A Death at the Palace

by M. H. Baylis

  Aguta sighed. ‘Today, Dovila is at a friend’s house. Every weekend, I try to find a different friend for her to stay, so I can work, and I don’t have to pay a babysitter.’

  ‘That must be hard,’ Rex said, not understanding where the conversation was heading.

  ‘Few weeks back, I saw an advertisement. In your paper, actually. A day-time care assistant. Weekdays. 8.00 to 4.00. I’ve done this kind of work in Lithuania, sometimes, you know, so I called up them, and they invited me for an interview. You know where it was?’ She frowned, half-amused. ‘Such a strange. It’s a nuns-house, in the woods, at the bottom of Alexander Palace. They look after people there.’

  ‘The Sisters of Saint Veronica of Jumièges,’ Rex said, as the circle closed.

  ‘You know place,’ she said, with a shrug. ‘I didn’t. So I went for an interview. On a Thursday 6th. In the afternoon.’

  ‘You didn’t get the job?’

  Her face suddenly looked bitter. ‘Most places, you know, Rex, if they don’t want you, they don’t telephone and tell you. They just say nothing. And maybe after two, three weeks, you stop hoping and you get the message. I thought maybe some nuns would behave a bit better than that, but…’ She ground her cigarette out on the floor, and blew on the coffee again. ‘I don’t know. Job was cooking, cleaning, helping with laundry. I could do it, but… That nun who was interviewing me, she had a very strong… erm… accent. Was a bit difficult for me to understand what she was saying and sometimes, I think, she didn’t understand me, either.’

  Rex could easily imagine Sister Florence frowning and squinting, and Aguta doing the same back to her.

  Aguta let out a long sigh, and lit another cigarette. ‘So it wasn’t success. It would have been so good, Rex, that job. So much better for Dovila. But…’ She gestured expansively with her hands, and a bit of the smoke from her cigarette followed their path, as if that had been her dreams, passing beyond reach, finally vanishing. ‘So I decide to walk over the park, back to here, to work. To clear my… brains. And you know the place where the water-fountain is? The path goes down, and up again. I saw her. I saw Milda there, with a skinny boy.’

  ‘Mark. His name is Mark.’

  ‘For how many weeks she was missing? Two? All that time, I was so worried. Visits to you. Calls to Klaipeda. And there she is, in the park. So I called out to her. Actually, I called her by the nickname. Vezlys. Tortoise. And I ran to her. I thought perhaps maybe she was a ghost, because she didn’t turn around. The boy was gone. And she just stood there, like she was in a dream, with that… with disgusting bladdy needle in her arm, staring at it. You know, I felt I was like her mum. I was crying, saying to her, where have you been, we’ve been so worried of you. But she doesn’t say anything.’

  Rex took a sip of the coffee. It was still too hot to drink. The little bit he’d swallowed scorched his insides. He pictured it, briefly, melting the stitches in his chest.

  ‘I don’t know, Rex.’ Aguta’s eyes filled with tears. ‘I just got so mad with her. We are same age. You know. Same class in the junior school. We shared desk. And she always does what she wants Goes to art school. Lives in squat, has parties, boyfriends…’ She rubbed her temples. ‘I work, all day, every day and I can’t even buy Dovila a new uniform. She’s in the last year’s uniform at the school. And Milda can just play with her life. She quits job, goes missing, makes a big drama, that’s what I thought, and now she’s in the park with a needle. Taking drugs.’

  ‘The needle was an accident.’

  ‘I know, I know. I understood that after. I remembered what she is like about those needles. But at the time, I just saw, I don’t know. I only saw how angry I was. Fuck you. A silly, selfish little girl.’ Her face became angry as she remembered. ‘I pulled that needle from her arm and then I pulled her hair. I pulled it hard as I could.’

  Rex shuddered as he imagined how hard she must have pulled. ‘And she fell, or… what?’

  ‘No. She just looked straight at me. And then…’ Aguta held a hand to her mouth and swallowed, as if recalling it made her sick. ‘She said my name. My nickname. Skuja. Or…’ She frowned. ‘Or maybe she was talking about that needle…’ She shook her head. ‘And then she said a lot of other things, but it didn’t make any sense, like backwards. And I said, ‘What? What?’ And then her eyes. Her eyes went up. I mean, they rolled up inside her head. Like zombie film. And then she fell. And she shook. A lot. And then she went.’

