cheeks. ‘Who’s Neil Addison?’

  ‘Neil Addison and I were trainees on the Lincoln Daily Dispatch together. He couldn’t write for shite, but somehow, he got every story before me. Then one day, the editor noticed that ninety percent of his stories were about small fires and vandalism. Then he noticed that every time a skip got set alight or a phone box got smashed to bits, no one knew where Neil Addison was. You know what Neil Addison was doing?’

  Powell pushed Rex out of his way. ‘We’re a local pressure group concerned about the effects of mass immigration. We had nothing to do with Milda’s death, and the implication disgusts me.’

  ‘Poor you,’ Rex directed, at the back of Powell’s head. But when he turned, he saw the owner of the Good Taste in the doorway, watching him, and shaking his head. When the old Greek went back inside his premises, Rex followed him.

  ‘Don’t blame Keith,’ the owner said, over his shoulder, as he carefully repositioned a poster with a cheeseburger on it. ‘He’s okay.’

  ‘Would you have thought he was okay in the Sixties, when you were trying to make a life over here?’

  The man motioned to Rex to sit at a table in the window and joined him, sitting gingerly, as if in pain. ‘There weren’t so many people here then. Back then, if someone had a problem with foreigners, it was always because they didn’t like foreigners. Now…’ He waved a hand towards the streets, as two gowned Somali women floated by, their faces like burnished moons.

  ‘Now it’s just about how many people per cubic foot? Come on, I don’t believe that.’

  ‘Believe it,’ said the man, picking something off a salt cellar. ‘Keith, he is… he always talks nicely to the girls in here, he’s got lots of Polish guys on his firm. He’s not saying, you know, darkies go home and all that racialism stuff. He’s just saying no more people. We’re full now. Same as what I say when all the tables are taken.’

  ‘So you’re going to be marching with him?’

  ‘I’ll be here, cooking. We’re doing a Marchers’ Special, bacon roll and a coffee for two quid.’

  ‘You were Milda’s boss, and now you’re doing the catering for the people who think she should never have been allowed in the country in the first place.’

  The café owner stared at him through greasy spectacles. ‘If she hadn’t been here, she’d still be alive. He paused. ‘And I wouldn’t have the guilt.’

  ‘What guilt?’

  He took the glasses off and rubbed the bridge of his nose. ‘I sacked her. I trusted that Czech girl’s word. And you know what? When she saw that leaflet this morning, and she found out Milda was dead, she broke up. Told me the truth. She told Milda to take that box of stuff. Said it was okay. Did a lot of other things, too, and made it look like Milda’s fault. I asked her – why? Why would you do that? She just goes like this.’ He mimicked a moody, Slavonic shrug. ‘I didn’t like her. That’s all she said. I didn’t like her.’ He shook his head and swore in Greek. ‘I’m hiring boys in this place. Greek boys only, from now.’ Two tears suddenly fell from underneath his glasses like little silver coins. Rex was shocked.

  ‘You only sacked her,’ he said, ineffectually.

  ‘She was a nice kid.’ He blew his nose and blinked at Rex. ‘Different. You know. Interesting. Hard to get to know, kind of, but…’

  ‘I know.’

  He was right. She had been hard to know. Suddenly he understood something else. From the time of Milda’s disappearance, Rex had been the subject of a range of anonymous threats and warnings.

  And from the time of her death, these had abruptly stopped.

  * * *

  He knew he was going to have to give up the allotment soon. It wasn’t just the amount of time Caroline needed him with her, nor the physical toll of travelling between Southgate and Palmers Green, nor even the fact that he seemed to forget such a lot. He was fit – he never smoked, never drank, walked or cycled whenever he could. If he ever ached, he took a hot bath with mustard powder. His foster-mother had taught him that.

  No, he thought, as a woman’s laugh rang out across the sheds and the seed beds, breaking through the dull roar from the North Circular. It wasn’t because of that. The allotment was changing. He had sensed it starting to happen, round about the time they sold their house in Palmer’s Green and moved to a smaller place in Southgate. Every time he journeyed the two miles back to tend his vegetables, one of the old, familiar faces was gone and another in its place. He hadn’t had much to do with the old breed of gardeners, of course, only a nod in passing, a word or two about the weather, but he sensed they belonged to the same species.

