LITMIR.BIZ

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talk?”

      He nodded, falling into step beside her. She had large feet for a woman, he noticed. “Money has already been wired to an account for you, details in here,” she said, briefly lifting the briefcase. Tallis was impressed but said nothing. People only gave money away with that much alacrity if there was risk involved to the recipient. “There are four individuals in total,” Cavall continued. “All served sentences for violent crime, including murder. We want them found. To assist in your search, you’ll be handed prison files and, in some cases, computer disks giving full profiles of each offender.” Tallis didn’t break stride. He wondered how she’d got hold of the information. Home Office or no Home Office, prison files were seen on a read-only basis.

      “And the mechanics?”

      “How you go about finding each target is up to you.”

      “But you want them alive?”

      “Of course.” Cavall shot him a sharp look, clearly repulsed by the notion of it being any other way. Good, he thought, he wanted to get that absolutely straight from the start. “As soon as the target’s located, call the contact number,” she continued. “It’s your job to stay with your man until the handover.”

      “That it?”

      “Yes.”

      Sounded simple. Too simple. “What if there’s a problem?”

      “You call and wait for further instruction.”

      “Who’s on the rest of the team?” he asked. They were cutting through the palm house, steam rising, orchids and evil-looking insect-eating plants the only eavesdroppers on their conversation. It felt swelteringly hot. The damp air smelt of sap.

      “There is no team.”

      Tallis stopped. Cavall turned, met and held his gaze. He was trying to decipher whether one good man was good enough, or whether he was merely expendable.

      “Think of me as your handler,” Cavall said, as if that should improve the situation. It didn’t. ‘Handler’ was a word used for police who ran informers. Tallis was starting to feel grubby.

      “Do I carry a warrant card?”

      She shook her head, making her blonde ponytail rock from side to side. “This is the equivalent of a black operation.”

      “So I’m completely on my own.” There was no alarm in Tallis’s voice. He just needed to clarify the situation.

      “Think you can do it?” Her brown eyes drilled into his.

      “Don’t see why not.”

      They carried on walking again. Tallis saw some kind of carnivorous plant swallow up a large bluebottle. “Will I be armed?”

      “What the hell for?” She looked entirely horrified.

      To protect myself, he thought. Should the need arise, he knew where to get hold of a weapon—not that he would do so lightly. After the Van Sleigh incident, he’d never wanted to carry a gun again.

      “We really can’t have any fuss,” she said, half-smiling, more conciliatory.

      He stole a glance, bet she was a blinding fuck. Not that he had any intention of trying to find out.

      They left the suffocating dome of heat and emerged into open air scented with roses. “If this is unofficial, will I be able to talk to arresting and senior investigating officers involved with the case?”

      “Up to you,” Cavall shrugged. “You’ll have to think of a cover story.”

      Christ, this gets better. “Former cellmates?”

      “I’m sure something could be arranged.”

      What and how? he wondered. “And which prisons are we looking at?”

      “The Scrubs, for starters.”

      They walked in silence along a terraced area, Cavall’s heels clicking on the gravel. Sunshine leaked onto the ground. Distant traffic hummed through a background of trees. Eventually they came to a bench. Cavall sat down, clicked open the briefcase, handing Tallis a thick buff-coloured folder. He stared at it. Another poisoned chalice, he thought. He was accumulating them like people collected supermarket vouchers. “You realise these people might have reformed, gone straight. They could be trying to rebuild their lives.”

      “Can’t afford another crisis of conscience, Paul.” She smiled but her voice was humourless. He noticed that whenever she used his first name, it served as a rebuke.

      “They’ve done their time,” he insisted.

      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.

      CHAPTER EIGHT

      BACK 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

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