A Death at the Palace

by M. H. Baylis

  He had no socks on, and his feet felt wet in his shoes. As he’d rushed to get out, Diana had said all the right things, made the right gestures. But her eyes couldn’t lie. And as he stepped away from the warmth of her flat into the sharp fresh night, they had asked one thing. Why? Why are you going? Because you ought to? Or because you need to?

  He didn’t know the answer. Milda was a lovely girl. She was young and beautiful, with a bewitching voice and an enchanting, old-fashioned manner. But he’d understood some time before they parted that finding something lovely was not the same as loving. He had not been able to love her. The gulf between them, composed of age and language, background and so much more, had simply made it impossible and yet, however starkly he put that point to himself, he could not let go. He couldn’t let go of Milda, just as he couldn’t let go of Sybille. Perhaps, he sensed dimly, he couldn’t let go of Milda because he couldn’t let go of his wife. No wonder Diana had had enough.

  Why did she have to be dead? Why had this man, this fragment of a person, cut the scalps of two girls, yanked the hair from the heads of two more and left all of them alive, but then taken the life of this one? Over the past few days he’d imagined terrible things happening to Milda. Usually, imagining something terrible happening meant it wouldn’t happen. But now it had. Something worse than he’d imagined.

  Bond returned and led him to an office where a tall Chinese-looking girl seemed to be packing the contents of her desk into a cardboard box. An odd occupation, Rex thought, at half ten in the evening. Behind the second desk, in a spotless, shapeless t-shirt, sat the elderly man who’d shown him Milda’s body. He introduced himself as Dr Clore, the pathologist.

  ‘We’ll cut her open tomorrow,’ he said, gruffly. ‘But it’s foul play.’

  Bond seemed to stiffen in his chair next to Rex. The girl openly tutted, as she put a photo frame in her box. Dr Clore took an almost savage slug from his coffee mug.

  ‘Bruising and redness around the neck,’ he went on, fixing his gaze somewhere between his notepad and Rex’s throat. ‘Ocular petachiae. Involuntary evacuation, 1 and 2.’ Now he looked, with bloodshot eyes, directly at Rex. ‘Meaning she’d pissed and shat herself. Standard signs of death by strangulation.’

  He broke off as the Chinese-looking girl pulled a white coat from the back of the door, added it to the pile in her box and started to leave. The box had once contained 48 disposable body suits.

  ‘You’re off, Bibigul?’ The girl didn’t reply. Rex wondered where the name came from. It didn’t sound Chinese. Dr Clore made a stab at standing up, but sat down again. His chair creaked. ‘Well, you know… wish you all the…’

  The girl had slammed the door before he could finish. Clore shrugged and took another drink from his mug.

  ‘We’ll know more tomorrow. But you know – they found her half in and half out of a bush, didn’t they, Mike? Someone must have stuck her in there.’

  ‘The “kid” was called Milda Majauskas,’ Rex said. ‘She was an artist from Klaipeda.’

  Dr Clore blinked slowly, like someone who was very tired, and rubbed his face. He had a stray lock of white hair, boyishly-long, and he shoved it back on the top of his head, before nodding, slowly, as if he’d got the point.

  ‘There are no immediate signs of forced penetration,’ he said, as if making a concession.

  At that moment, the wide and shining head of DC Orchard appeared round the door. His eyes widened in surprise and disapproval when he saw that Rex was in there.

  ‘Skip,’ Orchard said, jerking his head back, to indicate the need for a private word.

  ‘Girlfriend was she?’ enquired Dr Clore, tugging at a desk drawer, when Bond had left.

  ‘Sister,’ Rex said. He didn’t know why he said that. To get some reaction, he supposed. It didn’t work. Clore continued to pull at the drawer. Bond returned.

  ‘Better wrap it up there, gents,’ he said, rubbing his hands. Orchard came in behind him, fixing Rex with a cold glare.

  ‘How long had she been there?’ Rex asked the pathologist. ‘Who found her? Can you at least tell me that?’

  ‘Skip – this is seriously out of…’

  ‘Are you saying this looks different to the other attacks?’

  ‘Skip!’

  Bond put up a hand to silence his younger colleague. ‘I know. Come on, Rex.’

