A Death at the Palace Read online

  ‘Er…’ Ellie checked the Post-It on the front of her computer. ‘Male. 30-40. Dark hair and eyes. Says he wants to see a doctor. Receptionist says he needs an appointment. He gets threatening. Doctor comes out. Talks him down a bit. He vanishes before the Feds get there.’

  Rex was already dialling Diana’s number.

  ‘It was Dr Shah,’ Ellie added, with a faint smirk. ‘Not Dr Berne.’ Rex put the phone down. ‘But I’m sure she’d appreciate a call anyway. Show her you care.’

  There were many things Rex wanted to say to Ellie in that instant, but he was prevented by a shocked cry coming from the office of his boss. He looked up to see Susan Auerglass, dark-haired and pale in the doorway, replacing the phone.

  ‘The cleaner’s not coming in,’ she said.

  ‘We’d guessed that,’ Rex said.

  ‘Magda isn’t coming in,’ Susan repeated blandly, ‘because someone attacked her on her way to work.’

  * * *

  These days, he kept it in a Throat Pastilles tin at the back of a drawer in the kitchen, a drawer where his wife had once stored excess tea towels and the little labels she stuck on jam jars. In there, also, was a handful of silver milk bottle tops. These they’d collected, he remembered, for the neighbour-child in the Seventies – a ‘Blue Peter’ appeal, never fully explained, but which somehow converted milk bottle top foil into dams for Africa.

  A different child was upstairs now. A woman, really, but so slight, so funny in her ways, she could have been a little one. He could hear her using the water closet, as she called it in her quaint, old-fashioned way. How had she picked that up, he wondered, growing up where she did? When she came down, she would want to work with him, and there would be no time, so he had to put the tin away now. But he needed to see inside it first.

  The tin smelt of nothing except metal. Nor could you smell anything upon the lock of hair inside, not any more. He knew that, but there remained a power in it, same as a crucifix. Time was in that little box, and just by fingering the brittle, blonde fibres, he was back there, in that border town in the winter of 1952, with the breaths of the sleeping like a gas leak and the muted tramp of the dancers’ feet on the wooden boards, and the girl. The memory of the girl was still strong even now, but he found it impossible to savour without the bitterness of what went before, like a photograph of something lovely, which had to be dipped in acrid chemicals before its beauty could be brought within his grasp. At each re-playing, he had to steel himself to face the prologue, found his thumbs gripping the seams of his trousers as if he was truly back there, barely seventeen but about to be born.

  The London he saw today often reminded him of that sprawling camp on the Austro-Czech border. As he queued with his groceries in the headache light of the Morrison’s, an overheard string of Slavic words would spawn memories of defeated, sagging figures stamping their feet in the mud, eyes beseeching for the stub of a cigarette. The lot of them crossed by lines of wire, as if drawn in the pages of a school exercise book. Displaced persons. That was what you had to call them, then. When they were in the hospital – they were often in the hospital – they became patients. Not inmates or internees. And never prisoners. It was odd to be so polite, when they were confined in draughty huts behind wire-fences, and when everyone running the camp, soldiers and orderlies alike, assumed they were all Nazis or Soviet spies, even when they had numbers from Dachau and Sobibor tattooed on their arms. Fucking nest of Krauts and Bolshies, was how Philips described the place.

  In his mid twenties, Philips was the chief of the orderlies. Perhaps it was his lustrous moustache, or the way the Bootle slums had prematurely ravaged him, but everyone who met Philips found themselves behaving as if they were in the presence of someone older. It was a mistake he actively encouraged. The formidable Sister Hornby called him Mister Philips, the nurses called him Johnny and made sure he was never disturbed when he took to the latrines with a mug of char and a newspaper. Philips had rights over the little walk-in cupboard next to the pharmacy – this was where he could be found with Parry and Unsworth, playing pontoon for Passing Clouds, or discussing things in whispers. Once he’d walked past and seen the three of them fingering a peach-coloured camisole in there. Looted from one of the half-burned houses in the town? Ripped from one of the refugees? Either was possible. Philips had cruel good looks, black hair and blue eyes, and he was involved in the sale of petrol. Parry and Unsworth were his acolytes: the one slight and shifty, the other huge and unfinished-looking. There was a joyfulness about the way these three hated him, an enthusiasm that could have almost been mistaken for fondness.

