A Death at the Palace

by M. H. Baylis

  At the very top of it, where the mighty 141 concluded its passage up from Waterloo, Milda lived, in a squat by the North Circular. It wasn’t hard to find the house: a chunky, between-the-wars affair that could have looked respectable without the metal shutters and the main road running by. Many of the properties around were squatted: brown steel sheets over the doors, flags in the upper window denoting the nationalities of the new residents.

  He didn’t remember the number – houses on the North Circular ran well into the nine hundreds – but he knew it was by a crossroads, and that the place to its left was derelict. Or rather, it had more or less burnt down, but was, incredibly, still occupied by the people who had set light to it. Chankiss, Milda always called them, contemptuously. Junkies. She was a very proper girl, the squat her one nod to rebellion. She never swore, never took drugs, never broke a promise, and certainly never lied or stole. All of which made her, in her own way, and to Rex’s heart, the most attractive sort of rebel of all. But the Milda he’d heard about today didn’t sound like the girl he knew.

  Rex banged on the metal door of the squat, creating thunder within. From inside, he could hear quick footsteps, the ever-present dance music being turned down. Unexpected visitors caused anxiety. An Albanian who had once lived there was under threat of bailiffs, and the bailiffs weren’t the sort who’d care that he wasn’t there any more. Then, as Milda had often explained, there were the electricity, gas and water people, keen to investigate the continual theft of utilities. And the police, raiding the makeshift brothels. And the bored Turkish youths who sometimes knocked on the door – almost politely, she said – in search of a fight.

  A head poked from one of the upper windows: a middle-aged, weathered-looking man. Rex gazed up at him, squinting in the sun. ‘I’m looking for Milda,’ he said. The head disappeared. There were more footsteps and after a silence in which Rex felt sure he was being watched, the sliding of bolts. The man appeared again. He had so many freckles, his face was almost khaki, but his eyes were the colour of the sea in holiday brochures.

  ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘The journalist.’

  From this courteous, slightly mocking introduction, Rex knew this was Vadim. Much older than he’d expected. He had wavy, sandy-blond hair and a bandaged hand. He led Rex through the dark, fungal hallway into the kitchen, where a group of hefty boys in workboots and overalls was smoking grass. They were young, with cropped hair and pale skin; some still had acne. Rex recognised a couple of faces: fellow Lithuanians he’d been introduced to in the street when he was with Milda. At a word from Vadim, they all trooped out, acknowledging the interloper with grave, yet not unfriendly nods. Somewhere else in the house, the music was turned up again.

  ‘Maybe you don’t want to sit on our sofa in your handsome coat,’ Vadim said, seating himself at a table covered in computer parts. He said it smiling, so that Rex couldn’t decide whether it was an insult or not. He decided it was, and sat on the sofa, which offered all the comfort of a sock stretched over a coathanger. The floor was bare boards, but other than that, the kitchen looked quite bearable – no worse than the places Rex had lived in at university. Vadim picked up a soldering iron and squinted at some obscure piece of circuitry before him.

  ‘I am sorry, I must finish this because… I must finish it by tomorrow.’

  ‘Where is Milda?’

  Vadim shrugged. He was sinewy and powerful-looking – Milda had said something about him being in the army for a while. In fact, Vadim seemed to have done everything for a while: worked in a bar in Frankfurt, something indistinct in Finland. Now he mended computers – when he wasn’t fitting kitchens, or importing smoked fish.

  ‘She said maybe she might go to see Birgita,’ Vadim offered. ‘Do you know that girl?’

  ‘The artist.’

  ‘We are all artists perhaps,’ Vadim grinned, showing small, crooked teeth. ‘Even you.’

  It was one of those annoying, cool, European-squatter-type comments that meant nothing. Rex dismissed it. ‘When did she go?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Vadim replied, glancing up. ‘Three weeks ago, maybe.’ He looked away again.

  ‘And you haven’t heard from her since then?’

  ‘No.’

  Rex stared distractedly at the bright blue holdall by the side of the sofa. This didn’t sound like Milda, either – a girl who couldn’t pass ten minutes without informing someone where she was and what she was doing by text and telephone. Rex’s refusal to do the same, his need to go off the radar for an hour or two, had troubled her greatly, and contributed, he suspected, to the death of whatever they’d had together.

