A Death at the Palace

by M. H. Baylis

  In the sixth form there had been a girl called Helen. He had found her neither attractive nor especially interesting, although, looking back, he allowed that she might well have been both. Helen’s skill had been that she was everywhere. At all the College Newspaper meetings. In the only pub that would serve them. At the only parties he was invited to. Always beside him, with a faintly aggrieved air, as if he were being ridiculous for not understanding that their destinies were entwined. Whatever Helen had wanted, it had never happened.

  Helen had something in common with the North Middlesex Hospital. Its sheer ubiquity in his life made him loathe the place. He dreaded it. But he was always ending up there, in one capacity or another. This was just the first night they’d spent together.

  Apart from curtains with a design of Tower Bridge and taxis, the only decorative feature of the Danny Blanchflower Ward at the North Middlesex was a long, mauve stripe that passed across the middle of each wall and finally pointed upwards, as if heaven were the destination of anyone lying there long enough to follow the entire route. Rex had already done so several times since being awoken with a strong cup of tea at around 4.30 am. He had not arrived in heaven yet.

  But later, in spite of the sharp pain in his jaw, the dull throbbing at his temples and a myriad of further bodily complaints, he had polished off a surprisingly good plate of scrambled eggs. His neighbour, having ticked the box that said ‘Afro-Caribbean’ on one of the dozens of forms thrust daily at the patients, had been mightily disgruntled to receive a plate of rice and peas for his own breakfast, and had gladly passed it in Rex’s direction when he saw him gazing curiously at it.

  Wiping the last few beans away with a scrap of roti, Rex was thinking of revising his views on the North Middlesex when a visitor arrived.

  ‘Curry for breakfast. You must be feeling good.’

  ‘You got the blood out of your fleece then,’ Rex said. Keith Powell looked down at his bright, logo-emblazoned garment.

  ‘I didn’t,’ he said. ‘This is a new one.’

  ‘I should say thank you.’

  ‘You should,’ Powell said. He motioned towards a grey plastic chair. ‘May I?’

  Rex nodded. ‘Thank you. I’ve been beaten up lots of times,’ he said, wincing. ‘But never quite so thoroughly.’

  ‘They were shouting something about Milda,’ Powell said, as he sat down.

  ‘You’re certain it was a “they”?’

  ‘Three of them.’

  ‘Hoodies?’

  Powell frowned. ‘One of them had a sort of silver cagoule on. He didn’t have the hood up, though. And the other two were in those padded builders’ shirts.’

  ‘There was no moped?’

  ‘Not that I was aware of. Why? Do you remember one?’

  Rex didn’t answer. He was still wondering if Powell and his cronies had something to do with all the recent attempts to frighten him. That he had saved him from the attack didn’t quite fit this theory, of course. Unless it was a clever bluff.

  ‘I guess it was someone who thinks I killed Milda,’ Rex said, carefully. ‘They wouldn’t be the only ones.’

  Powell took his media-glasses off and rubbed his nose. ‘Well, you can strike Her Majesty’s Constabulary off your list, at least. They’ve charged someone.’

  Rex sat up, ignoring the pain. ‘Who?’

  ‘An Albanian. He’s coughed to it. To murdering Milda, and all the other attacks. They nicked him completely by accident.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Haringey Council got a tip-off about poor hygiene at a sandwich factory in Wood Green, so two inspectors went down with police back-up. One of the workers bolted when he saw the panda car. Legged it right across the railway line in front of the 13.02 from Letchworth. And when they caught up with him, he just coughed to the lot.’

  Rex lay back on the hard pillow, feeling a wave of wonder and relief. The tip-off – that could only have been Lawrence Berne, surely? And the stuff around Milda’s neck – the sodium nitrite – it must have come from the sandwich factory. ‘But what about the heroin?’

  ‘Says he shared it with her first,’ said Powell. ‘They used to live in the same squat, apparently.’

  Rex remembered the bills piled up in Milda’s porch. Powell confirmed his thoughts. ‘Adem Dushku. Little bloke. Honestly, you wouldn’t think he had it in him.’

  Something still didn’t quite fit. Milda had never mentioned an Albanian in the house. And could she have changed so much, that she’d have willingly sat down in a park, and injected heroin with some weird drifter? Rex felt a wave of nausea, and the rice and peas came back into his throat.

