A Death at the Palace Read online

  A Death

  at the Palace

  M.H. Baylis

  To my beautiful wife, Emma

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  The crossing paths of a pair of jets formed a perfect X above, as Rex Tracey lit an incense stick at the shrine in his front garden. It wasn’t aeroplanes he could hear, but their after-effect: the hollow plastic roaring of wheeled luggage being dragged across paving. The sound was there, too, as he left for work, as he waved to the Colombian lady who had recently moved in two doors down, and as he nodded, with more reserve, at the old rabbi who’d lived in the house on the corner since there had been a house on the corner.

  The luggage-sound would be the soundtrack to his lunchtime sandwich, his lullaby and, one day, his requiem. It was the theme of Wood Green, as unique to it as certain clicks and whistles to the hill-tribes of the New Guinea Highlands. All along the road towards the tube station he could see them, the arrivers: wispy Polish girls with feather-cut, plum-dyed hair, the boys uniformly shaven bald in short leather coats. Two dozen, identical, red-brick-terraced and satellite-dished streets away to the east, there was Tottenham Hale; from there a fast rail link to Stansted airport and the nine-quid flights to Krakow, Wroclaw and beyond. At any point in the day, but especially the mornings, some were coming, some going. The Kurds around the minicab office eyed them morosely, because these newcomers never took cabs, perhaps, or just because they were the newcomers.

  But young people with luggage always have a certain optimism, and this seeped into Rex as he limped down past the bus station and the toilets that were always locked. The sign – This Toilet Is Shut Indefinitely Because Of The Mess A Person Did – made him smile, although he’d seen it a hundred times before. His foot ached badly. A team of faerie washerwomen seemed to have shrunk his clothes in the night. He would be forty before his Oystercard needed its next top-up. But it was a sunny morning. He loved being able to walk to his work, through this ugly, lovely, teeming part of town. And he was seeing his GP tonight. Things were on the up.

  For some, only spring and summer can be seasons of rebirth, but Rex Tracey’s soul drew strength from the smoke of bonfires and the watery light of an October sun. The warmer months had been less fun: he’d gorged, without much joy, on fatty sausage and Polish beer in the evenings in his yard, pained by floating snatches of Slavonic in the lane outside. His time had been measured out by weekly visits to a once close relative who only sometimes recognised him – and far less frequent contact with a Lithuanian girl who didn’t love him anymore. At points in that low country of the spirit, he’d even thought of leaving his beloved Tottenham.

  Rex was a broad man of average height, with thick dark hair, and he limped because of an accident he’d had nearly a decade ago. People often looked at him twice, partly because of the way he moved, partly because he always wore a suit, but mostly because his face seemed to remind people of someone, or something. Friends and colleagues sometimes observed that he looked sad and you would, perhaps, need to have known him quite well to determine that this morning, Rex Tracey was happy.

  He hadn’t, contrary to the advice of his workmates, joined a dating site, taken up Tae Kwon Doh or given up wheat products. His brain had simply had enough of circling around the same old topic. He found, imperceptibly at first, that he could again follow the thread of a newspaper article, even one in the Guardian. He could bear to look at her sketches on the office wall. He could pass by the photocopier without remembering that filmic moment when he’d snagged the buttons of her jacket in the mesh of his hunting bag, and so commenced their affair. He couldn’t quite see one of those high cheekboned, Tartar-eyed girls without recalling her lips and the way she spoke, and perhaps he never would. But there was no doubt he was over the worst, and as more leaves fell, so his fortunes seemed to rise.

  ‘You don’t look so good, Rex.’

  It was a typical Eastern European pleasantry. He hadn’t recognised the girl delivering it until she was standing right next to him. She had a sharp little nose, green, slightly slanted eyes, and she wore a pale blue suit, studded with rhinestones.

  ‘Aguta. Labas.’ He kissed her on both cheeks, an awkward manoeuvre as all around them there were people pouring off buses into the Tube Station. ‘Are you going to work?’

  ‘Yes, but then I saw you from the bus and –’ She took a breath. ‘Rex, I wanted actually to ask you something. Have you seen Milda?’

