The Last Exile

He recalled the debrief afterwards. Stu had already chewed his ear off on the journey back to base.

“You entered that shopping centre with the absolute conviction that you were doing the right thing, ridding the world of a bomber, saving people’s lives.”

“Yes, but—”

“No but,” Stu snarled, sharp eyes glinting.

So Tallis told the great and the good what they wanted to hear: yes, he’d believed that lives were in danger; yes, he’d believed the woman had been a suicide bomber; yes, he’d been convinced beyond the shadow of a doubt.

He’d been returned to a desk job and normal duties, the standard procedure following suspension, and usual after the discharge of a firearm. He didn’t remember much of his time spent in the close company of a computer. He’d been too much in a state of frozen shock. Everything had seemed amplified. People, noise, as if all his senses had been in revolt. He’d become almost agoraphobic.

And then there’d been Belle. Immediately his mind tumbled with memories. His heart began to race. He thought about that very first time they’d gone out for dinner. He’d wanted to take her to an Italian restaurant but, because they were meeting out of town, they’d settled for a tiny French place serving international cuisine. The food hadn’t been bad but neither of them had eaten very much, as he recalled. Time had seemed too short for something so functional. But there had been something else. With each precious second that had passed, both of them had known that they were closer to saying goodbye, both of them, even then, had sensed how it would end between them. As it turned out, and for everyone’s sake, they’d agreed to go their separate ways, a hard decision made painful by the simple truth that they loved each other. After the shooting, he’d wanted to call her but had known it wouldn’t have been fair on either of them. He didn’t have the right to open old wounds.

Eventually, he was cleared through the formal channels of any wrongdoing, though absolution in his own eyes was harder to come by. Legal proceedings against the force were still pending, the inquest adjourned. Offered his old job back, he didn’t feel up to it. Hesitation could get him killed. Fear might kill someone else.

Staring at walls dingy with age and neglect, he thought the bungalow reeked of defeat. He really ought to get off his rear and go to the supermarket, if only because the beer had run out.

He’d taken to frequenting the cheap end of the food market. Sunglasses protecting his identity, he could lurk behind aisles piled high with boxes of cut-price goods without being noticed. The products all seemed to have strange-sounding names that reminded him of supermarkets in the far reaches of the Czech Republic. The clientele were interesting, too, in a lurid sort of a way. In summer they sported tattoos and nipple rings, in winter cheap, shiny imitation leather jackets—and that was just the women. The blokes had necks like tree-trunks, shaved heads and what’s your problem expressions.

Making a brief detour to the newsagent’s to pick up a copy of Loaded magazine, he dropped the shopping off at home—stashing the beer in the fridge, frozen stuff in the freezer—and grabbed some swimming gear, then headed the car south-west. Traffic was dense, with a succession of roundabouts, traffic lights and speed restrictions to further impede the motorist. The more ground he put between him and the city, the leafier the landscape. Clent Hills stretched out on one side, a whisper of Kinver Edge on the other, nothing like the place where he’d grown up in rural Herefordshire, home and county to the Special Air Service. Once upon a time, Tallis had nursed hopes of joining the SAS but hadn’t been considered good enough. It had been the first time he’d seriously encountered disappointment. Up until then he’d seemed to have led a charmed life, which was probably why he’d dealt with the rejection in his laid-back, don’t-give-a-fuck fashion. For the rest of his brief, if eventful, army career, he’d stuck with the First Battallion, the Staffordshire Regiment.

Belbroughton, the highly desirable village in which Max Elliott and his family lived, was the kind of place where the size of houses was only rivalled by the size of lawnmowers. Even the council homes were gabled. So-called down and outs could generally be found sitting on one of the many wooden benches donated by some worthy, consuming strong cider while speaking into expensive mobile phones. Cars louchely parked on block-paved driveways fell into the BMW, Mercedes, Porsche category. Aside from the village’s upmarket credentials, the place was steeped in history, a subject dear to Tallis’s heart. It was a regret to him that he’d not taken the subject more seriously at school, though he’d done his best in later years to make up for it and educate himself. When walking through the village on previous visits he’d studied a plaque on the main wall that told the story of a young woman convicted of theft and packed off to Australia. He’d also discovered various references to scythemaking, indicating that it had once been the mainstay of Belbroughton, the industry having petered out somewhere around the late 1960s. As Tallis drove past yet another multi-million-pound house, he couldn’t get past the feeling that had assailed him when he’d first discovered the village, that he’d entered a little oasis of glamour. God knew what the neighbours thought of him driving up to Max’s not inconsiderable pile in his lowly Rover.

