A Death at the Palace

by M. H. Baylis

  ‘I don’t know Rex… It’s just that… Coppers… they’re not political, you know. If they are, they keep it to themselves. You know, there are just unspoken rules. You don’t talk about what books you’ve read down the staff canteen, and you don’t talk about politics, either. But Orchard was… everything was politics with him. Politics, immigration, multiculturalism. It was like he was trying to get you into a conversation about it, all the time.’

  Rex smiled. ‘He’ll have limited options for that when he’s doing nights for Securicor.’

  Bond frowned. ‘What are you on about?’

  ‘He’s been Shanghai’d out, hasn’t he?’

  ‘He passed his Sergeant’s exams six months back, and a vacancy came up for a D.S. in Brixton. That’s where he’s gone, Rex.’ Bond chuckled. ‘You could say it was down, but definitely not out.’

  Rex took this in as the taxi – a battered Volvo, front window festooned with amulets and flags – drew alongside. Had Orchard been artlessly trying to find fellow-sympathisers, or almost as artlessly trying to entrap his fellow policemen? He suspected the latter. Something about D.C. Orchard – Detective Sergeant Orchard, as he now was – had always reminded him of the prefects at school, content to be hated, proud of the traitor-status. And now he’d been promoted. It was just like newspapers. If they couldn’t sack you, they moved you up a rung.

  ‘I read somewhere the other day… Know the average time a copper lives for after he retires?’ Bond said, suddenly, as Rex got in the back seat. ‘Twelve years.’

  He looked almost tearful. Rex had never seen him this way before.

  ‘Come on. Brenda will keep you busy for longer than twelve years. Do you want a lift?’

  Bond shook his head. ‘I’ve got to walk everywhere. For the exercise. Anyway, Bren’s got a supervision going on in the front room.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘She’s training to be a – what do you call it – counsellor. God knows why.’ He coughed. ‘See you around, Rex.’

  Rex watched the big man shuffle away, stooped and saggy. He felt sorry for ever having doubts about him. Living With A Violent Man. Now he knew why Brenda had been reading that book. She had a life outside her job, future plans. He worried that Bond did not.

  The taxi driver was playing a kind of Nigerian pop called Highlife. A copy of the Gazette lay on the dashboard. There was a front page scoop for Ellie, all about the stabbing, the arrest of Chapman, and his connection to Milda. GAZETTE MAN IN SOUTHGATE STAB ATTACK SHOCK, read the headline, itself evidence enough that Ellie had been allowed to write it. But the piece was good. He sighed. Ellie would be on her way soon, to some lowly but coveted role on a national. Everything was changing. He felt an urge to act now, while there was still time.

  ‘Can you drop me on the Lanes instead?’ Rex asked the driver.

  Wordlessly the driver changed direction. Rex steeled himself. The next task would be hard.

  He got out of the taxi by the pub, just as a long line of schoolchildren was being shepherded over the road by a group of harassed-looking adults. They were primary-age kids, divided by gender, but not – yet – by race. There was something heartening about the sight of them, the Polish girls primly tutting at the antics of the black boys, the Somalis, arm-in-arm, like sisters, with the Turks.

  In the midst of the chattering line, huddled together, conspiratorially, over the screen of a mobile phone, were the bent heads of Dovila and a classmate in a headscarf. Rex asked them where they were headed.

  ‘We’ve got to go to Finsbury Park to count earthworms,’ said Dovila without enthusiasm. At that moment, a teacher, a young, bald-headed man, edged across, frowning. ‘It’s okay, sir, he’s my mum’s friend,’ the little girl said. Rex gave the man what he hoped was a reassuring nod. It seemed to work.

  ‘At least you’ve got some entertainment,’ he said, pointing at the phone, as he kept step with the line. It was a bright blue thing with a big screen – not the device he’d given to her mother. ‘Is that yours?’

  sIt’s Mum’s. We swap sometimes because this has got Sims Pet Vacation 3 on it, but she doesn’t like me having it because she thinks I won’t remember to tell her any messages but I always do.’

  Rex suddenly had an idea. ‘Did you have the phone when Niela rang? From Lithuania?’

  ‘I answered it,’ Dovila said proudly. ‘I was coming home from swimming. And Niela told me the message and I told Mum. And I said to Mum we’d better go and tell you.’

