The Last Exile. E.V. Seymour
taking a break, and ricocheting harmlessly off a pillar. The other felled the target. Tallis ran forward, saw the stain from a wound in the young woman’s shoulder spread and dye her T-shirt a darker hue. In shock, she made no sound. Just fluttered a hand towards her body, a movement that, whatever instinct was stirring inside him, was to cost her her life. With the colour still draining from her skin, Tallis emptied five bullets into her head and neck, witnessing her final second of life, hearing her last breath, watching as her life-blood flowed freely on the floor.
An eerie stillness descended. People stood silent, in dread and awe and shame, all of them witnesses to something they neither understood nor desired. One woman was weeping. The bank clerk, white with horror, eyes drilling into Tallis, murmured, ‘Murderer.’
“Job done,” Stu said, the relief in his voice drowned out by the gathering clamour of local police and forensics in full cry.
Tallis nodded, feeling hollow.
CHAPTER ONE
One year later
RED silk tie or navy? Paul Tallis held both of them against the white shirt and dark blue jacket hanging from the top of the doorframe. Maybe red would come across as a bit aggressive, a bit over the top. Then again, he wanted to look as if he knew how to do the business. But he was supposed to be protecting a school-kid, not some foreign head of state, he reminded himself. Navy, then. Gave the impression of responsibility, reliability, confidence. Yeah, navy was definitely a safer bet.
He turned away, satisfied with his choice though not quite so thrilled with the out-of-shape figure reflected back from the long mirror propped against the wall. At six feet two inches, he was able to carry several extra pounds and get away with it, but lately his trousers had started to feel a little tight around the waistband. Sure, he knew that to the untrained eye he still cut it. It was more a case of not being as super-fit as he used to be. Always happened when you reined back on a fairly demanding exercise regime. Fact was, in twelve months he hadn’t run much, been to the gym or cycled. Hadn’t seen the point. The best he could muster was a quick thrash up and down Max’s swimming pool and that was only because he wanted to impress the au pair. Pathetic, he knew. Felka was considerably younger than himself, bright and fresh-faced, and with an innate sweetness and innocence that he had no intention of despoiling in spite of the fact that, on a number of occasions, she’d made it quite plain that she wouldn’t have minded.
He let out a sigh, smoothing his not-so-taut six-pack. No matter, he thought. His future employers weren’t going to interview him in the buff, and with his clothes on he still presented a commanding figure. He clowned a face in the mirror, thrust his chin out, the way he did when he shaved. Still had all his own hair and teeth, which at thirty-three he bloody well ought to have. The faint scar across his forehead made him look interesting rather than dangerous, he thought, and he still had the up-for-it look in his eyes. He grinned and winked. Once he got the job, could see a way forward again, he’d get back to his old exercise routine, get back to his old self. He’d done it before after he’d spent a stint undercover early on in his police career—nothing more guaranteed to screw up your brain and pile on the pounds than hanging out with people whose lives revolved around pubs, clubs and fast food. He’d had to drink so much alcohol to fit in that his weight had ballooned to Sumo proportions.
Not like Stu, Tallis thought grimly. The more the guy drank, the thinner he seemed to get. Last time they met he’d been wasted before Tallis had sunk his first pint. Tallis had ended up piling him into his car, a shit-heap in Stu’s opinion, and taking him back home or hame—the more drunk, the stronger Stu’s Glaswegian accent. Stu’s hame had turned out to be a room in a house full of deadbeats. Oh, how the mighty had fallen. Yet Tallis recognised that he, too, was one of them. It still astonished him how quickly one’s fortunes could change. In one single minute he’d ripped up the ground from beneath his feet. One false decision and the world, as he’d once known it, had changed for ever. To say he regretted the shooting didn’t even come close. An innocent woman had died, for Chrissakes, but there were other regrets: the collapse of the team and loss of personal identity.
It took him twenty minutes to shower, shave and clean his teeth, five minutes to dress and splash on the last dregs of aftershave. He’d shined his shoes the night before. Half an hour to kill, he thought, glancing at his watch, flicking on the radio. “The men were arrested in South London last night. The raid followed a long period of surveillance by police and MI5. It’s thought…” Tallis switched off and picked up the TV guide, idly flicking through the pages. He usually worked in the evening so TV was a bit of a luxury. Maybe he’d take in one of those home make-over shows, he thought, closest you could get to property porn. Might give him some ideas about how to transform his less than glorious surroundings. He suddenly became acutely aware of the horrible floral design of the wallpaper, the decrepit-looking gas fire in the tiled fireplace, the campaign table which was really a fold-down from Ikea and for which he’d paid six quid, the smell of old lady and lavender. In the thirty years his grandmother had lived there, she hadn’t changed a thing.
The phone rang. Tallis eyed it warily. After the shooting, and in spite of strict orders not to talk, his phone had never stopped. Since his fall from grace, it had never rung at all. He’d become a social and professional pariah: no status, no self-esteem. Someone once said that you could judge a man’s standing in the world by the number of calls he received. Applying that criterion, his was on the same level as an amoeba’s.
“Paul, it’s Max. You OK?”
Tallis smiled in relief. “Bit nervous.”
“Yes, well… erm, there’s been a change of plan.”
“Yeah? No problem,” Tallis said cheerfully. Flexible was his middle name, especially if it meant the prospect of landing a decent job that paid well. Since his decision to leave the force, finding work had proved a soul-destroying task. There weren’t too many orthodox lines of business for an out-of-work killer, as he’d been famously dubbed. To keep body and soul together, he’d taken a rubbish job as a security man at a warehouse. The work was tedious in the extreme, the pay lousy, with the result that he was seriously into his overdraft. That his grandmother had left him her crumbling wreck of a bungalow should have saved him from penury, but he’d spent so much time and money attempting to sort out the faulty plumbing and dodgy wiring, it was haemorrhaging his already limited resources.
“Thing is,” Max said, strain in his voice, “they’ve changed their minds, Paul.”
“Changed their minds about having a bodyguard or changed their minds about me?”
Sweaty silence. Tallis imagined Max rubbing his face with a paw of a hand. In looks, they were quite similar—tall, dark-haired, dark-eyed, ‘fucking good-looking’ according to Max in one of his more expansive moments. “It’s all my fault,” Max said. “I should have come clean, told them the truth from the start.”
Tallis almost laughed. The truth that we were given duff intelligence, he asked himself, or the truth that we were obeying orders? “Don’t worry, mate. Notoriety does strange things to people. To be honest, I’m not sure babysitting an over-pampered public schoolboy is really my thing anyway.” Tallis felt his neck flush. Pride was a terrible thing. Another month playing security guards and he’d go mental and be no good to anyone.
“I feel really bad about this,” Max said, deeply apologetic. “It was me who put you up to it, for Christ’s sake. Look, if there’s anything I can do…”
“You can. Have a nice holiday.” Tallis loosened the tie from his collar. “When do you fly?”
“Leave Heathrow tonight. Kids are so excited they’re already driving Penny nuts. Think she’s beginning to regret not taking Felka with us.” Paul smiled. He liked Penny enormously but she didn’t strike him as a natural at motherhood. How would she cope for six whole weeks without her au pair?
Max was talking again, hell-bent on trying to make amends. “Why not take a trip out to the sticks, check on the house, give it a once-over?”
“Doesn’t