The Last Exile. E.V. Seymour

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 need a once-over. It was me who advised you on security, remember?”

      “Well, go and see if Felka’s all right. She doesn’t leave until tomorrow. You could have a swim, make sure she’s not throwing a party or entertaining unsuitable young men.”

      “You asking me?” Paul laughed.

      “Keep an eye on her, I said, not get your leg over.”

      “The thought had never crossed my mind.” It had, and often, but he wasn’t going to admit that to Max. For reasons that baffled him, he’d acquired an unfair reputation for being a womaniser. In his book, there was a huge difference between having erotic thoughts about a woman and having base designs on one. It was all right to look and admire, but not to act on every instinct, which was why he was careful to keep his thoughts and emotions about the female of the species to himself. Somewhere lurking at the back of his mind, he suspected his brother had started the rumour. From the time they had been in their teens, Dan had always been jealous of the fact that women were more attracted to his younger brother than to him. So much easier for Dan to accuse him of being a letch rather than recognising the simple, uncomplicated truth that women preferred men who were nice to them.

      “And if you need a decent set of wheels …”

      “What’s wrong with my car?”

      “Where to start?” This time Max laughed.

      Tallis had to admit that his car was neither cool nor sexy. It wasn’t even very practical. Price alone had guided his decision to buy a Rover. After the demise of Longbridge, they had been practically giving them away.

      “I’d look on it as a personal favour if you took the BMW out for a good run,” Max said persuasively. “No point the lovely beast sitting in the garage for all that time.”

      Tallis almost punched the air. Things were looking up. This wasn’t just any BMW. This was a Z8, the dog’s bollocks. “Deal.”

      “Good man,” Max said, voice warm with absolution as he cut the call.

      It was too early for a beer but Tallis decided to have one anyway. Screw the fitness and weight-loss regime.

      CHAPTER TWO

      SEVERAL 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 СКАЧАТЬ