  Before Rex could ask another question, one of the multitude of teachers and assistants deemed necessary to take twenty kids worm-counting at the local park blew on a whistle. Dovila and her pals instantly pared down to single file against the window of a sofa shop and halted, awaiting further orders.

  I said to Mum, we’d better go and tell you. So it was Dovila who had taken the call, Dovila who’d pushed her mother to come and see him. Rex remembered the taxi ride back from the funeral, when Aguta was drunk. How she’d been strangely evasive. But why?

  * * *

  The sign on the Famous Manti Shop said ‘Famous Manti Shop – Restaurant’, but it had no waiting staff. Anyone rash enough to dine there was sent downstairs, to be tended to, erratically, by one of the dumpling-rolling women from the window.

  Armed with his 20% discount voucher, Rex strode up to the proprietor and asked for a table. The proprietor – a thin, melancholy figure who looked like he subsisted on a diet of coins – barked some words at the pair of headscarfed women in the window. Rex’s gamble worked: Bibigul rose from her work-station and led him downstairs.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she asked, in a low voice.

  ‘I need to talk to you,’ he said. ‘Bring me a bottle of Buzbag.’

  She looked annoyed, but went to fetch the wine. Rex waited in the chilly, damp basement, glared at by an assortment of blue glass eyes on the walls and startled, every few moments, by a rush of water from the adjacent lavatories.

  ‘I read about you,’ Bibigul said, as she returned with a glass and a bottle. ‘How is your eye?’

  ‘They said it’s going to be all right,’ Rex said. ‘When I was here last, you said some things, about the girl who was murdered at the Park. About the autopsy on her.’

  ‘What about it?’ she said, twisting the corkscrew in. ‘I thought you’d caught the guy.’

  ‘He says he didn’t do it. But he is the reason she got the sodium stuff on her neck. She shared a dark room with him.’

  ‘Clore didn’t bother to see if there was any sodium nitrite anywhere else,’ Bibigul said, as she poured him a drink. ‘He just found it on the neck, and because the spread of it was like a man’s hand, and he found petechial haemorrhages – that’s little burst blood vessels – in the eyes he stopped there. If he’d looked on her hands, he might have found the sodium nitrite there, and then we’d have had a good indication about the… dark room.’

  ‘So he jumped to the wrong conclusion?’

  ‘He always jumped to conclusions,’ she said bitterly. ‘That was what he did. He found one or two things on a body to comment on, and he left it there.’

  She looked at him, with her shining, steppe-land eyes. ‘Maybe you think he just did a poor job on that girl because she was from Lithuania and no one cared. But the truth was, he was at the end of his career, he drank too much, and he did a poor job on everybody.’

  ‘Can you remember anything else about the girl’s body?’

  There were footsteps on the stairs. The boss was hovering.

  ‘I’ll have six lamb, and six beef,’ Rex said. ‘Yoghurt sauce. No chilli.’

  He didn’t have to wait long. Soon he heard the ding of a microwave timer over the noisy plumbing.

  ‘I remember she had mud on the back of her shoes, and on the heel of her tights,’ Bibigul said, returning with a platter of manti, a fork and a napkin. ‘There were indentations in the soil around her feet – like she had been drumming her heels against the ground.’

  ‘Don�
�t you do that if someone strangles you?’ He remembered Chapman strangling him. The terrifying power of his grip.

  ‘No, your energy’s all focussed on stopping them. In any case, if someone strangles you hard enough for the blood vessels in your eyes to bleed, then you get bleeding in the throat as well. And there was no bleeding in the throat.’

  Rex had speared a couple of yoghourt-covered dumplings with his fork. He couldn’t bring them to his mouth, though.

  ‘So… someone drumming their heels is what? More like someone having a fit? Could she have had a fit because of the heroin?’

  ‘It doesn’t cause convulsions. It doesn’t cause anything, the amount she took.’

  Rex frowned. ‘I thought it was injected.’

  ‘It was. But only a very, very small amount went into the skin, and an even smaller amount passed into her bloodstream. We almost didn’t detect it. Some addicts do it that way if they can’t find a vein, they call it skin-popping, but her veins were perfect.’