  Tears were rolling down her cheeks. The café lady looked across, vaguely curious, through the steam of the dishwasher. Rex handed Aguta a serviette, and she took it.

  ‘I took that needle, and I ran,’ she went on, in a hushed, horror-struck voice. ‘I’m sorry. I killed her. And I didn’t know what to do. If I went to police, maybe they would take Dovila some place. Or send her to my mum. My mum is alcoholic, Rex. She lives on the 18th floor in Kaunas. No lift. Junkies on the staircase…’ She stopped, taking several deep breaths. ‘I killed her. And I thought to go and hide away. But then I thought, you were looking for her now. And if I stopped looking for her, then you would know. So I kept on, pretending to be worried. I am sorry. She was my friend. I loved her. But I killed her.’

  ‘You didn’t.’

  She lit another cigarette, trembling so much Rex thought she would set light to herself. ‘I did,’ she said. ‘I killed her Rex. I killed her.’ She was in tears now, almost hysterical.

  ‘Aguta, you didn’t kill her. Listen to me. It was an AVM. An arteriovenous malformation. Milda had had one since she was a child. Remember the headaches? The hospital visits?’ Aguta nodded hesitantly. ‘It’s like a little knot in the blood vessels of the brain. A tiny thing. But it’s a time-bomb. It can burst, at any time.’

  ‘So I pulled her hair, and the bomb went off.’

  Rex shook his head. ‘No. Or maybe. You pulling her hair could have caused it, but equally, maybe rolling round on the ground with Mark caused it. Or Chapman strangling her. Maybe none of those things caused it, Aguta, and it would have happened at exactly that time if she’d been lying in bed on her own, or playing the flute. Nobody can know.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘It’s up to you what you think. But nobody’s going to do anything to you, Aguta. I’m not going to tell anyone. Even if I did – the police, the courts, they wouldn’t do anything. It’s up to you to decide how you are going to live your life. Are you going to accept that something bad happened? That you were angry, and you lost control, but that you couldn’t help it, and move on? Or are you going to live your life all eaten up with it? Carrying it around with you like a…’

  He stopped The word he’d been on the verge of saying was ‘limp’. And he realised, in that moment, that he had been talking as much to himself as to her. About Sybille as well as Milda.

  ‘…like some piece of luggage,’ he finished. ‘It’s up to you.’

  Aguta stared down at the table, tracing with one fingernail a swirl-pattern in the split coffee. It was almost as though she were making a list, trying to work it out. Decide, in coffee and sugar whether redemption was to be found. ‘Don’t Worry, Be Happy’ played on the radio. She looked up at him with a brief, weak smile. For once, Rex thought, there could be no other pair of people, in London, or anywhere, experiencing this moment.

  ‘I’m not the other one, though.’

  Rex frowned. ‘What?’

  ‘You said if you found who killed Milda you would find the person who was sending you those… messages. But that wasn’t me.’

  ‘I know. But…’

  Rex trailed off. He hadn’t given his persecutor much thought over the last couple of days. Nor they him, it seemed. Perhaps they had given up. Either that, or they were gathering their strength.

  * * *

  Arthur Chapman had a sunny room to himself at Chase Farm, overlooking a garden in which gowned people with drips in their arms sat smoking on plastic chairs. He was not, as Rex had been told, under police guard – the police having deduc
ed, correctly, that whatever Chapman had done, he wasn’t going anywhere now.

  He looked smaller in bed, with the jacket of his cream pyjamas ballooning out around his wizened frame. There was a canula in his left arm, just above the wrist, inexpertly tied on with a patchwork of tape, like a poorly-wrapped present. A tuft of his thin, colourless hair stuck up. He did not seem surprised to see Rex. He looked as if nothing would surprise him now. As sun streamed in, he moved his lips wordlessly. Rex had no need to hear any words, because he knew what Chapman was asking.

  ‘Because I remembered,’ Rex said.

  He had remembered it only this morning. As he walked Aguta back to the beauty parlour, he’d told her he knew the nuns she had approached for a job, and offered to have a word on her behalf. If Aguta wanted to make atonement, he said, then there couldn’t be a much better way than working there.