  But he knew no one was fond of him. He knew it had nothing to do with his weak voice or his failure to understand jokes. Or even the way he always seemed to be there, unnoticed until it was too late, when a Nurse was adjusting her stockings in some private corner, or an orderly was being treated to the Major’s sarcasm – when anyone was engaged in something to which they wanted no witness. These traits of his, they added to it. But they weren’t it.

  Philips, actually, he found he could bear. He’d come across his kind before at the village school. The toughest boys left him alone, settling instead for a casual contempt, with perhaps just the odd shove when they had a girl to impress and no other ready means of doing so. It was the weaker ones he had to fear. For instance, when the rosters were drawn up, the sly Parry ensured that his was the shift begun in the savage chill of dawn. When a body had to be removed from the bunk-houses, or crawling sheets were incinerated, the task inevitably fell to him. So, too, when a sudden bountiful blip in the supply lines allowed a brief season of razor blades or American chocolate bars, he came to understand it would dwindle just before his turn. These he accepted as simple facts of his existence, no different from the manner of his birth or his upbringing. It was the fun he could not stand.

  The fun was Unsworth’s speciality. Fittingly for a man like a fleshy, overgrown boy, Unsworth had commenced with practical gags of Beano standards: vinegar in his tea, cold beer in his boots. He’d withstood them all in silence, even though that only made his tormentor more determined, just as his unblinking stare had once goaded his foster-mother to an ecstasy of slaps and threats. Less bearable were the girly mag and single sodden sock in his locker on inspection day, but even then there’d been compensation, because Nurse Morrisson had taken his side and said, in her beautiful Hebridean song-speak, that the older men should be ashamed.

  But the nurses, who’d been happy to treat him as a sort of pet in those early months, seemed to change as the tricks became crueller. Unsworth had spotted him lingering over an advertisement about thinning hair although, in reality, his hair wasn’t thinning: it was simply thin. So he’d gathered a handful of pale, blonde hair from the barber’s shop in the camp, and placed it on his pillow to give him a scare. And then the hair, because it had come from the refugees, had been full of lice, so his mattress had had to be burned and he’d been forced to undergo the ignominy of a scalping and a painting with the purple dye. And when he trod the wards with a bald, plucked head, he’d seen how the Nurses had glanced away, heard during tea-break the contempt in Nurse Reece’s voice as she giggled ‘just like a turkey!’ For the first time, he wondered – idly, as if day-dreaming – if it had to be this way.

  He didn’t blame anyone for his treatment. His mother had sought to abort him. Failing in that endeavour, she had abandoned him at the house of some nuns. He had not been meant to survive. Pale, weak-sighted and prone to illness, he’d been sent from the city to a foster-home in the Suffolk countryside. There he’d watched the life of the fields and seen within in it the explanation for his own position. God, in addition to Seeing Everything A Little Boy Did And Thought, was like his foster-mother and her three daughters. Powerful, unfathomable, capricious: creating life only to pluck it away, juxtaposing the glories of a fern with the ugliness of a slug. He had been scheduled for destruction by the Almighty, but somehow slipped the noose. So he carried the mark of something
that should not have been, and mankind could not help but feel revulsion when he crossed its path. This explained his fine, white-blond hair and his tiny eyes, and the fact that his skin was just one shade paler than normal. It was why even the motherly dinner ladies at the school shrank back from him. It explained everything.

  Until, in that winter of 1952, in his 18th year, he glimpsed something else. There was a festive air, even throughout the series of draughty huts that formed the camp hospital, as the nights grew to their darkest and the air so cold it hurt your teeth. It was only just December, but permission had been granted for decorations to be hung, and these the Nurses had cut cleverly into continuous skeins from a shipment of glossy magazines. His hair was growing back, and aside from the nicknames and the quips about his pale skin, he seemed to have slipped for a while beneath the radar of the normal folk.

