A Death at the Palace

by M. H. Baylis

  ‘What you will do with those wades?’

  He glanced up, alarmed. The strange girl was there, in her short, printed dress. She seemed so pale and fresh. She looked like she was naked, with a dress on top.

  ‘Those…?’ He followed her gaze to the carrier bag. ‘The weeds! We call them weeds.’

  She gave a laconic shrug. ‘Strange language. You write one way. Say another.’ She shrugged again, and put on a passable imitation of a posh, clipped English voice. ‘What you will do with those wiiiiids?’

  He found himself smiling, forgetting how much she scared him. ‘I will give them to my rabbits.’

  Her eyes widened. ‘Why you do have rabbits? Do you eat them?’

  ‘I don’t eat them. I…’ He could scarcely explain it to himself, let alone to this funny girl with the grey-blue eyes and the camera round her neck. He pointed at the camera as the skies darkened above. ‘You’re still taking photographs?’ He was pleased that he remembered that. He’d had some worrying episodes lately – whole stretches of time lost. But he remembered the girl and her Russian camera.

  She reached inside her handbag. It was canvas, with Indian writing. He couldn’t understand why people did this kind of thing. On the bus, this morning, he’d sat next to a fat, ginger boy with Japanese letters all over his jacket. It didn’t make sense.

  ‘Do you want to see?’ She was holding out a wad of photographs in a thin, semi-transparent envelope. Her smell – of shampoo and soap – cut through the soil and the exhaust fumes. She frightened him. But he wanted to see the photographs.

  They sat on a bench and looked at them together. The woman who’d been pushing the wheelbarrow stared over from her plot. Other people walked past on their way out, and they looked as well. He found he did not care.

  ‘SuperSnaps,’ he said, glancing at the logo on the envelope.

  ‘Close to my house,’ she explained.

  ‘They’re everywhere,’ he replied, sifting through the pile. ‘And they’re cheap. They’re cheap because they’re quick. But look –’ He pointed out a detail on one of the photographs, using a soil-rimmed fingernail. ‘That’s a pebble-dash wall, isn’t it? A camera like yours could have captured every detail of the texture and the differences in the light. But it’s flat. See?’ She nodded, earnestly. ‘It looks flat because they use the cheapest, least reactive paper. They don’t care. Or this…’ He moved to another photograph: a fresh, busy portrait of a dreadlocked girl standing in a children’s playground.

  ‘It’s my friend, Birgita.’

  ‘And you composed it beautifully,’ he said. He watched as she seemed to unfurl at the word. Had he ever said ‘beautiful’ to anyone before? ‘The swing over here. The drunks on the bench on the other side. There’s so much motion. And the way her hair seems to go through the ladder of the climbing frame. Very clever. But see.’ He jabbed his nail at the top edge of the photograph. ‘You go to all that trouble, and they chop off the end of her hair for you!’

  She tutted as she took the photograph from him. Then she gazed at him, as if in wonder. ‘How you do notice this things?’

  He didn’t know how to answer that. He didn’t know why he noticed things. Sometimes, he wished he didn’t. He was going to say that it was because he was invisible himself. But that wasn’t right. At first, it was true, people tended not to notice him. But then they did. They noticed him, noticing them, and then they disliked him for it.

  ‘If you want to take good photographs, you need to control the developing process yourself. That’s why I’ve got a darkroom.’

  Her eyes widened, as if he’d said he had a giraffe in his garage. And then she said, in a quiet, little voice, ‘Could I use that darkroom please?’

  He felt as if her words were tickling him. He liked that she just came out and said what she wanted, as well. He wished all people were like that.

  ‘No, I’m sorry. My wife is sick and…’ What else could he say? How could he be with her inside his darkroom? Stand behind this milky, fragile girl, with skin so thin he could almost hear the blood washing through her veins, and look at the hair, neatly plaited over the neck and the plastic zip against the soft white skin and smell the smell of her? He knew it could not be done. ‘We’re not set up for visitors at the moment.’

  She looked so crestfallen that he nearly changed his mind. Then he had another idea. ‘There’s a Camera Club,’ he said, reaching in his jacket pocket for a pencil stub and a scrap of paper. ‘At Winchmore Hill library.’ He wrote ‘Camera Club, Winchmore Hill Library’ on the piece of paper. ‘They’ve got a darkroom for members.’