  ‘Excuse me, Mister Rex. But is this any of your business when I speak to my girl?’

  ‘Maybe not,’ Rex said. ‘But Aguta was worried about her, because she didn’t come to Dovila’s birthday yesterday, so I promised I’d find out if she was okay.’

  ‘Aguta,’ the man said, simply, lifting a savage-looking hunting knife from the jumble on the table, and twisting it next to his temple. ‘Crazy bitch.’

  ‘You don’t think it’s odd for her to have missed the kid’s birthday?’

  ‘Many things Milda does is… odd. You know that. You tried calling to her?’

  ‘Voicemail.’

  ‘I will be, er, straight with you, okay?’ Vadim put his tools down and rubbed the bridge of his nose. How old was he? Fifty? ‘We had an argue, actually. Quite big argue. She quits her job at cafe, she’s got no money, she wants to borrow from me… So – I tell to her, after time, no, sweet-cheeks, get another job. So she slams the door, and she goes to see that friend Birgita. So – she wants me to call up her. Darling darling, I am so sorry, come home, without you I can’t live. So – I won’t. Understand? Even she doesn’t go to the kid’s birthday it’s same thing – she wants Aguta to blame me. Nasty Vadim! Games, games all the time. She cannot help it. It’s communism.’

  ‘Communism?’

  ‘Under communism everybody learnt tricks. Steal, cheat, manipulate. Now, all those people are coming here to your country, Mister Rex, and they only know to live as they lived before. Anyway. On you she doesn’t need to play tricks anymore.’

  Rex sighed. What Vadim said wasn’t entirely untrue. And the older man’s attitude was probably more healthy than his own. Even now, even after she’d left him for this sour old soldier, he was still running around London worrying about her. He stood up. Vadim showed him to the door. By the radiator he saw a pile of final demand letters addressed to Adem Dushku – the debt-ridden Albanian, he assumed.

  ‘I was a journalist also,’ Vadim said. ‘For a while. In Kazakhstan.’

  What a city. Only here, in a mildewed squat, could you meet a man who’d been a journalist in Alma-Ata, and now fitted kitchens in Arnos Grove.

  As he came out of the door, he almost bumped into a tubby Turkish man in a leather coat. ‘You Vadim?’ he asked. Rex gestured behind him. Vadim looked suddenly pained, as if Rex, or at least someone, had committed a social gaffe.

  ‘Taxi for Stansted yeah? Any luggage?’

  ‘In a minute,’ Vadim said tightly. The driver walked back to the road.

  ‘Going for a trip?’ Rex asked.

  ‘Vilnius,’ Vadim replied, sharply. ‘I better go. Actually.’

  * * *

  Later, Rex was waiting for a southbound bus amid a raucous throng of boys from the nearby school. Exuberant and smelling of bubble-gum, no doubt the only danger they posed was to someone’s eardrums. All the same, a stout woman carrying a lap-top case crossed the street to avoid them. That made Rex remember what Vadim had said about the computer he’d been repairing. Why had he said he had to finish it by tomorrow, when he was plainly on the verge of leaving the country today? Why had he looked so awkward when the taxi driver appeared? He didn’t understand, but it bothered him.

  The feeling did not ease as his bus travelled south down the Lanes, past the boxes of fruit and vegetables outside the grocers. He could believe she’d disappear in a sulk to
make a point with Vadim; even, at a pinch, if the argument had been harsh enough, avoid Dovila’s birthday. But lose her job, over a bunch of carrots?

  His phone rang. It was Ellie, in the office. She spoke in the bland, affectless fashion of someone very angry. He couldn’t be bothered to find out why. Keith Powell, she said, could meet him this afternoon, at his house. Rex took down the address, noting the postcode with surprise.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘How did you get on at the surgery?’ There was no reply. Ellie had hung up.

  He shrugged, resting his head against the cool glass of the window, letting the street go past in a blur. Among the medley of colours, one item drew his attention, and forced him to focus. A pale blue sign for the Eazylets lettings agency. The signs were everywhere along the street. Rex remembered he’d been looking at the same logo a few hours back, on the card in Terry’s wallet. He also remembered why the name on the card had been familiar to him. Ilona Balint. The first girl to be attacked.

