A Death at the Palace

by M. H. Baylis

  How had Milda felt about all this? Well-educated, full of promise, she’d come over here with her degree from art college, her luggage and her optimism like the rest of them, to find that the only skills required of her were cutting sandwiches and serving tea. Accused of theft. Left in the lurch, pregnant, by an alcoholic, arthritic local journalist. Living in a squat on the North Circular, threatened by Levantine gang-bangers and a local Nazi group secretly led and funded by a unit of the Metropolitan police? He could see now that she must have felt desperate. Who could blame her for accepting a little wisp of brown powder that might take that feeling away?

  And perhaps someone else, someone close to her, might blame him for that.

  At 12pm exactly, he was inside Sri Krishna, being reminded that the premises were not licensed. At 12.07 pm, he was back in there, with two large bottles of Svyturys – a Lithuanian beer – courtesy of the shop next door. At 12.09 pm, he remembered that he owed the owner of Sri Krishna money, having ordered 20 vegetable samosas to keep the Gazette staff going during a particularly tedious late shift, and lacked sufficient funds to pay for them. At 12.11 pm, he established to his relief that the place was now owned by someone else.

  Diana came at 12.33. She accepted a glass of beer, which Rex took as another good sign. They shared a tali: a palette of assorted soup-like curries, with warm bread and pappadoms. Rex told her about the two searches he’d found on the library Web browser, and she laughed and told him about a cousin, who had once actually written ‘Porn Mag’ on a shopping list. She had had a haircut and was wearing a deep green blouse which perfectly complemented her eyes. He told her so.

  Then things began to go downhill.

  ‘I’ve got some news,’ she said. ‘Actually.’

  ‘Ah. What’s his name?’

  ‘Kanta Bopha.’

  ‘Senegalese? Bhutanese?’ He was trying to sound playful, and failing.

  She smiled. ‘It’s a hospital. Next to Angkor Wat. In Cambodia.’

  ‘You’ve fallen in love with a building, three thousand miles away. You need help.’ He kept the jokes coming, because he sensed what was on the verge of being said.

  ‘I’m taking some time off from being a G.P.’ she said. ‘And I’ve always wanted to go out there. Well, you know… we talked about it. You lent me that book. So I’ve taken a job at the hospital. Three hundred dollars a month and all the rice I can eat.’

  He nodded. It sounded like a great opportunity. He said so, and he meant it. ‘When are you going?’

  ‘Well… quite soon…’ She took a breath. ‘Tomorrow, actually. I’d been thinking about it for ages, and I had a month’s worth of leave owing to me, and Dr Shah didn’t mind, because…’ She spiralled a hand in the air, short-hand for the various reasons. ‘It’s not to do with you,’ she added. ‘I want you to know that.’

  ‘I’m not that self-centred,’ he lied, offering her another glass of beer. She declined.

  ‘Yes you are,’ she said. ‘We all are. That’s part of the reason I’m going out there. To see if I can become a bit less.’

  ‘If it works, let me know,’ Rex said. ‘I might come and join you.’

  She squeezed his hand. Absurdly, he felt his eyes watering. He looked away. Waved at the waiter. ‘Could I have another bottle of beer?’

  The waiter – who looked himself not unlike a temple god of Angkor Wat – frowned. ‘I told you, no license, sir.’

  ‘I knew that,’ Rex said, as a tear rolled down his cheek.

  * * *

  His front gate was wide open, swinging out into the narrow road. Rex slammed it shut on his way in, expecting to find a dozen pizza delivery leaflets stuffed through his letterbox. He would complain – it must have been the leaflet-deliverer who left the gate like that. But then he considered that he was an almost-40-year-old bachelor, about to get on the phone and complain about the leaflet delivery man leaving his gate open. It couldn’t happen. He would not stoop that low.

  There weren’t any leaflets. Nor had the postman been. But someone had. Someone who had left the front door open. And who, judging by the sound of the tv in the front room, was still in there. Waiting for him.

  He lingered in his hallway. Alert, on edge, but not as blind with terror as he’d imagined he would be. This was it, surely. The end of the message. The point to which all those augurs had been leading, from the encounter in the car-park to the wheelchair and the packages.

