The Last Exile

by E. V. Seymour

  “You’re not serious?”

  “I wouldn’t ask otherwise.”

  “But what will I tell Carrie?”

  The least of your worries, Tallis thought. For a journalist Finn could be incredibly lacking in judgement. “I’m sure you’ll think of something. Kids are still off school. Can’t you take a holiday?”

  “What about you?”

  “I’m OK.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Sorry, Finn, have to go.” He cut the call.

  He went back to the house, checked everywhere was secured, and retired to bed at midnight. He lay flat on his back, looking at the ceiling. He knew he was missing something. All the conversations he’d ever had with Cavall, from the moment she’d stepped into his life to her final words, raced through his head. She’d known everything about him, from the public to the deeply personal. He assumed she’d used her extensive contacts in the Home Office to gather the information yet, if she’d been working alone, she’d have wanted all enquiries to remain secret. No point in arousing unnecessary suspicions that might later jeopardise the mission. Unless Darius was involved, Tallis thought, mind racing, and had conducted his own market research. A man of considerable means, he could afford it.

  He rolled over, reached for a glass of water, took a drink. The situation still pointed to someone talking. He thought of friends and colleagues, everyone he’d ever known, everyone a potential traitor, everyone with something to win or lose. Not so unusual in uncertain times, he thought, tossing and turning, sensing he was losing his mind. He went back to the Barzani case, the happenstance of his brother’s involvement. Bad guys and good guys, people not being as they seemed … Shit, he thought, throwing the covers back. What if Cavall hadn’t been what she’d seemed, but one of the genuine good guys? So far, he’d assumed she’d been part of the conspiracy, but what if he was wrong? What if she’d been a mole in Darius’s camp rather than the other way round? What if she’d exploited her relationship with Darius to try to find out about Fortress 35? Jesus, what if she’d been working for MI5?

  He got up, went downstairs, found a bottle of fine malt whisky in Max’s extensive booze cabinet, poured himself a mind-bracing dose, stared at it for several seconds and threw it down the sink, opting instead for a glass of plain, unmucked-about tap water. If he was going to think this thing out and stay alive, he needed to be absolutely sober. Taking the glass back upstairs, he lay down on the bed again.

  So this is how it played, he thought. Cavall had really been part of the security services, working in the Home Office but undercover. That would explain the degree of power she’d wielded, the knowledge at her disposal, the way she’d been able to track him at a moment’s notice, clean up after him. There was a popular belief that people who were spooks rushed about defending the realm unsupervised. It was a myth. There was structure, certainly someone in charge. There were rules. That was the reality. And that meant that his name hadn’t popped into the mix by accident. But what had made her come to him, of all people? Why had he, in particular, been selected? Why not a security service officer, someone who could be trusted? And how much exactly was Darius being played, or was it more a case of one playing off another? He must have fallen asleep because the next he knew the sound of a visitor at the gates was echoing through the house. He got up, grabbed his gun, reflex action. If it was someone with malign intent, they’d hardly announce their arrival by pressing the security key-pad. The noise persisted. Dull and desperate. For a horrible moment he wondered whether Max had arranged for friends to come and stay in his absence. It would be a typically generous act. Stupid, Tallis reminded himself. If that was the case, they’d have a key.

  Senses on full alert, he moved downstairs, his feet noiseless against the plush carpet. The entryphone was in the kitchen, just inside the door. He looked at the image on the screen, his mouth dropping open. He couldn’t believe his eyes. How on earth had she got here? How had she known where to come? Then he realised. He’d told a lie to protect his identity and she’d believed it. He spoke into the panel. “Elena?”

  “Max,” she cried.

  “You alone?’

  “Yes. Please, Max, let me in.”

  “All right,” Tallis said. “I’m coming down.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  SHE was cold, hungry and dirty. Exhaustion had rendered her speechless. When Tallis put a supportive arm around her, she stumbled and would have fallen had he not swept her up and carried her through the grounds back to the house. She weighed nothing. He could feel her ribcage through her clothes. How long had it been since she’d gone missing? he wondered. Three, four weeks? What had happened in that period? Had he really invested so much time in a murderous cause?

