The Burning Girl Thorne 4 Read online

  Thorne and Hendricks both started slightly when the phone rang.

  "Tom?" A woman's voice.

  Thorne sank back into his armchair with the phone. He shouted across to Hendricks deliberately loud enough for the caller to hear, "Oh Christ, it's that mad old woman who keeps phoning me up." Hendricks grinned and shouted back, "Tell her I can smell the cat food from here!"

  "Come on then, Carol," Thorne said. "Tell me what's been happening in glamorous Worthing. Any "cat stuck up tree" incidents or Zimmer-frame pile-ups I should know about?"

  The woman on the other end of the line was in no mood for the usual banter. "I need to talk to you, Tom. I need you to listen." So, Thorne listened. The curry arrived and went cold, but he didn't even think about it. He could tell as soon as she started to talk that something was seriously wrong.

  In all the time he'd known Carol Chamberlain, Thorne had never heard her cry before.

  TWO

  "I presume you tried 1471?"

  She raised her eyebrows. Asked if he thought she was a complete idiot.

  Thorne shrugged an apology.

  When he had first met Carol Chamberlain the previous year, he had taken her for a frumpy, middle-aged woman with too much time on her hands; a frumpy, middle-aged woman he had mistakenly assumed to be the mother of one of his constables.

  She still claimed not to have forgiven him.

  Ex-DCI Carol Chamberlain had arrived in Thorne's office on a humid July morning seven months earlier, and turned the hunt for a sadistic rapist and killer on its head. She was a member of what had become known as the Crinkly Squad a unit made up of former officers brought out of retirement to work on cold cases. Chamberlain hadn't needed a great deal of persuading to come back. Having done her thirty years, she'd been forced out of the Met to her way of thinking at least prematurely, and felt, at fifty-five, that she still had a good deal to offer. The first case she'd worked on had thrown up information that had changed the course of Thorne's investigation, and it would turn out later, his life. The cold case now anything but cold had quickly been taken away from her, but Thorne had kept in touch and he and Chamberlain had quickly grown close.

  Thorne wasn't sure precisely what Carol Chamberlain got from her relationship with him, but he was happy to give whatever it was in exchange for her directness, her sound advice and a bullshit detector that seemed to get sharper with age.

  Looking at her now across the table, remembering that first impression of her, Thorne wondered how he could have made so gross a misjudgment.

  Chamberlain held up the dirty cream envelope for Thorne to see, and then tipped it, emptying the ashes on to the table. "These arrived yesterday morning."

  Thorne picked up a fork and nudged the tines through the blackened scraps of material. He was careful not to touch any of it with his bare hands, but he didn't know why he was bothering. He wasn't sure yet if he was going to do anything about this. The pieces crumbled even as the fork touched them, but he could see that one or two fragments still retained their original blue colour.

  "I'll hang on to these." He picked up a menu and used the edge of it to scrape the ashes back into their envelope.

  Chamberlain nodded. "It's serge, I think. Or heavy cotton. Same material that Jessica Clarke's skirt was made out of. ." Thorne thought about what she was saying, what she'd begun to tell him the previous night on the phone. He remembered a little of the case, remembered the outrage, but most of the details were new to him. He asked himself if he'd ever heard such a horrific story. If he had, he couldn't remember when.

  "What sort of sick sod does that to a kid?" Thorne said. He glanced around, anxious not to alarm those at the nearby tables. Chamberlain waited until he turned back, looked him in the eye. "One who's getting paid for it."

  "What?"

  "We thought it was some sort of head case everybody did. Us and the schools and the papers, all getting jittery, waiting for him to do it again. Then we found out that Jessica Clarke was the wrong girl."

  "How d'you mean, "wrong"?"

  "The girl standing next to her in the playground that day was called Alison Kelly. She was one of Jessica's best friends. Same height, same colour hair. She was also the youngest daughter of Kevin Kelly." She looked at Thorne as though expecting a reaction. She didn't get one.