Keying in the code to the security pad, the electronic wrought-iron gates swung open allowing Tallis a tantalising glimpse of the house, which was Italianate in style with arches and domes to rival the Duomo. On his first visit there, Tallis had harboured serious suspicions about what exactly Max Elliott did for a living, fearing either he was a drug dealer or bent lawyer rather than the City financier he proved to be.

A paved drive led to a gravelled area and what Tallis called the tradesman’s entrance but was really the indoor pool and sauna. Spotting him through the glass, Felka beamed, threw aside the magazine she was reading, and swivelled her neat, deliciously put-together body off the sun-lounger to greet him. Tallis got out of the car, glanced up and smiled for the camera, part of the state-of-the-art security system. He’d personally advised Max on it free of charge after discovering that his mate had been royally ripped off by a cowboy security firm that didn’t know the first thing about protection and was only interested in taking a sizeable wedge of the client’s money each month on a bogus maintenance contract.

“Paul,” Felka said, “I didn’t expect you.” Felka had trouble with x’s and s’s, so it sounded like ‘eshshpect’, one of the many quirky things Tallis found deeply sexy about her. She had flame-red hair, pale features and the greenest eyes imaginable. Slight in build, she was wearing a bikini displaying perfectly rounded breasts and an enviably flat stomach. He suddenly felt old.

She tipped up on her toes and planted two impossibly chaste kisses, one on either side of his cheek. Tallis inhaled her perfume of musk and roses. “Max said you had an interview.”

“Change of plan.” He shrugged.

She studied his face for a moment, her expression suddenly serious. “You are sad,” she said. “I can tell.”

That obvious, he thought. He hoped she wasn’t too much of a mind reader—she’d be appalled by what else he was thinking. “Not for long.” He broke into a grin.

“Come,” she said, grabbing his hand. “We swim.”

“No splashing,” he teased.

The pool was thirteen and a half metres by six and a half, and over two metres deep at the far end. The floor, painted turquoise, gave the impression of clear Caribbean. Tallis let her push him in but not before he’d scooped her up off her feet, making her squeal, and threatened to dump her unceremoniously into the water.

“Promise we talk in Polish,” he said laughing, dangling her squiggling body over the edge.

“I promise. I promise,” she shrieked.

“Rude words, too.”

“Yes, yes.” Yesh, yesh.

Afterwards they sprawled out and watched the warm early July sunshine pour through the smoke-tinted windows. Several statues graced the outer perimeter of the pool. They looked like snooty guests, Tallis thought, sipping the coffee Felka had made.

As far as he understood, Felka was leaving to go home for a holiday the following morning, home being Krakow—a city on the river Vistula. According to Felka, and if he’d grasped it right, Krakow had been the capital during the fifteenth century, existing now as an industrial centre producing tobacco and railway equipment. Who needs work? he thought. This way I get history, geography and a foreign language all in the space of an afternoon.

“Can you tell me how to get from Euston station to Heathrow?” She was speaking in Polish again.

Tallis took a stab at it, pretty sure he had the right vocabulary but, worried he might send Felka off in the wrong direction, lapsed back into English. “Don’t want you ending up in Scotland.” He grinned. “I’ll draw you a map.”

“Good idea,” she said, jumping to her feet. That was the thing he loved about her. She was so full of zing. As she scurried off, he took a long look at her luscious, retreating form. There was something unbeatable about a semi-clothed woman with wet hair.

Felka returned with a notepad and pen and dropped them playfully on his chest. He picked them up and lightly swiped her bottom, making her break into peals of laughter. Sketching the route, he advised her to take a cab rather than tube because she had a very poor sense of geography. She’d once managed to get lost with the kids in the city centre. Penny had spent nearly an hour walking up and down trying to locate her, and that had been with the aid of mobile phones.

