The Burning Girl Page 2

  ‘You won’t need a match to tell you it’s the same killer.’

  ‘The X?’ It had been obvious when the body had been discovered the previous morning. The nylon shirt hoiked up to the back of the neck, the blood-trails running from two deep, diagonal cuts–left shoulder to right hip and vice versa.

  ‘Still not sure about the blade, though. I thought it might be a Stanley knife, but I reckon it could be a machete, something like that.’

  Thorne nodded. A machete was the weapon of choice with a number of gangland enforcers. ‘Yardies or Yakuza, maybe…’

  ‘Well, whoever’s paying him, he’s enjoying the work. He shoots them pretty quickly afterwards, so I can’t be a hundred per cent sure, but I think he does his bit of creative carving while they’re still alive.’

  The man responsible for the death of Mickey Clayton, and three men before him in the previous six weeks, was like no contract killer Thorne had ever come across or heard about. To these shadowy figures–men who were willing to kill for anything upwards of a few thousand pounds–anonymity was everything. This one was different. He liked to leave his mark. ‘X marks the spot,’ Thorne said.

  ‘Or X as in “crossed out”.’ Hendricks drained his can. ‘So, what about you? Good day at the office, dear?’

  Thorne grunted as he stood up. He took Hendricks’ empty can and went through to the kitchen to get them both fresh ones. Staring aimlessly into the fridge, Thorne tried in vain to remember his last good day at the office…

  His team–of which Hendricks was the civilian member–at the Serious Crime Group (West) had been seconded to help out the Projects Team at SO7–the Serious and Organised Crime Unit. It had quickly become apparent that organised was one thing this particular operation was not. The resources of SO7 were stretched paper thin–or at least that was their story. There was a major turf war between two old family firms south of the river, and an escalation in a series of ongoing disputes among Triad gangs that had seen three shootings in one week and a pitched battle on Gerrard Street. All the same, Thorne suspected that he and his team were basically there to cover other people’s arses.

  There was nothing in it for him. If arrests were ever made, the credit would go elsewhere, and anyway, there was precious little satisfaction in chasing down those responsible for getting rid of pondlife like Mickey Clayton.

  The series of fatal ‘X’ shootings–of which Clayton’s was the fourth–was a major assault on the operations of one of north London’s biggest gangland families, but the simple fact was that the Projects Team hadn’t the first idea who was doing the assaulting. All the obvious rivals had been approached and discounted. All the usual underground sources had been paid and pumped for information, none of which had proved useful. It became clear that a major new operation had established itself and was keen to make a splash. Thorne and his team were on board to find out who they were. Who was paying a contract killer, quickly dubbed the X-Man, to hurt the Ryan family?

  ‘He’s making life hard for himself, though, isn’t he?’ Thorne started talking from the kitchen and continued as he brought the beers into the living room. ‘This X thing, this signature or whatever it is, it limits what he can do, where he can do it. He can’t just ride up on a motorbike or wait for them outside a pub. He needs a bit of time and space.’

  Hendricks took a can. ‘He obviously puts a lot of effort into his work. Plans it. I bet he’s bloody expensive.’

  Thorne thought Hendricks was probably right. ‘It’s still cheap though, isn’t it? When you think about it. To kill someone, I mean. Twenty, twenty-five grand’s about top whack. That’s a damn sight less than the people putting out the contracts pay for their Jeeps and top-of-the-range Mercs.’

  ‘What d’you reckon I can get for a couple of hundred quid?’ Hendricks asked. ‘There’s this mortuary assistant at Westminster who’s getting on my tits.’

  Thorne thought about it for a second. ‘Chinese burn?’

  The laugh was the first decent one that Thorne could remember sharing with anyone for a few days…

  ‘How can it be the Yardies?’ Hendricks said when he’d stopped giggling. ‘Or Yakuza? We know our hitman’s not black or Japanese…’

  A witness claimed to have seen the killer leaving the scene of the third murder and had given a vague description of a white male in his thirties. The witness, Marcus Moloney, was an ‘associate’ of the Ryan family, and not what you’d call an upright citizen, but he seemed pretty sure about what he’d seen.

  ‘It’s not that simple,’ Thorne said. ‘It might have been, ten years ago, when people stuck to their own, but now they don’t care so much and the freelancers just go where the work is. The Triads use Yardies. Yardies work with the Russians. They nicked a gang of Yakuza last year for recruiting outside schools. They were as good as giving out application forms; signing up Greek lads, Asians, Turks, whoever.’

  Hendricks smiled. ‘It’s nice to see that they’re all equal-opportunities employers…’

  Thorne grunted, and the two of them settled back into saying nothing for a few minutes. Thorne closed his eyes and picked at the goatee he’d grown towards the end of the previous year. The beard created the illusion of a jaw-line and covered up the scar from a knife wound.

  The puckered line that ran diagonally across Thorne’s chin was the only visible reminder of a night six months before when he’d both begged for his life and prayed for death to come quickly. There were other scars, easier to disguise, but far more troublesome. Thorne would reach into his gut in the darkness and finger them until they reopened into wounds. He could imagine the scab forming then, blood black across the tender flesh. The crust that would itch and crumble beneath his fingernails, exquisite and agonising, for him to poke and pick at…

  Lucinda Williams sang softly about an all-consuming lust, her voice sweet and saw-toothed at the same time, rising like smoke above a single acoustic guitar.

  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 misjudgement…

  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 headcase; 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. ‘I’d’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 Kellys were the biggest. There were others taking control of the southeast, and there were a few independents knocking about, but the Kellys 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 Kellys 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 café 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, plus a son and heir, Stephen.’

  ‘Stephen. I remember him. He’d have been five or six when all this happened…’

  ‘Well he’s a big boy now. A winning individual by all accounts.’

  Chamberlain had picked up the spoon again. She tapped it against her palm. ‘Billy married Alison Kelly later on.’

  ‘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, with a kid already…’

  ‘Not exactly made in heaven then.’

  ‘I think it lasted a year or two. Once everything went pear-shaped, Billy got back together with whichever tart he’d had Stephen with. Married her as soon as the divorce from Alison came through.’

  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 wa
s 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 café’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…’