The Burning Girl Read online

  Mark Billingham

  The Burning Girl

  For

  Hilary Hale

  ‘And now I know how Joan of Arc felt,

  Now I know how Joan of Arc felt,

  As the flames rose to her Roman nose,

  And her Walkman started to melt…’

  ‘Bigmouth Strikes Again’–The Smiths

  Contents

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  February

  The Price of Being Human

  One

  The train was stationary, somewhere between Golders Green and Hampstead…

  Two

  ‘I presume you tried 1471…?’

  Three

  These rooms always had one thing in common. The size…

  Four

  The uniformed constable who’d been first on the scene was…

  Five

  Thorne had never conducted an interview alongside Carol Chamberlain before…

  Six

  On Monday morning, just after ten-thirty, Tughan stuck his head…

  Seven

  Thorne cut up Royal College Street, where a faded plaque…

  Eight

  An attractive young woman placed menus on the table in…

  Nine

  Leicester Square after dark was right up there with the…

  Ten

  Thorne left the Moloney murder scene as the sun was…

  Eleven

  Thorne could think of better places to be on a…

  March

  The Weight of the Soul

  Twelve

  Thorne pulled up outside the house and sat for five…

  Thirteen

  ‘You’re looking a bit better, Gordon,’ Holland said.

  Fourteen

  The elegant row of substantial Victorian houses would not have…

  Fifteen

  Rooker had been moved earlier that week to HMP Salisbury,…

  Sixteen

  A single word was written on the whiteboard in red…

  Seventeen

  ‘How did you get my number, anyway?’ Thorne asked.

  Eighteen

  If Thorne were to make a list of the places…

  Nineteen

  The waitress slid a plate of perfectly arranged biscuits into…

  Twenty

  ‘Tell me again about the meeting with Ryan. Tell me…

  Twenty-One

  Thorne closed the diary, lay back and pressed it to…

  April

  Immortal Skin

  Twenty-Two

  A couple of years before, while driving to work early…

  Twenty-Three

  ‘I think you’re an idiot, Tom.’

  Twenty-Four

  ‘So, come on,’ Rooker said. ‘What level of protection do…

  Twenty-Five

  Wednesday morning in the Major Incident Room. Two days after…

  Twenty-Six

  Chamberlain stood in the doorway watching Jack at the cooker.

  Twenty-Seven

  The car containing Memet and Hassan Zarif pulled away from…

  Twenty-Eight

  ‘I knew I should have got a toy or something.’

  Twenty-Nine

  Thorne was dragging the car around and flooring it back…

  Thirty

  Wayne Brookhouse’s face–open and attractive beneath the mop of…

  Thirty-One

  Thorne hadn’t known Wayne Brookhouse for long, of course, but…

  Thirty-Two

  Thorne waited nearly a week before going back to Green…

  May

  Ignorance

  Thirty-Three

  It was the day before the Cup Final–a little over…

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Praise

  Other Books by Mark Billingham

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  NEARLY HALF OF ALL NEW BUSINESSES FAIL WITHIN THE FIRST THREE YEARS!

  ‘DON’T BE ONE OF THE UNLUCKY ONES!’

  Dear Local Businessman

  As businessmen ourselves, we know only too well the risks involved in getting a new venture off the ground. We know too that as your business has already begun to establish itself, you must certainly be determined to succeed. We can make sure that happens.

  We are a company specialising in protecting the small businessman. We can take care of everything, so that you need never worry about anything again. We can offer guaranteed peace of mind for a reasonable monthly premium.

  Our rates begin at £400 per month, but if you should find yourself in short-term difficulty for any reason, payments may be offset at a cost to be negotiated. Compare our terms with any you might find elsewhere, but make sure that you talk to some of our other clients first. We’re sure you will decide that ours is a service you cannot afford to be without.

  Our reputation ensures that from the moment you go into business with us, you will be free to run your shop, restaurant or company, secure in the knowledge that we are there to handle any problem that may arise.

  We can be contacted 24 HOURS A DAY on the mobile phone number you will be given today by our representative.

  Call us right now and buy yourself some peace of mind!

  February

  The Price of Being Human

  Later, Carol Chamberlain would convince herself that she had actually been dreaming about Jessica Clarke when she got the first call. That the noise of the phone ringing had dragged her awake; away from the sound and the smell of it. The fuzzy picture of a girl running, the colours climbing up her back, exploding and flying at her neck like scarves of gold and crimson.

  Whether the dream was imagined or not, she’d begun to see it all again the moment she’d put down the phone. Sitting on the edge of the bed, shivering; Jack, who had stirred only momentarily, dead to the world behind her.

  She saw it all.