  ‘You are a member?’ she asked, taking the piece of paper.

  He almost smiled at the idea of him joining a club. For him, the word ‘club’ meant only turned backs and whispers.

  ‘It’s supposed to be very good,’ he replied. She gave a funny shrug, folded the piece of paper and put it carefully inside a compartment of her purse. There was a thoroughness about her that unnerved him. It was empty in the allotment now and the sky looked like a bruise. A breeze made his carrier bag of weeds crackle and he shivered slightly.

  ‘Rain!’ he said, pointing at the sky and gathering his things. He had an excuse to go now.

  ‘It isn’t raining,’ she said, blankly.

  And the rain didn’t come. The skies got darker, and the air seemed to swell with foulness. Back in his yard, the rabbits sensed danger afoot, snatching the weeds from his hands, and retreating with each mouthful to the safety of the dark, urine-soaked corners of their hutch. He didn’t know if it was the weather upsetting them, or the screams from the house.

  A locum GP had come just before tea-time, because the Fentanyl patches weren’t working anymore. Or rather, according to the GP, who was young and meaty-faced and hearty, the patches were still dealing with the ‘baseline’ pain, but because of the severe weight loss, and the way the larger tumour was now pressing on the nerves, Caroline was also experiencing regular ‘breakthroughs’. It was an odd word, he thought, as if there was something triumphant about this chorus of suffering that began, every half an hour or so, with a low, horror-struck gasp, before twisting her helpless body into a screaming arc and flinging it down again like an unnecessary flap of skin. The GP gave her a lollipop to suck. A painkilling lollipop. She was meant to keep it in her mouth, and the extra drugs would get more quickly into her bloodstream that way.

  From tea-time – it was ridiculous calling it that, of course, since neither of them ate or drank anything – to mid-way through EastEnders, the lollipop seemed to have done its job. She dozed while he pared the callous on her left big toe and filed the toenails. His mind drifted to the girl’s feet: how slender and long her toes were, how exquisite the U shape between her hallux and the second phalange. Caroline’s had been like that, once. No pretty girl, no beautiful woman ever thought she was going to die like this. Bedsores, incontinence pads, the stale smells at the far end of life’s hallway. Yet somehow, none of it shocked him at all.

  Later, he went out to see to the rabbits. The house was stuffy, but the yard was no fresher. The rain would not come. So he busied himself, feeding them more weeds, then changing their straw, and repairing the wire in the run. He never forgot the rabbits. By the time he’d swept the pile of sodden bedding and dung into a rubble sack, his wife was screaming again.

  He washed his hands, and went to the refrigerator, where the Doctor had told him to store the rest of the lollipops. They needed to be kept cool or the drugs inside them would deteriorate. ‘Lime, orange, cherry,’ the Doctor had said, handing them over. ‘Full set of traffic lights!’ He couldn’t decide what flavour to choose. The noise in the adjacent room told him that his wife wouldn’t care. Why would anyone who’d reached the point of needing these things care? And in that case, why had they bothered giving them flavours at all?

  As the next spasm came to an end, he switched off the tv, gently shifted her into a sitting position and unwrapped a cherry-flavoured lollipop.
r />   ‘Remember what he said. Don’t crunch it. Just let it dissolve.’

  She barely had the energy to keep it in her mouth at first. She lay on the pillow, head to one side, staring at the wall. But after a few minutes, the combination of the sugar and the drugs gave her a jolt of artificial vigour. She tried to speak. He told her to save her energy. But she tried again, the lollipop clacking against her teeth and the stick in her mouth seeming to beckon like a finger.

  So he took it out of her mouth and leant close. Her breath smelt of cherries as she said, in a whisper, ‘Kill me.’

  Chapter Six

  Of course, Dr Diana Berne had eaten many a lazy Sunday breakfast with a man before. Sitting together cosily in your pyjamas, with smoked salmon and bagels and a pot of strong black coffee was, for her, the very symbol of being in a relationship, and the thing she most missed when single. Weekends in Paris, dinners with ocean views: she liked those things, but she knew she could live without them. Sunday mornings were what counted, just another part of life when you were experiencing them, an aching hole when you weren’t.

