A Death at the Palace

by M. H. Baylis

  The torch gave him an idea. Back in the darkroom, he went onto his knees, onto the cracked, chemical-spattered lino, shining the torch into the corners, behind and underneath the work-bench. He heard his phone ringing down in the kitchen, and it occurred to him that he should go and answer it. But there, between the bench and the wall, the pale edge of Milda’s arm suddenly appeared in the beam of light, as if reaching out for help. The photograph had never left the room, it must have slipped out of his jacket almost immediately and fallen down.

  He pulled at it and heard it tear. It seemed to be stuck. He tried to pull the work-bench out, but it was either too sturdy, or Chapman had secured it to the wall. The phone continued to ring downstairs. He supposed someone had left him a message, that it would keep ringing until he went down and listened to it. He wasn’t about to do that now.

  He found that by lying flat on the floor, stretching his right arm to its fullest extent, pushing with his knuckles against the back of the work-top and simultaneously squeezing the photograph along and out with his thumb, he was able to extricate it. As the crumpled, dusty item came towards him, he understood how so many of his own treasured possessions had vanished over the years. Strange quirks of gravity and dynamics had fetched them up in places like this: they were not gone, but to all intents and purposes they were unreachable. Some people were the same.

  He knelt, staring at the picture, at what felt like the last living piece of Milda Majauskas. His phone had stopped ringing. He wondered if the battery was dead. He stood up with difficulty, and took a soft cloth from a box labelled CLOTHS on the worktop, wiping the photograph down tenderly. He had it. He had the key.

  As he opened the dark-room door, he knew immediately that something had changed. The air was cooler; a top-note of damp leaves mingled with the cake-tin smell. On the hallway carpet lay the council’s free magazine; he wondered if it had been there when he came in. Maybe the lifting of the letter-flap had let some air into this clammy little place.

  He returned to the kitchen to get his phone, and found Arthur Chapman, dressed like a nine-year-old for a prize-giving ceremony – tie, tank-top, side-parting. He was holding the phone in his neat hands. Why the hell was he back already?

  ‘What are you doing in my house?’ he asked.

  His eyes and his nose wrinkled as he asked the question, and Rex saw why Milda had named him after a rabbit. Pale and blinking, somehow fussy without even moving. With a pocket watch he could have come straight out of ‘Alice in Wonderland’.

  Quelling his urge to run, Rex put the photograph on the table. ‘Milda was here, wasn’t she?’ he said. His heart was thudding.

  Chapman peered at the photograph, then back at Rex. ‘I don’t understand people. I never have. They don’t make sense to me. The things they do and say. The things they smile about. Why do they like dogs? Why do they watch football? Do you know?’ He didn’t wait for a reply. ‘Just a few times in my life, I’ve met somebody, and I’ve let myself believe that I understand them. And every time, I’ve been wrong.’

  ‘It seems Milda was wrong about you.’

  ‘That depends what she wanted me for.’

  ‘Wanted you?’

  ‘She just wanted to take. I know that now. That’s why she sought me out. Moved in. She was in the bathroom, filling her pockets with my wife’s drugs.’

  ‘Where is your wife?’

  Chapman briefly raised his eyebrows. It was the closest thing he’d made to a gesture. The man didn’t seem to create expressions, or do things with his hands. He was just a looking, reporting device. A Camera-Man. ‘In St Pancras cemetery. She died. And that… girl moved in to help herself to the painkillers. I caught her with them.’

  ‘So you killed her?’

  Chapman’s eyes widened slightly. He backed up against the sink. ‘Killed her? I didn’t kill her. Who thinks that? Is she… where is she?’

  ‘In a cemetery in Lithuania, I imagine. They found her, dead in the park.’

  ‘What park?’

  Rex was confused. Chapman seemed genuinely surprised. ‘Alexandra Park. Don’t you follow the news? You obviously read the Gazette.’

  Chapman shook his head. ‘If you mean because of the competition, someone cut the piece out of your paper and put it on the Camera Club noticeboard in the library. I didn’t…’ He swallowed. ‘I pushed her. I mean I had my… I had my hand. There.’ He put his tiny left hand to his adam’s apple. ‘Just for a moment. I was angry. But she ran away. I swear she just ran away. Out of the bathroom, down the stairs and slammed the door. She broke the glass. I haven’t seen her since.’

