A Death at the Palace

by M. H. Baylis

  ‘My fault. I should have given you more of a steer,’ Rex said, glancing at Susan’s original Fifties school clock. ‘We’d better get cracking. And Ellie?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘If you’ve got any questions about editorial policy, never ask the editor. That’s what Brenda’s for.’

  * * *

  Ninety minutes later, Rex was polishing the main article, while Ellie finished an interview on the phone. She’d already been onto one of the ICU nurses at the Middlesex, and discovered that Victim Three, alias Marina Krelkina, the book thief, was showing signs of improvement. Now, she was talking to Dr Nicky Pryce, consultant psychiatrist at Pentonville Prison, and from the sounds of things she wasn’t letting him go.

  ‘So he’s collecting trophies, that’s what you think, and there’s a strong possibility that he’s rehearsing for something bigger…’

  Rex smiled. She was good: keeping Pryce on the phone, letting him enjoy the conversation, at the same time as wringing him for all the droplets of printable information she could extract. It was almost ruthless, and all the more impressive for being something she did naturally, without training. Or perhaps it wasn’t without training. Maybe drama school had done her some good.

  Another paragraph slotted onto the page, and Rex allowed himself another check of his phone, another glance at his inbox. It contained a curt missive from Diana.

  Explain yourself. Salisbury. 8.30.

  No sign-off. No kisses. But a chance, all the same.

  His smile vanished as Terry returned from downstairs and tossed him another jiffy bag. Brown this time. No stamp or postmarks. Just REX written in marker pen. ‘Gonna open it?’

  Rex didn’t reply. He knew he was being stupid. But a mysterious envelope, at that moment, promised no joy. It was a creaking door, a summons. He couldn’t help but see it that way.

  He tore it open and examined the contents. Inside, packaged in gaudy cellophane was a pair of black, rubber handcuffs. Not the kind the authorities used. Sexy Handcuffs, said the lettering on the packet. Part Of The Tie ’n’ Tease Range. There was no note.

  Terry chuckled. Rex felt oddly relieved. The doubting was over. He wasn’t imagining things. Someone was trying to spook him.

  ‘I reckon your bird’s forgiven you,’ Terry said.

  Rex shook his head. This wasn’t Diana. Not her style. But someone’s way of sending a message. Or part of one, to be studied and decoded in conjunction with mopeds and wheelchairs. And whatever nastiness might come next.

  ‘I’m beginning to think someone’s got it in for me,’ he said blankly.

  ‘Well, that’s because you’re a twat,’ Terry said, returning to his desk. ‘And it’s your turn to do a tea-run.’

  As he went down the stairs, it occurred to Rex that he should take care when he crossed the car-park. Then it occurred to him that it wouldn’t matter. The next thing would be different, predictable only in that he could predict nothing about it. The thought frightened him, as undoubtedly the sender of these signs intended.

  But why? Who wanted him scared? As a journalist he crushed toes and accrued grudges all the time, of course. The recent difficulties with Ellie and with Terry were just tiny fragments of a stream of wreckage, boxwood splinters in the ongoing tsunami of his life.

  This was the work of someone creative. Someone who communicated in metaphors and symbols. The only person he knew like that was Milda.

  Brenda wasn’t at her desk when he went by, but the book she’d been reading was open on the counter. It was called Living With A Violent Man, and it clearly wasn’t a work of fiction. The sight of it briefly distracted him from his other worries. Brenda normally read novels about badly-used girls in 1920’s pit villages. This wasn’t her thing at all.

  He was about to pick up the book when the outer doors swung open, making him jump. Aguta came in, cat-eyes flashing, smelling of hairspray.

  ‘Ok listen, I’ve gone to Milda’s house, right, and one of those boys there said she isn’t there, and Vadim’s not there, but he said he thought Milda gone home to see her mum.’

  ‘Hang on. Who said that?’ Aguta’s English seemed to be suffering alongside her heart-rate. In the meantime, Brenda had returned from the toilet and installed herself behind the desk, stowing the book out of view.

  ‘That boy in squat!’ Aguta replied irritably. ‘But then, listen, so okay, I went to internet café, on a Skype, I talked to sister. Milda’s sister, called Niela,’ she added stonily, in case he was thinking about stopping her flow again. ‘She told me Milda hasn’t come home, nobody expecting her, they don’t know anything from her.’ She came to a halt, breathing hard.

