The Burning Girl Thorne 4 Read online

  Carol knew full well what the trouble was. This was the first physical symptom of a virus that had been lurking inside her, waiting for the chance to blossom since the day she'd handed over her warrant card. She'd tried to ignore it on other occasions, when an unfamiliar reaction to something had forced her to ask the question. Have I stopped being a copper inside?

  She knew what the answer was. The cold-case stuff was Mickey Mouse; it was just playing at what she used to do for real. Now, she could feel doubt, worry, pain, anger. And fear. She felt them all in a way she never had for those thirty years she'd spent watching other people feel the same things. She felt like a civilian. And she hated it. She knew that this was all about Gordon Rooker. The reassurance that had come from Thorne's visit to the Royal had lasted no more than a couple of hours. God, it was all so bloody stupid. After all, the facts were pretty obvious: Rooker was locked up; Rooker was guilty; whoever had been phoning her and sending the letters was some nutcase who, by the look of it, had probably stopped now anyway. It hadn't been facts, though, that had made her throw up. She needed to deal with the feelings. She needed to deal with the panic. She needed to start behaving like a real copper again.

  "It's definitely not the food," Jack said as he slowed to turn into their quiet crescent. "How many times have we eaten in that place over the years?"

  Hendricks was already asleep by the time Thorne got in, just after eleven. As Thorne crept past the sofa-bed towards the kitchen, Elvis, his psychotic cat, jumped down from where she'd been curled up on Hendricks' feet and followed him. While he waited for the kettle to boil, Thorne poured some cat munchies into a grubby plastic bowl and told Elvis one or two things about his day. He'd rather have talked to his friend, who was a marginally better conversationalist, but the snoring from the next room made it clear just how well away Hendricks was. Thorne didn't want to wake him. He knew that Hendricks had probably had a fairly tough day himself.

  Up to his elbows in the cadavers of Muslum and Hanya Izzigil. Drinking his tea at the kitchen table, Thorne thought about those who would spend the coming night sleepless. Those with money worries or difficulties at work, or relationship problems. It was odd what could keep some people awake, while a man who dealt in death usually one that had been anything but peaceful could sleep like a baby. He thought about Dave Holland, bleary-eyed at 4 a.m." who would tell him just how ludicrous that expression was.

  Of course, he didn't know what went on in Phil Hendricks' dreams. Thorne hadn't slept brilliantly himself since the night he'd come so close to death the year before. There had been nightmares, of course, but now it was just as if his body had adapted and required less sleep. Most nights he'd get by on four or five hours and then collapse into something approaching a coma when he took a day off. Having removed his shoes, Thorne carried them, and what was left of his tea, towards the bedroom. On the way through the darkened living room he picked up his CD Walkman and a George Jones album. He held the bedroom door open for Elvis, and watched as she hopped back up on to Phil Hendricks' legs.

  "Sod you, then," Thorne said.

  He padded into his bedroom with his tea, his shoes and his music, and closed the door behind him.

  It was a sudden change in the light, no more than that. Carol Chamberlain saw it reflected in the dressing-table mirror as she sat taking her make-up off. She'd washed most of it off earlier, rubbing cold water into her face in the toilets at the Italian restaurant. Trying to stop the dizziness and to bring back a little colour to her cheeks.

  Jack was moving around downstairs. Locking up, pulling out plugs. Keeping them safe.

  She sat in her night-dress and stared hard at herself. It was time to sort her hair out, and maybe shift a few pounds though, at fifty-six, that was a damn sight harder than it used to be. She could try to get back to how she was when they'd taken the job away from her: her fighting weight', Jack called it.

  Leaning closer towards the mirror, cream smeared across her fingers, she saw the light change. A glow pink at first, then orange that crept through a gap in the curtains and lit up the room behind her. She opened her mouth to call out Jack's name, then closed it and pushed back her chair. As she walked towards the window, she saw the glow reaching up and illuminating the bare branches of the copper beech at the end of the drive. She knew more or less what she was going to see when she reached the far side of the room and looked out. She wondered if he'd be there. She hoped that he would be. He was already looking up when she pulled back the curtains, standing motionless next to the car, the can of lighter fluid white against his gloved hand. Waiting for her.

