The Last Exile (15 page)

“Passing through. Thought I’d catch some sounds.”

“Ah, the music festival.”

“Most enjoyable.”

“So you went back to wherever you’re staying and decided to have a shave.”

“That’s about it.”

“Don’t want to talk to anyone about how you got that injury, then?” she said, making one last valiant attempt.

“See it was like this, Constable,” Tallis said with a grin. “Just me, the shaving brush and the razor …”

“Fine.” The nurse grinned, playfully slapping his arm. “We’ll get you cleaned up but it’ll need suturing by a doctor.”

“Can’t you do it?” Tallis didn’t fancy another round of interrogation.

“It’s policy with facial injuries, I’m afraid. Doctors always deal with them.”

“What about steri-strips? Easy enough to slap on.”

“I’m sure you’d love that.” She laughed again. “No, sorry, there’s no getting out of it. It’s way too deep. Needs several stitches.”

The local anaesthetic inserted in his face was a lot worse than the stitching. By the time they’d finished with him, it was coming up for three in the morning. He wondered how the Travelodge would feel about him sneaking in shortly before dawn.

Outside, Cavall was waiting for him.

“Didn’t know you cared,” he said.

She gave him a cold look. “I was told you were here, thought I’d come and see for myself.” She sounded angry and less composed than on previous occasions.

“Where did you think I was? A lap-dancing club?”

She said nothing.

“Baby all right?”

“What baby?”

“Fuck’s sake, the baby in the pram. Didn’t Bill and Ben, or whoever they’re called, contact you?”

“Oh, yeah, sorry.” Cavall twitched a smile. “Baby’s fine. Reunited with its mother.”

“And the girl?”

“What girl?”

“The dead girl,” Tallis said, thinking, For Chrissakes.

Cavall flashed one of her rare smiles. “No need for you to worry.”

“About the fact we screwed up, or that a mother’s lost her daughter?”

“Don’t go sentimental on me, Paul. Doesn’t suit you.”

He turned on her. “You always been a hard-faced cow, or does it come with the job description?”

Cavall cast him a venomous smile. “Talking of job descriptions, where did you go after you called?”

“What?”

“Want me to repeat it?”

“You know where I went.”

“I know the transaction was carried out.”

“Transaction? This isn’t a bank negotiation. This is someone being picked up for murder who, incidentally, should face the full scrutiny of the law.”

“That’s your considered opinion?”

“Yes.”

“Think you should take a couple of days off.”

“Why?” He was really pissed off. He’d done his job, risked his life, got his face sliced up, and Cavall was behaving like a spank-arsed schoolgirl.

“On second thoughts, make it a week.”

What the hell was the matter with her? He smiled, decided on a charm offensive. “Bet James Bond never got told to take it easy.”

Didn’t work. “You might have the car,” she said, looking at the Z8 scathingly, “but that’s as far as it goes.” She slipped a folder from out of her shoulder-bag and handed it to him. “Some light reading. Could be your hardest case to date,” she added, stamping away into the remains of the night.

She’d wet herself.

Sick and giddy, she’d tried to run away on legs that refused to obey the scrambled impulses of her brain. Her skin itched and burnt with heat. Each time she opened her mouth to scream, her throat closed over. She could no longer see, her vision blinded by the booze. And her memory was shot. Nothing to hook onto.

The man and woman were dragging and bumping her along a track. Should have hurt but she felt too numbed to notice. There was a far-away noise in her head, rhythmic and soothing, repetitive, like waves breaking on a beach. She wanted to lie down and sleep, to lose herself. They told her she could. Soon. Funny how life depended on these two strangers, she thought, this man and this woman, her nemeses.

She glanced up, stared into the borders of a starless sky, shivered helplessly with fear. The night was an omen. Like a vast black cloak, it smothered and choked her. She wondered what would become of her lost and abandoned soul.

T
ALLIS
slept in the car. Shortly before seven, he returned to the Travelodge, showered, changed his clothes and had breakfast—full Monty—then checked out. Rather than beat any speed records, he drove at a sedate pace, stopping at midday for petrol and a cup of inky-looking coffee and picked up several copies of daily newspapers, including the Plymouth-based
Western Morning News
. He wanted to see if any had carried the story on the murder. A quick flick-through suggested they hadn’t. He’d probably missed it, or maybe it was in a small stop-press section, he thought, folding them up and driving back to Birmingham.

Home was much as he’d left it, apart from the ear-grinding clamour emanating from the next-door neighbours. The house didn’t shake with sound. It was pulsating, like the whole construction was going to take off and disappear into the ether. If only, Tallis thought, tight-lipped. Marching up the drive, he had his hand out ready to knock and complain before realising he’d never be heard over the din. Only one thing for it, he thought, noticing that neither car was on the drive, leaving little Jimmy at home alone.