  ‘So why would she have done that?’

  ‘I don’t know. Because she changed her mind? Because she wanted to try a little bit? Because it was an accident?’

  ‘An accidental injection?’

  ‘I’m not a detective. I know she didn’t look like a heroin addict, though. She didn’t have any of the signs.’

  ‘They don’t all inject, do they? Some junkies just smoke it, right?’

  ‘Yes, but people who have this habit are emaciated. You know – you must have seen it – their eyes kind of look too big in their heads?’

  Rex knew that look. He’d seen it recently, though he couldn’t remember where.

  ‘They have bad complexions and they don’t take care of their appearance. This girl was clean, and she was healthy. Well. She was healthy apart from the fit.’

  ‘You’re sure she had one?’

  ‘She had a violent fit. I think that’s what caused the burst blood vessels in her eyes. And I think that had more to do with why she died than anyone strangling her. I said all this to Dr Clore when we did the Preliminary Exam, but he wasn’t interested. And I…’ She looked embarrassed.

  ‘You were leaving anyway,’ Rex concluded. ‘So you think it was the fit that killed her?’

  ‘Not the fit. But unless she had epilepsy, a convulsion is usually a sign of something serious. Tumours. Meningitis. Lots of things.’

  Rex remembered all the talk of headaches, of Milda feeling dizzy and sick, visits to the hospital as a child.

  ‘Is there anything that… I don’t know how to put it… anything that she could have had for a long time that could have caused this? I mean, something she could have had since she was a kid?’

  Bibigul frowned, trying to unpick his meaning. Then she nodded, with a faint smile. ‘Could be. You can have something like AVM for years. A whole lifetime, unless it’s triggered by a shock or a sudden stress.’

  ‘What’s AVM?’

  He needed to know more, but the shop bell rang, and Bibigul had to go.

  As he drank his way through the warm wine, ignoring the pile of tepid dumplings, Rex got his phone out. He connected to a site he’d spent a lot of time on in the aftermath of his wife’s accident. Headmatters.org was a mine of information on the human brain, and the many things that could go wrong with it. It had helped him understand what happened to Sybille. The site’s symptom checker was the sort of thing you should avoid, if you had a hangover or a tendency to hypochondria.

  The connection was slow, unsurprisingly given that he was in a basement at the lower end of a built-up valley. Even so, by the time half the bottle of Buzbag was gone, Rex had worked out what had killed Milda. He also knew someone was responsible, and as he went back and forth over his conversation with Bibigul, he was almost certain he knew who.

  * * *

  The girl did not look out of place on a Saturday lunchtime in Newington Green. It was a sunny day, sharp and cold. The area had a hung-over feeling to it: people with bed-hair buying Cokes and Guardians in the newsagent; bleary boys eating fry-ups in the café; the odd, desperate soul staving off the doom with an early pint in The Alma. Shivering in a bomber jacket, with thin black tights and a denim mini-skirt, she got the odd stare, but it was more passing lust than disgust.

  There were two old women waiting for the 73 bus. They didn’t know one another, were of different races, but had already established a kinship based on it being cold, and the bus being late. They exchanged identical looks as the girl went past, although their thoughts were in fact quite different. Irene, 73, wondered why she didn’t have a proper coat. Joyce, 71, thought that type of girl deserved all the trouble she got.

  She could almost have been a trainee solicitor or a newly-qualified teacher: someone who had had a few drinks too many, passed out on a sofa a long way from her shared flat in Clapham or Ealing, and was now keen to get back there for a long bath before friends came round for dinner. It was a not-uncommon Saturday scenario. But if you went close to the girl you might have found a different story, detected something more disturbing in the unwashed, tied-back hair, the greasy circles around her eyes, the streaming nose.

  One man saw it all instantly. It was a visual language, common to all who followed this particular path to destruction. She caught his eye as he came out of the chemist’s with his dose. He caught hers. He didn’t need any trouble right now. But trouble, somehow, always found him.

  ‘Anyone got any brown around here?’ she asked hoarsely. He looked her up and down. Too pretty for a policewoman.

  ‘I might know someone,’ he said, addressing his trainers. ‘They’re in Clapton, though. Might be hard for you to find.’

