The Last Exile (6 page)

Cavall eyed him, her expression coldly remote. “They’re here illegally. They’ve already killed your fellow countrymen, women in some cases, and in the most horrific manner. In all probability they’ll reoffend. But if you want out, say so now and stop wasting both our time.”

He felt tempted. Just get up, walk away, and pretend he’d never seen her. Then Tallis remembered Felka, thought of the wounds to her body, her fear, her pain, and the piece of scum who’d inflicted it. “No,” he said decisively, “I’ll do it.”

“Good,” Cavall said, standing up. “Oh, and, Paul,” she said with a dry smile, “if you attempt to go public, or expose the plan, all knowledge of any link to me, and the department, will be vigorously denied. There will be no trail, no evidence, nothing to prove.”

Tallis looked up at her. “And if it goes wrong?”

“It won’t.”

But if it did, Tallis thought, watching her hips swing as she walked away, he’d be hung out to dry. Alone.

B
ACK
in his bungalow, Tallis stared at the folder as if it were an unexploded bomb. He must be cracked, he thought, taking a fresh bottle of single malt out of its bag and unscrewing the cap. Twenty-five thousand pounds’ worth cracked, to be exact, and that was just a down payment, according to Cavall.

He poured himself a healthy slug, looked at it, changed his mind and poured it back into the bottle. Unlike Stu, he now had a reason to stay sober. Pulling the file onto his lap again, this time slipping out all the contents, he spread them on the knee-high coffee-table. There were prison documents, press cuttings, reports of the police investigation and details of court hearings, and, of course, mug shots of Agron Demarku, past and present.

Demarku was Albanian. His crime: torturing and beating a prostitute to death with a baseball bat. Tallis expected someone with broad shoulders and aggressive raw-boned features but the lad, for Demarku had been barely nineteen years old at the time of the offence, was a mere slip of a guy. He had kind-looking eyes and the type of small cherubic mouth Tallis had only seen on little children. He wondered how, after twelve years
inside, prison had changed Demarku. Generally inmates went one of two ways: got lean or got fat.

Tallis turned to the latest recorded photograph of his man. Demarku had lost the freshness of youth. The hair was dirty blonde, skin more sallow. The blue eyes were dead behind the light. And he was thin, very thin.

According to the prison profile, Demarku had been born in Durres, an ancient port on the eastern Adriatic and more recently, Tallis thought, a focus for Albanian Mafiosi. Albanians, in spite of religious differences, had fought bravely, sometimes alongside Croatians, against a common enemy, the Serbs. As far as the Mafiosi were concerned, they maintained a code of silence to protect against betrayal. Like their Italian counterparts, they believed in honour.

A model prisoner, Demarku had spent much of his time reading and improving his English. He was also a devout Muslim. His medical records were without note, but a psychiatric report deemed him highly intelligent, manipulative and dangerous. In other words, Tallis thought, psychopathic. Demarku had expressed no remorse for his crime and maintained that his extreme actions had merely been the result of severe provocation. Had Demarku been a wife-beater, Tallis thought, something snatching inside as he viewed the crime-scene shots, Demarku’s defence would no doubt have fallen into the
she made me do it
category. Scalds and burns inflicted on the twenty-three-year-old victim’s body spoke another narrative.

The offender profile suggested that Demarku’s viciousness towards women stemmed from a mother who’d abandoned him when he’d been four, leaving him in the questionable care of his older brothers and father. The
shrink had stated for the record that Demarku’s formative years had been blighted by regular beatings and worse. A strange, unwelcome thought formulated in Tallis’s brain. He wondered what his own childhood would have been like without the restraining influence of his mother.

At the time of the killing, Demarku had been minding a small brothel in Camden, North London, which struck Tallis as unusual. Following the break-up of former Yugoslavia, the Albanians currently had a powerful hold on crime in the capital, but twelve years ago they’d been virtually unknown. Tallis considered how Demarku might have made his way to Britain: slipping away into the night on a fast boat and heading for the Italian coast as so many did. From there it would have been a relatively simple lorry ride to the UK. But why had he fled his native country? Not because of his vile family, surely? Tallis thought. And Demarku was far too young to have been caught up in the warm-up to the conflict that had engulfed the neighbouring region in the early 1990s. Educated guess, Demarku was on the run. A note by the senior investigating officer, a guy called Marshall, suggested that there was circumstantial evidence putting the young Demarku at the scene of a serious rape in which a middle-aged woman had been left a basket case only four months after Demarku’s arrival in the UK. No wonder the big guys want you found, Tallis thought, feeling the blood pump in his veins.