  ‘Journalist!’

  Vadim Kozyrev, Milda’s some-time lover, was sitting on Rex’s sofa, an unopened bottle of vodka on the coffee table, next to a felt-tip pen and a scrap of paper. The freckled Russian raised a hand in sardonic greeting.

  ‘How the fuck did you get into my house?’ Rex said, suddenly angry. Vadim mimed some kind of lock-picking procedure.

  ‘I worked for time as lock-smith,’ he said. ‘In city of Turku, Finland. Sorry. I wanted to leave you a note, but I didn’t have any pens. I thought, now a journalist must have a pens inside his house. So…’

  The lock-picking motion again. There was, to be fair, a half-written note on the coffee table. Rex sat down at the other end of the sofa. A medical soap opera was showing on the tv. It made him think of the wheelchair.

  ‘Have you been trying to frighten me, Vadim?’

  Vadim frowned. ‘I wasn’t trying to frighten you. I came to give you something.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That,’ Vadim said, waving a hand towards the bottle on the table. It had a gold foil top, and silver Cyrillic writing around the label. ‘Arkangelskaya. Seventy-two percent proof. Impossible to get it anywhere. Especially Arkangel,’ he added, with a smile.

  ‘Why?’

  Vadim sat back. ‘Because boys who beated you are sorry. They thought you did it. To Milda, I mean. They know they were wrong now. So they ask me…’

  ‘So they changed their minds after Dushku was arrested?’

  Vadim snorted. ‘Dushku? Shit! Dushku was living in the house maybe five, six, seven years ago? When he was living there, Milda was in Klaipeda learning A, B, C! She didn’t know Dushku and he didn’t kill her. Are you really a journalist, to believe that? Come on, man.’

  ‘So what made “the boys” change their minds about me?’

  Vadim tapped his bony chest. ‘I make change their minds about you. When I found out that they beated you, I made them. I explain them. This man is not police who just arrests some mad fuck Albanian and doesn’t care. On zhurnalist. He is a journalist, a good man. And if you want a justice for your friend, you get him on your side, boys, because he is the only person maybe who find out what really happen.’

  Rex took this in. ‘So they were friends of Milda’s then? The Boys?’

  Vadim bit his fingernail and nodded. ‘From art school.’ He was silent. Then he chuckled. After a second or two, Rex began to laugh too.

  ‘So you’re saying I had the shit kicked out of me by a bunch of artists?’

  ‘Yes. Painters. Illustrators.’ He snorted. ‘One of them does keramics!’

  Rex remembered the funeral party – the thin boy who had been awkward, hadn’t wanted to talk. He also remembered Powell, and his story about the graffiti artist. Now he understood. Or thought he did. He stopped laughing.

  ‘And the boys… did they do anything else to me? Before you changed their minds.’

  Vadim stopped smiling now. ‘Do something to you? What would they do?’

  ‘Try to frighten me. Leave things outside my house. Send me things.’

  Vadim shrugged. ‘Rex. You think everyone from Eastern Europe is gangster who leaves horse’s head in the bed?’

  Rex sighed. It looked like Vadim was telling the truth. Or the truth as far as he knew it. ‘No. No, I don’t think that.’ He reached for the bottle and examined it. ‘Please tell the boys thank you for the drink.’

  Vadim nodded, thoughtfully. ‘Somebody is trying to frighten you?’

  ‘I think so. I can’t work out why.’

  ‘When did it s
tart?’

  ‘The same day I discovered Milda was missing. They leave things outside my house. They send me things in the post.’

  Vadim nodded again. ‘Maybe she is the answer.’

  ‘Maybe so.’

  The Russian reached into his jacket and pulled out a carrier bag.

  ‘This was last remaining few things from Milda. A few things… from the bottom drawer. We thought to send to family, but then, maybe, they might… say something to you.’

  Rex took the bag. The trace of her perfume made him sad. Inside the bag was a London Transport Oystercard, some sort of student identity paper and a well-thumbed copy of the Thomas Cook International Rail Timetable. Rex looked at the Oystercard.

  ‘You can get information off these, can’t you?’ he asked. ‘If you know the login. Find out about journeys?’

