A Death at the Palace

by M. H. Baylis

  ‘I don’t think I did,’ Powell replied smartly. ‘But by all means mention it. Everyone’s welcome to our meetings. Tuesday evenings. Eight till ten. In the Good Taste Cafe.’

  * * *

  When I went to the surgery, I found it eerily quiet, as if some trace of the horrifying events still lingered in the air.

  ‘Ellie!’

  Rex’s voice rippled the stillness of the early evening office. The Whittaker Twins continued murmuring into their headsets. Ellie looked up briefly, then went back to typing, smiling and talking softly into a mobile cradled between her chin and her neck. Rex saw the logo of her favourite social networking site on her monitor. He felt a trembling in his jaw.

  ‘I’m sorry, yeah?’ Rex almost shouted into the mobile he’d just snatched from his colleague. ‘But Ellie’s got this, like, thing to do? Called a, like, job?’ He slammed the phone down on the desk. Ellie’s perfect, almond-shaped eyes were wide. He knew he’d gone too far.

  ‘That was assault,’ she said hoarsely. She glanced around for support, but no one was looking.

  Rex ignored her. He tried to calm down. ‘I need to talk to you about this piece, Ellie, it’s just…’ The word wouldn’t come. ‘You’re not writing a ghost story.’

  Ellie looked sullen and said nothing.

  ‘And you never write a news report in the first person. You know that.’

  ‘Dr Shah?’

  ‘What do you mean, Dr Shah?’

  ‘He’s the first person in the article.’

  Rex stared at the tiled ceiling. She wasn’t thick, he knew that. The very opposite. But how did you get four ‘A’ levels, get through three years of a degree at Bristol, followed by a year of NCTJ training here in London and still not understand the difference between florid Victorian-Gothic prose and a few paragraphs for the local rag? How could she not know what the first person was? He knew what he’d sound like if he opened his mouth, so he didn’t. Interpreting his silence as some sort of scheduled break, Ellie picked up her phone again and started texting. Rex glared in teeth-grinding silence. After a while she looked up.

  ‘What are you getting in such a state about?’ she said, letting her hair fall over her face in a sulky curtain. ‘You expected me to mess it up. That’s why you called the Surgery before I even got there. And guess what? I did. I messed it up. So now you can write the piece yourself, can’t you?’

  Ellie’s voice had started to wobble before the end and her eyes filmed over. Before Rex could answer, she had fled from her desk into the toilets. She’d started a drama degree before switching to journalism. Perhaps it had been the wrong decision.

  ‘A word.’

  Susan summoned him from across the office. Loud sobbing emerged from the Ladies.

  ‘Ellie is an extremely bright young woman, Rex.’ Susan closed the door and topped up her mug with green tea, all silently. She sometimes appeared in Rex’s dreams as a ghost – slender and dark and exotic, like a long-dead Byzantine princess. ‘Yes, she is,’ she added, seeing his face. ‘And the only reason she isn’t flourishing under your tuition is because you undermine her. Whenever she speaks, you get this pissy, bored look on your face.’

  Rex sat up in his chair, aware from the way the accent had shifted from Boston Old Money to New Jersey Dockyards that this wasn’t one of Susan’s chats. It was one of Susan’s bollockings.

  ‘If I didn’t know you better, you know what I’d say? I’d say, “Ellie’s a kid who’s going to go places. Rex – he’s been places. And that’s why he has such a problem with her.”’

  Rex started to speak, but she interrupted. ‘But I give you more credit than that, Rex, as a professional and a human being. You know what I think? I think Ellie is a young, intelligent and attractive woman, and for reasons that have been obvious to everyone in this office since the start of the summer, that’s the kind of woman you’re angry with right now.’

  ‘That’s psycho-twaddle, Susan.’

  ‘You’re not over Milda, Rex,’ his boss said. ‘You’re still very hurt. And I think you should go back for some counselling.’

  They’d worked together a long, long time, here and elsewhere, but sometimes he didn’t like this intimacy, this reminder that Susan knew so much about his past. ‘I’m planning to sleep with my GP,’ he said savagely. ‘Does that count?’

  ‘Cheap. Have you seen Milda lately?’

  ‘No one seems to have seen her lately. She’s not at the café anymore.’

  ‘How do you feel about that?’