Apart from his most recent visit to Marylebone Police Station, it had been many years since Tallis had last walked the streets of London. To reacquaint himself, he foraged through his only bookcase and, among a number of history books, found and pulled out an old
A-Z
. Plenty of scope for the ex-con to return to his old stamping
ground, Tallis thought, locating Camden. He’d heard anecdotally that nearby Haringey was a first stop for ex-prisoners, and the chronically deprived borough of Hackney next door one of the most dangerous places in the UK for gun crime, but would Demarku return there? Would he even stay in the capital? With his fellow countrymen heading this way in droves, it still seemed unlikely he’d beat a retreat to his homeland, but Tallis had to admit that was more based on hunch than fact. And that, he supposed, was the beauty of this particular job. He was not constrained by police procedure. He did not have to abide by the rules of PACE—Police and Criminal Evidence Act. He could be a maverick and go with the flow. But against this, he had no back-up, no armaments, no fibre-optic cameras, no listening devices, battering rams, no body armour or respirator. No listening ear, no guiding light, no companion, he thought sadly.

Tallis returned to the map. According to the notes, Demarku, now thirty-one years old, had left Wormwood Scrubs two and a half months ago. He’d still have a young man’s hunger, Tallis believed. Still have that burning desire to make up for the stolen years of childhood and time wasted in the nick. But the world would be a very different place to the one young Demarku had briefly left behind—more rush and thrust, more watching and checking, more pen-pushing and paper-chasing. Tallis rested his finger on the road outside the prison. Which route had Demarku taken? Via the bright lights of trendy Notting Hill in the hope of bumping into one of the beautiful people, or had he slunk off in the opposite direction to the lesser charms of Acton or Ealing? Which had it been?

He needed to get inside Demarku’s head, to throw
away his own values and adopt the attitudes of a psycho, a bit like learning a new language. People with great vocabularies and grammar often failed to convince because they lacked mastery of their accent. They continued to speak by using the same muscles and lip and tongue movements employed for their native speech. In learning a new language, you had to forget all that, and converse with new sounds, new speech patterns.

Tallis didn’t doubt that the police had already done their homework and carried out the usual enquiries, talked to close associates and friends, visited Demarku’s old haunts, so the only way forward was to look with a different eye and find something extra, something that would lead him to his man. Start with the obvious, Tallis thought. But first he needed to cover his tracks.

Across the road from the avenue was a long row of shops that included a mini-supermarket, newsagent’s, an Indian take-away and launderette, a couple of charity outlets, anything-for-a-quid stores, and cheap-price booze emporiums. The mobile phone shop was at the end next to a hairdressing salon called Wendy’s. Twenty minutes later, he came out with the latest up-to-the-second gadgetry, not because he fancied a new phone but because he needed a new identity.

As soon as he returned home, he called the Met, and asked to be put through to Detective Chief Inspector Marshall at Kentish Town Police Station, Camden.

Several minutes later, he was told that DCI Marshall had taken early retirement. Tallis scanned the report, found the name of his right-hand man, DI Micky Crow.

“On a rest day. Can I take a message?”

Tallis exhaled slowly. “Can you say Mark Strong wants to discuss an old case? Mention the name Agron
Demarku.” Leaving his number, Tallis rang off, briefly considered calling Wormwood Scrubs, but decided that a black man stood more chance of attending a BNP rally than he had of pumping the governor for information. Instead, he phoned into work and said he wouldn’t be coming back then rummaged in his bedroom for the weights he’d slung under a pile of blankets. Changing into a tracksuit, he gave himself a thorough workout, followed by a run to offset any stiffness in his joints. On his return, he showered, felt a million times better and checked out the train times from New Street to Euston.

Birmingham seemed small and parochial by contrast, Tallis thought as he stepped off the train and was swallowed up by a tidal wave of human traffic. It had been a while since he’d seen so many people, so many different shapes and sizes, nationalities and styles of dress. In the space of five minutes, and as his ear became attuned to his environment, he caught snippets of at least seven foreign languages, including Russian, Arabic and Portuguese. It was all so different to when he’d driven up a couple of days before. Cars, even crap cars, had a habit of sanitising one from the outside world and, given the circumstances, he’d been too zoned out to engage with it anyway. Here he felt a stranger, but he couldn’t escape the undeniable buzz, the sense of being at the hub, that he was important again.