  ‘You all right? Do you want me to get someone?’

  Rex squinted at Powell as the sickness ebbed away. ‘One thing I don’t get, Powell. And that’s how you know all this. Have you got an insider in the Tottenham nick?’

  There was a pause. ‘It’s more like the other way round.’

  ‘Tottenham nick’s got an insider in you? You mean you’re…’

  Powell held up a silencing finger. ‘SO21. Hate Crimes Division,’ he said softly.

  At the other end of the ward, a tall, olive-skinned young doctor was beginning his rounds.

  ‘So the Hate Crimes Division is going round the place, actively setting up local fascist groups in order to… What? See who comes out of the woodwork? Isn’t that entrapment?’

  By way of an answer, Powell whipped out a phone similar to Rex’s, and connected it to YouTube. Rex found himself staring at some wobbly footage of the corner of Turnpike Lane and Green Lanes. Wind crackled in the microphone. Orange jackets and union jacks came into view. Then Rex himself. He watched, slightly appalled, as a street-brawl unfolded, with him at the centre of it.

  ‘I think my old headmaster would be very disappointed.’

  Powell showed him another clip: crowds of marchers running down Turnpike Lane in blind panic, away from the explosion. Smoke and sirens and shattered glass.

  ‘These images are being downloaded thousands of times a day. Not to mention all the times they’ve been on the news, here and abroad.’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘So if you’d set out to show people that there’s no such thing as a reasonable anti-immigration group, if you’d wanted to prove that every time someone starts talking about sending people home, you get this’ – Powell tapped the screen – ‘you couldn’t have asked for much better, could you? You don’t need to outlaw people like this. You just need to let them exist, and make such a fucking pig’s ear of it all that anyone who might just be tempted to listen to them decides not to bother.’

  ‘And if they don’t exist, then you invent them?’

  Powell shook his head. ‘We didn’t invent the BWAP. We infiltrated it.’

  ‘So who did set it up?’

  Powell glanced towards the doctor, who was approaching with a chorus of nurses and students. ‘Look, we haven’t got time for that. We’re at a crossroads. I got involved yesterday and one of the lads who was putting the boot into you sort of… recognised me from another context.’

  ‘What context?’

  ‘I nicked him, four months ago, spray painting the back of Hendon bus station, but he got away. He recognised me.’

  ‘So who was he?’

  Powell frowned. ‘I don’t know. A graffiti artist. The point is…’

  ‘Your cover’s blown?’

  ‘Now it’s a question of damage limitation. This thing goes a lot further and deeper than I can tell you, but…’

  ‘In other words there are coppers involved,’ Rex interrupted.

  Powell looked as if he’d had a sudden twinge of toothache. It was enough for Rex to know he’d hit a nerve. So there were coppers involved.

  ‘Coppers around here?’ he said.

  ‘If you care about the things you claim to care about,’ Powell said, ignoring Rex and the waiting medical staff, ‘you will let us get on with what we need to do without compromising it for the sake of tomorrow�
��s chip-wrappers.’

  Rex absorbed this request. It would mean binning the biggest story he’d ever brought the Gazette. Ever brought to any paper, for that matter. ‘Two things,’ he said finally.

  ‘What?’

  ‘First, they don’t wrap chips in newspapers any more. Health and Safety.’

  ‘And second?’

  ‘Did Milda move in with you?’

  ‘No. She never even came to my house. Anything else?’

  ‘You know that headmaster I mentioned? He once played Hitler in a pantomime.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I always thought he was the least convincing Nazi I’d ever seen. Until I met you.’

  * * *

  In a quiet, northerly part of Muswell Hill there was a church, so incongruous amongst the wide suburban villas and the parked cars that it looked as if it had been dumped there. It was, in fact, two churches, shared by the United Reformed and the Russian Orthodox communities. A week out of hospital, and still sore in many places, Rex sat gingerly on a hard maple pew and wondered how the ecclesiastical sharing arrangements worked out. Did the Russians pack the icons away, so as not to offend their room-mates? What did the Protestants make of the wafers and wine that were said to have been transformed, magically, into Christ’s own essence by a man?