  ‘What it does mean – atonement?’ she had asked.

  ‘Trying to make up for something you’ve done. Trying to make sure you never do it again.’

  She had shaken her head. ‘Do it again? You think I might kill again?’

  * * *

  Outside, on the still deserted High Street, he remembered someone else saying something similar. Just before Chapman stabbed him, he had said, ‘I never killed again’.

  ‘So you killed once?’ Rex said, now standing at the end of Chapman’s hospital bed in Enfield. ‘You did kill someone?’

  Chapman nodded, and looked out of the window. Then he glanced back and, with difficulty, sat up in the bed. With a wavering arm, he reached out for the plastic water-jug on the bedside table. Rex intervened and poured him a glass of warm, slightly cloudy water. Chapman took a sip, and then seemed about to let the glass fall from his grasp. Rex took it and put it back on the side.

  ‘I killed a girl,’ he said, in a weak, ratchety voice. Rex had to lean close to hear him, catching the decay on his breath. ‘A very long time ago.’ He swallowed painfully.

  ‘What do you mean – in the war, or…?’

  Chapman shut his eyes, by way of saying no. Then something approaching a smile passed across the old man’s face.

  ‘It was in a refugee camp. After the war. I enjoyed it.’ He stared straight into Rex’s eyes, and Rex shuddered. It wasn’t evil he saw there, but the complete absence of anything. People did bad things, he knew, in wars and in their aftermath. But were they best left unexamined? In Chapman’s case, he sensed, there was little choice.

  ‘For years, I told myself that I hadn’t. Even that I hadn’t done it. But then I came back to my house, and you were there, in my kitchen.’

  ‘That’s what I don’t understand. What made you get out of the taxi and come back?’

  ‘I kept something. A memory. In a little tin. I always put it away after I’d looked at it. But that day, I don’t know why, I didn’t. I left it out. I keep forgetting things now. And when I remembered, I had to come back. But then you were there. And by mistake I told you. And I looked at you, and I saw that you knew. And your neck was just… there.’

  Rex nodded, remembering the little metal tin with the lock of hair in it. He’d thought it was Milda’s. ‘And you thought I’d tell someone.’

  Chapman laughed, a dry, wheezy sound, like some ancient wind instrument. ‘What would that matter? I tried to kill you because I felt an overwhelming urge to do it. Just one more time, before it was too late.’

  ‘Too late for what?’

  Chapman touched his forehead. ‘It’s Alzheimer’s. I forget things, and I see things that aren’t there. That’s the start of it, apparently.’ He licked his lips. ‘I’m going to be eaten away, piece by piece until there’s nothing left.’

  ‘What do you think it will be like?’ the journalist in him couldn’t help asking.

  ‘Like nothing,’ Chapman said, closing his eyes. He looked as if he had already died.

  * * *

  As dusk drew near, a thick, damp fog settled on Muswell Hill. As Rex took the little path to the convent through the woods, he had a sense of walking through clouds. It felt serene, other-worldly, dream-like. He wasn’t paying attention as he came to the stone steps at the end of his journey, and was startled by a tall, thin hooded figure coming the opposite way. He might have thought it was a ghost, but for the fact that it banged into him and trudged past, without a backward glance.

  Rex was about to utter some minor admonishment when he saw that the figure had dropped a postcard. He picked it up from the damp stones. It wasn’t the sort of card you’d send someone from your holidays. It dated from the war, and depicted a row of European bodies being inspected by a clutch of officials.

  He turned it over and saw that the card was addressed to him.

  He shouted after the figure, which was just about to be swallowed by the fog. It didn’t stop. He ran after it, back uphill, almost slipping on the wet pathway. It seemed to slow down a little, without turning round, almost inviting him to catch up. Out of breath, angry as much as afraid, Rex grabbed the arm of a grey hooded top and span it round.

  ‘Who the fuck are you?’ he shouted. ‘Why were you sending me this?’

  ‘Oradour sur Glane,’ said a voice from the depths of the hood. ‘1944. 642 villagers killed by the German SS.’

  Rex pulled the hood off to reveal a thin young male face with blond hair and large eyes.