  ‘So why would the boy in the squat tell you she’d gone home?’

  ‘The boy in the squat said to me Vadim told him that,’ Aguta replied, firmly and precisely. ‘And now Vadim has gone as well.’

  Gone somewhere on an aeroplane from Stansted, Rex thought. And he didn’t want me to know. Before he could say anything, the doors went again and Susan walked in. She didn’t even glance at Aguta.

  ‘Is the piece ready?’

  ‘Not quite, I’m –’

  ‘You’ve got twenty-seven minutes,’ she said, glancing at her watch.

  ‘Susan. Jesus. Why are you treating me like some office junior with an attitude problem?’

  She clipped up the stairs without answering. Rex looked at Aguta. ‘I can’t help right now. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Tonight?’

  ‘Tonight it’s…’ He was about to make an excuse, but changed his mind. ‘Aguta, look. Milda and I aren’t even talking to each other these days, and I’ve got a lot on my plate.’ He thought about the handcuffs, upstairs in his desk. If they were from her, what could they mean? Stay away? Free me?

  He was about to suggest that she call Milda’s sister again and find out the last time they’d heard from her. Or she could go back to the squat and find out when Vadim was expected back. There were a lot of things she could do, but before he could mention them, Aguta had left.

  * * *

  Powell was right. The area was changing. Being invaded, even. But, Rex reflected as he sat wedged into a tiny corner of The Salisbury, it wasn’t incomers from Eastern Europe packing out the bar and drowning out his thoughts. It was people who couldn’t afford to live in Islington. Already, the pub had started doing Scrabble Nights and slightly serious quizzes; at the table next to him, a trio of achingly pretty young women was discussing where to film an episode of ‘Law and Order’.

  He remembered trying to explain to Milda why he loved this area. Why even its bleaker sights – the listless, smoking men outside the snooker halls, the African shops with no stock beyond ten yams and a case of condensed milk – were as vital to his soul as trees and birdsong to a country-dweller. Why he no longer wanted to live in a place where everyone looked and dressed and spoke like him, even though that might have been safer and quieter. He was never sure Milda had understood why the people around him mattered so much. She was interested in the world, but less in its people, more in its patterns and arrangements of colours. And so, so many times, a thought would cross his mind, and she’d see it on his face, and ask him to explain, but he’d end up saying, ‘Nothing’, because the effort of explaining it, and having it then not understood by her, seemed too much. Their relationship hadn’t ended, but fallen into silence, like a pair of travellers approaching their destination.

  He realised he was sitting in the very seat where he’d first kissed her. That wasn’t ideal. Here he was, moving on, supposedly. Telling her best friend she was none of his business any more. Telling himself it had just been a fling, a spring and summer – inappropriate, but fun. But still Milda was everywhere. In every corner.

  His worries disappeared as he felt a gentle tap on his shoulder. He turned with a smile.

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Not the girl you were expecting?’ Susan said, with a dry smile. She’d changed into a new outfit, he noticed. ‘I wondered if you’d
got time for a quick one with Bilal and myself?’

  She indicated a handsome young man at the bar. Bilal was the Assistant Press Officer for Haringey Council, and a rising star of the local Lib Dems. A serious man, with seriously good suits, because his uncles imported cloth from Ankara. And an orange-juice drinker. Rex shook his head.

  ‘I’m sorry to read you the Riot Act today,’ she went on. ‘The copy was great.’

  Rex shrugged. ‘I haven’t really been switched on lately, you know, but…’ He held out a hand, as if reaching for the brighter future. Susan nodded.

  ‘Share some of that talent with Ellie. She deserves it.’

  She wandered off, leaving Rex to wonder if Susan, and indeed all women of her type, had a designated day and a night perfume. Then she came back. ‘If you’re thinking of staying and soaking, I wouldn’t,’ she said. ‘They’re doing Scrabble in about ten minutes.’

  The Scrabble came and went, in fact, as did another pair of pints, without any sign of Diana. She was either paying him back, or unavoidably detained. The solution, of course, was to ring or text. But something held him back: a sense that he deserved her to be late, or not show up, and didn’t have the right to ask about it. He was also certain that, whether she came or not, he wanted more to drink – a desire which necessitated a swift trip across Green Lanes to the Nationwide cash point.

