The Burning Girl Thorne 4 Read online

  She could hear Jack coming upstairs with the tea. She tried to blink the image away.

  She always remembered Gordon Rooker exactly as he had been the first time she'd laid eyes on him. She was cursed to remember Jessica Clarke the same way.

  At the end of the day, Thorne climbed into the BMW with a damn sight more enthusiasm than he'd had when getting into it eleven hours before. He pulled out of the car park of the Peel Centre, and for the next few minutes drove on autopilot. Most of his attention was focused on the far more important task of choosing the right music. The car had a six-disc CD multi changer mounted in the boot, and Thorne relished the time he spent once a week rotating the discs, making sure his selections gave him a good choice, but also a decent balance. There'd generally be something from the early years of country music and something more contemporary Hank Williams and Lyle Lovett were the bookends at the moment. Sandwiched between them would be a couple of compilations, sometimes a soundtrack, and usually an alt country outfit he was getting into Lambchop maybe, or Calexico. And there was always a Cash album.

  He scanned through the choices available. It was important that he make the right one, to carry him through the thirty-minute drive and deliver him home in a different mood. He needed to drift a little, to lose himself in the music and let at least some of the tension bleed away.

  The problem was Tughan.

  Half a mile shy of Hendon, Thorne had settled for Unchained. By the time Cash's vocal came in on "Sea of Heartbreak' and he was smacking his palms against the steering wheel, Thorne was starting to feel much better. As well as it was possible to feel, given the current procedural set-up. The current personnel.

  He drove east for a while, then cut south, crossing the North Circular and heading towards Golders Green.

  Thorne had clashed with Nick Tughan on a case four years previously, and he'd thanked all the deities he didn't believe in when their paths had finally separated. While Thorne had been part of the new team established at the Serious Crime Group, Tughan had found other tits to get on at SO7. Now he was back as part of the investigation into the Ryan killings, the investigation with which Thorne and his team were supposed to cooperate. He was back giving Thorne grief. Worst of all, the slimy fucker was back as a DCI.

  Though they hadn't set eyes on each other for four years, their relationship had picked up exactly where it had left off. It had been neatly encapsulated in their first, terse exchange in the Major Incident Room at Becke House.

  "Thorne."

  "Tughan."

  "I'll settle for "Sir" or "Guv"."

  "What about "twat"?"

  If an officer were to get physical, to throw a punch, for example, at another officer of equal or subordinate rank, things could get a tad sticky. If he were to throw that punch and break a nose, or maybe a cheekbone even if he just handed out a good, hard slap, to a superior officer a DCI, say he would be in a world of very deep shit. Thorne was thinking about just how unfair this was when his mobile began to ring.

  He took a deep breath when he saw the name on the caller ID.

  "Tom?" Auntie Eileen, his father's younger sister. "Listen, there's no need to panic."

  Thorne listened, glancing in the rear-view mirror, swerving across the road and pulling up in a bus lane. He listened as buses and cabs drove around him, deaf to the swearing of the irate drivers, to the bark and bleat of their horns. He listened, feeling sick, then scared, and finally fucked off beyond belief.

  He ended the call, dragged the car through a U-turn, and accelerated north, back the way he'd come.

  The scorch mark rose up the wall behind the cooker and licked a foot or so across the ceiling. The patterned wallpaper had bubbled, then blistered, where the grease that had accumulated over the years had begun to cook the dried paste and plaster beneath. The windows in the kitchen were open, had been for several hours, but still the stench was disgusting.

  "No more fucking chip pans," Thorne said. "We get rid of all the pans, all the oil in the place."

  Eileen looked rather shocked. Thorne thought it was his language but then realised when she spoke that it was more than that.

  "We should disconnect the cooker] she said. "Better still, we should get someone to come and take the bloody thing away."

  "I'll get it organised," Thorne said.

  "Why don't you let me?"

  "I'll sort it."