  Thorne shook his head. "Should I .. .?"

  "Let me run you quickly through how it was in 1984. You'd have been about what?"

  Thorne did the mental calculation. Id've been about to come out of uniform," he said. "About to get married. Sowing the last of my wild oats, probably. Going to clubs, going to gigs."

  "You lived in north London, right?"

  Thorne nodded.

  "Well, chances are that any club you went to was owned by one of the big firms, and the Kelly's were the biggest. There were others taking control of the south-east, and there were a few independents knocking about, but the Kelly's' had a stake in most things north of the river."

  As Thorne listened, it struck him that her normal, measured tone had become hesitant; the neutral accent had slipped, allowing her native Yorkshire to emerge. He'd heard it before, when she was angry or excited. When she was fired up about something. If he hadn't already known, he'd have guessed that something had shaken her badly.

  "The Kelly's' were based in and around Camden Town. There were other firms, other families in Shepherd's Bush and Hackney, and they sorted things out between them most of the time. There was the occasional bit of silliness a couple of shootings a year but it was no worse than it had ever been. Then, in 1983, someone took a pop at Kevin Kelly."

  "Put out a contract?"

  "Right, but for one reason or another they didn't get him. Whatever message they were trying to send wasn't understood. So, they went after his daughter."

  "And didn't get her either. Jesus."

  "Kelly got the message this time though. A dozen people died in the three weeks after the Jessica Clarke incident. Three brothers from one family were shot in the same pub one night. Kevin Kelly more or less wiped the opposition out."

  Thorne picked up his cup. The coffee was stone cold. "Leaving Mr. Kelly and his friends with most of north London to themselves."

  "His friends, yes, but not Kelly. It was like the attempt on his daughter knocked the guts out of him. Once the competition was out of the way, he retired. Upped sticks, just like that. He took his wife, his daughter and a couple of million, and walked away from it."

  "Sounds like a good move."

  Chamberlain shrugged. "He dropped dead five years later. Just gone fifty."

  "So, who ran things once Kelly joined the pipe-and-slippers brigade?"

  "Well, it was really just a family in name only. Kelly had no brothers or sons. He handed his entire operation over to one of those friends we were talking about: a particularly nasty piece of work called William Ryan. He was Kelly's number two, and..." Chamberlain saw the look on Thorne's face and stopped. "What?"

  "When you've finished the history lesson, I'll bring you up to date."

  "Fair enough." Chamberlain put down the teaspoon she'd been fiddling with for the past ten minutes.

  Thorne pushed back his chair. "I'm going to get another cup of coffee. Do you want anything?"

  They'd met in a small, Greek cafe near Victoria Station. Chamberlain had caught the train from Worthing first thing that morning, and was planning to get back as quickly as she could.

  Standing at the counter, waiting to order, Thorne glanced over at her. He thought that she'd lost a little weight. Ordinarily, he knew that she'd have been delighted, but things seemed far from ordinary. The lines across her face were undisguised. They showed when she looked up and smiled across at him. An old woman suddenly... and frightened. Thorne carried a tray back to the table: two coffees, and a baklava for them to share. He got stuck in straight away and, between mouthfuls told Chamberlain about the SO7 operation. About the present-day organised-crime set-up in north London. About the as-yet-unidentified
challenge to a powerful gangland boss named Billy Ryan.

  "It's lovely to hear that Billy's done so well for himself," Chamberlain said.

  Thorne was delighted at the sarcasm and the smile. That was more like the Carol Chamberlain he knew. "Oh, he's done very well. And Ryan's certainly is a family firm: brothers and cousins all over the shop, and a son and heir, Stephen. He's a winning individual, by all accounts."

  Chamberlain had picked up the spoon again. She tapped it against her palm. "Billy married Alison Kelly at one point."