He caught a tube north, standing room only, swaying with the roll and clatter of the tube’s manic flight through narrow tunnels, feeling like a human cannonball. The confined space strongly smelt of spices, body odour and unwashed clothes. Catching the eye of a pretty young woman, he smiled, his reward a downturned mouth and
a look of distrust meshed with scorn. Most of the faces were tired looking, or disinterested, he thought. Bunched up with others, he was given the unsettling impression of fleeing refugees. Maybe they were in a way. Not fleeing from war or destruction but life.

He surfaced into wet air and schizophrenic weather—one moment sunny, the next clouding over and tipping it down. Instinctively, he scoured the faces, wondering if Demarku was among them, unsure that he would recognise the guy even if he were. For all he knew, Demarku could have radically changed his appearance. Detective Inspector Crow hadn’t contacted him yet, but Tallis planned an ambush. First, he needed food.

He started walking, taking it all in—busy-looking car park, wheelie-bins, a skinny guy with a baseball hat on back to front crouched down on some concrete steps, unbelievably lighting a rock of crack in broad daylight, litter, dirty doorways, used condoms and spent syringes. He passed a fire station and a meeting house for Jehovah’s Witnesses, shops and more shops, some rundown, some holding it together. At last, he found a café to suit his taste. He went inside and ordered an all-day breakfast from a youngish woman who definitely didn’t want to be there. She didn’t so much walk as slouch to the table.

“Fried bread?” Nasal whine. Eyes glued to the notepad.

“Please.”

“Tomatoes or mushrooms?”

Both, he wanted to say but thought it might further upset her day. “Tomatoes are fine.”

“Eggs—fried or poached?”

“Poached would be good. Oh, and …”

“Yes?” Her eyes swivelled from the notepad. Never had
he witnessed such an innocent word convey so much menace.

“Tea?” he said, giving her the benefit of his best smile. Without replying, she bellowed his order for all of London to hear, and did a nifty turn on her heel that must have taken hours to perfect. Miserable cow.

In spite of the waitress’s distinct lack of customer-facing skills, the breakfast was surprisingly good, and fifty minutes later Tallis was back on the street, halfway between Camden and Kentish Town, standing on the pavement in front of a battered wrought-iron gate. Almost off its hinges, it opened onto a stone flight of chipped steps leading to a raddled-looking basement flat. As Tallis leaned over, catching a strong whiff of dead flowers, a cat shot in front of him and darted across the road. He watched it skitter along the pavement before disappearing down an alleyway then returned his gaze to the tightly drawn and grubby curtains, felt the cloak of silence. Kitty, it seemed, was the only sign of life.

Walking away, Tallis wondered whether the current occupants knew that, just over a decade before, the place had served as a knocking-shop, that a young woman, tortured and beaten, had lost her life there.

Tallis didn’t know who was more taken aback.

“Micky, short for Michelle,” the DI explained, as if she were talking to a deaf simpleton.

They were standing outside the police station, mainly because Crow, who had the build of an all-in wrestler, needed to smoke. She had short brown hair, and a rumpled expression that matched her trouser suit. Her complexion was that of a drinker, cheeks stick-of-rock pink and premature lines around her sagging mouth. She looked
knackered, Tallis thought. He launched into his hastily prepared spiel, explaining that he was writing a book, non-fiction, and had an interest in the Demarku case.

“Why?” Her eyebrows moulded together to form a long, dark, hairy line.

“I’m partly Croatian,” Tallis said.

The look on Crow’s face suggested that he’d just pissed in her vodka.

“Several generations ago,” he added with a reassuring smile. “I’m British born, British bred.” Christ, it sounded like a strap line for meat traceability.

“Right, well, that’s very interesting,” she said, puffing away, “but I don’t do chats with press unless I have to.” Her eyes flicked to her watch. He noticed her fingers were trembling. He’d observed the same symptoms in Stu. Drinkies, Tallis thought, Crow was counting the hours.

“But I’ve come all this way.”

“Shouldn’t have wasted your time.”

“Off the record, that’s all.”

Crow narrowed her puffy eyes. “You’re starting to annoy me. How can I put this nicely?” she snarled, squaring up to her full height so that her bloodshot eyes were level with Tallis’s shoulder. For a worrying moment, Tallis thought she might lump him one. Time for one last roll of the dice, he thought. “I’d love to take you for a drink after your shift.” He almost gagged at how charming he sounded.

Crow threw her head back and laughed. Sounded like threatened consequences. “Persistent bastard, aren’t you?”