  Eileen shrugged and sighed. "He knows he's not supposed to come in here."

  "Maybe we should put a lock on the door in the meantime." Thorne began walking around the room, opening cupboards. "He was probably hungry."

  She nodded. "He might well have missed his lunch. I think he's been swearing at the Meals on Wheels woman."

  "They don't call it Meals on Wheels any more, Eileen."

  "He called her a "fucking cow". Told her to "stick her hot-pot up her fat arse"." She was trying not to laugh, but once she saw Thorne giving in to it, she stopped bothering to try.

  With the tension relieved, they both leaned back against work tops Eileen folded her arms tight across her chest.

  "Who called the fire brigade?" Thorne asked.

  "He did, eventually. Once he worked out that it was the smoke alarm going off, he hit the panic button. For a while, I don't think he could remember what the noise was."

  Thorne let his head drop back, looked up at the ceiling. There was a spider's web of smoke-stained cracks around the light fitting. He knew very well that, some mornings, his father had trouble remembering what his shoes were for.

  "We really need to think about doing something. Tom?" Thorne looked across at her. For years, Eileen and his father had not been close, but since the Alzheimer's diagnosis two years earlier, she had been a tower of strength. She'd organised virtually everything, and though she lived in Brighton, she still managed to get up to his father's place in St. Albans more often than Thorne did from north London.

  Thorne felt tired and a little light-headed, exhausted as always by the combination punches of gratitude and guilt.

  "How come they called you?" he asked.

  "Your father gave one of the firemen my number, I think." Thorne raised his arms and his voice in mock-bewilderment. "My number's on all the contact sheets." He started looking in cupboards again. "Home and mobile."

  "He can always remember my number, for some reason. It must be quite an easy one."

  "And why did it take you so long to ring? I could have got here well before you."

  Eileen walked across to him, let a hand drop on to his forearm. "He didn't want to worry you."

  "He knew I'd be bloody furious with him, you mean."

  "He didn't want to worry you, and then I didn't want to worry you. The fire was already out by the time they called, anyway. I just thought I'd better get here first, tidy up a bit."

  Thorne tried to shut the cupboard door, but it was wonky and refused to close properly, however hard he slammed it.

  "Thanks for doing that," he said, finally.

  "We should at least talk about it," she said. "We could consider the options." She pointed towards the cooker. "We've been lucky, but maybe now's the time to think about your dad going somewhere. We could get this place valued, at the very least."

  "No."

  "I'm worried he might start going off; you know, getting lost. There was a thing on the radio about tagging. We could get one of those tags put on him and then at least if he did forget where he was."

  "That's what they do to juvenile offenders, Eileen. It's what they put on bloody muggers." He moved past her and into the narrow hall. He glared at himself briefly in the hall mirror, then leaned on the door to the living room and stepped inside.

  Jim Thorne sat forward on a brown and battered armchair. He was hunched over a low coffee-table, strewn with the pieces of various radios he'd taken apart and was failing to put together again. He spoke without looking up.

  "I fancied chips," he said. He had more of an accent than Thorne. The voice was higher, and pron
e to a rattle.

  "There's a perfectly good chippy at the end of the road, for Christ's sake."

  "It's not the same."

  "You love the chips from that chippy."

  "I wanted to cook 'em." He raised his head, gestured angrily with a thick piece of plastic. "I wanted to make my own fucking chips, all right?"

  Thorne bit his tongue. He walked slowly across to the armchair next to the fire and dropped into it.

  He wondered whether this was the point at which the disease moved officially from 'mid' to 'late' stage. Maybe it wasn't defined by anything clinical at all. Maybe it was just the first time that the person with the disease almost killed themself.

  "Bollocks," his father said to nobody in particular. It had been a struggle up to now, no question, but they'd been managing. The practical difficulties with keys and with mail and with money; the disorientation over time and place; the obsession with trivia; the complete lack of judgment about what to wear, and when to wear it; the drugs for depression, for mood swings, for the verbally abusive behaviour. Still, his father hadn't wandered away and fallen into a ditch yet. He hadn't started knocking back bleach like it was lemonade. He hadn't endangered himself. Until now.