  There could be no doubting which of the two traditions was being served up today. The air was heavy with incense and the fatty smoke of candles. A ruck of bearded men in vivid robes moved back and forth, without any discernible order, swinging thuribles, inclining crosses on long brass poles and bowing before panels of gold-painted icons. A choir sang in deep voices, bringing Cossacks and onion domes to mind, and Milda’s friends, a motley collection of squatters, anarchists and self-styled ‘art terrorists’, knelt and crossed themselves in memory of her soul. Birgita, her hair now cropped boyishly short, did not kneel, possibly because of the small bump now visible around her midriff, but kept her eyes closed in fervent prayer. Aguta and her daughter wept openly. DC Orchard had been in, performed some vague devotional gestures towards the front, and left, his mobile ringing. Others had also come and gone, all young, some known to Rex, others not at all.

  Adem Dushku was in the high secure mental unit at Crews Hill. The group calling itself the British Workers Action Party had disappeared, and people who rang a firm called Keith Powell – Kill Pests were referred to a page on Haringey Council’s environmental health website. Meanwhile, Rex gathered from a very well-crafted front-page piece by Ellie Mehta, gangs of Polish and Turkish boys from the local comp were regularly meeting in Morrison’s car park for organised scraps. An enterprising local businessman – a certain Greek Cypriot cafe proprietor – was trying to get them all into football instead, sponsoring a team and a strip, with the support of a much-loved local newspaper.

  Slowly, Rex found he could accept the police version of events. Milda had either taken heroin because she was no longer the person she had been before, or because she was in pain, or, perhaps, because she was under some duress from the person with the syringe. The latter was not a pleasant thought, but Dushku would be spending the rest of his days in a very bad place, and that was about as much comfort as anyone could hope for.

  Was he ‘KP’? It seemed unlikely. Milda’s email had said she was going to stay with him, and Dushku had been living in some sort of hostel. But in the light of Dushku’s confession and the evidence, the identity of her mysterious ‘little friend’ was probably an extraneous detail. Case closed.

  So why did he keep running over it? Was that just how a sudden death left people: asking questions, refusing to accept the obvious? Was it also because he was out of work now, rattling around his house all day with nothing but a dwindling bank account for company? Or was there some tiny beacon signalling from his subconscious, tapping out in faint, but persistent morse the message that something still didn’t make sense?

  That morning another jiffy-bag had come through the post. It had felt thick and squishy. Inside, very carefully sealed within two zip-lock freezer bags, was a piece of raw liver. Calf’s, he suspected. But he wasn’t about to cook it and find out.

  The persecution seemed almost artistic. Or elements of it did, whilst others, like the moped driven straight at him, were simply violent. He thought about the graffiti artist Powell had almost nicked. This almost-nicked graffiti artist had been one of the people beating him bloody on the pavements of Tottenham. Were they behind all these packages and messages, too? It was tempting to think so, but it didn’t add up. A liver in a jiffy bag was a threat. A kick in the ribs wasn’t a threat. Unless it was meant to be a threat of something worse.

  His thoughts were broken by the arrival of two further mourners. A pair of milky-white men in identical, charcoal-grey suits, with the sort of shoes you’d feel very grown-up in – if you’d just started school. The Whittaker twins. Mark – or possibly Robert – glanced at him, pulled a block of yellow Post-it notes from his jacket pocket and scribbled something, handing the result past his identical twin to Rex.

  We’ve come on behalf of all the staff at the paper.

  A second Post-it note came his way.

  How are you?

  ‘I think it’s okay to talk,’ said Rex. ‘These places are pretty noisy.’

  The twins stared ahead, suddenly awkward. They’d clearly planned to communicate by Post-its alone.

  ‘How’s Susan?’ Rex asked.

  Without moving his head, the nearest twin turned a pair of cold, grey eyes towards him, and spoke out of the side of his mouth.

  ‘She made us put a half-page advert in. To advertise for your replacement. But then she pulled it.’

  Rex took this in. ‘Maybe she’s got someone in mind.’

  ‘She hasn’t,’ the twins said together, loudly. Assorted heads and beards and kamelaukions swung round.