Felka frowned. “Much expensive.”

“Too expensive,” he corrected her.

She stuck the tip of her tongue out, half playful, half come-on. Tallis ignored the gesture. “Believe me, it would be safest.”

“No, no, I take the tube. I like the tube,” she insisted.

“But—”

“I’ll be fine.”

“All right,” Tallis sighed, advising her to take the Victoria line Euston to Green Park and change onto the Piccadilly line for Heathrow. He wrote it all down, sketched a map and handed her the notepad. “You must be looking forward to seeing your family.” He could manage that bit in Polish.

“Especially my little brother,” Felka said. “He changes so quickly. I hope he’ll still remember me.”

“‘Course he will.” How could he forget? Tallis thought.

“And you, Paul. You have a brother, too?”

Tallis flinched, wondering what was coming next. “Yes.”

“His name?”

“Dan. We don’t see so much of each other,” he added quickly, heading her off. “You know how it is.” Except she didn’t, of course. A sudden memory of Dan piling into the bedroom they’d shared, years before, flashed through his mind. Dan had had an infuriating habit of getting up in the middle of the night and switching the lights full on, often to locate his copy of Penthouse magazine. It hadn’t mattered that Tallis had been fast asleep. Usually it had ended in violence. And that had meant their dad had got stuck in. On Dan’s side.

Felka frowned. “That’s sad. Brothers should be close. Is he older or younger than you?”

“Older, but not by much—eighteen months or so.” Not that it felt like it. For as far back as he could remember, Dan had been like their father’s emissary, taking every opportunity to push him around, spy on his activities, report back to base. Because of Dan, he’d been continually in trouble—caught smoking red-handed, out after dark, consuming his first illicit pint, you name it. Because of Dan, he thought darkly, he’d often been humiliated in front of his mates. She nodded thoughtfully then spontaneously took his hand, squeezed it. “I will miss you.”

“No, you won’t. Think of all those lovely Polish lads.”

Felka pulled a face.

“You don’t like Polish boys?”

She let her viper-green eyes rest on his then slipped her arms around his neck, drawing him close. “I think I prefer English,” she whispered softly, nibbling his ear.

Tallis felt quite the gentleman as he drove home. It had been a long time since he’d so firmly rejected the charms of a lovely young woman. It wasn’t that he didn’t fancy her. He’d have to be deaf, dumb and blind not to, but he knew in his heart of hearts that Felka neither wanted nor needed him. She only thought she did. And she really was very young. There were too many sad bastards flaunting their younger and more malleable girlfriends to shore up their own inadequacies, and Tallis didn’t intend to join their club. Fortunately, his gentle put-down hadn’t offended Felka. He’d told her how gorgeous she was, sensitive and intuitive beyond her years, but that an affair was out of the question because of Max and Penny—they were his friends and she was their employee. It wouldn’t look good. She’d nodded solemnly then broken into a radiant smile. “Another time,” she said.

“Another place,” he agreed in a worldly way, believing he’d spotted something like relief in her young eyes.

“We’re still mates, then,” she said, slapping his arm.

“Best mates.” He laughed.

He got home shortly after six, intending to take something out of the freezer and bung it in the microwave. He’d bought some cheap Italian wine from the petrol station on the way back in honour of his considerable self-restraint and a mark of his confirmed celibate status. If it was good enough for Catholic priests, it was good enough for him.

He parked the car in the lean-to, loosely described by estate agents as a carport, and walked up the short path to the front door, expecting to encounter the same old silence. Except he didn’t. There wasn’t sound exactly, nothing you could readily identify. It was more a recognition of some disturbance, something different, the kind of feeling he’d sometimes experienced as a soldier.