  Rex found himself being gently, but forcefully propelled out of the room, first by one pair of hands, finally by two. He felt as if he was under arrest.

  Had that been the case, of course, then officers Bond and Orchard would not have let Rex out of their sight. As it was, they couldn’t wait to get rid of him.

  ‘Should I try to get hold of her family or…’

  ‘We’ll do that,’ Orchard replied, tersely, as he keyed something into his mobile.

  ‘Best just go home,’ Bond said, avoiding eye-contact.

  ‘I’ll get in touch with you tomorrow, shall I?’ Rex asked, unable to disguise his frustration.

  Orchard looked at him. ‘We’ll be getting in touch with you.’

  Bond said nothing, but raised his eyebrows by way of faint apology for his colleague’s manner. Rex left. He caught a bus by the old Pumping Station they were turning into flats. The Chinese-looking girl from the mortuary was on the bottom deck, arms clasped around her box and the white coat neatly folded up on top. She was in tears. Wrapped up in his own thoughts, Rex didn’t speak to her.

  * * *

  As he walked up the stairs to the Gazette’s office the next morning, he noticed he was less out of breath and that his limbs ached less than they had done in a long time. He’d gone home and straight to bed, sober, and as a result, physically, he now felt pretty well. The same could not be said for conditions inside his head.

  When someone suffers a bereavement, the people around them behave in one of two, equally ineffectual ways. They either bombard the sufferer with sympathy, or they act as if nothing has happened. Within thirty seconds of appearing in the office, Rex had experienced both. Brenda, standing in a huge, mauve jumper at Terry’s desk, shot him a look combining terror and concern, as if he were an apparition, but one nevertheless in need of a cup of tea. Terry, for his part, went on calmly handing Brenda black-and-white contact sheets as if nothing had happened. But that pretence became impossible to maintain once Susan appeared on the scene.

  ‘Rex,’ she said, in an urgent whisper, which had the effect of making the entire office fall silent. ‘I want you to tell me…’ Her mobile began to ring and, in an unprecedented gesture, she switched it off. ‘I want you to tell us how we handle this.’

  She was wearing a sort of ridged, off-white trouser-suit with a wide belt, giving her the look of a heroine in a Greek tragedy. Rex felt annoyed with her. Why did she have to make this into a scene? Why couldn’t it just be what it was? Milda was dead.

  ‘Body of Girl Found in Ally Pally Park,’ he said, blandly. ‘Police suspect foul play. I take it you want a murder enquiry to be a lead story?’

  ‘It’s definitely murder?’

  ‘It’s not definitely anything,’ he said, suddenly angry. ‘I only know what the pathologist thinks. They’re doing the autopsy today, so in the meantime, we work on what we know and what the police will tell us, and we wait for the coroner’s report to… Why am I telling you this, Susan? You know what we need to do.’

  ‘And you intend to be the one doing it?’

  ‘For god’s sake, Susan. We went out for four months!’ Rex exploded. ‘I’ve been split up from Milda almost as long as we were together. Of course, I feel weird about it. Of course, I’m thinking this has got to be something to do with those other four girls. But I’m not going to take to my sick-bed over it. I’m going to get on with the story.’

  Susan eyed him for a moment, then handed him a leaflet. It was another one from the BWAP. How Many More? – it asked.

  How many more girls are going to end up dead in our parks? How many more attacks? How dangerous do our s
treets have to become before the government understands that uncapped emigration is turning parts of the city into ‘No-Go’ zones? If you feel like us, join us next Sunday at noon, at Duckett’s Common. March to the Palace.

  Rex was simultaneously stuck by several thoughts. The BWAP had clearly abandoned the calm logic of Keith Powell’s earlier pronouncements, in favour of tasteless, irrational scare-mongering. Who knew that Milda’s death had anything to do with ‘uncapped emigration’, as the leaflet erroneously called it? Who could prove any such thing? Unless they knew something Rex and the police didn’t.

  But one thought dwarfed the rest in importance. The BWAP had had enough advance knowledge about Milda to churn out a leaflet about her death. How had they known?

  ‘Are they actually allowed to put out shit like this?’