  ‘If you go to school in France,’ continued the young man, in an accent suggesting he had done so himself, ‘everyone learns about it.’

  The penny dropped. ‘And you had a very good education. Didn’t you, Olivier?’ The young man frowned, and coughed. ‘Olivier is in prison. I’m Sylvain.’

  ‘You were just a pair of twelve-year-olds when I last saw you. Well… that’s not quite right, is it? Because I’ve seen you since, haven’t I? Seen you and heard from you quite a bit.’

  Sylvain. His wife’s nephew. One half of the unit always referred to as ‘the twins’. Now almost a man, and entirely fucking messed-up. Sylvain swallowed, and then spoke.

  ‘It’s to show you what you did to my family,’ he said, pointing at the card. ‘You, Rex.’

  Rex sighed. The wheelchair: Sybille. She wasn’t in one, but she might as well be: she never went anywhere. Why hadn’t he made that connection? Some part of him had always known the payback was coming, and another part refused to admit it.

  ‘Why is your brother Olivier in prison?’ he asked.

  ‘Dealing cocaine,’ the pale boy said, leaning against the wall and rubbing his throat, anxiously. ‘He chooses that. Our mother chooses vodka. So you see…’

  ‘Handcuffs for Olivier. Liver for your mother.’ Rex nodded. ‘Yes, I do see. And the anagram… If it hadn’t been for me going to New York, the accident wouldn’t have happened, and your life wouldn’t have been ruined.’

  He could understand how it would have seemed that way to a child, in search of something, or someone, to blame. For your parents’ divorce. For your mother hitting the bottle. For your twin brother going to the bad. It hadn’t strictly been like that, of course. Sybille’s sister’s marriage had been on the rocks for a long time before the accident – not least because of her fondness for clear, grain alcohol. And even from an early age Olivier had always been the one who climbed too high up the tree, waded too far out in the river, forever seeking some kind of self-obliteration. Rex couldn’t say all that to this pale, edgy boy, though. Something else seemed more important.

  ‘One thing I don’t understand, Sylvain. Sybille and I did argue about me going to New York, the night of the accident. But I never told anyone. So how do you know?’

  The boy swallowed. ‘Aunt Sybille told me.’ He swallowed again.

  ‘But Sybille can’t tell anyone anything.’

  Sylvain gave a laugh, which turned into a cough. ‘Is that right?’

  Rex didn’t know what to say. ‘Why didn’t you stab me when you had the chance, at the march?’

  ‘Because that bald guy was taking a photograph,’ Sylvain repl
ied. ‘Anyway. I changed my mind. I wasn’t finished.’

  From his long-lashed eyes, he flashed Rex a look of hate so strong it was like a stench from a bottle. Rex looked away.

  ‘I started coming here in September, when my course began. The nuns don’t know who I am. They just think I’m a nice Catholic boy who comes to visit the poor fucked-up people. I don’t say anything to them. But I listen to them. Every time since I first come in here, saying what a good man you are. To stay so close. The great journalist, who works in the shit little newspaper, so he can be still with his wife… You’re not good.’

  ‘I don’t pretend to be, Sylvain.’

  The kid said nothing. He pulled an asthma inhaler out of his jeans pocket. Rex remembered the sickly child of five years ago, with a back-pack of medications. And headphones permanently in his ears.

  ‘So you thought I deserved to be taught a lesson. Because of what some nuns said about me? You didn’t think, maybe, you could just come to the newspaper and talk to me? Maybe find something out about the life I’ve been living all these years since it happened.’

  Sylvain shrugged. ‘I wanted to hurt you, not be your friend.’

  A pigeon fluttered in the trees. Both men fell silent for a moment.

  ‘So the nuns think you’re a language student with a fondness for the sick and infirm. What about Sybille?’

  Sylvain looked straight at Rex. ‘She knows everything.’

  Something about the way he said it made Rex shiver. Then he remembered how angry he was.

  ‘Shall I keep this card then?’ he asked. ‘Save you buying a stamp? Tell you what – why don’t we meet up here every week and you can give me a bucket of shit?’

  Sylvain murmured something into his collar.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I said I’m not going to do anything else,’ he said sullenly.