A Death at the Palace

by M. H. Baylis

  ‘He was very pleased with the place you found him in Leytonstone,’ Rex prompted. ‘The gated mews.’

  Ilona Balint narrowed her eyes suspiciously. ‘I let a place out last week but…’ She turned her attention to a bulging notebook. ‘Yes. There’s a Mr Younger on the tenancy agreement but I never met him. Only his partner.’

  ‘You’ve never met Terry Younger? Skinny bloke? Bald? Funny accent?’

  ‘I know the accent because he rang me to ask about parking space,’ she said. ‘But that’s it. I never met…’ She paused as Rex pulled a copy of last week’s Gazette from the nearby coffee table. Thanks to a recent edict of Susan’s, mugshots of all the team were now featured on the back page. ‘No,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘Never seen him.’

  ‘Oh. Well. He speaks very highly of the agency.’

  She stared at Rex coldly for a moment or two, then asked him to fill out a form. Rex was so embarrassed by the encounter that he did so, painstakingly, and then spent several minutes looking at pictures of one-bedroom garden flats in the Wood Green area. Had this been a stupid idea?

  He had answered that question in the affirmative as he reached the front gate of his house, with a newly-purchased bottle of raki in his hand. Someone had left something outside the gate, and the light down the lane was so poor that he almost walked into it.

  His stomach lurched when he saw what it was: a hospital wheelchair, cheap and battered, with a pole on one side so that a drip could be affixed. He pushed it aside and went in.

  With a glass in his hand, and the news on the tv, he reminded himself that people were dumping things and playing pranks around this area all the time. It was chock full of students, and a good proportion of them were training at the North Middlesex. Nevertheless, the sight of the hook-like tip of the drip attachment over the fence out of his window troubled him. He had another drink, then went out and pushed the contraption over into the next road. Someone else might be spooked by it in the morning. But not someone with all the reasons he had.

  * * *

  ‘Promise me you’ll do something about that foot?’ Brenda Bond said as he limped into the office. His tight smile in response only intensified Rex’s headache, but it was all he could manage. If he actually made a verbal promise, he knew she’d hold him to it. Every day Brenda brought a family-sized ice-cream tub of freshly-made rolls to the office with her. Most of these she ate herself, but the rest were forced upon those Gazette staff-members she thought were looking ‘peaky’. She now advanced the opinion that Rex was looking peaky, and invited him to approach the desk. Vast yet carefully dressed, bejewelled and coiffed, the paper’s receptionist and sub-editor reminded Rex somehow of a ship, or an island. She wore rings she hadn’t removed in ten years.

  ‘I didn’t know you could still get fish paste,’ Rex said, through a mouthful of roll.

  ‘You can’t,’ Brenda said, adjusting her towering hair-do. ‘That’s my rhubarb jam.’

  He went upstairs quickly. It was Wednesday. Deadline day. The paper came out tomorrow morning. Ellie was at her desk in a short, grey dress over an ivory-coloured blouse. The outfit, and her tied-back hair gave her a chastened, penitent look, as if she were making a new start. She also looked very young, and Rex resolved to make a new start with her, too.

  Susan stood in the doorway to her office, her back towards the staff. Some sort of new cyber-hub was being installed, an item which promised to simplify her life, but which everyone except Susan knew would only complicate it further. As if in prophecy of the chaos to come, polystyrene nuggets and cable ties had spilled out across the doorway, the rumpled shirts and waistbands of two baffled IT types could be glimpsed further within and even on the other side of the office, Rex caught the whiff of new plastic and sweat.

  Rex went through his morning routine: reading emails, listening to messages, checking his diary. A thin jiffy bag had come for him in the post, and he found that the anonymous unexpectedness of it made him nervous. He’d spent a restless night, reflecting on the way the day’s puzzles all seemed to relate to him. He knew that Milda’s disappearing act wasn’t his fault. Nor was he involved in the attacks up at the Palace, or Keith Powell’s gang of apparently reasonable racists. Yet somehow, because all of those things had been book-ended by a kid trying to run him over in a car-park and the wheelchair outside his house, they seemed to point back to him. He knew where this line of reasoning came from. He knew where it led, too, and he was afraid if it.

