A Death at the Palace

by M. H. Baylis

  ‘Now go off and buy your vintage frock and stop worrying about it,’ Terry said. She was going to a party in Dalston that evening.

  ‘How about a lift?’ Ellie asked. Terry looked at Rex.

  ‘It’s fine, Terry. I’d rather handle him on my own. Go.’

  After they’d gone, Rex sat in the office, vaguely clicking on one website after another. A distant sound of hammering and shouting came from below. After an hour or so, there was silence. He went down to check on the prisoner, knocking on the door.

  ‘F-f-fucking let me out, you t-twat!’

  The shivers had set in. Rex knew there would be shivers, then sweats, then stomach cramps. After twelve hours, just after midnight, Mark would be at the lowest point of withdrawal, with aching limbs, a streaming nose and a hectic, whirring mind. But maybe they wouldn’t need to go that far.

  ‘You were with her, weren’t you? You were with Milda when she died.’

  ‘I d-don’t know what you’re on about!’

  Rex had expected this answer, but he was sure he was right. Mark was a junkie. His path and Milda’s had crossed. And his behaviour at the funeral suggested he had something to hide. He was something to do with her death. Rex went back upstairs.

  He returned every half hour after that. The voice behind the door became more strained, less sure of itself, but no more co-operative. Rex decided to lay his cards on the table.

  ‘I’ll give you some scag, Mark, if you tell me what happened.’

  ‘Nothing happened. Fuck off,’ Mark panted. From what he could discern, Mark was pacing up and down the room at high speed.

  He had stopped doing that by seven pm. He said he wanted to talk.

  ‘Go ahead,’ Rex said. ‘I’m not into torturing you. I just want the truth.’

  ‘I agreed to meet her,’ Mark began, in a slurred, quiet monotone, so that Rex had to push his ear hard against the door to catch the words. ‘At Ally Pally.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘She wanted an Interrail ticket. To get back home.’

  ‘And what are you? The Newington Green branch of Thomas Cook?’

  ‘I know these guys. At a printer’s in Clapton. They’re doing snide Oysters and railcards and that.’ He sniffed loudly.

  ‘You know all the leading citizens in the Clapton area, don’t you? What was your fee for the ticket?’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘What did you charge her?’

  ‘A ton. But when I got there with it, she said it was too much. We had a row. I went. Look, Rex, man, I really, really need…’

  ‘Not yet. So you had a row. And you went.’

  ‘Yeah. I swear. I just went.’

  ‘So Milda went to an isolated spot to meet a known smack-head scumbag, namely, you. You left. And Milda, with no apparent history of drug use or abuse, ended up with heroin in her bloodstream.’

  He listened. There was silence.

  ‘How, Mark? Osmosis? Telekinesis? Through the fucking air?’

  There was another long pause. Mark sighed. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, finally, in a tiny voice. ‘Please will you just give me my –’

  ‘You’re lying. I’m going.’

  Mark’s voice went loud again. ‘I’m not! Please. Don’t go, man.’ He thumped the door, three times, with what sounded like his head.

  ‘Mark. You lied about the money, because I know she didn’t have any money, and I know she tried to steal some painkillers from the bloke she was living with, and I imagine that was to pay you.’ He waited. Mark said nothing. ‘So I don’t believe you.’

  He went back upstairs and closed the double doors to block out the sound of Mark going wild. It wouldn’t be long now.

  His chest was aching – in fact, the centre of the wound, where the stitches were, felt as if it was on fire. He took some painkillers, which made him care less about the pain without exactly reducing it, and finally tore off the eye-patch, savouring the delicious damp touch of his palm against his eyelid.

  He went to look at himself in the toilet mirror. His eye belonged in a horror film. He could still see through it, but the vision was grainy and blurred. He put the patch back on.

  An hour later, after the end of X-Factor – which Rex had tried to enjoy on Susan’s wall-mounted flat-screen – and Mark still wouldn’t answer.

  Another hour, and Mark was answering, after a fashion, his responses amplified by the bucket. He was being sick.

  Rex began to wonder if this was going to work.