  There it was. The first of the day’s mentions. He was over Milda. But he wished people would stop going on about her, all the same.

  ‘Well, Aguta, we split up quite a while back, so…’

  ‘She hasn’t been doing some more work for the newspaper?’

  Milda had never really done much work for the newspaper. Susan, the boss, had hired her as a temp to do some general office admin, and found her wanting. She’d also, in common with the rest of the staff, liked her too much to give her the sack. The last concrete task Milda had performed for the Wood Green Gazette was doing a sketch of everyone who worked there.

  ‘She stopped all that when we… you know. She’s at that café down on Green Lanes now.’

  ‘So you’ve seen her?’ Aguta asked.

  ‘Not for some time. Why?’

  ‘Because,’ Aguta said. ‘I am bladdy worried, actually, about Milda.’

  How many times had he played this conversation in his head? Aguta would intercept him in the aisles of the Lidl, or knock on his door in the middle of a storm to say just this: I am bladdy worried, actually, about Milda.

  Aguta, her best friend from Primary School ‘Young October’, Co-operative Street, Klaipeda, Lithuania, would then add that Milda had never been the same since they split up. That she still loved him. That Vadim was not such a good man, after all. Please, Rex, please, call her on the telephone. She is sorry about everything.

  ‘It was Dovila’s birthday yesterday. She didn’t come. Didn’t call even. I tried her on her phone. Psh. Nothing.’

  Rex had to admit this sounded odd. Months ago, before they split up, she’d told him she was saving for Dovila’s birthday. He’d asked her how old the kid was going to be. ‘Ten,’ she’d said, in that way of hers, as if somehow it was quite amusing to be ten. Milda adored Aguta’s daughter. Which was why, he guessed, Aguta was worried.

  ‘So she’s only been missing a day. Why don’t you go to the house?’

  Aguta pulled at one of her vast, hooped earrings. ‘Vadimas disgusts me,’ she said, giving his name the Lithuanian ending. ‘I am reluctant to visit him.’

  A mean little part of him couldn’t help being cheered by this. He’d tortured himself with the idea of Vadim as a regular, stand-up guy, beloved by all of Milda’s friends. He was no longer torturing himself with this idea, of course. But still…

  ‘Let’s try her now,’ he said, reaching into his pocket for his new phone, forced upon him by his boss. It was black and card-thin, and bristled with functions he had no intention of using. He was intending to go back to his old phone after a decent interval.

  ‘She said they were having problems,’ Aguta said. She paused, as Rex waited in vain for an answer, then jabbed awkwardly at the touch-screen in an attempt to end the call. ‘See? Just always answerphone.’

  There was no point leaving a message. For girls like Milda, topping up a few pounds
at a time, dialling voicemail was too expensive. ‘Maybe she’s just gone somewhere for a while,’ he suggested.

  Aguta shook her head. ‘She wouldn’t disappoint Dovila, whatever else she had going on.’ She spoke precisely, her accent sometimes the only sign of her origins. A single mother who toiled at the back of Wood Green’s Shopping City doing beauty treatments, she spoke far better English than Milda, the university graduate.

  A shaven-headed man in a white tracksuit top passed by and thrust a leaflet at them. Rex took it without looking at it. ‘I don’t know, Aguta…’ He gazed out on the High Street as a wide, flapping-floral-trousered trio of Kurdish ladies rolled by with bags. The shops were opening up. He was running late for the paper’s Monday morning conference. Should he be worrying about an ex-girlfriend who’d been incommunicado for a day? ‘I don’t know what I can do.’

  ‘I wouldn’t come to you if I wasn’t worried.’ Aguta fingered the cross around her neck. ‘I got a bad feeling about this.’

  Rex sighed. Morbid superstition seemed to be an integral part of Lithuanian identity. He missed Milda. Missed the way she would do anything with him, from a night in a nasty pub to a séance at the Spiritualist Church, because it was all new to her, all interesting, all worth trying. He missed her manners. Her way of being a woman so old-fashioned it was almost tribal. And the careful, intense way she performed every action, from stirring a cup of tea to making love. But he’d been uneasy with that part of her – her habit of saying that certain people carried ‘the look of death’, or her refusal to wash her hair when the moon was waxing.