  He took a deep breath and slit open the envelope. It was a CD. From the makers of his new telephone. Featuring a new, upgraded Tutorial with bonus features. He shoved the thing in the bin. What kind of phone required you to have lessons in it?

  Luckily one of the Whittaker Twins wanted copy for an advertorial, the subject being SoTo, alias, South Tottenham, alias, the bit between Turnpike Lane and Seven Sisters, and why it was such an up-and-coming place for young professionals to invest right now in a two-bed flat with balcony and de Bouverie bath fittings. He rather enjoyed these assignments, the hyperbole of the local estate agents having reached such levels during the recent recession that nothing he could say would look out of place.

  ‘Hewn by artisans from the finest synthetic materials, this luminous new-build sits astride the mighty Philip Lane, basking in the reflected glory of a dozen kebab shops…’

  It wasn’t the copy he would give them in the end, but after a draining Monday and a rough night he was finding relief in a bit of silliness. Then he was interrupted by Ellie: she’d rewritten the Surgery piece and wanted him to take a look. This he interpreted, as a good sign.

  ‘Hunt For Surgery Attacker’ ran her suggested headline. Aside from the fact that the man hadn’t attacked anyone, and no one was actively hunting him, it was a decent, open-ended, story-still-to-be-told sort of headline. She’d laid out the facts clearly enough in her piece. An agitated, dark-haired man, unshaven, in jeans and leather jacket, had asked for an appointment at the GP surgery on West Green Road where Diana worked. On being told that he needed to be registered with the practice, he’d become violent. His accent was described as ‘foreign-sounding’, and his violence had frightened the Receptionist into pressing a panic button. But before the police had arrived, Dr Shah had come out of his consulting room and spoken to the man, who had then run away. Ellie’s piece included a quote from a terrified Turkish mother, who’d been in the waiting room with her asthmatic three-year-old son at the time. It also made a link to the overstretched mental health services in the borough. ‘Overstretched’ was a well-chosen word. To the sort of readers who sympathised with Keith Powell, it meant there were too many immigrants. To those of another mindset, it evoked images of exhausted professionals, accorded neither the respect nor the resources they deserved.

  It was a good piece. He wondered vaguely whether Ellie had been taking the piss with the last version. He glanced at her.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing. It’s a good piece. Spot-on, actually. Well done.’

  ‘Seriously?’

  Her face broke into the most artless, shy and touching smile. He almost felt like reaching out giving her a hug. Before this could happen, Susan was upon them both, phone in hand.

  ‘You’re here,’ she said, by which she meant that he had not been at some earlier, more desirable point. ‘Two hair-yanks and a scalping. It’s more than coincidence. I want to go big on it. Timeline, interviews with police, local women’s groups, maybe a psychologist…’

  Rex and Ellie both scribbled notes. ‘See if Ilona Balint and Magda will give you some interviews for page 2. Ellie – that could be for you. Well. You know. Divide it up amongst yourselves. And do we know if Victim Three has given any descriptions yet? What’s the kid’s name, anyway? Who was she?’

  ‘I’ve got a lead on that,’ Rex said. ‘But she won’t be giving anyone any descriptions for a while.’

  ‘What about the Surgery piece?’ Ellie interjected. ‘Rex said it was –’

  ‘Tha
t’s off,’ Susan replied bluntly. ‘A non-story. Okay? Let’s talk again after lunch. Oh, and Rex. I called that temp agency. No dice on Milda. Try and find the kid, will you? I’m only going to worry.’

  With that, she was gone. Susan’s flurries of energy could be annoying, but they were the reason everyone had a job. A former news editor on the Times, she’d combined some ancestral stock-options with two divorces and a redundancy pay-off to purchase this ailing local title before the owners closed it for good. National quality, local news was what it now said on the Gazette’s masthead, and that was the idea behind the whole venture. A local paper, properly done: all the usual ads and splashes but with real stories in between, a real attempt to get the readers involved in the issues that affected their lives. And nothing could affect their lives more directly than some freak going round attacking women.

