A Death at the Palace

by M. H. Baylis

  There was a long silence while Bernadette eyed Ellie. Rex half-expected her to leap across the desk and eat her head first.

  ‘I don’t like swearing,’ she said at last. ‘And it’s only stupid kids who call the police the Feds. But that’s basically it, yes.’ She folded her hands together. ‘He clearly has a problem with girls. He knows he has a problem. In the past eight weeks, he’s been thrown out of two GP surgeries and an A & E unit, trying to get help.’

  Rex and Ellie looked at one another, thinking the same thing. Dushku had gone to the Surgery Diana worked at. Tried to get help there. If that piece had been published, maybe he’d have got it.

  ‘But what about the forensics?’ Rex said. ‘Sodium nitrite, used in exactly the sort of environment Dushku worked in, round Milda’s neck. Are you saying the police made that up?’

  ‘Sodium nitrite is used in all sorts of environments,’ replied Mrs Devlin. ‘No one is saying they made it up, but some people might say it isn’t quite the evidence they have made it out to be.’

  ‘And what do you say?’

  ‘My job is to find all the holes in their side of things, and make sure the ones in ours are as small as they can reasonably be.’

  ‘Why was he doing it? Attacking the girls, I mean. Has he given you any idea?’

  ‘Mr Tracey, I have no idea, and I don’t want one. I do know he had a job in a hairdressers once. I wondered if that might have something to do with it.’

  ‘But you must have a view on whether he murdered Milda or not?’ Ellie said.

  Mrs Devlin gave her a broad, menacing smile. ‘Another cough drop, dear?’

  * * *

  Around 3 pm, Rex found himself on a 329 bus, crawling up the Lanes to Southgate. The residence of Arthur Chapman, the winner of a brand-new tripod courtesy of Khan’s Electrical and Photographic, was his official destination. Less officially, he had the addresses of three individuals who lived within a ten-minute walk of Arthur Chapman’s house, within the N14 postcode and with the initials KP. There were forty-six people with the initials KP living in the N14 area, but these three would be a start.

  Spilt lager and schoolkids: the classic odour of an afternoon bus was in Rex’s nostrils as he cast his eyes over the list. He wondered what sort of a person Kyle Pinkerton might be. He marvelled at a civilisation that could confer on someone the public identity of Klianthis Panayiotopoulos. And he discovered, to his surprise, that the landlord of O’Mahoney’s Shebeen was one Krishna Prabhu. At length, he arrived at Southgate.

  With its chunky mansion blocks over rows of shops, it was less of a suburb, more like a Hertfordshire town that had been captured by the city. No flatbreads here, no shops selling amulets, just estate agents and chemists. Once Rex passed the commercial hub at the crossroads, he was immediately in a quiet zone of modest, between-the-wars semis. Trentino Gardens was remarkable only because it bore the name of an Italian province, whereas all the roads around it were named after shrubs. Arthur Chapman lived exactly half-way along, behind a front door with coloured glass panes. One red pane had a crack in it.

  He was a slight, elderly man with small eyes that were perpetually staring. Rex was shown into a clean, worn-out little house unchanged since the seventies. It smelt of old people: sweet and slightly stale, like cake. He was about to go into the front room, but Chapman suddenly blocked his entry with what seemed almost like panic, ushering him down the wallpapered hallway into the kitchen.

  ‘So, first of all – congratulations, Mr Chapman,’ Rex said, after a long pause in which he’d expected in vain to be offered a cup of tea. Mr Chapman, whose hair was so white and fine it was more like a faint halo, nodded solemnly, without any sign of pleasure. Nor had he shown any interest in the tripod Rex had presented him with: it remained uninvestigated in the Khan’s carrier bag on a kitchen chair.

  ‘We’d like a photograph of you with your prize, and we also need two negatives so that we can print a copy of your prize entry in the paper.’

  ‘Can’t you scan it in?’ Chapman asked quietly, for the first time showing interest in the proceedings.

  Rex hesitated. The man was quite right. The truth was that, for legal reasons which only interested Susan, sending two negatives had been part of the competition rules. The further truth was that Arthur Chapman had included the statutory two negatives along with his competition entry, but that somewhere between Terry, Rex and the Pamukkale restaurant, they had been mislaid. The highest truth of all was that Rex didn’t give a flying one about the negatives. They were an excuse to leave the office, and snoop around N14, so he could try to find out what had happened to Milda, and whether it had anything to do with the spooky messages and sinister parcels.