  Vadim patted him on the knee. ‘My friend, you can get a data without login also. All you need is one Tube Station, and one computer engineer. Come!’

  As they were coming out of the gate, the postman handed Rex a sheaf of letters. He stuffed them in his hunting bag and walked with Vadim the short distance to the Tube Station. The freckled Russian nodded approvingly as they descended the stairs into the modernist cathedral space of the ticket hall. One of the reason so many Slavic people lived around here, Rex often speculated, was the uncannily Soviet atmosphere of Haringey and its environs. The tube stations, most of them designed in the Thirties, recalled the democratizing grandeur of the Moscow Metro. Alexandra Palace – where Milda had met her end – was always full of people from the old communist nations, who found it a comfortable reminder of the Workers’ Palaces of Culture. They even played Prokofiev over the loudspeakers at the bus terminus, though that was more to drive away the gang-bangers than to enlighten the masses.

  With supreme confidence, Vadim produced his London Transport IT Team ID card on a piece of ribbon, which he hung around his neck, and approached a guard. ‘Allo maite,’ he said, in a distinctive mixture of Slav and London that some wags had started to call Pockney, ‘Chast fitting apgrade, boss, awroight?’ The guard nodded indifferently, and Vadim went straight to one of the large ticket machines by the side of the main stairs. He passed Milda’s card over the yellow sensor plate and waited. Nothing happened. He licked the card and tried again. Strings of figures appeared on the screen. Vadim winked and motioned to Rex to have a look.

  Rex peered in at the tiny digital screen. Line upon line of data was being scrolled through, detailing journeys by bus and tube, the times and dates and costs. Vadim held up a finger, tapped various keys and swiped a different, blank card across the sensor. The machine set about printing ten receipt tickets, with the whole of Milda’s journey history printed on them in close, fine type.

  ‘You are impressed, I can tell,’ Vadim said. ‘Don’t worry. English people are not able to say these things, but I know.’

  ‘He picks locks, he hacks computers, he fits kitchens. What else?’ Rex responded dutifully.

  ‘I told you,’ Vadim said as the last of the cards dropped down into the hatch. ‘Soviet system. Everybody must become resourceful, because no fucking resources. You want us to plumb, we plumb. You want us to make bomb, with a freezer and some Chinese fireworks, we do it.’

  Rex stared at him. ‘That was you?’

  ‘What was me?’ Vadim said, feigning puzzlement.

  ‘Vadim. Shit. People got hurt by that thing.’

  ‘Only fascists,’ Vadim replied brightly. ‘Come!’

  In the little sandwich bar upstairs, they spread the tickets out on a table and tried to make sense of them. It proved pretty straightforward. For months, Milda’s only regular journey was from a bus-stop on Bowes Road, outside the squat, down Green Lanes to a stop near the Good Taste Café. Between, there were occasional tube rides to the sort of places Milda had liked to go as a treat – Leicester Square for the National Gallery, St Paul’s for the Tate Modern, Hampstead for walks and drinks. Rex remembered a few of these journeys himself: a glorious mid-May evening at The Holly Bush, a lost afternoon down Brick Lane, both in the salad-days of their affair. Even more sadly, he picked out the night she’d been on the top of the 141 bus and he’d spotted her: a Wednesday at the end of August.

  Suddenly, in early September, when Milda had lost her job, the pattern changed. She began to visit Tottenham Hale, just for short spells, an hour or two at a time, then return to the vicinity of the squat. A week later, there was a trip to Newington Green on the 141 route – tallying with what Birgita had told him about Milda’s last visit. Soon after that, for a fortnight, there was nothing except a couple of very short hops on the small back-street ‘C’ routes around Southgate. And then, on Thursday 6th October, the day Milda died, a final mammoth procession of public transport. Tube from Southgate to Wood Green. 29 bus from Wood Green to Turnpike Lane. 144 bus from Turnpike Lane to Priory Road. At Priory Road, she must have got off the bus, walked up the hill and through the woods to Alexandra Palace. Where she’d met her killer.

  ‘She could have caught one tube and one bus to get to Ally Pally. Probably even done it all on one bus,’ Rex said. ‘Instead she did it in these short hops. Tube, bus, bus. It took her hours.’