  ‘I think she’s right about the victim interviews,’ Rex said to Ellie with a smile. ‘You’d be perfect for that. And you get on well with Maggs, don’t you?’

  Ellie stared at her screen, sullenly joggling the mouse.

  ‘Ellie?’

  She turned to look at him. ‘I worked all night on that piece. And she just spiked it like that. No discussion. Didn’t even look at it.’

  ‘That’s just how it is sometimes,’ Rex said gently. ‘My first boss always used to bang on about it.’ He mimicked the man’s lugubrious Midlands accent. ‘The news dussn’t stay still, Rix, and nor can we.’

  Ellie’s plump, oxbow mouth turned ever so slightly upwards. ‘He really used to say that?’

  ‘He had a cliché for every occasion. But he was right. It’s something you’ll have to get used to if you want to stay in this game.’

  Rex sensed that he’d blown whatever goodwill he’d managed to gain, but before he could retract his last words, his chair was swung violently round. His first thought was that Susan had been listening and was about to rebuke him for being patronising. But it wasn’t her.

  ‘Good morning, Rex.’

  Angry, dressed in her khaki suit, Dr Diana Berne looked like an Israeli commando. Rex suspected he was about to get the Gaza treatment. And he knew why. A fat book landed in his lap. It was something he’d lent her, about the temples of Angkor Wat. She had been going to give it back to him. Last night.

  ‘Oh God, Diana,’ he began. ‘Sorry…’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. I was on my way to a house-call, and I thought you’d want your book back.’ As her hand brushed chestnut curls away from her eyes, the bracelet on her wrist jingled with agitation. She turned to leave, but then said, ‘If you’d changed your mind, you could have called, or sent me a text, you know.’

  ‘I didn’t change my mind. I just… I had to chase a story and I… Well, I forgot.’ Rex felt himself going red. His mouth was doing him no favours this morning. Was he really a journalist, someone paid to put things neatly into words?

  Patches of red also bloomed on Diana’s cheekbones, but not from embarrassment. ‘Well, thanks,’ she said. ‘Thanks a lot.’

  She walked out, then turned back in the doorway.

  ‘I don’t mind you forgetting. It’s what you did after that.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You don’t recall the six silent calls between the hours of two and five this morning? You must have been off your head.’

  She left.

  ‘I never made any calls to you,’ Rex said lamely, to thin air. He glanced around. There was a look of blissful fascination upon Ellie’s face, like a spectator in the electrifying final moments of a tennis match.

  ‘Before you do anything on the lead story,’ Rex said, lashing down any nuances of vocal or facial expressions that might reveal his feelings about the foregoing incident, ‘I want you to come up with an idea for the competition, write the copy, and talk to the Whittakers about getting one of the advertisers to give the prize.’ Ellie opened her mouth to speak, but Rex held up a hand. ‘Do it. Mention nothing about what just happened. And I’ll let you do half the front page as well.’

  He left. From Ellie’s silence, he assumed they had a deal.

  He’d just stepped into the car park when someone grabbed him and hissed in his ear.

  ‘Cunt!’

  He felt himself pulled with savage force into the dank service alley at the side of the office building and slammed against one of the huge metal bins. His head connected with iron.

  ‘D-don’t!’ was the only feeble thing that could come out of his mouth, as his attacker lunged.

  ‘Don’t what?’ Terry spat. ‘Don’t fuck you up like you’ve fucked me up?’

  He pushed Rex away and now, for the first time, he was able to register what had happened. Terry had attacked him. He felt warm blood trickling down his neck from his head.

  ‘What have I done?’

  ‘My Missus thinks I’ve got debt collectors after me, or I’m living under an assumed i-fucking-dentity because I’m a kiddy-fiddler or something!’

  Rex snorted. It was the wrong thing to do. Terry grabbed him by the collar.

  ‘You think it’s funny?’ He pushed Rex away, white with rage. ‘That girl in the Lettings Agency. She’s been texting my Missus. Tells her you’ve been in the office, asking funny questions about me.’

  ‘I didn’t ask any funny questions,’ Rex said, shakily restoring his collar to its usual position. ‘I just said I knew you, and you’d recommended her agency, and I was looking for a flat.’