  For a few long, still seconds they stared at each other. The flames were not spectacular, and the light danced only across the dark material of the man's anorak. The blaze never threatened to break up the shadow, blue-black beneath the hood that was pulled tight around his head.

  The fire was already beginning to spread across the Volvo's bonnet. It drifted down around its edges, into its mouldings, where the lighter fluid had run and dripped. Still, the words, sprayed in fuel and spelled out now in flame, were clear enough.

  I burned her.

  Carol heard locks being thrown back downstairs, and saw the man's head turn suddenly towards the front door. He took a step away from the car, then looked up at Carol for another moment or two before he turned and ran. She had seen nothing, could see nothing of his face, but she knew very well that he had been smiling at her.

  A few seconds later, Jack burst out of the front door in his vest. He ran, arms raised and mouth gaping, on to the front lawn. Carol half-saw him turn to look up, at the same moment she moved away from the window and back into the heart of the room.

  FIVE

  Thorne had never conducted an interview alongside Carol Chamberlain before and, although this was in no sense official, he still felt slightly odd, sitting there next to her, waiting for Rooker to be brought in. He looked around the small, square room and imagined himself, for no good reason he could think of, as a father, sitting with his wife. He remembered the sobbing black woman he'd seen on his last visit. He pictured himself and Chamberlain as anxious parents waiting for their son to be marched in.

  The door opened and an officer led Rooker into the room. He looked angry about something until he saw Chamberlain; then, a broad smile appeared.

  "Hello, sexpot," he said.

  Thorne opened his mouth to speak, but Chamberlain beat him to it. There was an edge to her voice that Thorne could not recall hearing before.

  "One more out-of-order remark and I'll come round this table and tear off what little you've got left between your legs that hasn't already withered away. Fair enough, Gordon?"

  Rooker's smile wobbled a little, but it was back in place as he pulled back his chair and plonked himself down at the table. The officer moved towards the door. "Give us a shout when you've finished," he said.

  "Thanks," Thorne said, looking up. "I thought you'd retired, Bill." The officer opened the door, turned back to Thorne. "Got a year or two left yet." He nodded towards Rooker. "Feels like I've been in here as long as this cunt." He quickly looked across to Chamberlain, reddening slightly. "Sorry, I didn't."

  Chamberlain held up a hand. "Don't apologise. That sounds about right to me."

  Rooker cackled. The officer stepped out of the room, letting the door swing shut, hard, behind him.

  "This is getting to be a habit," Rooker said. He produced a tobacco tin from behind the green bib and removed the lid. "Twice in a week, Mr. Thorne. I don't have family who come as often as that." He teased out the strands of tobacco, laid them carefully into a Rizla and rolled it pin-thin. "Nothing like as often as that.. ."

  In fact, it had been just over a week since Thorne had first encountered Gordon Rooker. And seven days since Carol Chamberlain had stared down from her bedroom window at the man who was claiming Gordon Rooker's crime as his own.

  Rooker lit his roll-up. He picked a piece of tobacco from his tongue and looked across at Chamberlain. "I
thought you'd retired," he said.

  "That's right."

  "Living out in the sticks with a houseful of cats, listening to The Archers."

  "What do you know about where I live?" Rooker turned to Thorne. "If she's not on the job any more, what are we doing here?"

  By 'here', Rooker meant the Legal Visits Room. It was normally reserved for confidential interviews, for meetings with police officers or solicitors, for official business. Thorne was content to keep things unofficial.. . for now. He had seen no real reason to go to Brigstocke and certainly not to Tughan. The connection between Rooker and Billy Ryan was twenty years old and tenuous at best to the SO7 inquiry, and he'd promised Carol Chamberlain that he'd try to sort things out on his own time. He'd discreetly pulled a few strings and called in a favour or two to ensure that he, Chamberlain and Gordon Rooker could discuss one or two things in private.