  ‘If they are, it’s a bloody cheek,’ Terry cut in. ‘Mate of mine got done just for having a gollywog on his van. Doing kiddies’ parties, he said.

  ‘I gather they are not allowed to put it out, no,’ Susan said, gracing Terry with a brief, chilly look. ‘They’ll face prosecution. But they’ll probably apologise and still benefit from the publicity. Anyway, do we starve them of oxygen or devote half the front page to calling them bottom-feeding scum? Discuss.’

  She turned smartly on her heel and went back into her office, listening to the message on her mobile phone. Rex sat next to Ellie.

  ‘Oxygen or bottom?’ he asked. Ellie smiled, but looked troubled.

  ‘The thing is. I mean – I’ve got absolutely nothing in common with those kinds of views at all. I mean, at all – I mean, my grand-dad’s from India and… But in a weird way, it’s like what they’re saying… it’s sort of happening… Or it could?’

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘I went to Eski Dostlar like you asked me.’ Ellie made a face. ‘What makes men spend their time in places like that?’

  ‘Their wives?’

  ‘Yeah well, they didn’t want to talk to me, but this one guy was in there making a delivery, and he said he’d have a coffee with me at the cake shop round the corner.’

  ‘I bet he did.’

  ‘He was totally old.’ Ellie said, rolling her eyes. ‘Like thirty-five or something. Anyway, he said it was all about cigarettes.’

  ‘Cigarettes?’

  ‘He said people buy cheap cigarettes round there, and they come in on the lorries from Turkey. But now, they’ve started coming in from Poland, and Lithuania.’

  ‘So the fight at the social club was about the illegal cigarette trade?’

  ‘He said that his uncle said it was about ten blokes – big blond boys from Poland or somewhere like that – came in and smashed everything up. And then this morning, I saw this, just over the road from my bus-stop.’

  She showed him a picture on her mobile phone. It was a recently opened Polish supermarket, rather badly stocked on the lager front, if Rex remembered rightly. The door had been boarded up and a single Turkish word spray-painted across the right-hand window. Sıçan.

  ‘Do we know when that appeared?’

  ‘Overnight, the owner said.’

  ‘Do we know what that word means?’

  ‘Rats,’ Ellie said, brushing a strand of hair behind her ear.

  Someone else had used that word. The mini-gangster who’d attacked him outside Ausra’s squat. He’d called the Eastern Europeans rats. Could someone have thought Milda was a rat, too? Something to be exterminated.

  ‘That’s not all,’ Ellie said.

  ‘Jesus. What time did you come in this morning?’

  Ellie looked annoyed. Rex was making too many jokes. ‘Sorry,’ he added. ‘I’m a bit – you know.’

  ‘Why don’t we go and get a decent coffee somewhere?’

  Rex would end up waiting a long time for a decent coffee, because just at that moment D.C. Orchard swung in as if in the closing scenes of a low-rent police show. He’d cut his neck shaving, Rex noted.

  ‘We’d like you to come down and answer a few questions,’ he said, just loudly enough for everyone to hear.

  ‘Is that the Royal ‘we’?’

  Orchard was so pleased with himself, he barely even frowned. ‘Is it going to be a problem?’ he asked.

  ‘I doubt it’s going to be a pleasure.’

  * * *

  ‘Autopsy found she was 15 weeks pregnant,’ Orchard said, sitting back and rubbing the back of his straw-blond head. From that relaxed position, he reached for his file and peered into it. ‘Explaining the presence of an appointment card at the Chase Farm ante-natal unit in her handbag.’

  ‘That’s why you turfed me out of the mortuary last night was it? You found the card then and now the PM’s settled it for you?’

  ‘You told my colleague Detective Sergeant Bond that your relationship ended in the first week of July,’ Orchard went on, ignoring Rex. ‘In other words, a little over fourteen weeks ago.’

  Rex took a deep breath, deeper than he ought to have done in the fuggy little interview room. It smelt of men and coffee.

  Milda had been pregnant.

  ‘Did you have intercourse in the final week of your relationship with Milda Majauskas?’

  ‘Intercourse with Milda Majauskas, or intercourse in general?’

  ‘Do you want this to get a whole lot more shit?’

