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yearsinside, 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. Theshrink 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 stampingground, 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.