A Death at the Palace

by M. H. Baylis

  Across the room came a salvo of Slavic curses. Kurva! Bletstva! Pashyal’ ti! Little Dovila giggled and looked up at her mother. But Aguta was silent, a tear rolling down each, perfectly made-up cheek.

  ‘He encouraged her to try heroin, and she ended up murdered in a park. As safe as we try to make this city, some people will come here, and they will find danger. So to those young people at home, in Lithuania, and other countries, who are thinking about coming to London for money and fun, we say, think about the other possibilities, too…’

  Orchard’s face gave way to an item about a man keeping a donkey on the balcony of a high-rise flat in Wembley. The tv was switched off, and there was general silence. Rex couldn’t believe what he’d just heard. It was like a manifesto for the now-disappeared BWAP. And no wonder they had disappeared. There was no need for them, with policemen reading out their mission statements on the lunchtime news.

  Was that what Powell had meant at the hospital? ‘This thing goes a lot further and deeper than I can tell you.’ Orchard was one of them. And now that Powell’s undercover investigation had stalled, people like Orchard could carry on unimpeded.

  ‘Do policemen talk like that in your country?’ he asked the person next to him, a thin, pretty boy with a knitted skullcap on. To Rex’s surprise the boy frowned and walked away. Had he offended him somehow?

  In the meantime, it became apparent that Aguta was in no fit state either to stay where she was, or to get home without help. Her daughter, Dovila, ten and bossy, helped her into her jacket, forced her to drink water, and painstakingly led her to the door. Then she turned an apple-cheeked face to Rex and asked, ‘What train do we get to our house, please?’

  He walked three doors down the road, past an off-licence and a tandoori, to the mini-cab office. He asked for and obtained a cab, established the identity of its driver and its probable cost – all without anyone addressing a single word to him in response. Was it rudeness? Indifference? Or just a kind of efficiency, in a city of so many tongues.

  When he got back, Birgita asked if he’d bought any cigarette papers, which he hadn’t. Why, he wondered, had Mark said she didn’t like him smoking, when she smoked herself? For that matter, where had Mark disappeared to with that fiver? The off-licence was only next door. But Rex had other things on his mind. Like getting the inebriated Aguta and her daughter into a taxi.

  The driver had his radio tuned to a jazz station, and as they drove slowly through the roadworks and drizzle, Rex felt as if they were in an advert or some painfully stylish movie. They’d only gone a short way along Green Lanes when the driver turned right.

  ‘This isn’t the way,’ Aguta slurred.

  The driver, a bird-like Sudanese in a heavy tweed coat, explained that most of Green Lanes was unpassable today. ‘Dig dig dig,’ were his exact words.

  Listening to Billie Holiday, they headed east into Stoke Newington, a land where council tenants, Hasidic scholars and tv producers dwelt uneasily side-by-side. There was a street where every shop sold cupcakes, or vintage clothing, or expensive retro toys. But the main high road – joining up with the old Roman route of Ermine Street as it headed to Tottenham – was markedly less chichi. There were bookies, several examples of what Milda had called ‘Irish Man pubs’, and a large, brightly-lit hall, where Yiddish-speaking women in wigs and flat shoes rummaged through bins of dried goods.

  A sign announced a burst water main ahead. The driver clicked his teeth and swung right again, taking them into the Hackney borders.

  Aguta wound the window down, and hiccupped. Rex gave her an Extra Strong Mint. Then he felt duty-bound to offer them to Dovila and the cabbie, leaving none for himself.

  ‘I got to sober up,’ Aguta said, shivering. ‘I promised to ring Niela.’

  ‘You’re in touch?’ Rex asked. Aguta responded with a shrug.

  ‘One thing I don’t understand,’ Rex went on. ‘What made her go home so suddenly? One moment she was going to come with me to tell the police about the email, the next she was flying home with the body.’

  Aguta shrugged. ‘Police rang and said they were releasing the body, so she just wanted to go.’

  ‘But that email might have been important. At the time, we thought it was.’

  ‘Important to us. Not to police.’

  ‘You don’t know that.’

  ‘If you come from our country, you try to have as little to do with police as possible.’