  ‘I think we do need them for copyright reasons,’ he said. ‘Sorry to put you out. I mean, I’m sure the ones you sent will turn up, but…’

  ‘They’re upstairs,’ Chapman murmured, staring at Rex as if he expected him to change into a butterfly. ‘In my darkroom.’

  There was another long, unnerving pause, during which the ticking of a clock in the hallway could be heard clearly. Rex looked out through the kitchen window into the yard beyond. What were those long wooden boxes? Rabbit hutches?

  ‘Could I have a look at your dark-room?’ he asked. ‘Perhaps we could take your photo in there?’

  Chapman nodded and headed out of the doorway. He moved silently. Rex followed him up a narrow staircase with an orange and gold swirly carpet. It was fixed in place with big ornamental clips, as his own grandmother’s had been.

  On the landing there was a mawkish painting of a little girl in a bonnet, and three doors, their once-white gloss paint turning yellow. Chapman opened the middle of these, and pulled a cord to switch a light on. Rex followed him in. Floorboards creaked beneath linoleum. At one point this must have been the box-room, or a child’s bedroom, but now, with the aid of a wooden screen, a blind, and some insulating material around the door-jamb, it had been converted into a darkroom.

  It was tidy, like Arthur Chapman himself. Obsessively so, with equipment on little racks, photo albums arranged in alphabetical order, no single item not in some symmetrical relationship to another. The room smelt of chemicals and dust, its bland, utilitarian look matching Chapman’s beige shirt and grey trousers. The old man, with neat, precise movements that for some reason Rex found unnerving, moved a buff folder out of the way in order to retrieve a little card index filled with negatives, which he then began to look through, slowly.

  Rex looked at the shelf of developing chemicals in front of him: white bottles with stark black writing, arranged so that each label faced the same way. Fixative. Emulsion. Stop-bath. Boric Acid. Silver dioxide. Sodium Nitrite. Rex read and re-read those five syllables. Milda had worn Guerlain on her neck. But she died with a different fragrance there.

  Used in all sorts of environments, Bernadette Devlin had said. Like photography.

  The light was dim, and his eyes began to hurt, peering at these little labels, so he glanced down to the bench, where some photographs from the displaced folder had spilled out. They were all versions of the image that had won the prize, some slightly broader or longer, with more detail in the frame. He moved the top photograph to look at the one beneath. Then, at the outer edge of the image, he saw a sliver of something that turned his heart into a jackhammer.

  Chapman coughed. Rex dragged his eyes away from the photograph.

  ‘Sorry.’

  Chapman held out a little strip of dark brown plastic – the negatives. ‘I’ll get you a sleeve.’

  He turned to a low metal filing cabinet. As he pulled out the drawer, Rex stuffed the photograph clumsily inside his jacket. It wouldn’t fit in the pocket, so he was forced to trap it next to his body and hope that it didn’t fall out.

  Chapman placed the negatives carefully inside the plastic sleeve, then attached a label and wrote his name and address on it in maddeningly neat capitals, before handing it to Rex.

  ‘Do you want to take your
photograph now?’ he asked. ‘Where’s your camera?’

  Luckily, Rex had left it downstairs with the tripod, so he headed downstairs, the photograph nestling in his armpit. Trembling and sweating, trying not to look at the rabbit hutches outside, he took two very bad snaps of Arthur Chapman standing in his kitchen, and left, promising the pictures would be in tomorrow’s paper.

  He’d got a few yards down the road, when he noticed he no longer had the photograph.

  Somewhere between the dark-room, the kitchen and the hallway, it must have fallen out. Chapman would find it. And he would know that Rex knew. That Rex knew he was KP. The rabbit man.

  * * *

  ‘Can I see Detective Sergeant Mike Bond, please?’

  ‘I’m afraid he’s gone,’ said the heavily-pierced boy on Reception.

  He was wearing eye-liner today, and an off-the-shoulder jumper with more holes than wool. The changing face of Tottenham nick.

  ‘What do you mean, gone?’

  ‘He had a heart-attack,’ the boy said, scratching one shoulder to reveal a shower of tattooed stars. ‘Do you want to talk to somebody else?’