Tallis put the bottle of wine down on the low wall that edged the garden, and moved forward cautiously. Since receiving death threats, he was more attuned to detail, to things not being quite right. A quick visual told him that the porch door was locked, the front door closed. All just as he’d left them. Skirting down the side of the building, he checked the back—again, door firmly locked, no telltale footprints in the overgrown borders, no sign of broken glass or break-in. Peering in through the windows, he saw no signs of disturbance in the kitchen, nobody lurking in the bedroom. Bathroom window was shut tight. At least bungalows had some advantage, he thought as he continued his tour of duty. They might be easy to break into but they were also a doddle to check and clear. Feeling the pressure ease, he glanced in through the side window at the doll-sized sitting room, and tensed. The image seemed to dance before his eyes so that he had to blink twice to take it in: an immaculately dressed blonde, classy looking, hair swept back in a ponytail, long tanned legs, sitting on his sofa, as cool as you like. To add insult to injury, she was flicking through his brand-new copy of Loaded.

CHAPTER THREE

“WHO the bloody hell are you?”

The woman glanced up as if he were an unreasonable husband demanding to know why his dinner wasn’t on the table. “You normally greet people like this?”

“Only when they break into my house.”

She arched an imperious eyebrow and transferred her gaze to the walls. Tallis felt his jaw tighten. “How did you get in?”

“Does it matter?”

“Yes.”

She smiled—nice set of white teeth—and leant towards him. “Aren’t you a tiny bit intrigued to know why I’m here?”

She sat back again, uncrossed her legs, re-crossed them. She was wearing a dark brown linen dress with a plain square neck and three-quarter-length sleeves. Her arms were slender, fingers long. Apart from a thin gold necklace, she wore no other jewellery. He estimated her as being the same age as him, possibly a little older. She was actually very beautiful, he thought, and she knew it. She had soft brown eyes displaying vulnerability she didn’t possess, small breasts, about which he had a theory. Women with small breasts were dangerous. You only had to look at Lucrezia Borgia, the illegitimate daughter of a Spanish pope with whom it was rumoured she’d had an incestuous relationship. Even by sixteenth-century standards, Lucrezia was judged to have been cruel and avaricious.

“Who are you?”

“My name’s Sonia Cavall.” She extended a hand. He didn’t take it. She let it drop. “Aren’t you going to sit down?”

“You still haven’t told me what you’re doing,” Tallis said, ignoring the invitation.

“I’d have thought that was obvious.” She put the magazine away, slowly, carefully, met and held his gaze.

He blinked. This was barmy. She was so composed, so in control. Was he going mad? Or was he missing something? Horrible questions hurtled through his brain. Had they met before? Had he been drunk? Had they slept together? Christ on a crutch, was she pregnant with his child? No. He gave himself a mental shake. He was always very, very careful about stuff like that and he hadn’t slept with a woman for God knew how long. “Explain or I’ll call the police.”

Again the astringent smile. “Oh, I don’t think so.” Confident. Authoritative. He immediately thought spook. “Consider me your fairy godmother.”

Playing games, are we? Tallis thought. All right, baby, let’s play. He donned a smile. “I never read the Brothers Grimm.”

“Should have. They’re quite instructive. Full of moral fervour.”

“Can we cut the crap now?” He was still smiling but he felt fury. Whoever this woman was, she was too smart for her own good.

“What if I said you’ve been selected for a job?”

“What job?” Suspicion etched his voice.

“Finding people.”

He burst out laughing. “Come to the wrong house. It’s not what I do.”

“What do you do?” There was a scathing intonation in her voice.

He should have thrown her out on the spot yet he badly wanted to know what this was all about. “What sort of people?”

“Illegals.”

“A job for Immigration, I’d have thought.”

Cavall said nothing. Tallis tried to fill the gap. Immigration remained in rather a pickle, which was why the latest Home Secretary, like all the rest, had pledged to take a robust approach to failed asylum-seekers and illegal immigrants.

“We’re talking about people released from prison after serving their sentences,” she told him, “and mistakenly released into the community.”

“Mistakenly?” Tallis suspected some inter-agency cock-up.

“They should have been deported,” Cavall said, ice in her voice.

“Not exactly original.” Tallis shrugged. “It’s happened before.”

“But these individuals are highly dangerous. It’s feared they may reoffend.”