  Chapman stood still, saying again and again that he hadn’t killed Milda. His story made sense. It explained the traces of the developer fluid around her neck. In any case, how could this tiny, unworldly man have transported the body of a healthy young woman a mile and a half to Alexandra Park? He wasn’t the right person. He was creepy. Unsettling. But not the killer…

  Rex suddenly registered that Chapman had just said something new. Something very strange. He looked at him, and between the two men there passed a kind of recognition. Rex had grasped the significance of what Chapman had just said. And Chapman knew it.

  The little man held out his arms in a strange, Christ-like gesture. That was the last truly clear image Rex had. Then there was a flash of pain as one of the man’s tiny hands crushed his throat like a vice. Rex choked, his blood seeming to force his eyeballs out of his head, and as his vision began to dim, he struck out at the calm, smooth face staring up at him.

  It made Chapman relax his grip for an instant, just enough time for Rex to move backwards. But as he struggled to find his breath, there was a flash of steel in the corner of his vision, a clatter of cutlery from the draining board.

  The next thing Rex was aware of was a sharp, wet pain just above his cheek. His vision suddenly turned brown, as if his eyes were covered with onion-skin. He felt the same point of cold agony, this time in his chest. He staggered forward and heard a little cry as he hit the floor. It didn’t sound like his voice.

  Chapter Nine

  Helen Fitch. That was her name – the girl who had followed him around in sixth form. Rex wanted to laugh out loud and clap. Now Helen Fitch was a nurse. One of his nurses, in the hospital. It was odd that she didn’t seem to have aged. She looked better, though. Perhaps it was the uniform. At college there hadn’t been a uniform, and given the clothes, hair and shoes fashionable in the Eighties, this had meant that everyone looked like shit. She did not look like shit now. When Helen Fitch changed his dressings, with her cool fingers and her soap smell, Rex thought he loved her. Was it too late to tell her?

  The curtains around his bed opened, and he expected Helen Fitch to come in, in her crisp, starched dress. Instead he saw a tall, thin figure in a grey hooded top. His heart fluttered. The Reaper had come. It pulled the hood down. Rex saw his wife’s blank, scarred, half-face.

  He shot up in bed, sweating.

  The painkillers were nice. Provided he stayed awake. If he slept, he had nightmares: sweat-bathed newsreels from the basement studios of the psyche. The nurse came across to him.

  ‘Okay? Bad dream?’

  He nodded.

  ‘It’s good news about your eye, isn’t it?’ she said. He looked around at the ward, divining from what was going on that they were in the long tundra of time between waking up and the arrival of the first doctor. For some reason, Helen Fitch now had an Irish accent. Perhaps she had been living over there. Rex would ask her later.

  When the doctor came, he was angry that it wasn’t Doctor Diana Berne, but a young, puzzled-looking Greek boy. He wanted Diana. Helen Fitch eased him back onto the pillows, and brushed his hair out of his eyes, speaking to him as if to a child.

  ‘It’s the medication,’ she said. And she drew the curtains around his bed. He lay with his head to one side and looked through the fog at the printed images of Routemaster buses and Tower Bridge. He had been here before.

  As
the fog receded, pain took its place: a burning cord passing from the middle of his chest down the inside of both arms to the tip of his middle fingers. And a dull pulse behind his left eye, like the throb of a distant engine. They ebbed and flowed in intensity, sometimes together, sometimes separately. He tried to get out of bed, thinking he could run away from them, but he vomited.

  He felt as if he were being passed through a sieve. But on the other side, miraculously, instead of being a mush, he seemed to reassemble into something like the person he had been before. Hour by hour – or maybe day-by-day, he had no idea which – more and more made sense.

  He was in hospital. The North Middlesex hospital. Again.

  Chapman had attacked him with something sharp. There was a patch over his eye. A dressing over the middle of his chest. And the girl from the sixth form… Yes, she might have been called Helen Fitch: his subconscious might have scored on that one. But she wasn’t the Irish nurse whose soft cool hands gave him a hard-on. She wasn’t even called Helen. Her name was written on her badge. He found he could not read it. But it certainly didn’t say Helen.