  She wiped her nose on the sleeve of her jacket. He tried not to look disgusted. ‘If you go with me, I’ll give you a tenner’s,’ she wheedled. ‘Please.’

  ‘It’s a long bus ride,’ he said.

  ‘Please. I’ll give you two bags,’ she said. ‘I’ve got a car.’

  He should have listened to the thin, reedy note of warning that sounded when she said she had a car. But he was thinking of the two bags. Two little twists of a carrier bag, plump and tied-off like sausages, stuffed with the pinky-brown powder that clung to the bag like pearls of sap on a plant. It melted on the foil with a seductive hiss, smelt like cocoa. So much better than the methadone.

  He followed her across the Green. A few, grumpy young Dads were pushing small children on swings. He tried not to look at them. They crossed the road at the zebra crossing – funny that a bag-head should be so careful, he thought. She was approaching a gold-coloured Vauxhall Chevette. An odd car for a skinny young bag-head bird to drive.

  Then one of those wiry, bone-headed blokes got out – the kind who never had an ounce of fat on them, lived on speed and Wotsits, and could still out-run a bus in their fifties. He felt a little disappointed, but not too much. He wasn’t that into the girl anyway. He just wanted the bags. Was he still going to get them, though, with this knucklehead in tow?

  The man gave him one of those hard, upward nods, enough to communicate that he wasn’t going to rip his head off right now, then opened the passenger door for him. Surprised, he got in, and found himself in a clean, lovingly tended leather interior. The bloke got in next to him.

  ‘What the –’

  The other passenger door opened, and another man got in on his right side. This one was bulkier, in a crumpled suit, and wore an eye-patch. The girl slipped into the driver’s seat. Were they Old Bill?

  ‘Hello Mark,’ Rex said, turning to the captive sandwiched between himself and Terry. ‘Shall we go for a little ride?’

  * * *

  The Server Room didn’t have any servers in it. Susan was always saying that the Gazette was going to go online, and was always having meetings with bright, sharp IT consultants in equally bright, sharp suits. So far, though, the only concrete step in that direction had been earmarking an oversized stationery cupboard on the floor below the main office for the purpose.

 
Earlier that Saturday afternoon, Rex Tracey and two accomplices – fellow employees of the Gazette – had found another purpose for the Server room: that of imprisoning a twenty-nine year old heroin addict named Mark Crosby, along with a mattress, a sleeping bag, six bottles of water, three buckets and a radio. The moment he saw the amenities that had been laid on for him, Mark had begun to hammer on the door.

  On the other side of the door, flushed and frightened, Ellie unzipped the bomber jacket she’d borrowed from her flatmate’s sister.

  ‘What’s with all the shit in the Server Room, Rex? I thought you just wanted to talk to him.’

  ‘I do. But I anticipate it taking some time.’

  Ellie’s eyes widened. ‘Hang on. Then technically you’ve just kidnapped him.’

  ‘Indeed,’ Rex said, rubbing his shirt over the spot where the bandage was. ‘You have, too, since you willingly impersonated a heroin addict to lure him into Terry’s car.’

  ‘You said… I just thought that was to get him to talk to us! Jesus.’ She glanced in panic at the door. ‘What if Susan drops in?’ Ellie demanded.

  ‘If anyone tries to drop in, they’ll have problems,’ Rex said, ‘because I’ve changed the entry code.’

  ‘What if someone hears him?’

  ‘On the High Street? On a Saturday?’

  ‘What if he’s still doing it on Sunday?’

  ‘Trust me, by Sunday, he’ll be so desperate for his scag that he’ll be singing like Domingo.’

  ‘Who? I don’t care, actually.’ Ellie’s voice became louder. ‘Rex – you’re a bastard. If this gets out, and I’m an accessory, my whole career’s over! You lied to me about what you were going to do!’

  ‘It isn’t going to get out,’ Rex said. ‘And if it does, we’ll just say we persuaded some obliging young sex-worker from the Brownswood to act as bait.’

  ‘Aye,’ Terry chipped in. ‘Ratty looking Indian tart she was. Fat arse and flat tits. Never asked her name.’

  Rex sensed a softening in Ellie’s mood. ‘And if your career is over, you could always go back to the acting. You were brilliant, you know. First-class.’