“Ditto.” And everyone knew the recidivist rate was high. The only difference was that released British lifers were monitored. One slip, even for a relatively minor offence like drunk and disorderly, could land them back in prison. The people Cavall was alluding to had presumably dropped off the radar.

“A decision has been taken at the highest level to have them located.”

Tallis shrugged. So what? he thought. Bung them on a website or something.

Cavall’s face flashed with irritation. “You don’t seem to understand the seriousness of the threat.”

“Oh, I understand. It would be a source of great political embarrassment should it come to the attention of the public, particularly if one of them should reoffend.”

“We don’t want to spread panic and fear,” she said evenly.

“So put your finest police officers onto it.”

“We already have.”

“We?”

“I represent the Home Office.”

This time Tallis’s smile was genuine. Which bit? he wondered. “So this is an arse-covering exercise.”

“Damage limitation,” she corrected him.

To protect reputations and ease some politician’s way up the greasy ladder of success, he thought. “Britain’s finest failed, that right?”

“I’m sure you’re aware of the pressure on police resources.”

Code for they’d got nowhere. Doesn’t quite square, he thought. The British live in a surveillance society. With over four million cameras tracking our every move, each time we log on, use our mobile phone or sat nav in our car, fill in a form, make a banking transaction, someone is logging it. Except, of course, the information is fragmented. It takes a measure of expertise to draw the right inferences, match the electronic footprints and plot the trail back to an identity. While the ordinary citizen might feel threatened and guilty until proven innocent by the power of technology, a determined criminal could still manipulate it and evade detection. Either he stole someone else’s identity or had no identity at all. “Why not wheel out the spooks?”

“Snowed under with the terrorist threat.”

Tallis flinched. The security service had foiled many plots since 9/11 and 7/7. They were mostly doing a fine job in difficult circumstances, but the death of Rinelle Van Sleigh was a stain on their history. Somehow, somewhere, there’d been a chronic lapse of intelligence, and for that an innocent woman had paid with her life. To a far lesser degree, so had he: life as he’d once known it was over. “So these individuals aren’t on control orders?”

“They pose no terrorist threat,” Cavall confirmed.

“What happens if and when they’re found?” He suspected a form of extraordinary rendition.

“They’re handed over and deported, like I said.”

“Handed over to whom?”

“I think you’re forgetting that these are extremely dangerous individuals.”

“They still have rights.”

“So did their victims.” Her look was so uncompromising, he wondered fleetingly whether she’d been one of them. “Rest assured, they’ll be handed over to the authorities responsible for deportation.” She smiled as if to put his mind at rest.

“How do you know these people haven’t already left the country?”

“They don’t have passports.”

Tallis blinked. Was she for real? “Heard the word ‘forgery’?”

“No evidence to suggest that’s the case.”

Tallis stroked his chin. That had not been a good answer. There was something fishy about all this. Too much cloak and dagger, smoke and mirrors. What authorities, what agencies? “You say a decision was taken at the highest level.”

“From the very top.”

“And it’s legal?”

“Yes.”

He studied her face—impassive, confident, certain, the type of woman who once would have appealed to him. He idly wondered, in a blokish way, whether she was beddable. “Why me?”

“Because you have the right qualities. We need someone who’ll follow orders, but also kick down doors. We need someone with a maverick streak, Paul.”

Tallis frowned. He didn’t recognise the man she was describing.

“At eighteen years of age, during the first Gulf War, you were part of a reconnaissance troop that came under friendly fire by the Americans. You rescued a colleague showered with shrapnel and pulled several others to safety then, still under fire, retrieved an Iraqi flag, waving it in surrender until the firing ceased. For that you received the Queen’s Gallantry Medal for Heroism. The citation ran ‘outstanding courage, decisiveness under fire’. On joining the police, you became a firearms officer, during which time you fell out with a sergeant who tagged you as a chancer.”

A stupid, dangerous bastard, Tallis remembered. So concerned with procedure, the man daily risked the lives of his men. “I was put back on the beat.”

“And swiftly caught the attention of CID, where you became rather a good undercover operative until you got your old job back and then graduated to the elite undercover team. You also speak a number of foreign languages. Your credentials are impeccable.”

“Aren’t you forgetting something?”