  ‘He’s been doing fine off the ventilator,’ he heard the nurse saying outside the curtains. ‘The doctor’s given him an excellent prognosis – provided he does as he’s told.’

  The other person outside the curtains – a woman – murmured something.

  ‘He might seem a bit weird,’ the nurse said. ‘It’s all the different drugs.’

  ‘He’s always been a bit weird,’ Ellie said, as the curtains opened. She was wearing a green corduroy suit and she had her hair down. Rex sat up, but as she pulled out a chair at the side of his bed, he shifted away. He felt ashamed to be here, in this bed, in a thin gown, smelling of sweat and iodine and dried blood, next to a strikingly pretty young woman.

  When he’d been a little boy, one of his teachers had come to see him at home when he’d been off sick with chicken pox. And he’d felt the same then, even though he was only six or seven: that she shouldn’t see him, in his bedroom, in his pyjamas.

  He tried to smile, but it made his eye feel like it was going to explode in a shower of sparks. He thanked her for the grapes. She said that the nurses all clearly fancied him, and they went on like that for a few minutes, strangely coy with each other.

  ‘What’s happened to him? Chapman?’ Rex said.

  Ellie seemed to relax a little in her seat, relieved to drop the small talk. ‘He’s in hospital. Don’t worry. Not this one. He’s in Chase Farm, with a policeman outside the door.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because he’s been charged with attempting to murder you with a vegetable knife.’

  ‘Ellie. I mean, why’s he in hospital?’

  ‘You landed on him. That’s what he says, anyway. He stabbed you, then you landed on him and you broke his femur. He had to call an ambulance on your phone.’

  ‘Chapman called an ambulance?’

  ‘Yep. Funny thing is, he saved your life. Because if he hadn’t, you’d have died from your’ – she pointed at his chest – ‘punctured lung thing.’

  ‘What I don’t get is how come he was back at his house. I thought he was in a taxi.’

  ‘So did we. Then the taxi driver rang, and said he’d just got out at some traffic lights. Didn’t say anything. Just got out. We tried warn you, but you didn’t pick up.’

  Rex remembered his phone ringing downstairs as he searched in the dark-room. ‘He didn’t kill Milda.’

  ‘That’s what he says.’

  ‘I think he’s telling the truth.’

  ‘Why did he attack you then?’

  Rex lay back on the pillow. Why? Dimly, he remembered something at the end of his encounter with Arthur Chapman. The little man had said something odd. He had a feeling the strangling and the stabbing were related to that. But how? And if the man was telling the truth, then who had killed Milda? It made his eye ache to think about it. He gave up. For now.

  ‘I’m here on a mission,’ Ellie said. ‘First of all, to give you this. It arrived this morning.’

  He felt his bowels weaken as she unzipped her handbag. He wasn’t sure he could take another spooky little token from his tormentor.

  It was a postcard of Angkor Wat.

  It was from Diana. He wanted to read it straight away, but he was too tired, and he knew Ellie would study his reaction, and relay it to everyone at the office. Who, of course, would also have read it.

  ‘And secondly, to show you this… You’re an internet superstar!’

  She pulled out her phone and clicked on YouTube.

  ‘If it’s me acting like a thug at the riot. I’ve seen it,’ he said. But Ellie shook her head.

  ‘It’s a mash-up of it.’

  Someone, for reasons best understood by the under-25s, had set the whole Turnpike Lane scrap scene to music, modifying people’s voices through some clever mixing software so that they seemed to be singing along. The song, a nicely ironic choice for a racist rally, was ‘Message To You, Rudie’ by The Specials.

  ‘Stop your fucking about…’ sang Keith Powell. ‘This is about your future…’

  ‘None of you got any future…’ came the riposte from Rex, before the scene exploded into speeded-up fighting and ska trombones.

  ‘It’s gone viral,’ Ellie said. ‘Isn’t it brilliant? I mean – how stupid must that BWAP lot feel now?’