  He took her into one of the children’s rooms, stripping back the covers, gently putting her into bed. Within minutes she was asleep. As he stared at her matted hair, the shadows under her eyes, the pale, pale skin, he was grateful that at least something good had come out of the nightmare.

  Apart from leaving her to use the bathroom or make more coffee, he stayed by her side through the night and into the following day. When eventually she stirred, he fed her caj sa limunom, tea with lemon, like his grandmother had taught him to make, found some of Penny’s clothes and ran a bath for her. Elena watched him with big eyes. While she bathed and dressed, he defrosted bread and butter from the freezer and opened a tin of cock-a-leekie soup. He laid a place for her at the kitchen table and drew the chair back for her as she came into the room. He treated her as if she were a princess.

  “Pretty,” she said shyly, touching her shirt.

  “Jeans are a little big,” he said with a smile.

  She nodded, frowned, tugged at the waistband.

  “Never mind, you’ll soon be all right again.” Prostitution, beating, starvation—who was he kidding?

  “Where is your wife, your family?” she said, looking around the large kitchen as if they might suddenly pop out of a cupboard.

  “Oh, they’re away, staying with my wife’s parents. School holidays.” He twitched a lying smile.

  He watched her eat. It was the second time since their worlds had collided, he remembered. On this occasion, however, she didn’t offer to share. She ate greedily, not caring whether the soup dribbled down her chin. When she’d finished he poured the rest of the soup into her bowl. She ate again, more sedately, silently spooning each mouthful, using the bread to mop up the dregs. After he’d cleared away he asked if she wanted anything else.

  “To go home,” she murmured.

  He let out a sigh, pushed a straggling strand of hair back behind her ear, making her flinch. How many times had she shuddered at being touched by a man? In truth, he’d already foreseen the complication. Without a passport, Elena wouldn’t be going anywhere.

  “And where is home?”

  She broke into a smile. “A little place called Sakiai not so far from the big town of Kaunas.”

  “You must be on the borders of Kaliningrad?” A Baltic naval base in Western Russia.

  She nodded.

  “You have brothers, sisters?”

  Her face clouded with worry. “A sister, a year younger.”

  Tallis lightly touched her arm. “She’ll be fine. I’m sure.”

  He gently asked how she had wound up in England. It was a depressingly familiar story. A family friend had told her of lucrative work abroad as a waitress. The rest was a medley of trickery and betrayal. He asked what had happened to her at the brothel after their final meeting.

  She spoke quietly of two men who’d come for her. “Duka argued with them,” she said, with animated eyes. Tallis smiled. He could handle most things, most people, but Duka was not a woman to be crossed by any sane or sensible individual.

  “What about?”

  “Me. They said they want to—how you say?” she said, frowning. “Have me together, spit-roast, I think they say.”

  Demarku and Iva, Tallis thought. “You sure? They used tha
t expression?”

  “Yes. They say they will pay more money, but Duka says no.”

  “You recognised these men?”

  “No.”

  “Describe them?”

  She wrinkled her nose. “One is bit smaller than you, brown hair.”

  “Eyes?”

  She shrugged. “Maybe blue. I did not see.”

  “Build?”

  “Thin, I think.”

  “Age?”

  “Maybe like you, or younger.”

  “No distinguishing features?”

  “I do not understand.” She frowned.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Did he have marks on his skin? Scars,” he said, pointing to the fine white line that ran along his forehead.

  She shook her head vigorously. “He is not a man to remember.”

  Ben, the bogus immigration official, Tallis thought, stomach snatching. “And the other guy?”

  “Old,” she shivered with disgust. “Big.”

  “Fat?”

  “No.” She gestured with her hand, pointed it up in the air.

  “Tall?”