  * * *

  Rex thought he had a good idea of the sort of man Keith Powell would be. One of the dwindling tribe of blue collar Tottenham whites. Bull-necked and defiant, they drank in the few taverns where the Cross of St George flew. They consumed Carling by the bucketload. And they prided themselves on their good relations with their Asian newsagents and their Turkish kebab vendors. But it only took the tiniest spark – a bent wing mirror, a case of miscounted change – for some of them to turn into roaring, racist psychopaths. Their sons and daughters spoke perfect patois – they had half-Caribbean babies, sometimes, too – but that didn’t make them any more accommodating when the matter of housing, or school places, or women in burkahs cropped up.

  Powell’s address didn’t fit this profile. His street lay in the protective shadow of Alexandra Palace, at the intersection of the three, defiantly middle-class hamlets of Crouch End, Hornsey and Muswell Hill. At one end of it, a little shop sold organic bread. As Rex shuffled along through the fine drizzle, fashionable mums gazed up from brand-new buggies and pushchairs. He began to wonder if Ellie had given him the right address, but there it was: the silver Luton, shining rudely amongst his neighbours’ Audis and lovingly-restored camper vans, like a tradesman refusing to use the back door. On each side, painted in stout black letters, was ‘Keith Powell – Kill Pests’.

  Rex rang the bell and waited. Silence and birdsong were broken by the rasp of a scooter engine. Rex swivelled round. The sound had made him anxious. He was relieved to see a chunky, grizzled-looking black man drive slowly past, the clipboard on the handlebars announcing him to be a trainee cab-driver, learning The Knowledge.

  The door opened, and man in his mid-thirties stood before him. He was dressed in smart jeans and a striped jumper, with his dark hair drawn into a little fin: the uniform of the North London media-type.

  ‘You’re wet,’ Powell said. ‘Did you have to park a way off?’

  Rex said nothing, wanting to avoid the car conversation. Powell’s accent was flat and featureless. South-eastern and possibly working class, he thought, but subject to some deliberate bleaching process. Like Powell himself, judging from his appearance.

  ‘Are you really called Rex Tracey?’ Powell asked, as he took off his coat in the hallway. ‘You should have been a private detective with that name.’

  ‘Well. I do find things out,’ Rex replied, for perhaps the eight-thousandth time in his life.

  They sat in a bright front room decorated with black-and-white photographs and Ikea nick-nacks. It was a thoughtfully laid-out space, very male, with its leather cushions and silver orbs. Powell didn’t wear a wedding ring, Rex noticed, as he poured out Darjeeling tea. They could also have had Earl Grey, Lapsang, or half a dozen fruit and herbal blends. A neo-Nazi van driver who offers you a choice of teas. The world was changing.

  Keith Powell seemed to think so too. ‘We’re well aware this country has been built upon waves of immigrants,’ he said earnestly, his hands mimicking the open, ‘trust me’ gestures of a certain recent Prime Minister. ‘We’re not challenging that. And we’re not trying to pretend there’s any such thing as a pure white Englishman. All that rubbish was deconstructed decades ago.’

  Deconstructed? Rex had rolled his eyes before he’d had a chance to restrain himself.

  ‘I didn’t always drive a van, you known,’ Powell said. ‘I was a teacher. Up in Corby. History and PE.’

  Rex had already noticed the bookshelf on the far wall, stuffed with popular history: the Reformation to the Rolling Stones. ‘So what happened?’

  ‘Too much form-filling and liberal fascism.’

  ‘Liberal fascism?’

  ‘As in, I can’t tell a black lad to take off his Bob Marley cap because that’s infringing his human rights. As in, I’m not supposed to be in a room on my own with a female pupil. As in –’

  Rex stopped him. This all felt engineered, fake. The variety of teas, the big words. The fact that Powell’s front room smelt of cigarettes, but he wouldn’t smoke, and there were no ashtrays or lighters to be seen. He wanted to disguise certain things, yet he couldn’t hide the angry glee with which he warmed to his theme. The sense of injustice, the use of home-made terms like ‘liberal fascism’. And how quick had he been to mention blacks?

  ‘You’re called the British Workers’ Action Party. What kind of action are you talking about?’