  Even so, as Aguta spoke, Rex felt a darkness as he stood on that busy little corner, a faint chill upon his skin. He knew what she meant. Somehow, it didn’t feel right.

  ‘I’ll see what I can find out,’ he said. ‘I’m sure it’s nothing, though.’ He was about to reach for his wallet and give Aguta something for her daughter, but then he had another idea. ‘Would Dovila like this phone? For her birthday?’

  Aguta rolled her eyes. ‘Rex. Where we live, they would stab her for a phone like this.’ She patted his arm. ‘But you’re right. For Dovila, getting a mobile would be like marrying a prince. And I wouldn’t mind her having one, to be honest, if I could find one that the other kids didn’t steal… No… Rex…’

  She stood objecting, as Rex rummaged in his bag, and proffered the beloved, battered, six-year-old handset he’d been hanging onto. Then, as soon as it was in Aguta’s hand, she just nodded curtly and stowed it in her handbag.

  ‘You’re a kind man. Milda was stupid to end it with you.’

  Rex shrugged, embarrassed.

  ‘She knew it, too.’

  Aguta departed, in her creaking blue suit, leaving Rex with the new phone he loathed, a faint but definite sense of unease, and a crumpled leaflet in his hand. He glanced down at it.

  RUNNING OUT OF ROOM

  Beneath this heading, the leaflet declared that the area was too crowded. Controls needed to be put in place. Recent immigrants needed to go home. The authors called themselves the British Workers’ Action Party. They had a phone number. Squinting across the road, towards the rude newsagents that Rex never went in anymore, he could see the man in the white tracksuit, dishing out his leaflets with limited success. Rex wondered if he should nip across and talk to him. He decided to ring the number on the leaflet instead.

  No one answered, and the ringing was soon replaced by the expectant bleeping of a fax machine. He folded up the leaflet, crossed by the traffic lights and made his way to the office.

  Of course, the area was, in a sense, running out of room. Walking up Wood Green High Street to the shops on a Saturday lunchtime, for instance, was like participating in some Fritz Lang vision of the future: a conveyor belt, every race packed nose to neck, marching in slow formation. Some of that was down to the ridiculously narrow pavements, the thoughtless siting of the bus-stops and the constant digging by the water and gas and cable companies. Even so, it was true: more people were coming, all the time. You could tell that from various indices. The names on the satellite dishes, for a start: DigiTurk and Hellas1 now giving way to PolSat and RusTel.

  The entrance to the newspaper was behind the high street, fronting onto a car park shared by council offices and a supermarket. You needed sharp instincts to cross it on foot, not just because of the erratic parking techniques and the delivery lorries, but also because many of the two-wheeled local road-users had adopted the car-park as a cut-through. Rex kept one eye on the vehicles, another on the ground, where all the cigarette packets were.

  The fag packets provided the most accurate gauge of who was coming and going. When Rex had moved in to the area, the health warnings were still in English. Then it became Polish, then to Bulgarian and Rumanian as the citizens of those countries were granted the right to seek work here. Today, the language he saw most often on the car park floor was Hungarian. So were the other smokers going home, or was everyone just budging up to make room? Did the British Workers Action Party know, or care? Whatever the answer, there was, Rex sensed, a story in it.

  A loud buzz caught his attention. He glanced up to see a kid on a moped, heading straight towards him. Startled by the speed, he moved to one side, only for the moped’s grey-clad rider to swerve in the same direction. The kid was aiming his bike at him.

  He had just enough time to see, inside the mysterious folds of the hood, a pair of eyes staring coolly ahead, more through him than at him. He could smell the diesel and the hot metal before his instincts told him to dart out of the way, between an pair of parked cars.

  The kid sped past without a glance. Rex gazed after him, heart banging. What had that been about? The sensible part of him said: nothing. Just kids. And Tottenham. And mopeds. But that made things worse, rather than better.