  The colours were as bright, and the sound as clear and crisp as it had been that morning twenty years before. She was certain of it. Though Carol had not been there, had not seen any of it with her own eyes, she had spoken to everyone, everyone who had. Now she believed that when she ran over it in her mind, when she imagined it, she was seeing it all exactly as it had happened…

  The sound–of the man’s feet on the grass as he climbed the slope, of his tuneless humming–was drowned out by the noise from the playground. Beneath the high-pitched peaks of shouts and screams was a low throb of chatter and gossip, a wave of conversation that rolled across the playground and away down the hillside, towards the main road.

  The man listened to it as he got nearer, unable to make out anything clearly. It would almost certainly be talk about boys and music. Who was in and who was out. He could hear another sound, too: the buzz of a lawnmower from the far side of the school where a team of gardeners was working. They wore green boiler-suits, and so did he. His was only missing the embroidered council logo.

  Hands in his pockets, cap pulled down low on his head, he walked around the perimeter of the playground to where the girl and a bunch of her friends were gathered. A few of them were leaning back on the metal, cross-hatched fence, bouncing gently against it, relaxed.

  The man removed the secateurs from his belt and squatted, inches away from the girls on the other side of the fence. With one hand, he began snipping at the weeds that sprouted around the base of a concrete fence post. With the other, he reached into his pocket for the can of lighter fluid.

  It had always been the smell, more than anything, that had worried him. He’d made sure the can was full and there was not the faintest hiss or gurgle as he squeezed, as the jet of fluid shot from the plastic
nozzle through the gap in the fence. His concern was that some hint of it, a whiff as it soaked into the material of the blue, knee-length skirt, might drift up on the breeze and alert the girl or one of her friends.

  He needn’t have worried. By the time he’d laid the can down on the grass and reached for the lighter, he’d used half the fuel at least, and the girls had been too busy chattering to notice anything. It surprised him that for fifteen seconds or more the girl’s skirt smouldered quietly before finally catching. He was also surprised by the fact that she wasn’t the one who screamed first…

  Jessica had only one ear on Ali’s story about the party she’d been to and Manda’s tale of the latest tiff with her boyfriend. She was still thinking about the stupid row with her mum that had gone on the whole weekend, and the talking-to she’d been given by her father before he’d left for work that morning. When Ali pulled a face and the others laughed, Jessica joined in without really appreciating the joke.

  It felt like a small tug at first, and then a tickle, and she leaned forward to smooth down the back of her skirt. She saw Manda’s face change then, watched her mouth widen, but she never heard the sound that came out of it. Jessica was already feeling the agony lick at the tops of her legs as she lurched away from the fence and started to run…

  Long distant from it now, Carol Chamberlain imagined the panic and the pain–as shocked as she always was at the unbearable events unfolding in her mind’s eye.

  Horribly quickly. Dreadfully slowly…

  An hour before dawn, it was dark inside the bedroom, but the searing light of something unnatural blazed behind her eyes. With hindsight, with knowledge, she was everywhere, able to see and hear it all.

  She saw girls’ mouths gape like those of old women, their eyes big and glassy as their feet carried them away from the flames. Away from their friend.

  She saw Jessica carve a ragged path across the playground, her arms flailing. She heard the screams, the thump of shoes against asphalt, the sizzle as the hair caught. She watched what she knew to be a child move like a thrown firework, skittering across a pavement. Slowing down, fizzing…

  And she saw the face of a man, of Rooker, as he turned and jogged away down the slope. His legs moving faster and faster. Almost, but not quite, falling as he careered down the hill towards his car.

  Carol Chamberlain turned and stared at the phone. She thought about the anonymous call she had received twenty minutes earlier. The simple message from a man who could not possibly have been Gordon Rooker.

  ‘I burned her…’

  ONE

  The train was stationary, somewhere between Golders Green and Hampstead, when the woman stepped into the carriage.

  Just gone seven on a Monday night. The passengers a pretty fair cross-section of Londoners heading home late, or into the West End to make a night of it. Suits and Evening Standards. The office two-piece and a dog-eared thriller. All human life, in replica football kits and Oxfam chic and Ciro Citterio casuals. Heads bouncing against windows and lolling in sleep, or nodding in time to Coldplay or Craig David or DJ Shadow.

  For no good reason other than it was on the Northern Line, the train lurched forward suddenly, then stopped again a few seconds later. People looked at the feet of those opposite, or read the adverts above their heads. The silence, save for the tinny basslines bleeding from headphones, exaggerated the lack of connection.

  At one end of the carriage, two black boys sat together. One looked fifteen or sixteen but was probably younger. He wore a red bandanna, an oversized American football jersey and baggy jeans. He was laden with rings and necklaces. Next to him was a much smaller boy, his younger brother perhaps, dressed almost identically.

  To the man sitting opposite them, the clothes, the jewellery, the attitude seemed ridiculous on a child whose expensive trainers didn’t even reach the floor. The man was stocky, in his early forties, and wore a battered brown leather jacket. He looked away when the bigger boy caught him staring, and ran a hand through hair that was greyer on one side than the other. It looked, to Tom Thorne, as if the two boys had blown their pocket money in a shop called ‘Mr Tiny Gangsta’.