  ‘I don’t care! She was the office temp. We had a fling. All right, more than a fling. A relationship. But she left. We split up.’

  ‘What about Syb? Have you seen her?’

  ‘Syb kind of picks up on my mood. And I don’t like to upset her.’

  Susan smiled. ‘So you admit you’re in the sort of mood that upsets people.’

  ‘Sod off,’ he said, but more gently.

  ‘Play nicely, Rex. Ellie’s an okay kid.’

  ‘She sends bloody text messages while I’m speaking to her!’

  ‘None of which bothered you at all when Milda was around.’

  Rex opened his mouth and closed it again. She had him there, and it annoyed him.

  ‘Tell yourself it was just a fling if you like, Rex. But you looked happy. Happier than I’d seen you in ten years. You made Milda happy, too.’

  ‘Well – thanks for reminding me what I lost.’

  ‘I’m reminding you because I want you to give yourself time to get over it. Admit it mattered. Admit you’re hurt. Grieve!’

  ‘Susan. Jesus.’

  ‘Your Keith Powell interview’s good,’ she said, suddenly swerving onto a new topic. It was typical Susan style. Rex imagined the scene in her head to be a continuous, hurtling ticker-tape. ‘Very funny. I’ll put it in if there’s room, but just so you’re clear, I’m not making any spurious link to the two attacks up at the Palace.’

  Before Rex could answer, the door had opened and Ellie had come in, her face blotchy and streaked.

  ‘Rex?’ She spoke in a theatrical whisper as she handed him his phone. ‘I thought it might be urgent.’

  ‘Rex Tracey.’ He stood up and took the phone out of the office and into the stairway, which smelled as ever of toast and radiators. ‘Hello?’ At first there was no reply, then a voice crackled on the loudspeaker, startling him.

  ‘Rex, it’s Mike Bond.’

  Mike Bond was Brenda’s husband, a Detective Sergeant for as long as anyone could remember at St Anne’s nick, and a font of valuable information for the paper. The staff lived in fear of the day Mike retired.

  ‘What have you got for me, Mike?’

  ‘Another girl’s been attacked at Ally Pally. She’s in the North Middlesex.’

  ‘Does she have a name?’

  Bond ignored the question. ‘Poor kid. Same as the last one. Well – not the same, actually. Worse. A lot worse…’ He cleared his throat. ‘Lithuanian, we reckon she is, this time.’

  Rex’s heart squirmed. ‘A name, Mike?’

  He was out of the door before Bond had finished struggling with the name.

  Chapter Three

  The North Middlesex was a place under permanent siege. Burly Congolese security guards paced the corridors, and a complex one-way system was in place, so that no one could get from the A&E entrance into any of the consulting rooms or the wards without being escorted or entering a PIN code. This might have had something to do with infection, but it had more to do with people.

  Rex knew the system well. He loathed the place, but the job took him here at least once a month, more when the weather was fine and the gangs spent more time on the streets, disrespecting each other. In spite of all the precautions, he was able to wander unaccosted into the Intensive Care Unit. There were no nurses: machines did all the looking-after here, machines in three, large-windowed rooms, arranged in a horseshoe around a tiny lobby. He didn’t need the posters – in English, French, Turkish, Somali, Kurdi
sh, Bengali, Urdu and Albanian – to tell him to wash his hands and put on a gown.

  Each of the three rooms housed a body, but Rex knew instantly which one to look at. Through the observation window he recognised the cello-like curves of the shoulders, the narrow waist, a wisp of her almost brass-coloured hair. Seeing this hair on the hospital pillow, as he’d seen it so many times on his own pillows, he knew that Susan was right. He still cared. He hadn’t come here on the trail of a story; he had come because Milda had carved out a space inside him, because he still cared about her, even if they weren’t and never would be together.

  He took a step inside the room. She’d never been big, but now, surrounded by all the tubes and the hissing, bleeping machinery, she looked tiny, like a premature baby. She must have been badly hurt to have ended up here, and he could see a heavy white dressing covering one side of her head. But she faced the other way. And he knew that he had to look. He moved round the bed.

  ‘What are you doing? Who are you?’

  A stout, furious nurse filled the doorway, a plastic hat covering her afro like a cloud.