  He was about to say that British police weren’t like that. Then he thought about Powell and Orchard and the BWAP, and suddenly wasn’t so sure.

  ‘But Niela was staying with you, Aguta. Didn’t you try and persuade her to stay?’

  Dovila started to say something, but caught a warning look from her mother.

  ‘She was upset. I was upset. I don’t remember all the things that were said. It’s just… it’s finished now.’

  Aguta shrugged again and turned to stare out of the window, dead-eyed. Rex knew he would get no further. Besides, did it matter that Niela had had second thoughts about some stray email, now that the killer had been found?

  It seemed inconceivable that there could be a third obstacle on such a straightforward trip, but they’d only gone a short distance when they again ground to a halt. There were cars in front, behind, and some sort of drama with flashing lights up ahead. They were in a smart, tree-lined enclave of tall villas, whose inhabitants gazed nervously from their windows onto the grey council blocks beyond. Used to trouble, many of them were out in the road now, talking to their neighbours, pointing, commiserating.

  ‘Stop haunting me now. Can’t shake you nohow,’ Billie commented from the radio speakers. ‘Good morning heartache, here we go again.’

  Rex offered to walk ahead to see what was going on. His limbs ached and he wanted the air, even larded with exhaust fumes as it was. The flashing lights came from a police car, parked across the road. Next to it was a private ambulance. There was a light metal trolley in the driveway of a grand house, whose brick-built garage contained a car with all its doors open. In the driver’s seat, Rex saw a white haired man slumped at the wheel, then a young, pointy-featured policeman blocked his view.

  ‘I’m from the Wood Green Gazette,’ Rex said, before he remembered that was no longer true. ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘Car in garage. Dead bloke. Can’t you work it out?’ replied the policeman, in a not-unfriendly fashion.

  ‘That’s a Lincolnshire accent,’ Rex commented.

  The policeman’s face creased with pleasure. ‘Sleaford. You?’

  Rex knew how he felt. No one else ever understood. ‘Louth.’

  He glanced over the man’s shoulder. He thought of suicide as a teenage strategy, borne of an inability to see that things change. ‘What makes someone that age top themselves?’ he wondered out loud.

  ‘Maybe it’s the job,’ said the policeman. ‘I know I couldn’t stand it. All those bodies.’

  ‘What was he? An undertaker?’

  ‘A Forensic Pathologist. Name was Dr Clore.’

  * * *

  Noise bothered him. It always had. As a child, he’d once stuffed cotton wool deep into his ears to block out the sound of his foster mother’s coughing. A piece had got lost in there and given him an infection. But his hearing had turned out none the worse for it. It was extra sharp, in fact – another of the ways in which he noticed everything around him. Even now, when whole mornings and afternoons of his life vanish from his memory, he still saw and heard and smelt everything.

  At first he thought the singing was the woman next door. The tenant of a West African housing association, she was a sturdily built woman with a baby but no husband. They hardly heard a peep from her, except once a fortnight or so, when she cooked in her kitchen, and sang along to gospel songs on the radio. The singing annoyed him. When it came, he would pace up and down the stairs, opening and closing doors, flushing the toilet, hoping to drown it out with sounds that were under his own control, hoping too that the
woman would hear and be quiet.

  When it started, this hadn’t sounded like the woman’s songs, but he couldn’t imagine what else it could be, so he went into the hall and pressed his ear against the wall. The house next door was silent. He could even hear her clock ticking on the other side of the wall. But he could also hear singing. It seemed to be coming from higher up in his own house. He went up the stairs. It was coming from the bathroom at the back, looking out over the yard. He went in there and saw that the window was open. She had taken the gauze curtain down and must have washed it, because she was down there in the yard, in a pink blouse and a grey skirt, pegging the curtain out on the washing line. She was singing to herself as she worked. Nobody had ever sung in this house. Or any other of the houses he had lived in.

  He had no memory of her asking to move in, or of any conversation on the subject, but that didn’t mean it hadn’t taken place. Nowadays, when he tried to consider things too deeply, it felt like a drill skidding on a surface it couldn’t penetrate, giddy and dangerous. He just knew that the girl was here now. She washed and cleaned and cooked. He taught her to use the darkroom. Her photography was coming along. And if she hadn’t arrived when she did, he might have killed his wife. She had saved him, as Caroline once had.