  "What we talked about a week ago," Thorne said, 'it's escalated." Rooker looked, or tried to look, serious. "That's a shame."

  "Yes, it is."

  "I told you last time."

  "I'll forget the rubbish you told me last time and pretend we're starting from scratch, OK? This has to be down to some fuck wit you've done time with, or somebody who's written to you. You told me all about some of the letters you get, right?"

  "Right."

  "So, any bright ideas, Gordon?"

  Rooker took three quick drags. He held the smoke in and let it out very slowly on a sigh. "I've got to have some sort of protection," he said.

  Thorne laughed. "What?

  "Word got around after you were here last time." Thorne shrugged. He'd obviously opted for privacy a little too late.

  "You've not exactly been popular for quite a while now, Gordon. Talking to a copper isn't going to make much difference."

  "You'd be surprised."

  Chamberlain's voice was quieter than when she'd spoken before, but the edge had sharpened. "If you've got something to say, Rooker, you'd best say it."

  Another drag. "I want this parole. I really need it to go my way this time."

  "And?" Thorne stared blankly across the table at Rooker. "Not a lot we can do about that'

  "Bollocks. It's down to the Home Office. You can get it done if you want to."

  "Why would we want to?"

  "I need a guarantee that I'm getting out.. ."

  "Don't want much, do you?"

  "It'll be worth it."

  "Unless you're telling us who Jack the Ripper was and where Lord Lucan and Shergar are holed up, I doubt we'd be interested." Rooker didn't seem to find that funny.

  "What about these letters?" asked Chamberlain. "The phone calls. That's what we're here to talk about."

  Rooker stared down at the ashtray.

  "Whoever's doing this has been to my house."

  "I want protection." Rooker looked up at Thorne. "After I'm out."

  "Protection from who?" Chamberlain said.

  "New identity, national insurance number, the lot."

  "Billy Ryan," Thorne said.

  "Maybe."

  "Is Billy Ryan going to come after you?"

  "Not for the reason you think."

  "So why should we give a toss?"

  "I can give him to you."

  Thorne blinked. This was interesting. This was far from tenuous. He avoided eye contact with Chamberlain, refused to show Rooker anything, kept his voice casual. "You're going to grass up Billy Ryan?" Rooker nodded.

  "Grass up the Ryans," Chamberlain said, 'and you really will be a target."

  "That's why I want protection."

  It was a straightforward piece of gangland logic, and Thorne could see the sense of it. "Get Ryan before he gets you. That it?"

  "Don't make out like you wouldn't like to put him away. He's a piece of shit and you know it."

  "And you're a fucking saint, are you, Gordon?"

  "It's him or me, isn't it? What would you do?"

  "After what you did at that school, what you did to that girl. I'm inclined to let Billy Ryan have you."

  Rooker's head dropped and stayed down as he stubbed out what was left of his cigarette. He ground the butt into the ashtray until there appeared to be nothing left of it at all. For a moment, Thorne wondered if he'd palmed it, like a magician. When Rooker finally looked up, the cockiness had gone. The lines in his face had deepened. He seemed suddenly tense. He looked like a frightened old man.

  "I didn't burn the girl," he said. "It wasn't me." Thorne saw Chamberlain's hands clench into fists on the table, white across her knuckles as she spoke. "Don't piss me about. Don't you bloody dare piss me about."

  Rooker licked his lips and repeated himself.

  And Thorne believed him. It really was that simple. All that struck him as odd was that Rooker seemed so reluctant, so hesitant about his denial. Surely things were arse about face. Thorne remembered how, a week before, the man sitting opposite him had admitted to setting a fourteen-year-old girl on fire as easily as he might own up to nicking lead off a roof. Now, he was taking it back, denying he'd had anything to do with it, and it was as if it were the hardest thing in the world.

  It was like he was confessing his innocence.

  Dave Holland and Andy Stone got along, but no more than that. A year or so ago, when they'd first begun working together, Holland had resented Stone's easy charm, and bridled at his place as the young pretender to what he was never sure feeling threatened. They'd kicked along well enough since then, though there were still times when the ease with which his fellow DC told a joke or wore a suit made him want to spit.