  "Kevin Kelly's daughter? The one who...?" She nodded. "The one who Gordon Rooker meant to set fire to. The one he mistook Jessica Clarke for. Her and Billy Ryan got married just before Kelly died, if I remember rightly. It made the old man happy, but it was never going to last. She was a lot younger than he was. Just turned eighteen, I think. He'd have been mid-thirties." Thorne pointed his spoon towards the last piece of baklava. "I'm eating all of this. Don't you?" She shook her head and he helped himself. "Tell me about Rooker," he said.

  "There's not a huge amount to tell. He confessed."

  "That always helps."

  By now, the smile was long gone. "Seriously, Tom, it was about as simple a case as I ever worked on. I was the DI. I took his first statement."

  "And what did you think?"

  "It seemed to fit. Rooker wasn't unknown. What he did at that school, to that girl, was well out of the ordinary, admittedly, but he was someone who'd do pretty much anything, or anybody, if the price was right."

  Thorne had come across far too many people like that. He was coming across more of them all the time. "Did he say who was paying it?"

  "He never went as far as to name anyone, but he didn't have to. We knew that he'd worked for a few of the smaller firms before. He may even have been involved in the failed contract on Kevin Kelly. Also, we knew that Rooker liked to burn people. It hadn't been proved, but he was in the frame for a contract job in 1982. Someone, probably Gordon Rooker, tied the boss of a security firm to a chair and emptied a can of lighter fluid into his hair."

  "What a charmer."

  "Actually, he was. Or thought he was. Bastard was flirting with me in that interview room." She stopped, swallowed, as if trying to take away a sour taste. "Like I said, it was simple. Rooker pleaded guilty. He got life. And, as of yesterday, when I called to check, he was still in Park Royal Prison."

  Thorne stretched out a hand and placed it over hers for a few seconds.

  "He was still there about three hours ago. When I called." The smile returned for a moment, but it looked a little forced.

  "Thanks, Tom."

  "What about Jessica?"

  Chamberlain's eyes flicked away from Thorne's face and she stared past him, out of the cafe's front window. "The burns were major. It was a year before she could go back to school."

  "What about now? What does she...?" She shook her head, her voice barely above a whisper. "You didn't really expect a happy ending, did you, Tom?"

  "One would be nice," Thorne said after a few moments. "Just occasionally."

  She turned back to him and her face softened, as if he were a child asking for something that she couldn't possibly afford.

  "She threw herself off a multi-storey car park on her sixteenth birthday."

  Muslum Izzigil had been swearing pretty solidly for ten minutes when the two boys walked into his shop.

  He was working his way through an enormous pile of tapes, all returned the night before and each one needing to be rewound. People returning videos without bothering to rewind them were the bane of his life. He took a tape out of the machine, slammed it into a box, reached for another. "Lazy bastards ."

  He glanced across at the two boys who were flicking through the boxes in the used for sale' bins near the door. He held up one of the tapes and pulled a face. "How hard is it to rewind? Huh?" One boy looked blankly back at Izzigil, while his friend whispered something and began to laugh. Izzigil hit the rewind button for the umpteenth time and leaned back against the counter. He looked up at the screen, watched a minute or two of an Austin Powers movie, then turned his attention back to the boys.

  "New releases over this side," he said, pointing. "We haven't got it, film is free next time. Same as Blockbuster." The two boys were pulling display boxes from racks in the adult section, leering at the pictures on the back. One boy rubbed a box against his crotch, stuck out his tongue and licked his lips.

  "Hey ." Izzigil began to gesture. "Don't mess." The boys quickly pulled a couple more boxes from the rack, carried an armful across to the counter and dropped them down. One was almost a foot taller than his mate, but they were both stocky. They wore baseball caps and puffa jackets, the same as Izzigil saw the black kids wearing, hanging around Shopping City on a Saturday afternoon ... "Got anything with Turkish birds in?" the taller boy asked. The other boy leaned on the counter. "He likes women who are really hairy ."