  ‘She didn’t believe a word of it! And why the fuck should she?’ A red flush crept upwards from Terry’s collarless stonewash shirt. ‘Because I never did fucking recommend it, did I? So what were you playing at? She thought I was being investigated or something.’

  Rex sighed. He had a choice. Lie, and probably come up with something even less believable. Tell the truth and get beaten up.

  ‘I thought it was odd that you had Maggs’ scarf in your car,’ he said, staring straight ahead at the side of the building. ‘And then you had a card from Ilona Balint in your wallet. The two women who were attacked, both had a link to you. So did the third one. She had a rail ticket from Leyton in her bag.’

  Terry’s eyes widened and then narrowed. ‘So you think I’m –’

  ‘Thought. In fact, never thought. Wondered. Worried. Looked into. It’s what I do, Terry. It’s my job.’

  There was a dreadful pause. Rex readied himself for the proper kicking. The longer the pause went on for, the more he wanted it over, and the kicking to start.

  ‘I always thought we were mates,’ Terry said, quietly. ‘Silly fucking me, eh?’ Then he walked out of the alley.

  * * *

  There was no longer anything green about Green Lanes, but the area at its southern end, Newington Green, still possessed a circle of land roughly that colour, with benches and railings. Attempts had been made to smarten this up over the years, with modern, brightly-painted play equipment, a little café for the parents, and a modern, automated toilet which people had dubbed the Cosmic Loo because of the way its fluorescent, junkie-deterrent lighting glowed at night. No attempt had been made to smarten up the local Brew Crew, however, who teetered glassily on a pair of benches by the western entrance, and gave Rex filthy looks because he was a man, in a suit, with a mobile phone in his hand.

  He wasn’t actually making a call. So far he had managed to get Diana’s number up on the little screen, but he was still weighing up what to do with it. A younger version of himself might have been pleased to have had this furious, curvaceous Jewish girl, with all her dark ringlets, turning up at his office and bawling him out. The present version had to admit he’d found it quite exciting. The difference was that now he knew there were real feelings at stake, in along with the drama. You didn’t get to being single and childless at their age – Diana’s birthday was a month after his own – without having had a fair deal of romantic trampling. She was slow to trust, he knew that, and his not turning up must have hurt. At the same time, you didn’t pull a scene like tha
t one in the office if you didn’t want a response. It had been more of a challenge, he felt, than a straightforward rebuke.

  ‘Wanker!’

  He didn’t look back. For a start his neck was aching too much from Terry’s assault by the bins. And if he didn’t look round, he could at least try to convince himself that the Brew Crew were shouting at someone else. Probably not, though, and maybe they had a point. Plenty of people seemed to think he was a wanker today.

  But Diana… Did he want her challenge? Why had he pushed her out of his mind so completely last night? Maybe it proved what Susan had said, that even if he no longer loved Milda, he wasn’t over the loss of her. In that case, was it fair to be getting involved with someone else? The task of getting to know Diana – more accurately, getting her to know him, with all his dark corners and conversation-stoppers – seemed long and hard. Too hard. But was that just nerves? Or nerves and laziness? He knew what came from doing nothing. Nothing.

  ‘Diana?’ – he was through to her voicemail – ‘Look, I’m genuinely sorry. Please let me make it up to you. Give me a call. And, you know, if you don’t, I’ll give you one. I mean – I’ll try you again.’ He took a breath. ‘And, just for the record, I was very drunk at four this morning but I never rang you. Honestly.’

  He’d meant to say more, but he was walking, and as he neared the squatted restaurant formerly known as Hodja Nasreddin, he heard shouts and bangs. Glancing up, he saw four or five Turkish boys, clad in the obligatory uniform of the North London street-villain, milling around the doorway. A girl with a nose ring and dreadlocks piled up on her head like a haystack was shouting, while one of the boys bashed the spray-painted metal shutters with a piece of wood. Rex stood watching a little way off, by the bins.

  ‘It’s my uncle’s restaurant,’ another boy was saying. ‘All you Russians got to pay me if you want to stay here.’ His sideburns, Rex noted, had been shaved into rococo swirls. As, in fact, had the sideburns and necklines of all his compatriots.