  "You know you're supposed to stay out of the kitchen," Thorne said. Then came the two words the old man seemed to say most often these days. His catch phrase he called it, in his better moods. Two words spat out or dribbled, sobbed or screamed, but mostly mumbled, through teeth grinding together in frustration: "I forgot."

  "I know, and you forgot to turn the cooker off. The rules are there for a good reason, you know? What happens if you forget that knives are sharp? Or that toasters and water aren't meant to go together?"

  His father looked up suddenly, excitement spreading across his face as he latched on to a thought. "More people die in their own homes than anywhere else," he said. "Nearly five thousand people a year die because of accidents in the home and garden. I read it. More in the living room than in the kitchen, as a matter of fact, which I thought was surprising."

  "Dad." Thorne watched as concentration etched itself into his father's features and he began to count off on his fingers and thumbs.

  "Falls are top of the list, if I remember rightly. "Impact accidents", they're called. Electrocution's another good one. Fire, obviously. Choking, suffocation, DIY incidents."

  "Why didn't you give them my number to call?" His father continued to count off, but began mouthing the words silently. After half a minute or so he stopped, and went back to poking about among the coils and circuits scattered across the table. Thorne watched him for a while. "I'll stay the night," he said. The old man grinned and got to his feet. He reached into his pocket and produced a crumpled five-pound note. He held it out, waved it at Thorne. "Here you go. Here's some. bugger." He closed his eyes, struggling to find the word. "A piece of the stuff people buy things with."

  "What do I want money for?"

  "Money!"

  "What do I want it for?"

  "To nip down the road and get us some chips. I still haven't had my fucking dinner yet."

  He lay awake in the dark, thinking about the burning girl. He'd never really stopped thinking about her, for one reason or another, not for any significant length of time, but lately, for obvious reasons, she'd been on his mind a great deal. The colours and the smells, which had understandably faded over the years, were suddenly more vivid, more pungent than they had been at any time since it had all happened. Not that he'd had much more than a second or two back then to take it all in. Once the flames had taken hold, he'd had to be away sharpish, down that hill towards the spot where he'd parked the car. He'd moved almost as quickly as the girl herself. The rest of it the girl's face and what have you had been filled in afterwards. He'd seen it, swathed in bandages, splashed across every front page and every television screen. Later, he'd seen what she looked like with the bandages off; it was impossible to tell how her face had been before.

  It was funny, he thought. Ironic. If he had seen her face that day at the playground, he would have realised she wasn't the one. Afterwards, of course, nobody would mistake her for anyone else ever again. He drifted, eventually, towards sleep. Thoughts giving way to fuzzy pictures and feelings.

  He remembered her arms flailing in the instant before she began to run, as though it were nothing more serious than a wasp. He remembered the sound of her shoes on the playground as he turned away. He remembered feeling like such a fucking idiot when he realised she was entirely the wrong girl.

  Thorne spent most of the night writhing across nylon sheets, sinking into the ludicrously soft mattress in his father's spare room and dragging back the duvet which had slid away from him down the natural slope of the bed. He felt like he'd only just got off to sleep when his phone rang. He checked his watch and saw that it was already gone nine-thirty. At the same instant that he began to panic, he remembered that he'd called Brigstocke the night before to tell him what was going on. They wouldn't be expecting him at the office. He reached down towards where the phone lay chirping on top of his clothes. His neck ached and his arms were freezing. It was Holland. "I'm in a video shop in Wood Green," he said. "We've got two bodies, still warm. And that's not the title of one of the videos."

  FOUR

  The uniformed constable who'd been first on the scene was sitting at a small table in a back room, next to a teenage boy whom Thorne guessed was Muslum Izzigil's son. Thorne stared across at them from the doorway. He couldn't decide which of the two looked the younger, or the most upset.

