The Burning Girl

by Mark Billingham

  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 Jack 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.’

  She started to speak, but Thorne stopped her.

  ‘I mean the local lads. This is just some nutter, Carol. It’s a kid pissing you about. It’s someone who’s read some poxy true-crime book and hasn’t got anything better to do.’

  ‘He knows things, Tom. Things that never came out. He knows about the lighter that was dropped at the scene, which brand of fuel was used…’

  ‘It’s someone Rooker spent time with inside, then. Rooker’s told him to wind you up when he’s got out.’

  She shook her head. ‘There’s no reason for Rooker to send anyone after me. He confessed, remember. Anyway, Rooker bloody well liked me.’

  ‘He had a relationship with you. You were the one who interviewed him. Which is why you’re the one being targeted now, and not whoever the SIO was.’

  ‘I think it’s just because I’m next in line. The DCI on the case left the force well before I did. He emigrated to New Zealand ten years ago. He’d be a damn sight harder to track down than I was.’

  It made sense, but Thorne had one other suggestion. ‘Or maybe, whoever it is knows that you were…affected by what happened to Jessica.’

  She looked up at him, concerned. ‘How would anyone know that? How do you know…?’

  They walked on in silence for fifty yards or so before Thorne spoke again. ‘Are you worried that you put the wrong man away, Carol? Is that what this is about?’

  ‘No, it isn’t. Gordon Rooker burned Jessica Clarke. I know he did.’

  They didn’t speak a
gain until they reached the station.

  Halfway across the concourse she stopped and turned to him. ‘There’s no need to bother waiting. I’ve got quarter of an hour until the next train back.’

  ‘It’s fine. I don’t mind.’

  ‘Get back to work. I like to potter about a bit anyway. I’ll buy a magazine, get myself sorted. I’m a fussy old bat like that.’

  ‘You’re not fussy.’

  She leaned forward to kiss him on the cheek. ‘Cheeky sod.’

  Thorne sighed and broke their embrace. ‘I don’t quite know what you expect me to do about this, Carol. There’s nothing I can do officially that anybody else couldn’t.’

  ‘I don’t want you to do anything officially.’

  He saw then, despite the light-hearted tone and the banter of a few moments before, just how rattled she really was. The very last thing she wanted was to let the powers-that-be see it, too. He couldn’t believe that they’d take her off the Cold Case Unit, but there were plenty who thought the Met should not be using people who’d be better off queuing up in the post office.

  ‘Right,’ Thorne said eventually. ‘But it’s OK for me to waste my time.’

  Chamberlain pulled a large handbag on to her small shoulder and turned on her heels. ‘Something like that…’

  Thorne watched her disappear inside WH Smith.

  Walking back towards the underground, he thought about scars that you hid, and those that you showed off. Scars bad enough to make you jump off a car-park.

  THREE

  These rooms always had one thing in common. The size might vary, the style was usually governed by age, and the decor was dependent on the whim of budgets or the inclination of the top brass. But they invariably had the same smell. Chrome and tinted glass or flaking orange plaster-board. Freezing or overheated. Intimate or anything but. Whatever the place was like, that smell would tell you where you were with a sack over your head. Thorne could sniff it up and name its constituent parts like a connoisseur: stale cigarette smoke, sweat and desperation.

  He looked around. This one had a bit of everything–a fresh coat of magnolia, the fumes charged up by the heat coming off radiators a foot thick. There was a snazzy new system of coloured chairs. Blue for visitors, red for inmates…

  Most chairs were occupied, but a few red ones remained vacant. A black woman in the next row but one glanced across at him. The seat opposite her was empty. She smiled nervously, her eyes crinkling behind thick glasses, and then looked away before Thorne had a chance to smile back. He watched the woman beam as a young man–her son, Thorne guessed–swaggered towards her. The man grinned, then checked himself slightly, looked around to see if anyone had noticed him drop his guard.

  Thorne checked his watch: just before ten. He needed to get this over with as quickly as possible and get back to the office. He’d called DC Dave Holland earlier, on his way west across London, towards HMP Park Royal…‘I need you to cover for me,’ he’d said. ‘Tell Tughan I’m off seeing a snout, or that I’m following up a hunch, or whatever. You know, some “copper” bollocks…’

  ‘Do I get to know what you’re really doing?’