  "I feel like shit warmed up," Stone said. Holland looked up from the computer screen and smiled. "Caning it again last night, were you?"

  "Still sweating Carlsberg and Sea Breezes." Holland raised an eyebrow. "Cocktails?"

  "I was with a very classy lady, mate." Holland was at least self-aware enough to admit that now, with a baby to think about, his resentment had distilled into plain, old-fashioned jealousy.

  "I bet I still had more sleep than you, though," Stone said.

  "Right.. ."

  Holland had more or less grown used to the physical fatigue. He could happily nod off at pretty much any time, and was not beyond catnapping in the Gents' after a really bad night. It was mentally that he was still finding things tough. There was a fuzziness about his thinking these days, a reluctance to go in any direction other than the path of least resistance. There was a time, back before the baby and the rough patch they went through even before that, when Sophie would badger him about being the kind of straightforward, head-down, career copper that his old man had been. She didn't have to bother these days, and she knew it. Holland didn't have the mental energy to do a great deal else.

  And there was the way the baby made him feel: the sheer, fucking size of the love and the terror. Looking down at her sometimes, he could feel his heart swell and his sphincter tighten at the same time. Holland closed his eyes for a few seconds. He could remember so vividly the first time he'd walked into a CID suite. He could recall virtually every moment of that first case he'd worked on with Tom Thorne. He saw in perfect detail the clothes he'd been wearing on a particular occasion in Thorne's car, or in the office when they got a break in the case. It was only the excitement of it, which he knew had been intense, that seemed suddenly distant and hard to imagine.

  "Where's that plum from SO7, anyway?" asked Stone. "He's never here when he's needed, is he?"

  They were going through the paperwork and computer data relating to what had quickly emerged as the less than legitimate business activities of Muslum Izzigil's video shop. When one or two members of Brigstocke's team had expressed surprise that video piracy was still big business, they had been subjected to Tughan at his most patronising: "Five thousand copies from one stolen master tape, knocked out at a couple of quid a pop. You might be looking at half a million per year per film. It's not quite up there with heroin, but there's a damn sight less risk and you don't tend to get pu
t away for so long." Some, notably Thorne, had remained sceptical. Then again, Thorne was sceptical about everything that came out of Tughan's mouth, and there was certainly evidence that pointed towards a sophisticated smuggling operation. There was no such evidence leading them to whoever was running it; whoever Muslum Izzigil among many others in all likelihood had been fronting for; whoever had reacted so aggressively when Billy Ryan had tried to muscle in on their territory.

  Whoever was paying the X-Man.

  There was a DC from SO7 who, theoretically at least, was supposed to be working with Holland and Stone, but whenever there were paper-trails to slog through, urgent meetings would materialise back at Barkingside, or mysterious sources would suddenly need chasing up on the other side of London.

  "They're taking the piss, aren't they?" Holland found it hard to disagree with Stone's assessment. He was about to chip in with a comment of his own when something on the screen caught his eye. He stared at it for a few seconds, scrolled back to check something else, then held up a hand, beckoning Stone from the other side of the room. "Come and look at this, Andy."

  "What?"

  "A name." He highlighted two words on the screen for Stone to look at, moved to a different page and highlighted the same words again. Stone stared down at the screen from behind his shoulder. "Just a name," Holland said. "Nothing to tie it to anything dodgy, as yet."

  "There wouldn't be. These fuckers are too clever for that."

  "Maybe."

  "Definitely. We won't catch 'em with Windows 2000, I can tell you that."

  Holland grunted. "Well, whoever they are, their name just keeps cropping up."

  "I was a dead man," Rooker said.

  Chamberlain leaned back in her chair, waiting. Thorne moved in the opposite direction. "Don't get existential on us, Gordon. Keep it simple and keep it honest. All right?"

  "I was fucked, all right? That simple enough? Whoever did the girl made it look like me. I was known for stuff like that, wasn't I? For using lighter fuel."

  '"Whoever did the girl". I take it you can't tell us who that was?"