  This particular Sunday breakfast wasn’t exactly filling the hole. Rex had gone to some effort, she could tell that: warm Turkish pide bread with black olives, salty beyaz peynir cheese and floral Cyprus honey. A classic Levantine breakfast, eaten on divan cushions in the narrow, low-ceilinged living room of his little house, with the French windows open onto the front yard. But instead of the Sunday papers, they were reading the autopsy report for Rex’s murdered ex-girlfriend.

  In a way she had asked for this. On Friday lunchtime, she’d seen the copy of the coroner’s file on Dr Shah’s desk – Milda had been one of his patients – and later that night, she’d rung and asked Rex if there was anything he wanted explaining. He’d accepted. Eagerly? Out of politeness? She couldn’t tell. There’d been loud Middle Eastern pop in the background, but she’d suspected he was alone, at home, drinking. And she wasn’t sure why she’d offered, except that she didn’t want there to be a bad atmosphere between them. But what did she want?

  Rex was angry today. He kept tearing his bread into little shreds and rolling into pellets between his fingers. The cause of his anger was the autopsy report.

  ‘Milda would never have taken heroin,’ he said, for the fourth time since she’d arrived. ‘I knew her. It’s rubbish.’

  The autopsy report said there were traces of injected heroin in Milda’s bloodstream. Diana had been surprised to read that. But then, she hadn’t known the girl. Not like Rex did. Or thought he did.

  ‘She used to come here and complain about the lads at the squat smoking skunk. She thought drugs were stupid. And that guy… the pathologist… I swear there was something weird going on there.’

  ‘You said yourself: Milda changed. You didn’t see her for months. You don’t know what might have happened.’

  Rex shook his head. ‘Never. She used to have a go at me for taking codeine. If she’d been some sort of smack-head, she’d have nicked them off me. They’ve mixed up the bodies. Seriously. That’s what I think.’

  ‘That can’t happen,’ Diana said, patiently. ‘Unpleasant things come out when people die. I’ve seen it so many times. Abortions, missing kidneys. It’s like opening someone’s diary.’

  Rex blinked, another piece of dismembered bread poised in between his fingers. Diana saw a slight trembling at the side of his mouth and worried she’d gone too far.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she added, more softly. ‘I know you still have feelings for her, and it must be hard, finding out drugs were involved.’

  He shook his head again. ‘I want to find out the truth. I don’t have any feelings except that. And anyway, drugs weren’t really involved, were they? Not as involved as some bloke covered in nitro-glycerine yanking out her hair and sticking his hands round her throat.’

  ‘It was sodium nitrite.’ She looked down at the report, and read aloud. ‘Strangulation. Traces of sodium nitrite in and around the bruised area of the neck suggesting deposits left by the pollex and digits of a smaller-sized, male left hand. In other words, whoever strangled her had the stuff on his hand.’

  ‘But what is it?’

  ‘It’s a chemical –’

  ‘Yeah, I got that,’ he said.

  She sighed. His house, two streets east of the tube station, was clean and bright and sandalwood-smelling – nothing like the chaotic binge-site she’d envisaged. But its owner was hung-over, red-eyed, looking for someone to have a go at. She wondered if she should leave. ‘It’s a chemical used for all sorts of things.’ She picked up the packet of beef salami from the table. ‘It’s in this, for a start. As a preservative. And it’s in fertilisers.’

  ‘So they’re looking for a left-handed, salami-eating farmer with an interest in ladies’ hair,’ he said. His mouth smiled, after a fashion, but his eyes looked as unhappy as ever.

  ‘I don’t think you’re being honest, Rex. I mean – she’s been murdered, and she was pregnant with your child. You and her were together. There’s no shame in admitting you feel something.’

  ‘I felt something for her once. Maybe not enough. Certainly not enough to make a baby together. All right? I feel guilty about that, so… I feel I owe something to her. I owe her the truth. That’s it.’

  ‘Maybe you’re never going to let yourself feel enough. For anyone. Because of your wife.’ Diana felt her heart beating fast as she said it. But it was, she knew, exactly what she felt. And why she’d come here today. Because she hoped she might be wrong.