  In his imagination, the junkie would first get a bit antsy, then desperate, then tell him everything. But he was getting really sick now. It gave Rex no pleasure to be torturing someone. Indeed, he felt a lot of sympathy for anyone who depended on some powdered poison to feel all right. At least he knew what was in a can of Okocim. He wondered whether he should give Mark the methadone he’d been carrying when they picked him up, but he also know that would scupper the whole thing. The pain would be gone. He’d go to sleep, and Rex would get nothing. It was time to move things on.

  He took a package from his desk drawer and decanted some of its contents into a clear plastic coin bag from the petty-cash box. Then he went downstairs. There was no noise from Mark.

  Rex knocked on the door softly. ‘Mark?’

  Silence. Rex tapped the door. Again, there was nothing.

  He began to feel worried. What if Mark had choked on his own vomit?

  ‘Mark!’ Rex tried again, banging the door hard.

  ‘Wafukizit?’

  Rex’s legs nearly buckled with relief. ‘I’m going to open the door, and I want you to stay on the floor, on the opposite side of the room. Do you understand? If you’re anywhere else, doing anything else, when I come in, I’m closing the door again and the deal’s off.’

  There was a long wait before Mark’s weak reply came. ‘I couldn’t stand up if I fucking wanted to.’

  Rex opened the door. Mark was on the mattress. He’d taken his shirt off and was bathed in a greyish, granular sweat. His hair was plastered to his forehead and the room smelt of vomit.

  ‘You can have this scag,’ Rex said, holding up a bag of brown powder, ‘when you tell me what really happened at Ally Pally. If you make any sudden moves, it goes. If you say anything that’s a lie, it goes. Do you understand? I want the whole story.’

  Mark nodded, and took a draught of water. He began to speak, with his head against the wall and turned to one side. It was more like he was letting the truth fall out of his mouth than speaking.

  ‘I didn’t know her that well. Just seen her round. She come up to see Biggsy a few times like, and I thought she were alright. Then one day, I seen her, up at Choices.’

  ‘What’s Choices?’ Rex sat on the end of the mattress, a move which, for some reason, made his stitches sting.

  ‘It’s a drug counselling place.’

  ‘You’re having counselling?’

  ‘No one goes there for the fucking counselling!’ Mark spat. ‘It’s where all the dealers hang out.’

  ‘So what was Milda doing there?’

  ‘I never said she was there,’ Mark objected. ‘I said I seen her. I mean – she was just round there. I was on my way there, and I saw her.’

  ‘Where is it?’

  ‘Southgate. She said she was trying to get home. Back to Russia, I mean.’

  Rex wondered how Mark could be living with a woman from Lithuania, by all accounts have made a woman from Lithuania pregnant, and still think she was Russian. ‘Go on.’

  ‘I think Birgita must have told her about my mate at the printers or something because she knew about it. And I told her it’d be two hundred for an Interrail. She said she only had one-twenty, but then, this guy came up to us in the middle of it. I sort of know him, from around, like. And he asked us if I had any syrup.’

  ‘You mean methadone?’

  ‘I told him to fuck off. I didn’t want Milda catching on and it getting back to Biggsy – Birgita, you know – but Milda twigged. I thought she was just g
oing to walk off, but she didn’t. She said she could get me lots of pills. Diamorphine and that. So I agreed to meet her, a week later, with the ticket.’

  ‘So what went wrong?’

  ‘Nothing went wrong my end. I brought the ticket, up to Ally Pally. But when she turned up, she was all upset. I dunno why. And all she’d brought is fifty quid and one poxy bottle of codeine pills.’

  ‘So you were angry. Is that why you attacked her?’

  ‘I was angry because I’d told my mate he was going to get double his money back when I sold all the pills.’ He suddenly lifted up his head. ‘I never hurt her, though, man. I swear.’

  ‘What was she doing when you left her?’

  ‘I just walked away. I was fucked off, that I’d got this stupid ticket, and no pills, and now she knew, and she might tell Biggsy, so I just walked off. But she… she grabbed on to me… onto my shirt.’

  ‘And you pushed her away.’

  ‘No. Seriously, I never. I pulled my shirt back, but she grabbed onto my legs. She pulled me down. Like a rugby tackle.’

  It was an odd, athletic simile for a heroin addict. It reminded Rex that somewhere, underneath the layers of grease and lies, there was a very ordinary person. Someone who had watched rugby, perhaps even played it.