  Rex stood for a moment and collected his thoughts. ‘When you say he’s gone, do you mean he’s dead?’

  ‘Erm… no,’ said the boy-receptionist. ‘He’s like, gone to the hospital in an ambulance? About an hour ago?’ He raised his voice, as if Rex were elderly and confused. ‘Do. You. Want. To. Speak. To. Anyone. Else?’

  Rex asked to speak to a member of C.I.D, as long as it wasn’t Detective Constable Orchard.

  ‘Ah, that’s cool, he’s gone as well,’ said the receptionist, smiling.

  ‘Another heart-attack?’ Rex asked.

  ‘Nah, he’s just, like, I dunno. Yeah. Gone.’

  At last he was ushered past the barriers to speak to a thin, benevolent-looking Welshman named DC Brenard. He was not much more forthcoming on the matter of DC Orchard’s unavailability, but he did sit down and take out a pen.

  Rex told him about the photograph he’d seen in Chapman’s dark room.

  ‘The photograph you don’t have any more,’ said Brenard, twirling a wedding ring on a long, twiggy finger.

  ‘I know. But it’s there. Somewhere. In his house. And I know that arm.’ Rex banged the desk as if the photograph was still in front of him and he could see the narrow band of his former lover’s flesh along the edge of the image. ‘And that watch-strap. It’s Milda. She must have ended up staying with Chapman.’

  ‘You’re referring to the edge of a watch-strap,’ Brenard said, after what seemed like much thought. ‘A watch you bought from a fairground stall at Clacton…’

  ‘I know. I know what you’re going to say. Lots of arms. Lots of watches. But then there’s the sodium nitrite. Around her neck. It’s used in developing photographs – Chapman had some in his darkroom. And Kishkis Pishkis. In the answerphone message. It means a rabbit.’

  Brenard held up a hand. ‘What answerphone message?’

  With a supreme effort of will, Rex marshalled his thoughts. He explained everything, while DS Brenard listened and took notes.

  ‘We will have to look into this,’ he said finally.

  ‘Who will? When?’

  ‘Trained detectives will, as soon as possible,’ replied Brenard. His tone was serious, but infuriatingly calm.

  ‘But he’s out there. She’s dead, and he’s free! What if he does it to someone else while you’re looking into it?’

  ‘Someone has already confessed to killing Milda Majauskas.’

  ‘And he’s now withdrawn that confession.’

  ‘In the meantime, since that person has been in custody, no one has been attacked. Which doesn’t mean we won’t be looking into this.’ Brenard gazed back at him. ‘Swiftly.’

  Rex felt his stomach clench. There was nothing he could do. It would take time. Some things in life just did. Justice was notoriously slow. Slow for good reasons, perhaps. And waiting was often the right thing to do.

  The trouble was that none of those good reasons mattered to Rex right now.

  * * *

  Early the next morning Rex, Susan, Ellie and Terry sat in the offices of the Gazette. Susan, as ever, was lily-fresh, but the rest of the team were pale and red-eyed with exhaustion. They had been up all night. Now Ellie was going through the plan one last time.

  ‘Taxi’s booked to pick up Chapman at 9.15 am. He’s been told to dress smart, and bring the tripod. Sabjit Khan is coming here for 9.45 in expectation of being photographed handing over said tripod to the competition winner Chapman. Terry will find himself unavoidably delayed by twenty minutes, and then once he’s here will come up with some suitable technical hitch to string the photo-session along a little more.’

  For all the fatigue in the room, there was an unmistakeable air of excitement. Rex had been amazed he’d convinced Susan to go along with his scheme. In the end, two things had swung it. The fact that this was for Milda. And the fact that it involved some intrigue. Susan had a light in her eyes, a light that hadn’t burned quite so fiercely since she’d manned the Times’ foreign desk during the fall of the Berlin Wall.

  That light was why Susan had driven to Chapman’s house in Southgate in person – or rather, as a ditzier, softer, weaker version of her normal person – to apologise that Rex’s photographs hadn’t come out, and invite him to a special presentation at the offices. To everyone’s surprise, Chapman had swallowed it, which could only mean that he hadn’t found the photograph. That, in turn, meant that once Chapman was out of his house, Rex could break in and retrieve the vital evidence.