  ‘Not the kind of action you’re thinking of,’ Powell retorted. ‘This whole thing started out just me and some local lads, working blokes, meeting up in a room on the Lanes, to talk about things. We never wanted to be a party, as such, just a sort of informal pressure group.’

  ‘So what changed?’

  ‘The fact that every third shop around here sells Polish sausage.’

  Rex laughed derisively, but Powell joined in, as if they were sharing a joke. ‘Don’t quote me on that. But we’re being swamped, aren’t we? Every school round here is stuffed with kids from Eastern Europe, who can’t speak English and won’t learn because they’ll probably only be here six months. We haven’t got room for every single person who wants to come here.’

  ‘But you’re not really talking about all the other immigrants, are you? Your leaflets target people from the eastern bloc and the former Soviet Union. And you’ve just said yourself that these are mostly short-term visitors. So why not let them do what they want, and go?’

  ‘Because they’ll be replaced by others. We’re not a transit camp. Some controls have to be placed on it all, and if the government is reluctant to do it, then people have to fight.’

  ‘Fight?’

  ‘Through public debate.’ Powell was interrupted by a bleeping sound from upstairs. He stood up. ‘Sorry, someone’s sending me a fax. Must have run out of paper.’

  ‘I didn’t know people still used them.’

  ‘We buy supplies from Rumania.’ He shrugged, and turned round at the door. ‘Mention in your article that my company does business with Eastern Europe. We even have a Polish girl on reception. This isn’t about xenophobia.’

  ‘Spell that for me?’ Rex said. Powell responded with a smile, and a good-natured V-sign, as he ran upstairs. Rex was surprised. How many people flashed the V’s nowadays?

  He drifted over to the walls. The photos were self-made, executed with a real feeling for light and shade. All lonely seaside scenes, with a complete absence of humans. Powell’s artistic world seemed to be a coastline, ravaged by wind and sea, under threat from barnacles and other pitiless invaders. Maybe that extended to his politics, too.

  He moved over to the bookshelves, and thought it would be funny if there was a copy of Mein Kampf in there. Then he saw that there was, which he didn’t find so funny. There was a piece of paper sticking from the top of it. He pulled the book out. It belonged to Corby Central Library. The slip of paper was a letter from the Probation Service, dated a month ago, its language so bloated with jargon that it was all but impossible to understand. The gist, though, was that Keith Powell was a ‘probation ser
vice user’, attending monthly meetings with his ‘probation service provider’ at an address just off the Archway Road. So Powell had form. And he had a copy of Mein Kampf. Not that possession indicated belief, of course. But still…

  Rex went into the bright, spare bathroom – the bathroom of a single man, he decided, from the position of the loo seat to the peppering of stubble in the basin. But then, on the way out, he saw in the waste basket a tube of aloe vera foot gel, and a couple of cotton wool pads. The sight of them gave him a quick stab of nostalgia for Milda and the strange, fragrant detritus she left behind whenever she spent the night. Did Keith Powell have someone like that? Or was he just a Nazi who looked after his feet? It was important, perhaps, if you were going on marches all the time.

  ‘You a bit of a scooter boy?’ Rex asked Powell. He was in the little hallway, looking at the green fishtail parka on the coat-hooks as his host came back down the stairs.

  ‘I restore vintage Lambrettas, actually.’

  ‘Just restore them?’

  ‘The best ones are like vintage wine. You don’t ride them. You just have them. You into scooters?’

  A scooter, of some sort, had very nearly been into Rex that morning, but he didn’t say so. In any case, he had no idea what a Lambretta looked like.

  ‘I’ve kept thinking I’ve seen you before somewhere,’ Powell went on, as he opened the front door. ‘Now I remember where. You drink in the Victoria Stakes, don’t you?’

  Rex inclined his head slightly. He was there sometimes. He was in most pubs sometimes.

  ‘I’ll buy you a pint if I like the piece,’ Powell said as he saw Rex out.

  ‘Erm. Yes,’ was the best Rex could manage. He wondered whether Powell was profoundly stupid or dangerously clever. Did he imagine they were friends now?

  ‘Just one thing,’ Rex said, turning round just as Powell was about to shut the door. It was a trick he’d seen on Columbo. ‘Where did you say your group had its meetings?’