  ‘I fell over. And she was on me, saying all this Russian stuff.’

  ‘It’s Lithuanian. Milda and the woman you’re having a baby with – they’re Lithuanian.’

  ‘It’s all part of Russia, isn’t it?’ Rex didn’t reply. ‘Look, I don’t know what she was saying, but she was trying to get the ticket off me. And I got away from her, but my works come out of my pocket.’

  ‘Your works?’

  ‘Syringe. We was rolling round, and it got stuck in her arm. And then she just stood there, staring at it, and staring at me. It’s like she was frozen. I said – I dunno why I said this, but it’s what I’d think if I got someone’s sharp in my arm – I said, I’m clean. I’ve been tested. It’s true. But she didn’t hear me. She was just staring at it, in her arm. Shaking.’

  ‘Why didn’t you take it out?’

  ‘I tried to. But it was proper stuck in, and when I grabbed it, she grabbed my hand. I told her to get off. I could see there was a little bit in there. In the works, I mean. And she was pushing and puling my hand, and I was worried some of it was going to go in her. But then someone came along.’

  ‘Really? The police called for witnesses. Nobody came forward.’

  ‘It was a woman.’

  ‘What did she look like?’

  ‘I didn’t see. They called out, but they were just on the other side of the hill, you know, so I couldn’t see them. I thought it might be someone she knew, so I just legged it.’

  ‘Why do you think it was someone she knew?’

  ‘When they called out, Milda span round. Like there was something about it she recognised. The voice. Or what they said.’

  ‘But they didn’t call out her name?’

  ‘I don’t think so. It was something different. Look – are you gonna tell Birgita about this? I just –’ His voice cracked. ‘She’s the only good thing I’ve got going on. I can’t fuck it up. Do you know what I mean? Please.’ He started crying. ‘I can’t lose her, man. I know I’m a fucking waste of space. But I can’t lose her. Please.’

  This hadn’t gone the way Rex had expected. He held up the bag he’d been carrying and looked back at Mark, who slowly took hold of his shuddering emotions., peering at him through snot-webbed fingers.

  ‘You know what’s in the bag, Mark? Cumin. I was going to give you a bag of cumin, so you knew you’d confessed for nothing. I was angry. I thought you’d caused Milda’s death and hidden it all this time. I was wrong.’

  Mark took his hands away from his face. ‘She was all right when I left her, I swear. I mean, she wasn’t all right, but…’

  ‘I can’t imagine Milda having anything to do with drugs,’ Rex said, mainly to himself. ‘It’s the opposite of the person I knew.’

  ‘You know what Karl Jung said, don’t you?’ Mark brushed a greasy strand of hair out of his eyes. ‘Everyone has three selves. How they see themselves. How other people see them. And how they really are.’

  Rex looked at him in surprise.

  ‘See?’ Mark said. ‘That’s the bit you see. Thick junkie scum. There’s two-thirds more, of me, that you’ll never see. Biggsy sees it. She’s the only one. I reckon there were two-thirds more of Milda, too.

  Perhaps he was right. ‘We kept your methadone,’ Rex said. ‘I’ll go and get it.’

  ‘No!’ Mark almost shouted.

  ‘You don’t want it?’ Rex asked.

  ‘I’ve come this far,’ Mark said, biting on one of his knuckles. ‘I might as well make something out of it. You never know. I might even stay off it this time.’

  Rex nodded. He let Mark clean himself up in the washrooms, gave him a vast mauve fleece that he found under Brenda’s desk, and let him out into the wild of a Wood Green evening.

  ‘Who do you think it was?’ Mark asked, turning to Rex in the doorway. ‘The person who came along?’

  Rex shrugged. ‘Maybe we’ll never find out.’

  He watched Mark’s unsteady progress across the car-park, strangely concerned for the person he’d loathed a few hours before. He hadn’t told Mark the truth, of course. There was nothing to find out, because he knew already. He knew how. And he knew who. But he didn’t know how to handle it. He didn’t know if he could.