  He had been very frightened of using the darkroom with her. One afternoon, not long after the funeral, he’d sat fingering the little lock of hair he kept in a Strepsils tin in a kitchen drawer, and thinking about his journey to this point, and he’d heard her upstairs, using the toilet, and been afraid. She was so soft, so pale and delicate – like the girl in the hospital bed, like the silver, dew-frosted spider’s webs he used to find on hedges when he was a boy. So perfect he needed to take a stick and thrust it through them. He felt afraid that he might do that to the girl, one day, in the close, tight dark of the dark-room, pick up something heavy and smash it down on her, just because she was so perfectly made.

  As he stood here now, looking down on her, he couldn’t believe he had ever worried. She knelt daintily at the washing basket, her long neck bent as if in prayer, then straightened with her underwear in her hands, and strung it out, piece by piece, on the line taking pegs from her mouth, singing and humming all the while. The scene was so beautiful, he wanted to take a photograph of it. He turned to go to the dark-room and fetch a camera, in his urgency knocking a slim bottle of shampoo from the ledge. Something – the noise, his movement – must have startled her because she glanced up and stopped singing. He withdrew into the shadows. The moment was gone, but he would always have it in his head. Whatever else went, he would always have the pictures inside his head.

  * * *

  ‘It’s been there for years. How can you never have seen it? It’s about half a minute away from your office. And it’s in between an off-licence and a pub.’

  ‘Not my office any more,’ Rex said, ignoring the alcoholism taunt.

  ‘Anyway, it’s called Sri Krishna Vegetarian Restaurant…’

  ‘It’s vegetarian?’

  ‘I’m giving up meat.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’ll tell you when I see you. You are going to show up, aren’t you? You can hardly use work as an excuse.’

  ‘Nothing ever stood between me and a bowl of mushy cumin-flavoured vegetables. I’ll see you at 12.15.’

  Dr Diana Berne hung up. Rex felt encouraged. Given where they’d left things, even an early vegetarian lunch was an augur of promise.

  But in the meantime he had somewhere to go: the Famous Manti Shop on Green Lanes. He’d discovered after some judicious – if fraudulent – calls that this was where Bibigul, the late Dr Clore’s one-time assistant was now working.

  Rex stood outside and looked in the shop’s window. She was in the window, at a low table, with a woman either side, rolling out dough and turning it into little parcels. Manti were everywhere: mandu in Korea, momo in Nepal. Portable snacks carried by the Mongol horsemen across the plains from Ulan Bator to the heart of Haringey.

  Bibigul, fittingly enough, was from Kazakhstan. A highly qualified forensic pathologist who’d worked in Moscow and Hamburg, she was, understandably, bitter about her current role. She sat twitchily in her cap and apron at a little table at the back of the shop, aware, as Rex was, of her boss hovering nearby.

  ‘We had a case come in,’ she said, in quiet, clipped phrases that reminded him of horses’ hooves. ‘A baby. A cot-death. A mistake at the mortuary meant the parents couldn’t give the baby a proper burial. Dr Clore and the Director told them it was because there was a power failure in the morgue, so the body… uh… deteriorated over the Bank Holiday. Do you remember – that very hot one, at the end of May?’

  Rex nodded uneasily. It was hot in the shop, too – the charcoal ovens blasting smells of wood and lamb fat around. Not exactly the aroma you wanted when you were discussing cadavers.

  ‘But it was Clore. He was drunk and couldn’t operate the regulator. When I left on Friday for the weekend, I asked him if he wanted me to do it, but he shouted at me. He did things like that all the time. I wrote a letter to the parents. I thought they should know.’

  ‘And you were the one who got the sack.’

  ‘They didn’t sack me,’ Bibigul said, sharply, before the boss strode past for the fifth time. ‘They invited me to hand in my notice, and I did.’

  ‘Why do that? Why not report him? Take it to a tribunal?’