  Charged with tacking the paper-chains to the walls of the men’s ward, he’d had to borrow a stepladder from Philips’ store, and mysteriously been offered a tot of schnapps by the man himself. Philips was sodden with drink, as if some great central bone had been removed, and his sharp features were dissolving further with each sip. With liquid eyes, Philips had shown him a photograph of a plate-faced, defiant-looking little girl and said that if anyone hurt his daughter, he’d swing for him. As he watched the older man blinking owlishly at this snapshot, he’d run his hand lightly over the NAAFI ashtray on the desk. And, as if the inspiration came from the cold clay itself, he’d suddenly thought of swinging it into the side of Philips’ skull. It was the first time he’d had such a thought since his childhood. He saw no connection between it and the way he was treated. It was just an idea, like the snatch of a song that might pop into your head when you were mopping floors. Then Philips had glanced up from the photograph. ‘What are you doing?’ he’d asked, quietly, as if he’d forgotten that he’d invited him in. ‘Creeping round like a fucking ghost.’

  Later, while he was at his task, perched several feet from the ground, there’d been a terrific crashing from the women’s ward. In itself this wasn’t remarkable: the camp held many who’d been in the East, witnessed the ovens and the cattle-trucks, and it was a rare night when no hoarse, half-conscious bellowing split the blue-black dark between the bunkhouses. But the warmth and the smell of alcohol and the abject screams of a young voice combined to remind him of the foster home and its routine miseries, so that he wasn’t truly alert when the girl came charging into the room. She was blonde and naked, and her voice was raw with shouting. In her hand she had something that flashed, like a scalpel. Nurses froze, while the men in their beds – mostly gaunt internees with hacking coughs – shifted upwards, hopelessness temporarily cured by a flash of pink nipples and pubic hair. She ran around the ward, cursing and then pausing, almost comically, to brush some books off the desk of the nurse’s station. Then she stood still, the knife in front of her, as if modelling for a sculptor. A Nurse from the women’s ward – he’d heard her referred to as Kathleen – came running in, with Philips behind her. The girl tensed, as if about to spring at them.

  ‘Now then, girl, what’s all this about?’ Philips asked, softly. ‘What’s the matter, hmm?’ The drunken orderly crooned at her, as if to a frightened horse. Observing from the stepladder, quivering with alarm, he was amazed that Philips could make his voice so gentle. ‘No need for all this, is there? No one’s going to hurt you.’

  This, he thought, was how men behaved, and why he would never be one. They knew what to do. They were undaunted. His foster-mother again: ‘Boys don’t tell tales. But perhaps you’re not really a boy at all…’

  Philips began to inch towards the girl, talking all the while in that soft, soothing voice. Alcohol fumes from his breath filled the room until it seemed a spark from the stove would ignite them. The girl trembled, at one point almost letting her knife-hand fall. Philips saw his moment to make a leap, but as he did so, she spat in his face and slashed him. Philips sprang back, cursing her, and the girl darted away. Stumbling over the books, she crashed into the step-ladder and he fell on top of her, clutching at the air.

  He was aware of a numbing pain on one side of his face, the smell of her saliva and the feel of her soft skin. He wanted only to get away, but she was thrashing at him, and some instinct made him thrash back, flailing arms and legs and occasionally connecting with hard surfaces that may have been skin and bone. Something tore at his ear. Then the flailing stopped and he heard laughter. Blurred shapes pulled into focus and he saw the entire ward, shaking with mirth.

  ‘Don’t ye know where to put it, lar?’ Philips knelt down to him as two Nurses pulled the naked girl away from him. He glanced away in confusion, pulling himself upright on the nearest bed. In the bed was an old man, his face dappled with sickness and filmy eyes. With damp lips, the man made a circle of his thumb and forefinger. Then he inserted the index finger of his other hand into the circle, wheezing as he did so, his crackling phlegm like the percussion for some wider orchestra whose sole purpose was the mockery of him. They were all laughing: the sick and the strong, the free and the confined. ‘What a fucking treat that was,’ Philips sighed gratefully, wiping a bead of blood from his cheek.