  ‘We’d… we sort of tailed off.’ Rex could feel himself blushing. He stared into Orchard’s close-set, blue eyes and longed to thump him. ‘But we had a big row one night. And in the morning, we had, well, I guess I thought it was making-up stuff, but for her, it must have been a valedictory. That means goodbye,’ he added. Orchard gazed at him with unchecked hate.

  ‘So you had intercourse, and then you split up?’

  ‘No. We had intercourse, and breakfast, then she went to her job, and I went to mine, and she met me in the park at lunchtime and we split up. Parks are full of people splitting up at lunchtime, have you noticed that?’

  ‘And you never saw her again?’

  ‘We met up twice. Once by accident. Once because we arranged to. Neither particularly successful. Then I saw her on the top of a bus one night. Start of September. I sent her a text. She didn’t reply.’

  ‘What did the text say?’

  ‘It said: I just saw you on the 141 bus, hope you’re okay.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  Rex sighed. Orchard had heard him perfectly well. It was a text-book ploy to get him riled or catch him out, or both. Journalists did it, too.

  ‘I just saw you on the 141 bus, comma, hope you’re okay,’ he repeated.

  ‘Why do you think she didn’t reply?’

  ‘Moved on, I guess.’

  ‘You hadn’t?’

  ‘It took me a little longer.’

  ‘Is that usual for you? You find it hard to deal with rejection?’

  ‘I’d say that even though I invested less in the relationship than her, the age I’m at now made me feel it harder when it ended.’

  ‘Did you know she was pregnant?’

  ‘No.’

  Orchard stared, disbelieving. Another interview trick. Rex remained silent.

  ‘She’d never been pregnant before at any point?’

  ‘Not while we were together. We used condoms.’

  ‘So there’s a chance she wasn’t pregnant by you?’

  ‘I suppose there is, but I’d be surprised. She wasn’t like that. She was very… serious about relationships and that sort of thing. Anyway, I presume that pathologist has got some unpleasant way of telling whether it’s mine. Whether it was mine,’ he added.

  Orchard appeared to nod. ‘You say you split up in the park. But whose decision was it?’

  ‘I did it, because she wanted me to.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘If you don’t know what I mean, Detective Constable Orchard, perhaps you need to get out and have intercourse yourself a bit more.’

  Orchard didn’t even blink. ‘She told one of her friends she split up with you
.’

  ‘As she did. That’s how some girls are, isn’t it? They don’t want to do it, so they make the bloke do it by behaving so badly that he has to split up with them. Which friend did you speak to? Aguta?’

  ‘Behaviour including sleeping with someone else?’ Orchard asked, ignoring his question.

  ‘I doubt Milda was the kind who’d do that.’

  ‘But some women might? To be honest, I think you’re right. You can’t trust them.’ Orchard gave him what he clearly hoped was an encouraging, bloke-ish wink.

  ‘Jesus. So you think I’ve been attacking all these girls, do you? Building up to the big one? How do you explain the smoke?’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘One of the girls said he smelled of smoke. I don’t smoke.’

  ‘Which wouldn’t rule you out of killing Milda, and making it look like the work of someone else. Or being an occasional smoker as well as an occasional attacker of young women.’

  ‘Is that what you think?’

  ‘I’m not paid to think,’ Orchard said, unaware of the irony. Rex was not in the best shape to appreciate it himself. ‘For the moment, Rex, I’m just interested in your relationship with the deceased. Unless you’ve got something else you want to confess?’

  ‘Something else? I’ve got nothing to fucking confess. My relationship with Milda had run its course. We kept bickering and falling out over silly things. All she needed to do was be a bit arsey over one last little thing and it would be the final straw.’

  ‘What was it – the last little thing?’

  ‘A sandwich,’ Rex recalled, awkwardly, having forgotten that detail himself. ‘I fetched us sandwiches, and the girl put black pepper on both, and Milda had a strop about it and said she’d have to go hungry, because she didn’t want pepper.’

  ‘A sandwich.’ Orchard wrote it down. Rex suddenly remembered that a ‘Cuban sandwich’ had cropped up in his final, fateful argument with his wife. Was that meant to mean something? Or was it just another of life’s senseless absurdities?