  “Yes,” she said. “He had white eyes.”

  “White?” Tallis laughed. “You mean pale?”

  “Yes.” She laughed, too.

  “Anything else?”

  “He had …” she floundered, stood up, walked around the kitchen, dragging one of her feet behind her.

  Fuck, Tallis thought, Darius.

  “So what happened again?”

  It was two hours later. They were drinking a bottle of fine burgundy from Max’s cellar. Elena was getting tipsier by the second. He, on the other hand, felt stone cold sober, mainly because he’d hardly touched a drop.

  “I tell you, the other man, he starts smashing the place up. Duka gets very angry. She screams.”

  “Screams?” He imagined it would sound like something between a wounded rhino and bison.

  “Yes,” Elena said, big-eyed. “Then she pulls a knife. It is long with thin blade, and I run,” she said, making a skittering motion with her hands.

  “Then what?”

  “I keep running. First night, I spend in shed.”

  “In someone’s garden?”

  She nodded enthusiastically. “I eat bread for the birds from the grass. I walk and hitch to London. There I find place.”

  “A hostel?”

  “Yes. Two nights I stay. I eat and sleep. But,” she said, wrinkling her nose again, “I have no money. I have no papers. I am afraid people will send me to the police and I will be in trouble. So I leave. I walk the streets. I …” Her voice cracked and faltered. She looked up at him and smiled awkwardly. “I make money. Sometimes I sleep, how you say, roof?”

  “Rough,” he corrected her.

  “Yes, rough. Is not so bad when weather is good.”

  Between the days of sunshine, Tallis remembered, it had been appallingly wet. It was a wonder she hadn’t developed pneumonia.

  “By day, I find a café with Internet. I find where Belbroughton is. I come and, presto,” she said with zest, “I find you.”

  “You mean you walked?” Tallis said, astounded.

  “Some time by bus. Never lorry. Bad men in lorries.”

  Bad men everywhere, Tallis thought.

  Later, when Elena was asleep, he stole out and phoned Belle again.

  “Where the hell are you?” She sounded tense and tired and overwrought.

  “Did you get my message?”

  “Fine, be in touch,” she repeated facetiously.

  He opened his mouth to speak but Belle got in first. “And don’t tell me that there are dark things happening in your life.”

  You have no idea, he thought, imagining he heard her snort or sigh or something. “Those trainers,” she said at last.

  “Yes?” he said, sharpening.

  “I have a result that may surprise you.”

  “Go on.”

  “Come and see me.”

  “Belle, I can’t. It’s difficult.”

  “Never mind,” she said maddeningly dismissive. “It will keep.”

  “Belle, for God’s sake, tell me now.”

  “Tell you next time I see you.” There was a playful note in her voice.

  “This is ridiculous. It’s blackmail.”

  “Sorry, Paul,” she said with a small laugh. “If it’s the only way I can get you to come home, then that’s the way it has to be.”

  Then no dice, he thought, cutting the call.

  He was back in the library. This time he took a short cut and pulled out the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. Going to the index, he looked up the word fortress. There was one reference under Shakespeare. He looked it up. Richard II (1595) act 2, sc 1, line 40:

  This fortress built by Nature for herself

  Against infection and the hand of war,

  This happy breed of men, this little world,

  This precious stone set in the silver sea.

  Was that how the name of the group had come about? Did its members regard themselves as the happy breed of men, England their little world, their precious stone to be protected at all costs from disease and foreigners? Was Fortress 35 the real goal for Cavall? Was that what she’d been trying to unlock? And had he been her key to opening it? Now what?

  He went back to bed and lay awake considering Darius’s next move, his mind spinning back to their conversation over lunch. Darius had been scathing about any outlandish plan to remove a few illegals from the earth. Not worth it, abhorrent idea, or some such words that boiled down to the same thing. But the more Tallis thought of the political capital to be gained by Darius, the more reasonable it seemed. Men like John Darius existed to create tension, to destabilise society, to fan the flames of fundamentalism. Tallis imagined the newspaper headlines: BRITISH GOVERNMENT SANCTIONING DEATH SQUAD.