  Football was afoot that night – to be precise, a match between Trabzonspor and Fenerbahce – and the jubilant fans of one or other team were tooting their way down the Lanes, waving flags from the windows. It looked like a revolution might have done, seen from street level: happy and hopeful and altogether rather fun. And, Rex thought as he picked his way across the busy road, markedly less boorish than the English way of celebrating sporting triumphs.

  As he crossed back with fifty quid in his wallet, he was beeped at by a big silver people-carrier. He assumed it was carrying more Turkish football fans, so he gave it an awkward wave, passed in front of it and carried along his way.

  But it slowed down. A window wound down.

  Rex speeded up, but the people carrier kept pace with him. Somebody wanted something. Another bit of intimidation? Jesus. Not today, he thought. Not after everything else.

  ‘Were you going to stand me up again?’

  Diana was in the front of a big taxi, it emerged, seated next to a grinning Somali driver, with a huge pouch of qat bulging in his left cheek. The back of the vehicle was filled with Ikea bags.

  ‘I thought if you were showing up this late you’d need a very big drink, so I went to get more money.’

  ‘Good. I’ll have a very big vodka tonic,’ Diana said. ‘Sorry I’m late.’

  Rex made a sort of Gallic de rien gesture and went back into the pub, spirits renewed. He jostled his way to the bar counter, but it didn’t really matter where he stood. The Salisbury, as Diana’s Uncle Lawrence had so often pointed out in his columns, was a classic Victorian corner house, and boasted the longest bar in North London. Out of some inverse logic, the management only ever employed one, angry girl to cover said bar. By the time he’d managed to attract the girl’s attention, Diana had come to stand with him.

  ‘That nice driver’s going to take all my Ikea stuff to my house and leave it down the side. Can you believe that?’

  ‘I didn’t know you were going shopping.’

  ‘To be honest, I hadn’t planned to, but I had a shit day, and I needed cheering up before I…’

  Her voice trailed off, and he caught a look in her eyes that told him she’d said too much, and knew it. Why would she need cheering up? Because meeting him would probably make her feel worse? Or because she wanted to be on good form when she met him? Rex decided not to ask. ‘You went to Ikea to cheer yourself up?’

  ‘It’s lovely in there!’ she said, rather loudly, touching his arm. ‘There’s never anyone around at tea-time. You get yourself a plate of meatballs and a glass of red for a fiver, and you come out with new glasses and duvet covers and chopping boards for the cost of a couple of cinema tickets.’

  Rex said he’d never thought of it quite like that.

  ‘Then you get a Somali-Cab back home, and those guys are all super-bright, they’ve got the World Service or Radio Four on all day and they’re high as kites on that stuff they chew, so you have a lovely conversation with them. Trust me, Rex, it’s a treat, Ikea.’

  ‘Perhaps we should have met there.’

  Diana spotted a couple leaving a table and she swooped over to bag it. She seemed breathless, nervous, even anxious. And why had she gone all the way up to Edmonton if she knew she was going to meet him? He began to wonder if this drink was a good idea.

  As the barmaid brought the drinks over, he suddenly had a clear line of sight across the bar. In the crush on the other side, he saw a familiar face. By the time he had worked out who it belonged to Keith Powell was disappearing into the Gents. Not alone, but in the company of two bull-necked, shaven-headed men in casual sporting gear.

  Rex left the drinks at the bar and followed the men into the toilets. Powell was cropping up too much today – in the picture Milda had made, in the new, inflammatory posters. And the camera. Could Powell really be the one who’d given Milda a camera? He had to know.

  You are hitting middle age when you start to notice the quality of public lavatories. Rex had long thought that The Salisbury’s were a shining example of the genre. Original door handles, oak panelling, ribbed glass and big, vitreous wash basins. To piss in there was to take part in local history. Maybe Lawrence Berne should put that in his column.

  The trio didn’t spring apart as Rex walked in, but they looked as if they had. To confirm the general impression of wrong things afoot in that chilly, fishy place, Keith Powell gave him a wide, eager grin.

  ‘Who are these?’ Rex asked, noticing that one goon had a horizontal groove across his nose, whilst the other sported a vertical one down his chin. ‘Your Media Team?’