  She thought he was going to be angry. But instead, he smiled, and bit into an olive. It was the first thing she’d seen pass his lips all morning. ‘My problem,’ he said, chewing slowly. ‘Is that everyone I meet thinks that. They think it, but it isn’t true.’

  ‘Maybe you should ask yourself why they all think that.’

  ‘I have.’

  ‘And what did you decide?’

  ‘They’re all a bit stupid, basically.’

  ‘Thanks.’ She felt her eyes filling up. She was angry with herself for it. Even angrier than she was with Rex. The rude, self-pitying prick. She grabbed her handbag from the floor, concentrating internally, on the next few moves. Tissues. Lip gloss. Leave.

  But before she could do that, there was a sharp rap at the front door, startling them both. Rex started to get to his feet. Diana nearly volunteered to go herself, but she quashed the impulse. Why did she always do that? Become the willing doormat?

  She took advantage of his departure to blow her nose. She heard high, urgent, female voices at the door and wondered if it was a group of gypsies. In her part of town, troupes of ankle-skirted, fierce-looking girls knocked on doors on Sunday mornings, proffering stray copies of the Big Issue and dishcloths.

  But it wasn’t gypsies. Rex came back inside, with two women and a little girl. The little girl, who seemed familiar to Diana, was dressed as a pirate. The women smelt of cigarettes.

  ‘This is Milda’s friend Aguta,’ Rex said. ‘And Milda’s sister, Niela.’ Diana couldn’t help looking with curiosity at the second woman, the sister of the girl Rex had loved. She was slight, dressed in a cheap red and grey tracksuit with bleached hair and big, hooped earrings. Her face looked hard, but her eyes were pretty. Milda had had those eyes, too: she’d seen them in the newspaper photos.

  ‘Why’s Doctor Berne here, Mum?’ the pirate girl asked. The child must be one of her patients, although Diana couldn’t remember her name, and Rex wasn’t bothering to introduce her. ‘Is he ill?’

  ‘No he isn’t,’ her mother – who had plum-tinted hair and a blue leather biker jacket – replied. ‘They’re… friends.’ She pursed her lips. The tracksuited woman glared.

  ‘I was just going,’ Diana said, with a tight smile.

  ‘Were you?’ Rex asked.

  She didn’t reply, just walked out through the French windows, crunching across the gravel. Rex caught up with her by the gate.

  ‘Diana. I wasn’t calling you stupid. I m
ean… I didn’t mean to call you stupid. Sorry.’

  She nodded. ‘I’ve got to go anyway. Really. I want to get home before that march kicks off.’

  Rex clutched the top of his head. ‘Fuck! The march! I’m supposed to be covering it!’

  His distress was so comical that she couldn’t help smiling. This sweetened the mood between them, making the moment of parting harder to arrange. There was an awkward pause. She decided to kiss him on the cheek at the precise moment – so it seemed – that he decided that he wasn’t going to kiss her on the cheek. She stumbled, there were a few, faltering words of goodbye and she walked back towards her bus-stop, cursing herself.

  She reached the end of Rex’s lane, where three roads met around an unkempt square of grassland. In the middle of the square, not drinking super-strength lager, not letting his bull mastiff do a shit, not kicking a ball or engaged in any of the other activities that traditionally went on there, there was a young man in a grey hooded top. She assumed it was a young man, anyway, from the height and build, but the face was obscured by the hood.

  He was doing exactly what he’d been doing when Diana had walked past an hour or two before. Standing with his hands in his pockets. Staring at her.

  She scanned the street ahead, reminding herself to stay calm. Bad things had been going on up at Alexandra Palace. But this was a residential street, a full half mile away.

  A very quiet residential street, though. Few people were up at this time on a Sunday. At the far end was a parade of shops: two grocers, an Afro barbers and a cab-rank. Normally there were people milling about, but now there was no one. She quickened her pace, feeling the man’s gaze on her, and not daring to check if she was right. Surely the grocers would be open. She only had to get inside one of them to be safe.

  She walked past a low, Art-Deco block of flats with abandoned mattresses and car parts scattered on its lawns. She crossed a road and turned around. The man had vanished.