  ‘Being followed by somebody?’ Vadim suggested.

  ‘Or just unable to make up her mind.’ Rex gathered up the cards. ‘It looks like she went to stay in Southgate for a fortnight. You can see it all here. She lost her job, she argued with you, she spent a night with Birgita, and then she moved to Southgate. Who did she know there?’

  Vadim shrugged. ‘I fitted kitchen there the other week. It’s all old people. Lot of Greeks. Jews people. Actually quite lot of English,’ he added. ‘Nobody… how I can say it… our sort.’

  ‘Do you know anybody with the initials, K.P.?’

  Vadim pondered. ‘Only peanuts.’

  He left soon after that, something to do with a friend’s cousin’s boiler in East Ham. ‘You know why East Ham is becoming new capital of Lithuania?’ he asked Rex in parting. ‘Because even Rumanians don’t want to live there!’ He departed, chuckling at his joke, which perhaps had deeper layers of meaning to someone who knew East Ham, or Lithuania, or Rumania. And Vadim doubtless knew them all.

  Rex, who had been given a cup of coffee hotter than the surface of the sun, tarried awhile, and made the mistake of deciding to look at the letters in his bag. There was a water bill. A credit card bill. Meanwhile, someone calling himself Ian Daley – Electrical had written to him in very fine old copperplate to say that unless Rex paid the outstanding £200 for the re-wiring done in March, Rex would find himself in court.

  If he wanted to find out what had happened to Milda, who was behind the messages and the threats, he was in the wrong place. He looked down at his knees, where the fabric of his favourite suit was wearing a little thin. He thought he had better go home, and change into something with sturdier knees. This afternoon, he was going to be down on them, in Susan’s office. Begging for his job back.

  * * *

  Apart from his short-term memory, his other senses were intact. His hearing, in fact, seemed to become sharper and more sensitive every day. In bed one night recently he’d heard the faintest of pattering sounds, so he’d got up to look out of the window. It was a squirrel running over the roof of the shed two gardens down.

  He was losing weight, but it wasn’t a surprise. He had started to find sounds and sights more nourishing than any food. He had spent a full hour in the Iceland, letting the contents of a bag of frozen peas roll and trickle and crunch past his ears, luxuriating in the sounds until a Security Guard had asked him if he was unwell. And now, in his own home, leaving traces in every room, was a creature so visually delectable, so much like silk and cream to his optic nerves, that he’d hardly had to take any photographs. Her towel on a radiator, the damp imprint of her bare body upon it. Her plate, with the dainty remains of a snack upon it.

  Then, one day, he had seen too much. He was crossing the landing from th
e darkroom, and heard her in the bathroom. The wood of the door was thin, and years of steam and fluctuating temperatures had opened a long, narrow split in one of the panels. If he positioned himself just to the side, he would be able to see a strip of her. He had seen her like that the other day, drying herself, and fled down the stairs. But today, the light pulled him in.

  He heard a zip. A soft fabric rustle, then the snap of elastic. The sounds caressed and coaxed the confusing shadows and flickers from the slit into a full, technicolour vision he could touch and smell. A vision of her undressing to stand there, pale as milk, with the golden light streaming between her legs. He groaned in awe.

  There was a silence, then a rattle, a sound like a string of beads being cut. Little round, red pills cascaded out from under the door. She opened it, fully clothed, an odd look on her face.

  ‘You are okay?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘But –’ He had picked up a few of the pills. ‘These are my wife’s…’

  He shoved her aside and saw the bathroom cabinet was open. She had taken out and unzipped the plastic washbag where Caroline’s drugs had been stored. There was a bottle on the floor. Another, unopened, on the sink.

  She had humiliated him. Another one of them had humiliated him, after seeming to be different, seeming to hold out some promise to him. Anger streamed through him.

  And then turned to joy. What a glorious, sharp, dizzying release it gave him to grab the soft, mocking flesh, to feel the fibrous chords and tendons underneath and then to hear the moan from her as a pink flush spread along her jaw and outwards.

  He waited for the crack – like the shifting links of some huge fathoms-deep chain – but when the sound came, it was different. More like a distant crash. He felt only relief, though. She was gone. He was alone.