  ‘Hey! I’m calling Security. Who is this man?’ She voiced her thoughts, an African trait, he had noticed. ‘Where is that policeman?’ She bustled out of view, all crackling apron and outrage.

  ‘You don’t need a policeman. I’m –’ Rex’s voice faded away as he saw the face on the pillow. The bone white skin. The orange stain of the iodine. The rust-brown of the dried blood. So many colours. Like the fruit and veg outside the grocers. He heard muttering in the corridor. Was the nurse talking to someone, or just herself?

  ‘Rex. You’re not supposed to be in here. What are you doing?’

  At the sound of his name, he glanced away from her, to the voice in the doorway. Even in the cap and gown, Mike Bond looked like an old policeman.

  ‘I thought…’ Rex was shaking. ‘I thought it was her, Mike.’

  * * *

  The tea tasted somehow like the women who served it: of face-powder, lavender and lilies. There was no currently no cafeteria at the hospital – Lawrence Berne had, in fact, offered a ditty on the subject to the Gazette, beginning with the couplet: ‘I fancied a bun or a teacake/After they’d checked out my prostate.’ In place of the normal facilities, some ladies from a church in Barnet served hot beverages and flapjack from trestle-tables in the waiting area. Rex sipped his drink gingerly, then put it under his chair as Bond appeared, carrying a blue, plastic sack. He was a big man, with a heavy, jowly face and white hair whipped into tight waves, like something from an ice-cream machine.

  ‘This was the book,’ the policeman said, easing his bulk into a chair and pulling from the sack a pale, green, cloth-bound book with a Lithuanian title. This was sealed inside another bag for evidence purposes, but Bond let Rex handle it. The bag was big enough to allow him to open the book and see Milda’s name inside, in her handwriting. She’d written, typically, in fountain-pen. Somehow this book of hers had ended up in the hands of that forlorn creature in Intensive Care.

  ‘That’s the only thing we’ve got with a name on,’ Bond went on, pulling another, plastic-shrouded item out from his sack. The next item was a dirty, fabric handbag with a flower-print. There followed various of its contents: a paintbrush, lip-salve, a railway ticket from Leyton High Road, and a torn envelope. Rex read the words on the envelope out loud. ‘Hodja Nasreddin.’

  ‘Someone you know?’

  ‘He’s a sort of Islamic folk character,’ Rex said, absently, staring at the fragment of envelope. ‘But look – that’s an ‘N’ underneath it. It’s part of a postcode.’

  ‘An Islamic folk character who lives in North London.’

  ‘There used to be a restaurant with that name, just off Newington Green. It’s a squat now.’ Rex sensed rather than saw Bond’s raised eyebrows. ‘I went there once with Milda.’

  ‘Brenda said you were seeing one of those girls,’ Bond said, gathering back the bagged items. ‘But I didn’t know her name. I’m sorry. That must have been a fright for you.’

  Rex shrugged. ‘We split up, actually. Back in July…’

  ‘Never exactly the sort to stick around, are they?’

  Rex looked at him. ‘Who aren’t?’

  Bond lowered his voice. ‘An awful lot of these Eastern bloc girls are just here for trouble.’ He jerked his crenellated hairdo back in the direction of the wards. ‘That one certainly was. You only had to look at the clothes she was in. You know what I mean.’

  ‘What was she wearing, Mike? A t-shirt that said Please Throttle Me and Pull Out A Chunk Of My Hair?’

  Bond sighed, as if Rex were being deliberately obtuse.

  ‘He did worse than that this time. He cut out a chunk of her scalp the size of a sardine tin.’

  ‘He scalped her?’

  Bond nodded. They were both silent for a while, until the policeman tapped the cover of the book. ‘You’re certain this is your girlfriend’s book?’

  ‘I’m certain my ex-girlfriend wrote her name in it,’ said Rex slowly. ‘It’s her name. It’s her handwriting. And she always writes in fountain pen.’ She does everything carefully, he wanted to add. Wants everything to look beautiful, even if it takes hours to do it. Bugger all use as an office temp, of course.

  ‘So there’s a good chance she knows that kid in there,’ Bond said, jabbing a thick thumb in the direction of the wards behind him. ‘How can we get in touch with her?’