He crept round the back. Really was about time they got a gate or took some sort of security measure, he thought. First rule of MOE—method of entry—was to check whether the door was locked. Luck was on his side. In fact, the door was slightly ajar, a pair of muddy trainers and a football suggesting that little Jimmy had been having a kick-about in the garden. Tallis walked inside, grateful for the blanket of noise encompassing him and masking his movements. He advanced towards the fuse box, which was in a small utility room just off the kitchen. He knew the exact location because, on a previous visit, shortly after he’d moved in, his next-door neighbour’s fat wife had asked him round, ostensibly to trace the source of a power cut. The see-through negligee had suggested something else, he remembered with a smile, as had the look on her face when he’d calmly opened the fuse box, flicked the trip switch, power back on and made a getaway, declining the offer of coffee or anything else.

Opening up the clear plastic panel, he located the main supply and threw the lever. At once, there was silence. Job done, he slipped back across the kitchen, out of the back door and crossed into his own drive.

There were two messages on his phone. Stu was in a rage, his message along the lines of where the fuck did you get to, you tosser? Max sounded despondent. “Hi, Paul. Hope you’re OK. Gather the guy picked up by the police for Felka’s murder has been formally charged. Understand the parents have requested her body to be flown back to Poland for burial. Thought we’d try and arrange to attend the funeral. What do you think? Think it’s appropriate?”

Tallis listened to the rest of the message, which largely concerned Max’s holiday though his friend didn’t sound
as if he had much of an appetite for it. He deleted Stu’s message and saved Max’s, letting out a sigh, badly needing someone else to talk to. And not just anyone. Did he have the courage to phone Belle?

Hand hovering, sparks of excitement exploding in his stomach, he imagined hearing her voice. In passing he could find out how she was, how work was going, if she was happy, if she was miss—No, he thought, riven with disappointment, it wouldn’t be right. Moving his hand from the receiver, he stared at the phone as if it was the cause of his heartbreak.

Without any great enthusiasm, he unpacked, shoved a wash into the machine and dealt with the dirty dishes stacked up on the draining board, wishing he’d made more of an effort to clean up before he’d left. Afterwards, he took out something unlabelled and unidentifiable from the freezer and made himself a sandwich from the remnant of some sweaty Cheddar, spooned two large shots of instant coffee into a mug and, while the kettle boiled, pulled out the folder Cavall had given him.

It felt much thicker than the others, the reason for which soon became obvious. In addition to the investigative reports, there were a number of witness statements and a CD based on film taken from a CCTV camera, which he put to one side, preferring to scan the text first. The salient points were: Mohammed Hussain, Mo to his mates. Sometimes known as Mo Ali or Mo Rahman, or Saj Rahman. Pakistani. Thirty-five years of age. Had fled from Islamabad and gatecrashed the UK at the age of sixteen. History of living on the streets of Greater Manchester, engaged in petty theft, working up to armed robbery with violence. Dangerous obsession with guns. Always operated in a gang. So he’s a team player, Tallis
thought. Hussain had taken part in holding up a post office in Manchester during which a postmaster had been shot and killed and for which Hussain had received fifteen years at Her Majesty’s pleasure after a trial that had lasted several weeks at Manchester Crown Court. Hussain had served most of his sentence at Strangeways, a massive Victorian complex, grimy and depressing, renamed Her Majesty’s Prison Manchester in an attempt to rebrand it after serious rioting broke out in 1990.

Tallis broke off to pour hot water into his mug. There was no milk so he settled for two sugars instead. As an afterthought, he snaffled the last biscuit from the tin. Taking both to his desk in the corner of the living room, he powered up his PC, and put the CD from the file into his machine. Within seconds Tallis was looking at a series of flickering black and white images. A slot on the upper left-hand side told him the date and, underneath this, the timeline.

The focus was angled at the counter and the terrified man standing behind it. Three other figures wearing balaclavas, their backs to the camera, brandished sawn-off shotguns, an evil and underestimated weapon in Tallis’s opinion—the sheer damage it could inflict on the human body was awesome. All three figures formed a human shield, preventing the postmaster from fleeing or anyone from coming to his rescue. There were two others in the frame, both women, one on the floor with hands clamped over her ears, another screaming by the look of her, her long hair grabbed by the robber on the left while the guy in black on the right clearly threatened to do something awful to her if the postmaster didn’t comply. And he had the means, Tallis saw. At the guy’s feet was a small can of what looked like petrol. The guy standing in the middle
passed him a lighter. All this while issuing orders to the postmaster, who seemed too petrified to move.