  She laughed faintly and shook her head. ‘You see this job? It’s not what I trained to do. But the boss here… He’s been here for thirty years, he’s got a house in Cyprus, because he makes good manti. If he stops making good manti, he stops making money. It’s not like that in pathology. Not for men like Dr Clore. He was old, and he was a man, and he knew everybody, all the professors and the judges, so it didn’t matter that he wasn’t good at his job anymore. He was at the top. And people like me can’t report or make tribunals because we are at bottom.’

  This final omission of the word ‘the’ had been Bibigul’s only mistake, as far as Rex could tell. That, and, possibly, leaving Kazakhstan.

  ‘He made a lot of mistakes? Not just with the baby?’

  ‘The last case before I finished –’ She shook her head. ‘I can’t say anything else.’

  ‘But who was the last case? Can you remember? Can you tell me that?’

  ‘It was the girl. That girl they had the service for. I remember, because they showed a picture of her on the news at lunchtime. And then at tea-time, the news said that Dr Clore had killed himself. I didn’t know he had a… what do you call it… a conscience, but perhaps…’

  ‘Why would he have had a guilty conscience about Milda?’

  She shook her head again, and stood up as the boss walked back their way. ‘Buy some manti. Please.’

  He went, with a box of minced-lamb dumplings and a leaflet offering 20% off his next purchase, and he sat in the library at Wood Green searching forensics sites on the internet. The browsing history had not been deleted, and he saw that the last user before him had posed the eternal question: ‘Where I can find free picture of naked lady?’ Some other goodly citizen of the borough of Haringey had, on the day previous, typed into Google, ‘if u hit sumbdy with a hamer on the head wil they die or do they jus like get a bruse?’ He was tempted to click on it, and see what advice Google had offered.

  As to his own forensic questions, little information was forthcoming. He didn’t have the autopsy report with him, and he was now no longer sure what to look for. Since Dushku’s arrest, he’d almost come to accept the idea that Milda had taken drugs with the Albanian Drifter, just as he’d come to terms with the idea that he had yanked out her hair and strangled her, for his own twisted little reasons. Clore’s suicide changed things, though.

  And there was no doubt: someone was trying to tell him something. Not just a simple ‘fuck off and die’; it was easy to get that message across if you wanted to. Whoever was behind all these symbols – organs, handcuffs, wheelchairs – wanted
him to know something important, something that could not be said outright. It had to have something to do with Milda. But what?

  Then again, driving a moped at him, or beating him up: these actions were hardly subtle or encrypted… Were they even related to the other stuff? Or the work of someone else, who also hated him?

  For the first time, sitting in the underheated, stale-smelling library, he admitted to himself how afraid he felt. How powerless. It was a physical, giddying feeling, like the one he’d had all those years back, when they told him Sybille would never recover. He’d been sick on that occasion, over some buff-coloured folders on the consultant’s messy desk. He felt sick now.

  He hurried out for some air, and when a couple of bored-looking PCSOs began eyeing him with interest, moved on for a wander through the labyrinthine weirdness of Shopping City. It distracted him and took his heart rate down, eventually.

  Built in the early Nineties around a disused railway station, Shopping City was six stories of glass, steel and discount, threaded together by steep, bare sided escalators from which you felt permanently on the verge of toppling. If Green Lanes was the old world, Shopping City was the new. A few, bewildered Turkish pensioners sat on the benches in the atrium in their caps and their multi-pocketed fishing vests, but everyone else in there – customers, staff, security – was very young, with a complicated hairdo and a diamante stud in at least one ear. The whole place glittered and shone – all of it, from the door handles on the shops to the quasi-military get-up of the security guards. But when you looked more closely, it had as much substance as a pub darts trophy. Everything was cheap. Much was counterfeit: a burger bar called Mad Donald’s, The Barbadian Muffin Kompany. The only shops that lasted were Boots and Primark: all the others – the one selling fussy baby clothes for Africans, the specialist in religious statues for the South Americans, the leather ’n’ studs outfit where Rex suspected Aguta had obtained many of her sartorial ensembles – these came and went. It was an illusion of Western abundance, frequented and staffed by people who were beginning to suspect they might have been duped. A year ago there had been riots throughout the borough. Shopping City had been attacked, windows smashed, fires started in the delivery area at the back. But nobody had stolen a thing. It was as if it wasn’t worth the effort.