  Later, there were vodka and pickled cucumbers back at the old restaurant where Birgita lived with the man she called Mark. He wasn’t around, Rex noted – at least, he hadn’t been in the Church and he couldn’t be seen back home. He wondered if Birgita changed lovers every time she changed her look.

  It was Parisian New Wave schtick now: gamin hairdo, black roll-neck sweater and matching pedal-pusher trousers. She drank peach juice, and very slowly, smoked her way through a single, thin roll-up, continually putting it out in a huge turquoise ashtray and re-lighting it. There was a boy with a ukulele, and an old, grey man, like a, convict, who played the accordion; together they bashed out Ochi Cherniye and something that sounded like Bublitschki but wasn’t.

  ‘So.’ Birgita filled his glass and clinked her mug of juice against it. ‘I told you I had a bad feeling for Milda.’

  ‘You did.’ Rex sipped the spirit. It was an odd, dirty yellow colour, and strong: more like an anaesthetic than a drink.

  Birgita sighed. ‘I knew she was pregnant, Rex.’

  ‘She told you?’

  ‘She came to visit to me here, and I told her about my baby,’ she said, instinctively patting her abdomen. ‘And she cried. And then it came out. You know, she said she saw you. On a bus. I mean, she was on a bus. And she saw you. And she had just done the test. It was inside her bag, and she went past you on the bus. And you… did you send to her a text?’

  ‘Yes. She didn’t reply.’

  ‘She didn’t know what to do. I’m sorry. I thought you should know, but… it was for her to tell you, not mine.’

  He remembered something Birgita had said – something he’d been struggling to remember when he met Milda’s sister, Niela. ‘So that stuff about feeling dizzy and sick… that was just being pregnant?’

  Birgita shook her head. ‘She said no. She had it before.’

  Rex pondered this for a moment. Birgita must have mistaken his expression for one of sorrow, because she patted him, surprisingly heavily, on the shoulder. ‘I think she didn’t feel ready for a baby,’ she said, pouring more of the dark vodka into his glass.

  ‘Does anyone?’ Rex asked.
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  She smiled. ‘I was ready when I was fourteen.’

  ‘Lucky you. When is it due?’

  ‘January. Yes, lucky me,’ she added gnomically.

  He was going to ask her about Mark, who was presumably the father of the baby, but she went to the toilet. Rex went through the kitchen to the back yard for some fresh air, and promptly found Mark, in fact, tinkering with a bicycle. He jumped as Rex appeared, and in his skinny black jeans and sleeveless t-shirt, he reminded Rex of a startled crow.

  ‘Not joining in the fun?’ Rex asked. He took in the man’s appearance. Though he couldn’t have been much younger than Rex, he had spots, and his eyes were the size of eggs. Mark held up his cigarette in response

  ‘Biggsy doesn’t like the smoke,’ he said, in broad Salford dialect. ‘Anyhow, I was just off to get some more booze. Don’t suppose you’d er…’

  Rex got the hint and handed over a fiver. Mark took it between long, yellow fingers, and vanished like smoke. The smell he left behind was one Rex remembered from his student days. Rolling tobacco and deodorant sprayed onto stale clothes. Was Birgita really having a baby with this bloke? But then, had Rex been a better prospect for Milda? Evidently not.

  A collective roar of disapproval emanated from inside the house, as if perhaps the accordionist had started to play Barry Manilow. But there was no music. Instead, a voice droned from a television set. Rex went back to find everyone watching Newsroom South East on BBC 1. Newsroom So What? – as they used to call it, in the paper trade.

  A young reporter with a long Tamil name stood outside the Muswell Hill Church, discussing the death of Milda, and the doubts that could now be put to rest. The only mourner on screen was DC Orchard, who had evidently shown up for his fifteen seconds of fame. He now delivered to the camera a thoroughly rehearsed statement.

  ‘Milda Majauskas was a pretty girl, who’d done well at art school in Vilnius, and came here looking for work and adventure. We hope that some of the people considering a similar journey, and their parents, might take heed of what happened to Milda. She did not, as her family thought, share a flat with friends. She had a room in a dangerous, damp, squatted house. She left her job after accusations of petty crime and drifted into a life on the margins, accompanied by Adem Dushku, a drug addict who lived in her house.’