  The new ones were different. To start with, they were all so large. Even the women. Like some alien race, with loud, strong voices and bright clothes and broods of large, vigorous children with names that sounded made-up. They grew flowers and they drank wine and they came up to the allotments, all the way from places like Crouch End and Hornsey, in camper vans and on folding bicycles. They had barbecues, and they played music, and mostly they were English, like him, but they spoke in ways he could barely understand. Sometimes, in the summer evenings, the men played guitars and passed around pungent, home-made cigarettes. They kept their plots immaculate, they immersed themselves in all the necessary committee business and were never anything but polite. Even so, they were slowly, steadily pushing him off the land. It was just nature. He saw that. The strong pushed the weak to the edges, onto the poor soil where they withered and died. It was a process that had happened to him all his life. With one notable exception, when he had fought back.

  He had been weeding today, bent to the clay-filled earth, throwing the green leaves into a Tesco carrier bag, when he smelt the smell of women’s sweat. A pair of them strode by in immaculate wellingtons, hair in ponytails, bare arms glistening behind a creaking wheelbarrow. One spoke to the other one, in a low voice, and they both giggled. It wasn’t about him. But he knew the tone of it. He knew the sort of thing they were talking about, and his face burned.

  It was like a club, he thought, straightening for a moment and wiping his hands. Or two clubs. On one side was the club of everyone who could discuss it – discuss sex – like that woman with the wheelbarrow was doing. Of everyone who was able to have sex, was comfortable having sex, and announcing to the world at large that their sperm and their eggs were permitted to keep the human race going. On the other side, all those people whose broken, run-down genes had to be partitioned off, sent down cul-de-sacs to extinction and who, consequently, were neither having sex, nor comfortable having it, or seeing it, hearing it, all around them.

  Because that was the other thing. The club of the people who were having sex wanted the club of the people who were not having sex to know. To know and to hurt with the knowledge. His foster-sisters had sent him on a fictitious errand. On a muggy, clammy afternoon, just like this one. The point of the errand had not been that he should fetch the shears, but that he should pass round the back of the rabbit-hutches and see June, the eldest of the sisters, with her navy blue knickers down around her ankles, panting as she held on tightly to the red-haired boy from the grocer’s. An unfamiliar, foxy smell on the breeze that he found he liked and wanted more of. They had wanted him to see the thing that they all did, and that he never would. They had wanted him to hurt.

  ‘You’re a married man.’ A doctor had said this to him in the hospital, shortly before Caroline’s hysterectomy. Said it with a thin, mocking sort of smile, as if perhaps he knew that once, once only, in a shuddering, embarrassing squash of limbs and apologies, had this man and his wife managed what was, at that time, called ‘relations’. He had felt nothing. She
had cried out. But he’d been so horrified at the mess that he hadn’t been able to ask her if she was hurt. They had lain there, in the lumpy bed at her sister’s house in Rye, side by side, each pretending to be asleep, each knowing the other one wasn’t.

  That was their honeymoon. Not long after, Caroline said she was pregnant. He was unable to relate it to what they’d done in the bed at her sister’s house. How could a baby result from that? It felt as if the post-war government, prone to capricious, mysterious announcements and restrictions, had merely issued another one: you will move to one of the new towns and you will have a baby.

  So they had moved to Welwyn Garden City, to a new house on a new estate, but before they had even unpacked, Caroline went into the hospital. Some women’s bodies rejected their babies. That’s what they said. And he understood, of course, that any baby made half from his own flesh would have to undergo that fate. But before that, there were five months in hospital, five months of complete bed-rest, they said. By then he had started his own chiropody practice, and the hours were long. And at the hospital, they were very strict about visiting times, so the priest from the nearby Church started to go and see Caroline in his stead. He was a young, serious, good-looking man with red cheeks and thick hair. After the baby came still-born, the priest stopped visiting, and he even crossed the road a couple of times to avoid talking. And when Caroline came out, she said she didn’t want to go to Church any more and she wanted to move away, back to London. Somewhere with more life in it, she said.

  So they did. And Caroline’s answers were so sharp whenever he mentioned Father Daniel – that was his name – that he assumed she must have had a falling-out with him. Perhaps the young Father had said that losing the baby was God’s will, and she hadn’t liked that, and turned her back on him and the religion, too. Years later, when there were strikes and power cuts, he’d been searching in a drawer for candlesticks and she’d shouted at him in the same sharp voice, that he was not to go in there, that there was nothing to see in there. So he hadn’t. And when she was out at the shops, he looked again, but there were only cream-coloured napkins and wooden napkin rings and tablecloths. They never used them, any more than they ever discussed the things they wondered about.