  Within a second or two of the woman coming through the door, the atmosphere in the carriage had changed. From buttoned-up to fully locked-down. English, in extremis…

  Thorne looked at her just long enough to take in the headscarf and the thick, dark eyebrows and the baby cradled beneath one arm. Then he looked away. He didn’t quite duck behind a newspaper, like many of those around him, but he was ashamed to admit to himself that this was only because he didn’t have one.

  Thorne stared at his shoes, but was aware of the hand that was thrust out as the woman stood over him. He could see the polystyrene cup, the top of it picked at, or perhaps chewed away. He could hear the woman speak softly in a language he didn’t understand and didn’t need to.

  She shook the cup in front of his face and Thorne heard nothing rattle.

  Then it became a routine: the cup held out, the question asked, the plea ignored and on to the next. Thorne looked up as she moved away down the carriage, feeling an ache building in his gut as he stared at the curve of her back beneath a dark cardigan, the stillness of the arm that supported her baby. He turned away as the ache sharpened into a stab of sorrow for her, and for himself.

  He turned in time to watch the older boy lean across to his brother. Sucking his teeth before he spoke. A hiss, like cats in a bag.

  ‘I really hate them people…’

  Thorne was still depressed twenty minutes later when he walked out of the tube station on to Kentish Town Road. He wasn’t feeling much better by the time he kicked the door of his flat shut behind him. But his mood would not stay black for long.

  From the living room, a voice was suddenly raised, sullen and wounded, above the noise of the television: ‘What bloody time d’you call this?’

  Thorne dropped his bag, took four steps down the hall and turned to see Phil Hendricks stretched out on the sofa. The pathologist was taller, skinnier and, at thirty-three, ten years younger than Thorne. He was wearing black, as always–jeans and a V-neck sweater–with the usual assortment of rings, spikes and studs through most of the available space on and around his face. There were other piercings elsewhere, but Thorne wanted to know as little about those as possible.

  Hendricks pointed the remote and flicked off the television. ‘Dinner will be utterly ruined.’ He was normally about as camp as an armoured car, so the joky attempt at being queeny in his flat Mancunian accent made Thorne smile all the more.

  ‘Right,’ Thorne said. ‘Like you can even boil an egg.’

  ‘Well, it would have been ruined.’

  ‘What are we having, anyway?’

  Hendricks swung his feet down to the floor and rubbed a hand back and forth across his closely shaved skull. ‘Menu’s next to the phone.’ He waved a hand towards the small table in the corner. ‘I’m having the usual, plus an extra mushroom bhaji.’

  Thorne shrugged off his jacket and carried it back out into the hall. He came back in, bent to turn down the radiator, carried a dirty mug through to the kitchen. He picked up Hendricks’ biker boots from in front of the sofa and carried them out into the hall.

  Then he picked up the phone and called the Bengal Lancer…

  Hendricks had been sleeping on Thorne’s sofa-bed since just after Christmas, when the collection of mushrooms growing in his own place had reached monstrous proportions. The builders and damp-proofers were supposed to be there for less than a week, but as with all such estimates the reality hadn’t quite matched up. Thorne was still unsure why Hendricks hadn’t just moved in with his current boyfriend, Brendan–he still spent a couple of nights a week there as it was. Thorne’s best guess was that, with a relationship as on and off as theirs, even a temporary move would have been somewhat risky.

  He and Hendricks were a little cramped in Thorne’s small flat, but Thorne had to admit that he enjoyed the company. They discussed,
fully and frankly, the relative merits of Spurs and Arsenal. They argued about Thorne’s consuming love of country music. They bickered about Thorne’s sudden and uncharacteristic passion for tidiness.

  While they were waiting for the curry to arrive, Thorne put on a Lucinda Williams album. He and Hendricks argued about it for a while, and then they began to talk about other things…

  ‘Mickey Clayton died as a result of gunshot wounds to the head,’ Hendricks said.

  Thorne peered across at him over the top of his beer can. ‘I’m guessing that wasn’t one of your trickier ones. What with most of his head plastered all over the walls when we found him.’

  Hendricks pulled a face. ‘The full report should be on your desk tomorrow afternoon.’

  ‘Thanks, Phil.’ He enjoyed taking the piss, but, aside from being just about his closest friend, Hendricks was the best pathologist Thorne had ever worked with. Contrary to appearances, and despite the sarcasm and the off-colour jokes, there was no one better at understanding the dead. Hendricks listened as they whispered their secrets, translating them from the mysterious language of the slab.

  ‘Did you get the bullet?’ Thorne asked. The killer had used a nine-millimetre weapon; what was left of the bullets had been found near the previous victims, or still inside what was left of their skulls…