  Chapter Ten

  It was one of the remarkable things about the city that in a place containing so much variety, so many forms of life, someone would always be doing exactly what you were doing, at the same time. No one was original. Like ants, everyone scurried on set paths in a vast, ordered nest. This notion had first struck Rex on his honeymoon. He and Sybille had flown to the South Pacific, to New Caledonia, a journey originating humbly in a ride on the Number 27 bus from Camden to Paddington railway station. There was a solid, red-cheeked and sandy-haired man, farmer-like, waiting at the bus-stop on Camden Parkway. He caught the train to Heath-row with them. Later, they were marginally surprised to see him at the bar at Charles de Gaulle airport, as they changed flights in Paris. But not as surprised as when he turned up at a waterfront Pizzeria in Noumea. For his part, the sandy-haired man remained indifferent to their presence as he had been at the first bus-stop: he recognised them, but it meant nothing to him. People were just everywhere, always, doing the same things.

  So Rex wasn’t surprised to find people having their nails done at a beauty parlour at the back of Shopping City at 8.30 on a wintry Sunday morning. There were African ladies, in dazzling dresses, on their way to church; Kurdish girls sporting plain black chadors over diamante-studded jeans. Most of the staff were Chinese – nails seemed to be a Chinese business, right across the capital. Only one person who worked there was not: she specialised in make-up, skin-care and head massage, for which there seemed to be no call this morning. This person sat reading a tv supplement, occasionally glancing out of the shop.

  In Shopping City the rents became cheaper, the further away from the High Street you went. The atmosphere near the beauty parlour was more like a covered market. A Bangladeshi clan sold cheap cookware. Some tough-looking Essex lads had a unit purveying belt buckles, Confederate flags and cannabis-related paraphernalia. And a pair of twin sisters, London-Jamaicans, ran a little café selling fiery pasties and sorrel punch, as well as regular teas and coffees, to the other market-traders. It was to this place – named The Jerk Shack – that Aguta took Rex. A reggae cover version of ‘Amapola’ played on the radio, as steam rushed into the milk jug.

  ‘Have you listened to this station?’ Rex asked. ‘In the mornings, it’s old reggae. In the afternoons, it’s a Nigerian pastor casting out devils over the phone.’

  Aguta didn’t smile. She lit a cigarette: in this part of the precinct, nobody objected.

  ‘Eye is looking okay now,’ she said, gesturing
towards him with the cigarette. He’d taken the patch off. She said it as if she had seen his eye at its worst. But she hadn’t. She hadn’t come to visit him in the hospital. Now he understood why.

  ‘How did you know?’ she asked, sending a jet of blue smoke to the ceiling.

  ‘Niela. Milda’s sister.’

  Aguta frowned. ‘You have spoken with her?’

  Rex shook his head. ‘I spoke to Dovila.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean, Rex.’

  ‘Do you remember, in the taxi, coming back from the funeral service. I asked you – what would make Niela suddenly go home? What would make someone so concerned about finding out the truth one day, then go home the next? And you couldn’t answer me.’

  Aguta said nothing, merely looked at her cigarette.

  ‘I might have forgotten about it, but then you came to see me about that message. It didn’t add up. Someone who just wanted to bury her sister and grieve, gets back in touch. With another clue, another bit of evidence. That’s not someone who went home because they weren’t bothered about finding out the truth. That’s someone who only went home because they thought that someone here was going to keep on the case for them. And who could that have been?’

  Aguta swallowed, and he knew he was right.

  ‘Then I saw Dovila. She had your phone.eAnd I realised – you swap them sometimes, don’t you? So she was the one who got the message from Niela. And she was the one who made you come and see me. If the message had just gone to you, you’d have ignored it, wouldn’t you? Strung Niela along, and let it lie. Because you were the one who wanted to let it lie. Not Niela. You were the one who called out to Milda, weren’t you, in the park? Just before she died. Some words she recognised, but not her name. That’s what the witness told me. A nickname.’

  He paused as one of the café-owners brought over two mugs of coffee. When she’d returned to her counter, Aguta blew on the coffee, then pushed it away, tears in her eyes.. ‘I couldn’t understand why you got so cross, when I asked Dovila for that photograph on her phone. I couldn’t understand how come it could have been there one day, and gone the next, unless someone had deleted it. And then I realised. It was you who’d deleted it. Because you didn’t want to look at her. You couldn’t face being reminded. What I don’t understand is why,’ Rex went on more gently. ‘I was hoping you could tell me.’