  ‘Rex, have you spoken to your helper?’ Susan asked.

  ‘He’s meeting me at the end of Chapman’s road.’

  ‘Even if you can’t find the photo, take pictures. Pictures of everything.’

  * * *

  At 9.18 am, assured by means of text that Chapman had been picked up from his house, Rex turned the corner into Trentino Gardens. The day was grey and damp, cold as a morgue-slab.

  His man wasn’t there. Rex leaned against a bus-stop, lifting his bad foot a couple of centimetres off the cold ground. Was he really about to break into Chapman’s house? He felt oddly calm about the prospect. His fear was that he wouldn’t find anything.

  Vadim appeared, crowbarred into a dark brown suit.

  ‘Are you in court?’ Rex asked. It was what people said, in his Lincolnshire hometown, if they saw you in a suit. He wasn’t surprised to find Vadim understood the joke.

  ‘Disguise. Nobody notices a smart man at nine ’o’ clock in the morning,’ Vadim replied, with a crooked grin.

  They went to Chapman’s house and into the porch. Vadim rubbed his hands together and started work on the front door with its one cracked pane, whistling a little tune through his teeth. A postman had started making his way slowly down the road from the other end.

  ‘Have you done it yet?’ Rex asked, nervously, scanning the street.

  ‘When I’m in,’ Vadim hissed. ‘You’ll know it.’

  ‘That postman’s getting nearer.’

  Vadim stood up and stared down the street to where a chubby man in a tracksuit stood, peering at the front of a package. ‘He’s a casual. Look. No uniform. Doesn’t know who lives where. We’ll be fine.’

  He went back to work on the lock, armed with something that looked like an antique pair of forceps. These gave way to a knitting needle and finally, a paperclip, before the door gave a satisfying click – an event occurring just microseconds before the postman pushed the gate open. He stared at them, processing what he’d seen.

  Rex froze. They had been caught.

  ‘Okay, sweet-cheeks, I’m off to office, have lovely day.’ Vadim cried suddenly, kissing him on the lips. ‘Cook for me something nice!’

  With a cheery wave to the postman, he waltzed back down the path and out of the gate. The postman handed Rex some letters and scurried away, embarrassed. Rex went inside, closed the door, and leaned back against it, breathing hea
vily.

  Another text from Ellie: ‘Eagle landed yet?’

  Rex felt suddenly annoyed at how much his colleagues semed to be enjoying themselves, as if this were some kind of team-bonding Murder Weekend. But the corpse wasn’t going to get up at the end. The corpse was a girl he had loved. Just not, perhaps, loved enough.

  He wasn’t enjoying himself. Every new thing he had to do made him nervous. More than that, it took him deeper, further from the fun and games of his colleagues, down a tunnel of dark feelings and sights no one should have to see, and which he’d already seen once before. He wanted justice for Milda, a bright young woman who had come here with hope and been dumped in some bushes. He wanted to know who was threatening him, and why. But most of all he just wanted it over. He was tired.

  First he went into the front room, the room Chapman had seemed to be pushing him away from the day before. He was surprised to find a bed, no sheets or pillows, just a plastic mattress cover. Next to it was a pair of high-backed chairs – the kind only ever found in rest homes – and an old Strepsils tin on top of a coffee table. In the tin was a little swatch of hair. Rex stared at it with revulsion. It was the same colour as Milda’s hair. He forced himself to take a picture of it.

  There was nothing else in that stuffy room, around which hung the sweetish aroma of a medicine chest. He went directly upstairs to the darkroom and switched the light on. Scanning the work-top, he could see that Chapman had been up there and cleared the buff folder away. The photograph wasn’t on the shelf of albums. It might have been in one of the drawers of the filing cabinet, or the sturdy cupboard – but these were all locked. Perhaps it was lying around somewhere, not noticed by Chapman. But how much chance was there of that, with this man who lined up all his pencils to face the same way?

  He checked in the other rooms, half-heartedly taking pictures with his phone. Downstairs again, he scanned the kitchen cupboards and even the bin. Nothing. He sat on a kitchen chair, looking out onto the yard. What had Milda made of this place? Was it, with its faded, humble air, the big red torch on the shelf, the knives and forks draining in the little pot on the sink, a reminder of home? He doubted Milda’s home had been like that.