  ‘I’ve been wondering the same thing myself.’ Rex gazed morosely around, at the peeling walls and the curling lino. At the posters, executed in vivid, third-world graphics, proclaiming the wisdom of hand-washing and the dangers of an infant’s cough. Why did he have to spend so much time in this place?

  Later, outside, in a breezy car park surrounded by garment factories and lock-ups, Rex rang the office.

  ‘It’s not Milda,’ he told Susan.

  ‘Thank God.’ He heard Susan relaying the news to other people behind her, then murmurs of relief. ‘We’ll talk later. Do you want a drink?’

  ‘I’ll call you.’

  ‘Ok. And Rex?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you know where Milda is?’

  ‘No. She’s not at the café. No one seems to know where she is.’

  ‘I’m going to contact the agency she came through. Someone should be warning all these girls not to walk through the Palace.’

  As they got in the car, Bond went through all the things that had happened to the girl now in the ICU. She’d been found unconscious in the grounds of Alexandra Palace, with strangulation marks to the neck like both of the other girls who’d been attacked up there. The scalping, though, was a ghastly new departure – neat, almost workman-like, it had exposed the skull beneath. She’d had a small brain haemorrhage, and now they were worried about sepsis in the wound. The girl was seriously unwell.

  ‘You reckon it’s the same person behind all three attacks?’

  Bond sighed, shifting a box of rubber gloves off the dashboard and stowing it on the back seat. ‘Don’t know. Seems likely, though. Maybe pulling their hair out wasn’t giving him enough of a thrill. Maybe he can cut them quicker.’

  ‘Or slower,’ Rex added. ‘Sick bastard.’

  ‘Still no nasties, you know, down below,’ Bond mused, with a policeman’s mix of callousness and delicacy. But he went on to add that the buttons had been undone on the third girl’s jeans, as if perhaps the attacker had been on the verge of something, but been surprised.

  Bond gave him a lift to the crossroads, where Green Lanes hit the North Circular. It was right next to the squat where Milda lived. Rex pointed it out before he left the car, but Bond merely took a note of it and drove on.

  He wanted a drink. There was a pub over the road, which over the years had undergone countless changes of management and design, without ever becoming any more attractive. Now it was calling itself a ‘Polish Sports Bar’. Rex just wanted a dark corner, out of sight, where he could drink steadily, from re
lief and sadness, but mainly from memories.

  Ten years ago he’d stood next to another bed like that, seen another broken girl, possessed and violated by all the equipment that kept her alive. Bond’s final words on the subject, before they’d switched to holidays and roadworks, swung in and out of his mind, like an ancient church bell. ‘If she gets through the next 48 hours, they think she’ll be all right,’ he’d said. ‘In one way, at least.’ The girl he’d watched a decade ago had turned out all right, in one way. Desperately, heart-breakingly not in so many others. He wouldn’t be able to cope if that happened to someone else close to him.

  A bus went by, carrying another bright-blue sign for the Eazy-lets agency. The sight brought a thought to the surface: the third girl – because she was, without doubt, the third girl, now, part of a definite sequence of events – had had a railway ticket from Leytonstone in her bag.

  And that gave her one thing, one unsettling, unthinkable thing in common with the other two girls. He didn’t want to address it. He also knew he had to.

  A quick call ascertained that the agency was open until 7 pm, and that Ilona Balint was still working there. He caught a bus back to Wood Green.

  The North London office of EazyLets was in between a Caribbean takeaway and shop that unlocked mobile phones, but didn’t sell them. At that hour, Ilona Balint was the only person in there. She was a tired-looking, metallic blonde, whose make-up almost, but not entirely obscured the natural beauty beneath. She came to the locked door, looked him up and down and asked him his business before undoing the catch to admit him. A coloured scarf did not quite hide the red marks around her neck, and a pale blue woollen hat announced, rather than disguised, the hank of hair Rex knew had been removed in the attack. He tried not to stare.

  ‘You want to register with us?’ she said stiffly, sitting down at the desk.

  ‘A friend of mine recommended you,’ Rex said. ‘Terry Younger.’

  Ilona Balint shrugged the shoulders of her pale grey business suit and flipped through a drawer. She was young, Rex saw, looking at her hands, but something had withered her. Was it the job? Hungary? Or what had happened at Alexandra Palace? She’d got off lightly compared to the last girl, but of course she wouldn’t see it that way.