  Holland stood at Thorne's shoulder. "The boy ran out into the street when he found them. Constable Terry was having breakfast in the cafe opposite. He heard the boy screaming."

  Thorne nodded and closed the door quietly. He turned and moved back into the shop, where screens had been hastily erected around the bodies. The scene of crime team moved with a practised efficiency, but it seemed to Thorne that the usual banter, the dark humour, the craze -was a little muted. Thorne had hunted serial killers; he had known the atmosphere at crime scenes to be charged with respect, even fear, at the presentation, the offering up, of the latest victim. This was not what they were looking at now. This was almost certainly a contract killing. Still, there was an odd feeling in the room. Perhaps it was the fact that there were two bodies. That they had been husband and wife.

  "Where was the boy when it happened?"

  "Upstairs," Holland said. "Getting ready for school. He didn't hear anything."

  Thorne nodded. The killer had used a silencer. "This one's a little less showy than the X-Man," he said.

  Muslum Izzigil was sitting against the wall between a display of children's videos and a life-sized cardboard cut-out of Lara Croft. His head was cocked to one side, his eyes half-open and popping. A thin line of blood ran from the back of his head, along freshly shaved jowls, soaking pink into the collar of a white nylon shirt. The body of his wife lay, face downwards, across his legs. There was very little blood, and only the small, blackened hole behind her ear told the story of what had happened. Or at least, some of it... Which one had he killed first? Did he make the husband watch while his wife was executed? Did the wife die only because she had tried to save her husband?

  Thorne looked up from the bodies. He noticed the small camera in the corner of the shop. "Too much to hope for, I suppose?"

  "Far too much," Holland said. "The recorder's not exactly hard to find. It's over there underneath the counter. The shooter took the tape with him."

  "One to show the grandchildren."

  Holland knelt and pointed with a biro to the back of the dead woman's neck. "Twenty-two, d'you reckon?"

  Thorne could see where the blood was gathering then. It encircled her neck like a delicate necklace, but it was pooling, sticky between her chin and the industrial grey carpet. "Looks like it," he said. He was already moving across the shop towards the back room. Towards what was going to be a difficult conversation.

  Constable Terry got
to his feet when Thorne came through the door. Thorne waved him back on to his chair. "What's the boy's name?" The boy answered the question himself: "Yusuf Izzigil."

  Thorne put him at about seventeen. Probably taking A levels. He'd gelled his short, black hair into spikes and was making a decent enough job of growing a moustache. The hysteria which Holland had mentioned, which had first alerted the police, had given way to a stillness. He was quiet now, and seemingly composed, but the tears were still coming just as quickly, each one pushed firmly away with the heel of a hand the instant it brimmed and began. to fall.

  He started to speak again, without being asked. "I was getting ready upstairs. My father always came down just after eight o'clock, to deal with the tapes that had been returned in the overnight box. My mother came down to help him get things set up once she'd put the breakfast things away." He spoke well, and slowly, with no trace of an accent. Thorne realised suddenly that the maroon sweater and grey trousers were a uniform, and guessed that the boy went to a private school.

  "So you heard nothing?" Thorne asked. "No raised voices?" The boy shook his head. "I heard the bell go on the door when someone opened it, but that isn't unusual."

  "It was a bit early, though, wasn't it?"

  "We often have customers who come in on their way to work, to pick up a film that's been returned the night before."

  "Anything else?"

  "I was in the bathroom after that. There was water running. If not, I might have heard something." His hand went to his face, pressed and wiped. "They had silencers on their guns, didn't they?" It was an odd thing to say. Thorne wondered if perhaps the boy knew more than he was telling, but decided it was probably down to seeing far too many of the shitty British gangster movies his father kept on the shelves.

  "What makes you think there was more than one of them, Yusuf?"