  The Media Team glared, whilst Powell did his best to look hurt behind his chunky media spectacles. The hurt look lasted all of a millisecond before he gestured to his two companions and they headed straight back out through the door. As they did so, both hand-dryers switched on, whistling like jet engines.

  ‘They didn’t stay long,’ Rex observed.

  ‘Are you running that interview tomorrow?’ Powell asked casually.

  ‘We felt your organisation was good enough at getting its own publicity,’ Rex replied, leaning up against the noisy hand-dryer. ‘And making publicity out of tragic events.’

  Powell shrugged. ‘Like you, we have to respond to the news.’

  ‘Or make the news.’

  Powell snorted. ‘You think we’re the ones attacking the girls? Why don’t you think about about the lorry-loads of Rumanian sex offenders showing up here every day?’

  A boy in ripped jeans, a lumberjack shirt and an exquisite set of Edwardian facial whiskers came in at that moment, and made his way across to the urinals. Rex suppressed the urge to smile, and then saw that Powell was doing exactly the same thing. This was the man’s trick. Making you think he was just the same as you. It was sinister.

  ‘Seen Milda lately?’

  If Powell was surprised, he didn’t show it. ‘No, actually. How do you know her?’

  ‘How do you?’

  ‘I met her at the café.’

  ‘Swapped photography tips, did you?’

  ‘Erm…’ Powell looked genuinely confused now. ‘I don’t think so. We were just, you know… she worked in there… I ate in there. We have our meetings there, so… We talked sometimes. Why?’

  ‘So you had your meetings in there, where you and your pals discussed chucking out all the Eastern Europeans, but somehow, in spite of that, you struck up a little friendship with one of the Eastern Europeans serving you your bacon sarnies?’

  ‘It wasn’t like that. We’re not talking about chucking anyone out.’

  ‘You’re fond of Lithuanians, then?’


  ‘Individually,’ Powell replied coldly. ‘Yes. Can I go now?’

  Rex wasn’t in Powell’s way, but he stood aside just the same. Powell stalked out, letting the door slam.

  By the time Rex had retrieved the drinks and found Diana, she had her arms folded and had torn a beer-mat into a dozen very small pieces.

  ‘What took you so long?’ she asked, ignoring the drink.

  ‘I’m just very bad at getting noticed by barmaids.’

  She didn’t smile. This wasn’t looking good.

  ‘I’m just going to say what I’ve got to say and get it done with, okay?’

  ‘Okay.’ This really wasn’t looking good.

  ‘I know it wasn’t you who made those phone calls. I mean, I don’t know who it was, but I believe you when you say it wasn’t you. Sorry.’

  ‘It’s okay. I’m sorry I stood you up.’

  ‘I don’t want you to be sorry. I just want you to be straight with me…’ She took a deep swig. ‘I get the feeling you’re not really into this. I mean – there’s always something going on. You make an arrangement, but you don’t show up. Or you show up late. Or you show up on time, but you’re thinking about something else.’

  She had listed three types of failure. And they’d only been out four times. This relationship – if it could ever have been called that – was slipping away in front of his eyes.

  She took another drink. ‘I can’t work out if you’ve got some terrible secret, or you’re just not that bothered. And you know, I’m not sixteen any more. I don’t want you in my handbag. I don’t want worshipping. I just want to know, that when you’re with me, you do actually want to be with me.’

  Rex took a long pull of his drink and stood up. ‘Come on.’

  She frowned – her eyes flashing – in that moment, no longer a Jewish GP from East Finchley but a tribeswoman of the Negev. ‘Come where?’

  ‘I do want to be with you,’ he said. ‘Really. But I need to show you something.’

  Chapter Four

  There had been holy women on Muswell Hill since pagan times. There was an underground stream that fed a well, and its water, so legend told, had once cured a travelling chieftain of the scrofula. Around the place there had arisen a shrine, its original caretakers transforming into nuns as the new faith spread around the land, and the mossy well became known as Muswell Hill. The Sisters of Saint Veronica of Jumièges now counted this spot, high up above the Tottenham marshes, as their own. Encircled by trees, invisible except from the top deck of the 144 bus, the religious house was a mystery to many a long-standing resident of the area, and those who caught a glimpse of its lichen-covered tiles from the terrace bar at Alexandra Palace usually thought it had something to do with the park groundsmen.