The Last Exile (2 page)

S
EVERAL
beers later, Tallis was in danger of feeling maudlin. He’d changed back into jeans and T-shirt, feet up on the coffee-table because there was nobody there to tell him not to, and was considering his lowly domain. The road in which he lived, a mile out of Birmingham city centre, was the type where people regularly dumped litter and the remains of last night’s tikka Marsala in the privet. Dog shit regularly anointed the pavement. Compliments of the next-door neighbour’s fourteen-year-old son, rock guitar blasted out at all times of the night loud enough to shatter the windows.

Tallis could cope with all that—just. But not the bungalow. Bungalows were for others—disabled, retired and those who cared not a jot about image. In short: for old people. For a bloke with all his life ahead of him, living in one was a travesty. Because of his less than cool surroundings, he’d actually bottled out of bringing a woman back. Once. The thought made him feel ashamed and disloyal. His gran had been exceptionally generous in leaving the place to him but, aside from the obvious lack of refurbishment, Tallis felt she’d handed him a poisoned chalice. Certainly his older brother, Dan,
already as bitter as cyanide, viewed it that way, citing his younger brother’s devious ability to deceive and wheedle his way into an old woman’s affections as clear evidence. His mum had been restrained in any form of criticism, (difficult as it was her mother who’d played fairy godmother). Dad, utterly predictable, had taken Dan’s side.

Tallis wondered what his grandmother would have made of the ensuing family fallout. He’d loved her to bits. A Croatian by birth, she’d never fully got the hang of English even though she’d lived most of her life in Britain after marrying his grandfather. It had been Gran who’d given him a love of foreign language, Gran who listened when nobody else had, who’d never judged, never taken sides, and though he was glad that she wasn’t around to witness his current circumstances, he badly missed her. Not that he’d been short of takers desperate to hear his tale of woe. Plenty of people had listened at first, the I-jackers, as he thought of them, the people who’d hijack a conversation with the express determination to talk only of themselves. Fortunately, Tallis had Max, the closest he’d come to finding a confessor. They’d met several years before in a pub and had hit it off from the start, probably because both of them had been three-quarters of the way down a bottle of Bourbon at the time. Max, Tallis often thought, was the most elegant drunk he knew. Beyond this, and their joint lust for life, theirs was an unlikely pairing. Max came from a wealthy background where nannies and public school, university and a job in the City were normal. Tallis was a guy who came from humble and uncomplicated origins—left school at sixteen to join the army, eight years on joining the police. Then much, much later, had made the screw-up of all screw-ups.

Her name was Rinelle Van Sleigh, a Liberian who’d overstayed her visa. The explanation for her frantic flight from the police that mid-July morning a year before was explained by the stolen pair of trainers she had been concealing in her rucksack. Perhaps her over-reaction to the law had been connected to growing up in a country where coups and civil war had been commonplace. Aside from his brief stint in the army, Tallis had heard enough from his grandmother about the breakdown of law and order that could befall a nation, the hatred and suspicion it generated, and the madness that ensued. Maybe the Liberian girl had recognised something horribly familiar in the eyes of the plain-clothes police officers, and in her fear, a fear not misplaced, had turned tail and run. Tallis revisited that day often, playing the events through in his mind, frame by frame stopping, rewinding. To kill the wrong person was a firearms officer’s worst nightmare. That it had happened to others before provided no solace. But to kill someone you instinctively believed to be innocent was like a fast track to eternal damnation.

Tallis rubbed his temple, replacing the image of the dying woman with the memory of the second-by-second news coverage, the graphic headlines. Only the better quality press had emphasised the importance of correct intelligence, the chain of command, the fact it had been a dynamic or fast entry rather than an operation of containment based on accumulated information. As usual everyone had blamed everyone else. Overnight he’d shot to fame but one not of his choosing. He’d heard himself and Stu described as gunslingers and woman-haters, of being institutionally racist.

Tallis grimaced at the irony. Throughout his life he’d constantly defended the rights of the black man, mainly
against his own father, a man who harboured a rabid and irrational dislike of people whose skin colour was different from his own. To be accused of holding those same views was a terrible insult to Tallis. For a time he and Stu had been the talking point of every radio phone-in and television show. While experts had opined and members of the public heaped insults, Tallis had received death threats. All this while he’d been on suspension, another force engaged in finding out if rules had been broken, and the Independent Police Complaints Commission investigating the case with the certainty of an internal inquiry and the possibility of criminal proceedings.

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.”