  * * *

  He was halfway up the office stairs, ringing the number on the leaflet again, before he remembered that he hadn’t bought a coffee. Two weeks ago, this would have presented no problem, but the machine in the kitchenette had broken, and Brenda Bond, the paper’s receptionist and layout editor, had refused to replace it, on the grounds that everyone drank far too much. The caffeine made them irritable and careless, she said, and she bore the brunt of it. No one ever argued with Brenda. They just bought their lattes from the shop on the corner. Rex, with his aching foot, decided to do without.

  ‘KP Kill Pests,’ said an Eastern European voice as the call was answered. Rex hovered on the landing, thrown off guard.

  ‘What?’

  There came a sigh. ‘KP Kill Pests. Is it existing job, new order or just query?’ Chast kviri was how she said it, reminding him instantly, painfully, of Milda.

  ‘I thought this was the British Workers’ Action Party.’

  ‘Oh.’ A pause, protracted rustling. ‘That is a small mistake. The boss sometimes diverts his private phone to the business line. Can I take a message?’

  Rex smiled. What would potential recruits and donors make of it, dialling the number of the new racist party only to find themselves talking to a Polish receptionist?

  ‘So the person who runs – what is it – KP Kill Pests – also has something to do with the British Workers’ Party?’ Pest control and racism: unwanted guests, pollution. Appropriate to the point of poetic.

  ‘The proprietor is Keith Powell,’ was the tart reply. She was all briskness now. ‘Do you wish to leave a message for him?’

  ‘I’m from the Gazette,’ Rex said, giving her his contact details. ‘I’d like to speak to Mr Powell about his party, and the leaflets he’s been handing out on the High Street.’

  ‘He’s in a meeting.’

  What kind, Rex wondered. A sales rep with a new kind of rat-trap? Or shaven-headed minders and moth-eaten flags in the back room of a pub?

  ‘If you’d just tell him I called.’ Then he added, ‘And also tell him there’s already a group called the BWAP. Bangladeshi Women Against Prostitution.’

  He went into the office, grinnin
g, although he doubted that Powell’s receptionist got the joke, or was bothered if she had. Not being bothered by jokes seemed to be a big part of the Slavic identity. They presented a stern, critical front to the world, as if only they understood how serious it all was. ‘You really think you’ve got a right to be happy, don’t you?’ Milda had once said to him. Inaccurately, as it happened.

  He passed by her sketches of the office staff on the walls: bold, fat charcoal lines that were part calligraphy, part theatre. There’d been moments when he’d wanted to take them all down, but he knew no one would let him. A daft impulse always made him breathe in when he went by them, as if he might catch a trace of her from the paper. He no longer did this because he needed to; now he just did it because he always did. And in doing so this morning, he registered how stale the office smelt, of old sandwiches and the bottom of coffee cups.

  ‘Wazzup!’

  Ellie Mehta, twenty-four, all treacle hair and rosy cheeks, clicked off her Facebook page and span round in her chair. She was wearing a tight-fitting, military looking trouser suit. She smelt, as she did every morning, of lemon shampoo and mints.

  ‘Have we stopped having this place cleaned?’ Rex asked, sweeping a sandwich carton and a crisp packet from the sticky desk into the already-overflowing bin. The place was a tip.

  Ellie just shrugged. ‘The cleaner’s gone AWOL. Anyway, it’s been, like, way busy?’ Rex tried not to wince – at the terminology, and the way it was phrased as a question, when it wasn’t a question. ‘Some bloke going postal in a GPs.’

  ‘What GPs?’

  ‘Bryant Villas,’ Ellie said. ‘Isn’t that the one where Diana works?’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I’ve only got a few details. That Mauritian Special Constable rang me, the one who keeps trying to get me to go bowling with him? I’m no way going to though because I saw this tweet he’d…’

  ‘Details?’ Rex said, gritting his teeth. His junior had the face of an English rose, the body of an apsara dancer and a temperament that would have tested the Buddha.