  Izzigil felt himself redden. He said nothing, began to gather up the display boxes that the two boys had dropped and piled them up.

  "Whatever you've got, I hope it's a damn sight better than this." The shorter boy reached into his jacket, produced a plain black video box, and slammed it down hard on the counter. "I rented this from you the other day."

  Izzigil looked at the box, then shook his head. "Not from here. My boxes are different, look ."

  "You trying to stitch me up?" the boy said.

  "We want our fucking money back, mate ." The smell reached Izzigil then. He almost retched, and let his hand drop below the level of the counter. "You should go before I call the police ."

  The taller boy picked up the box, opened it and shook the turd out on to the counter.

  Izzigil stepped back. "Christ!"

  The taller boy began to laugh. His friend pulled a mock-serious face.

  "That film's shit, mate ."

  "Get the fuck out of my shop!" Izzigil reached beneath the counter, but before he could lay his hand on the pool cue the shorter boy had leaned across and a knife was suddenly inches from the shopkeeper's face.

  "You were given a letter ."

  "What letter? I don't know about a letter."

  "Some friends of ours gave you a fucking letter. You were offered the chance to behave like a businessman and you didn't take it. So, now we won't be wasting any more money on fucking notepaper. Clear enough for you?"

  Izzigil nodded.

  "Now we stop messing about. Next time we might stop by when you're upstairs giving your hairy old lady one, and your son's down here, minding the shop ."

  Izzigil nodded again, watched over the boy's shoulder as his friend moved slowly around the shop, tipping display cases on to the floor, casually pulling over bins. He saw a customer put one hand on the door, then freeze and move quickly away when he glimpsed what was happening inside.

  The boy with the knife took a slow step backwards. He cocked his head and slipped the knife into the back pocket of his jeans. "Someone will pop round in the next week or two to go over things," he said. Izzigil's hand tightened around the pool cue then. He knew it was much too late to be of any use, but he squeezed it as he watched the two boys leave.

  On the screen above him, Austin Powers was dancing to a Madonna song as Izzigil came slowly around the counter and walked towards the front of the shop. He pressed himself against the window and looked both ways along the street.

  "Muslum?"

  Izzigil turned at his wife's voice and took a step back into the shop. He saw her eyes suddenly widen and her mouth drop open, and he turned back just as the black shape rushed towards the window. Just as the world seemed to explode with noise and pain and a terrible waterfall of glass.

  They walked slowly back along Buckingham Palace Road, towards the station. It was the middle of the lunch hour, and people were queuing out of the doors of delis and coffee-shops. February was starting to bite and Thorne's jacket was zipped up to the top, his hands thrust right down into the pockets.

  "How's J
ack doing?"

  Chamberlain stopped for a second to let a girl dart across the pavement in front of her. "He's the same." They moved off again. "He tries to be supportive, but he didn't really want me to go back to it. I know he worries that I'm taking on too much, but I was going mental stuck in the house." She looked at herself in a shop window, ran fingers through her hair. "I couldn't give a shit about gardening."

  "I meant about these phone calls. That letter."

  "He doesn't know about the letter and he slept through all but one of the calls. I told him it was a wrong number." She pulled the scarf she was wearing tighter around her throat. "Now. I'm more or less hovering over the bloody phone all night long. It's almost worse on the nights when he doesn't ring."

  "You're not sleeping at all? It's been going on for a bloody fortnight, Carol."

  "I catch up in the day. I never slept much in the first place."

  "What's he sound like?" Thorne asked. She answered quickly and simply. Thorne guessed that she'd known the questions he would ask, because they were the ones she would have asked.

  "He's very calm. Like he's telling me things that are obvious. Like he's reminding me of things I've forgotten ."

  "Accent?"

  She shook her head.

  "Any thoughts as to his age?"

  She carried on shaking it.

  "Look, I know this is going to sound strange, but I'm not sure why you didn't just call the police."