  ‘For pity’s sake!’ Nurse Morrisson snapped. At first he thought her anger was directed at them but then he saw the stone in her eyes and knew that it wasn’t. ‘Clean yourself up before Major Adams sees you!’ And he passed, under a gauntlet of pointing fingers and jokes he couldn’t understand, to have his bitten ear seen to by a plump Nurse who shook so much with laughter that it took an hour to finish the job. So he was late for the afternoon rounds, and Nurse Morrisson said something to Sister Hornby, who had a word to Major Adams and they put him on the Nights after that.

  They had tucked him away, an embarrassment, but he was grateful for it. The fact of Philips being drunk in the afternoon had reached the Major’s ears and he’d been placed on a charge. Red-eyed and shivery without drink, Philips began regularly to lose his temper and had struck Unsworth with the heel of his boot. He was pleased to be out of the way. Most of all, he was pleased that he had to work the night of the Christmas party – a Thursday so cold that everything went still, as if it was held in ice.

  The refugees and the camp staff had been brought together in Hut E, for a night of dancing. There was a gypsy violinist and a Polish accordionist who were meant to be playing duets, but as they got drunker, their melodies clashed. Listening to it all, thirty feet away in the heat of the hospital, he started to feel queasy.

  At half-past eleven, seeking relief, he stole into the isolation ward, where the TB cases were housed. He’d had TB as a child, and fancied that gave him immunity. In any case, he didn’t care. Major Adams was very strict about the TB patients being kept cooler than the others and that, on nights like this, made their ward the most bearable place in the camp. In the darkness, drugged and weak, they slept, and it had become his habit to creep into their room and watch them. The smell in there was of ether and diseased breath and unwashed hair. It gave him an odd, trembling feeling: a kind of power to have entered somewhere forbidden unseen, to be watching people at their most vulnerable. In the moonlight their faces shone like angels. But they could be sealed in the snapshots of his memory, doing the most embarrassing things. He’d watched the gypsy-looking woman asleep, rocking back and forth with the meagre hospital pillow between her legs. The old man who claimed to have been a rabbi, sucking his thumb. The two Latvians who looked like SS soldiers, curled up in the one bed. He pored over these images, sometimes transplanting them with the heads and faces of Philips, Parry, Unsworth and the Nurses. He came to feel that it wasn’t a curse he had, for seeing people as they chose not to be seen. As witness of mankind in its weakest, secret moments, he was close to God.

  Laughter outside the windows made him freeze against the wooden wall. A woman’s voice played a melody he remembered from his foster sisters with the village boys: I’m telling you to stop, because I want you to keep doing it. He dared to gla
nce through the glass, feeling the cold pane jab against the tip of his nose. He saw Nurse Morrison playfully batting a man on the arm as they tottered towards the nurses’ quarters, her free hand adjusting her dress. The man spoke and he knew it was Philips. His heart began to beat harder, and he was not sure why. Was it the sight of Philips with Nurse Morrison? Or was it that, in the bed to the side of him was the girl who had run into the men’s ward with the scalpel two weeks ago? On the evening of that day, Nurse Morrisson, regretting her harsh words, had told him not to worry. The girl, she explained, had been ‘got by some soldiers’ and was ‘a little, you know, in the head.’ None of which he had understood, except the fact that Nurse Morrison was being kind to him again, and that it was no longer quite enough.

  Now she was beneath him, the girl, lying in a twisted shape like a swastika. The lung-types – this was what Philips called them – experienced violent swerves of temperature in the night, and in one of those she must have flung all the covers from her bed. He made to pull the sheets and the itchy, linseed-scented blankets over her, but paused at the sight of a naked thigh and tentacles of dark hair. It wasn’t these, but the contrast between bare flesh and the printed hem of her thin nightdress that seized his attention. Took him to that day he’d had to walk through the village in a short cotton frock of his foster sister’s, all the while pulling it desperately to cover his bare-legged shame. The taunts of the children, the sniggers of the labourers outside the Market Arms. His hair, finer and blonder than the girl’s in the bed, teased into tiny pig-tails by his foster-mother. Now let’s see if you lie to me again. It was June’s dress she’d made him wear, the oldest sister. June who chased him down the street with her friends, chanting Who’s a pretty girl. June he’d surprised at the allotments with the copper-haired boy.