the bloody hell are you?”
The woman glanced up as if he were an unreasonable husband demanding to know why his dinner wasn’t on the table. “You normally greet people like this?”
“Only when they break into my house.”
She arched an imperious eyebrow and transferred her gaze to the walls. Tallis felt his jaw tighten. “How did you get in?”
“Does it matter?”
“Yes.”
She smiled—nice set of white teeth—and leant towards him. “Aren’t you a tiny bit intrigued to know why I’m here?”
She sat back again, uncrossed her legs, re-crossed them. She was wearing a dark brown linen dress with a plain square neck and three-quarter-length sleeves. Her arms were slender, fingers long. Apart from a thin gold necklace, she wore no other jewellery. He estimated her as being the same age as him, possibly a little older. She was actually very beautiful, he thought, and she knew it. She had soft brown eyes displaying vulnerability she didn’t possess, small breasts, about which he had a theory. Women with small breasts were dangerous. You only had to look at Lucrezia Borgia, the illegitimate daughter of a Spanish pope with whom it was rumoured she’d had an incestuous relationship. Even by sixteenth-century standards, Lucrezia was judged to have been cruel and avaricious.
“Who are you?”
“My name’s Sonia Cavall.” She extended a hand. He didn’t take it. She let it drop. “Aren’t you going to sit down?”
“You still haven’t told me what you’re doing,” Tallis said, ignoring the invitation.
“I’d have thought that was obvious.” She put the magazine away, slowly, carefully, met and held his gaze.
He blinked. This was barmy. She was so composed, so in control. Was he going mad? Or was he missing something? Horrible questions hurtled through his brain. Had they met before? Had he been drunk? Had they slept together? Christ on a crutch, was she pregnant with his child? No. He gave himself a mental shake. He was always very, very careful about stuff like that and he hadn’t slept with a woman for God knew how long. “Explain or I’ll call the police.”
Again the astringent smile. “Oh, I don’t think so.” Confident. Authoritative. He immediately thought spook. “Consider me your fairy godmother.”
Playing games, are we? Tallis thought. All right, baby, let’s play. He donned a smile. “I never read the Brothers Grimm.”
“Should have. They’re quite instructive. Full of moral fervour.”
“Can we cut the crap now?” He was still smiling but he felt fury. Whoever this woman was, she was too smart for her own good.
“What if I said you’ve been selected for a job?”
“What job?” Suspicion etched his voice.
“Finding people.”
He burst out laughing. “Come to the wrong house. It’s not what I do.”
“What do you do?” There was a scathing intonation in her voice.
He should have thrown her out on the spot yet he badly wanted to know what this was all about. “What sort of people?”
“Illegals.”
“A job for Immigration, I’d have thought.”
Cavall said nothing. Tallis tried to fill the gap. Immigration remained in rather a pickle, which was why the latest Home Secretary, like all the rest, had pledged to take a robust approach to failed asylum-seekers and illegal immigrants.
“We’re talking about people released from prison after serving their sentences,” she told him, “and mistakenly released into the community.”
“Mistakenly?” Tallis suspected some inter-agency cock-up.
“They should have been deported,” Cavall said, ice in her voice.
“Not exactly original.” Tallis shrugged. “It’s happened before.”
“But these individuals are highly dangerous. It’s feared they may reoffend.”
“Ditto.” And everyone knew the recidivist rate was high. The only difference was that released British lifers were monitored. One slip, even for a relatively minor offence like drunk and disorderly, could land them back in prison. The people Cavall was alluding to had presumably dropped off the radar.
“A decision has been taken at the highest level to have them located.”
Tallis shrugged. So what? he thought. Bung them on a website or something.
Cavall’s face flashed with irritation. “You don’t seem to understand the seriousness of the threat.”
“Oh, I understand. It would be a source of great political embarrassment should it come to the attention of the public, particularly if one of them should reoffend.”
“We don’t want to spread panic and fear,” she said evenly.
“So put your finest police officers onto it.”
“We already have.”
“We?”
“I represent the Home Office.”
This time Tallis’s smile was genuine. Which bit? he wondered. “So this is an arse-covering exercise.”
“Damage limitation,” she corrected him.
To protect reputations and ease some politician’s way up the greasy ladder of success, he thought. “Britain’s finest failed, that right?”
“I’m sure you’re aware of the pressure on police resources.”
Code for they’d got nowhere. Doesn’t quite square, he thought. The British live in a surveillance society. With over four million cameras tracking our every move, each time we log on, use our mobile phone or sat nav in our car, fill in a form, make a banking transaction, someone is logging it. Except, of course, the information is fragmented. It takes a measure of expertise to draw the right inferences, match the electronic footprints and plot the trail back to an identity. While the ordinary citizen might feel threatened and guilty until proven innocent by the power of technology, a determined criminal could still manipulate it and evade detection. Either he stole someone else’s identity or had no identity at all. “Why not wheel out the spooks?”
“Snowed under with the terrorist threat.”
Tallis flinched. The security service had foiled many plots since 9/11 and 7/7. They were mostly doing a fine job in difficult circumstances, but the death of Rinelle Van Sleigh was a stain on their history. Somehow, somewhere, there’d been a chronic lapse of intelligence, and for that an innocent woman had paid with her life. To a far lesser degree, so had he: life as he’d once known it was over. “So these individuals aren’t on control orders?”
“They