  The outcry and backlash would be phenomenal. It would result in a free-for-all. After suffering slow genocide in the Balkans, the Iraq War, Abbu Graib, Afghanistan, Muslims could turn round and finally say I told you so. There’d be rioting in the street and worse. With fears of reprisals, non-Muslims would turn in droves towards something and someone they could trust, and that didn’t mean a soft opposition or a party that had voted to go to war, but someone who was a real, identifiable, knowable figurehead, who had deeply held beliefs about country, the alleged good society, who, however right wing and outspoken they appeared, would never stoop to killing off his enemies in the way the British Government had done. From John Darius’s point of view, the day Cavall had come knocking on his door, looking up an old mentor, talking about the deplorable state of the nation, he must have felt all his Christmases had come at once. Except, Tallis thought, from the security service’s point of view, they were taking one hell of a chance, a risk that seemed to him way too high.

  As for Darius, either he would do nothing or he’d eliminate him, as Cavall had been eliminated. What was utterly inescapable: Tallis knew too much and his life was in danger from both sides of the divide. His best hope was to do what he’d clearly been set up to do: find out the identity behind Fortress 35, its workings, and pass on the information to the security services.

  By morning, he had no more answers. He got up. The irresistible smell of bacon cooking was wafting up the stairs. He found Elena in the kitchen. She was wearing one of Max’s blue and white striped aprons, far too big for her, and was poking the contents of a frying pan.

  “Where did you get the bacon?”

  “I went out. I found money in your jacket. You’re not cross I take it?” she said suddenly looking anxious. Thank God he’d taken the gun out, he thought.

  “But how did you get back in?”

  “I left the gate open.”

  “Fucking hell, Elena,” he said, grabbing her by the shoulders. “Please, promise me you won’t do anything like that again.”

  Her face drooped. A tear appeared at the corner of her eye. “I am sorry,” she said. “I do not think. You are angry.
”

  “No, I’m not angry. It’s just that we have the gates for security. There’s no point having them if they’re left open. I’d better go and check,” he said, making for the door.

  “What about breakfast?”

  “Keep it warm.”

  He walked the entire grounds. He checked the fences, the summerhouse, the shed where Max kept his lawn-mowing equipment and tools. He went into the swimming-pool area and sat down on the lounger, remembering the last time he’d been there, with Felka. “You are sad,” she’d said. “I can tell.” Then he remembered the rest of the conversation and wondered why it was that something so obvious, so blatant hadn’t struck him before. Suddenly there was a horrible kind of logic to everything that had happened to him. He likened it to the wedding car: everyone looking at the chauffeur driven Rolls-Royce or the vintage Bentley, admiring the sleek lines and the ribbons and bows, but paying little or no attention to the occupants. For the first time in many years, Tallis put his head in his hands and wept.

  “Tell me about the men who came to the brothel,” Tallis said. He didn’t like asking the question but he had one last, faltering hope.

  Elena averted her eyes. “I do not remember.”

  “You have regulars?”

  “Regulars?”

  “Men who visited more than once?”

  She nodded.

  “And they asked for you?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “The fat man—had he been before?”

  “No.”

  “What about the man he was with?”

  “Yes.”

  “For you?”

  “No.”

  Tallis stroked his chin, felt several days’ worth of stubble. “Remember, when I was coming to visit you and you weren’t there? You’d been booked by another man.”

  “Yes, I remember.”

  “What was he like?”

  She looked at him with injured eyes. “Rough.”

  “Did he hurt you?”

  She nodded, unconsciously touching her bottom lip with a finger.

  “Can you describe him?”

  She nodded again, and looked at him with such clarity it broke his heart. “He has dark hair, brown eyes. He is taller than you, broader across here,” she said, touching her shoulders. “He says he is a police officer.”