As with a lot of firearms incidents, it escalated quickly, what happened next unpredicted. The guy on the right quickly lost it, leapt over the counter and grabbed the hapless postmaster round the throat, issuing him with a final ultimatum. Snapping out of his mute state, the postmaster, rather than giving in, began to struggle. A fight ensued. The gun went off. Tallis’s eyes flicked to the timeline. It read 17:29:19 p.m. Rather than fleeing immediately, Hussain, cool as you like, frisked the dying man, grabbed some keys from his pocket and raided the safe. The robbers made off with several thousand pounds between them before being picked up travelling in a stolen car two hours later.

Tallis ran the tape a second time, pausing it, rewinding it, running it again, watching the action, seeing who did what when. The pecking order between the villains soon became clear. Both guys on the left and in the middle deferred to the figure on the right at all times. While they seemed nervy, pumped up maybe with drugs, Hussain was coldly calm, the father figure. Tallis studied him again. He was, by any standards, a tall guy. Maybe six-three, six-four. Tallis smiled. No matter how much Hussain might try to disguise himself, he couldn’t conceal his height. And he was well built, dwarfing everyone else in the room. He was the man with the power. He called the shots. Literally.

Tallis rechecked the length of Hussain’s prison sentence. Fifteen years didn’t seem an awfully long time but he supposed Hussain’s brief had argued that the gun had gone off by accident. As was standard practice, Hussain had been released at the two-thirds mark, coming
out after serving ten years. Refilling his mug, he read through the witness statements once and then again. Understandably, the woman threatened with death by fire had given a harrowing account, the other woman a slightly less traumatised version. Neither of them was in any doubt as to the identity of the ringleader and main offender. Both witnesses confirmed what the police already knew: Mohammed Hussain had threatened to torch the woman. Gunshot residue found on Hussain’s clothing confirmed that his weapon alone had discharged the fatal shot that had killed the unfortunate postmaster.

Tallis slipped out a newspaper cutting current at the time.

A later article included photographs of all three individuals. Tallis tried to look beyond the posed exteriors to the men. In Hussain’s case, it wasn’t easy. He had a face that exuded threat. His spatulate nose suggested it had been broken at least once and his eyes were flat and dead. Glossy hair tied back, in popular fashion at the time, he had deep sideburns that crept down his face like large hairy caterpillars. A later photograph suggested he’d ditched the ponytail, possibly because he’d been going bald on top. The eyes remained the same, shifty, skin pitted and lined due to prison conditions. A medical report confirmed that he suffered intermittently from smoking-related bronchitis. Guess I’m looking for a tall guy with a cough, Tallis concluded, looking for notes on visitors and seeing none, which struck him as odd.

He returned to the personal file again. He didn’t think it a stereotypical view but most individuals he’d come across of Asian origin had reams of relatives. There’d
been a standing joke at the warehouse where he’d briefly worked about the time taken off by certain colleagues to attend funerals. There always seemed to be an uncle or aunt pegging it and it was never a simple afternoon or morning’s absence. There’d be days of preparation and fasting and prayer. Yet Hussain seemed absolutely alone in the world, both inside prison and out.

Tallis turned to the interview records. Hussain revealed nothing. He employed a deliberate policy of not answering questions and refusing to confirm his real identity. Interestingly, it was never actually proved which one was really his. For some reason, Hussain was settled on, through what reasoning Tallis didn’t find out. Of no fixed abode, it was discovered that Hussain had, at one stage in his life, been living at an address in Moss Side, an area engulfed in gun culture and home to Yardie power.

Tallis took out a pad, reviewed everything once more and jotted down some notes. It didn’t take him long to realise that this time he was sunk. His Urdu was about as good as his Chinese: in other words, non-existent.

He took it easy for the rest of the day, thought about returning the Z8 to Belbroughton and decided he couldn’t face the silence. As a precaution, he put the car in the carport, and hoped not too many undesirables would notice. He had no intention of taking Cavall’s advice. The stitches didn’t need to come out of his face for several days so there was no time to be lost, if only he knew where to start looking. Start with the obvious, he supposed. It amazed him how often criminals felt compelled to return to their old haunts. If Hussain, or whatever he called himself, had survived for several years in the Greater Manchester area, Tallis had no reason to believe he would be in a tearing hurry to leave. Which left him with a
problem. Tallis’s only connection to the city was with a bloke he’d met on a training course who was serving with Greater Manchester Police. He didn’t know the city and its environs at all. The thought of walking straight into his brother’s new stamping ground left him feeling cold.