  It occurred to Rex that some of the BWAP’s senior leadership would be delighted with this thing called a viral mash-up. In fact, they’d probably put it onto the internet themselves. But he didn’t say anything, just lay back and feigned an interest as she rummaged in her handbag for something else.

  ‘Thirdly, as representative of the Wood Green Gazette, I am instructed to give you this…’

  She handed him a large, green envelope. It contained a birthday card, reminding him that he had turned 40 while he’d been in hospital. The Gazette staff had all signed it, with comments ranging from the formal ‘Best wishes, M. Whittaker’ to the jovial ‘You Old Coffin-Dodging Bastard, Terry’. Inside the card was another envelope. Rex opened it. He was booked on a return flight to Phnom Penh, at the end of next week. ‘You can change all the dates for fifty quid,’ Ellie said. ‘I don’t know if you’ll be up to flying by then …’

  She carried on talking, but he was too tired to listen. He lay back and closed his eyes. Would he be using that ticket? He doubted it. He had too much work to do.

  * * *

  The next morning he discharged himself. He was made to sign a disclaimer form, and a small group of nurses watched him struggling to put on the stiff, bloodied clothes he’d worn a week ago, without helping. They wanted him to see how hard it was, so that he’d change his mind. They didn’t know how stubborn he was.

  Help came from a strange quarter. He was in a chair, bent over, feeling as if molten lead had been poured into the front of his face as he tried to tie up a shoelace when a visitor sat on the bed. He looked up in surprise. It was Mike Bond, paler, scruffier, in a knitted jumper and grey tracksuit bottoms. He looked like one of the broken men of Wood Green, who sat in the library all day, staring at the newspapers.

  ‘Going somewhere?’ asked the old policeman.

  ‘Home,’ Rex replied. ‘These places make you ill.’

  Mike chuckled, the empty skin of his neck folding into hills and valleys, with a cover of silver furze. ‘I felt the same. Brenda wouldn’t let me discharge myself, though.’

  ‘So are you still in here?’

  ‘Christ no. If you have a heart attack these days, you’re in and out in 48 hours. Quicker than a wisdom tooth… I had to come in for a check-up,’ Bond explained, ‘so I thought I’d look in on you. Hang on….’

  He spotted Rex’s feeble attempts to put his other shoe on.

  ‘Mike, no…’ Rex protested, but it was too late. The copper knelt and put his shoe on for him. Rex glanced from the bald top of Bond’s head to the Nurses’ Station and saw the looks. Bond got back up, flushed and a l
ittle breathless.

  ‘I take it you’re not back at work then,’ Rex asked.

  ‘Bren wants me to take early retirement,’ Bond said gloomily, as he sat back on the edge of the bed. ‘I might not have any choice. There’ll be a review board in a couple of weeks.’

  There was a silence, broken by the clatter of a surgical dish and a burst of polite African cursing.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Rex said. ‘And I’m sorry about what I said at the march, too.’

  Bond nodded. ‘Well, you had a point,’ he said, scraping his index finger with his thumb.

  ‘You are part of a racist conspiracy?’

  ‘I did enquire about Keith Powell but I was told to stay away. I couldn’t tell you that, because he was undercover.’

  ‘I know.’ Bond raised two white, curling eyebrows. ‘I worked it out,’ Rex said. He didn’t want to land Powell in trouble.

  ‘If you’re going, you might as well go,’ said the Irish nurse. ‘We need the bed.’

  As he picked his way painfully through the hospital’s corridors, Rex thought this was what it must feel like to be old. Everything aching and weak. Vision blurred. The one-way system – devised to prevent the local gang-bangers from killing each other on the hospital’s watch – had changed, adding to his sense of disorientation. He felt lucky to have an invalid policeman at his side.

  ‘Your mate’s gone,’ Rex noted, as they left the medicated heat of the Reception area and went outside. The cold air stung his chest. He wondered if that was because of the wound. Perhaps he shouldn’t have been so hasty about leaving.

  ‘Orchard wasn’t my mate,’ Bond said. ‘He was a… I don’t know… Anyway, he wasn’t my mate.’

  ‘What did you have against him?’

  A mini-cab tooted its horn. Rex nodded towards its driver, acknowledging the invitation.