  ‘I’m doing someone a favour. I should be back by lunchtime if the traffic’s all right, so…’

  ‘Are you driving? When did you get the car back?’

  Thorne knew what was coming. He was stupid to have let it slip. ‘I got it back late yesterday,’ he’d said.

  The car in question, a pulsar-yellow BMW, was thirty years old, and Thorne had parted with a good deal of money for it the year before. Thorne thought it was a classic. Others preferred the term ‘antique’. Holland, in particular, never missed an opportunity to take the piss, having maintained from the moment he’d seen it that the car was a big mistake. He’d gone to town when it had spectacularly failed its MOT and disappeared into the garage a fortnight earlier.

  ‘How much?’ Holland had asked, gleeful.

  Thorne had cursed as he’d caught a red light. He’d yanked up the handbrake. ‘It’s an old car, all right? The parts are expensive.’ Not only were they expensive, but there seemed to be a great many of them. Thorne couldn’t remember them all, but he could recall the growing feeling of despair as they were cheerfully reeled off to him. For all Thorne knew about what was going on under the bonnet, the mechanic might just as well have been speaking Serbo–Croat.

  ‘Five hundred?’ Holland had said. ‘More?’

  ‘Listen, she’s old, but she’s still gorgeous. Like one of those actresses that’s knocking on, but still tasty, you know?’ As the car was a BMW, Thorne had tried to come up with a German actress who would fit the bill. He had failed. Felicity Kendal, he’d said as he pulled away from the lights. Yeah, that’ll do.

  ‘She?’ Holland had sounded hugely amused.

  ‘She’s like Felicity Kendal.’

  ‘People who call their car “she” are one step away from a pair of string-back driving gloves and a pipe…’

  At the noise of the chair opposite him being scraped backwards, Thorne looked up and saw Gordon Rooker dropping on to the red seat. Thorne had never seen a picture, or been given a description, but there was no mistaking him.

  ‘Anyone sitting here?’ asked Rooker, a gold tooth evident as he smiled.

  He was sixty, give or take a year or two, and tall. His face was thin and freshly shaved. The skin hung, leathery and loose, from his neck, and a full head of white hair had yellowed above the forehead with a lifetime’s fags.

  Thorne nodded towards the green bib that Rooker wore, that all the prisoners wore on top of the regulation blue sweatshirts. ‘Very fetching,’ he said.

  ‘We’ve all got to wear these now,’ Rooker said. ‘A few places have had them for ages, but a lot of governors, including the one here, thought they were demeaning to the prisoners, which is all very splendid and progressive of them. Then a lifer in Gartree swaps places with his twin brother when nobody’s looking and walks out through the front door. So, now it has to be obvious who’s the prisoner and who isn’t, and we all have to dress like prize prats when we have visitors. You think I’m making this up, don’t you?’

  The voice was expressive and lively. The voice of a pub philosopher or comedian, nicely weathered by decades on forty roll-ups a day. While Rooker was speaking, Thorne had taken out his warrant card. He slid it across the table. Rooker didn’t bother to look at it.

  ‘What do you want, Mr Thorne?’ He held up a hand. ‘No, don’t bother, let’s just have a natter. I’m sure you’ll get round to it eventually.’

  ‘I’m a friend of Carol Chamberlain.’

  Rooker narrowed his eyes.

  ‘She’d’ve been Carol Manley when you knew her…’

  The gold tooth came slowly into view again. ‘Did that woman ever make commissioner? I always reckoned she had it in her.’

  Thorne shook his head. ‘She was a DCI when she retired. That was seven or eight years ago.’

  ‘She was a decent sort, you know?’ Rooker looked away, remembering something. His eyes slid back to Thorne. ‘I’m not surprised she got married; she was a good-looking woman. Still fit, is she? Is she a game old bird?’ He leaned across the table. ‘Do you like ’em a bit older?’

  Whether the suggestive comments were an attempt to unsettle or to bond, Thorne ignored them. ‘She’s being bothered. Some lunatic is sending letters and making calls…’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

  ‘Whoever he is, he claims to be the person responsible for the attempted murder of Jessica Clarke.’ Thorne looked hard at Rooker, studied his face for a reaction. ‘He reckons he was the one who burned her, Gordon.’

  There was a reaction, no question, but Thorne had no idea what Rooker was so amused about.

  ‘Funny?’ Thorne asked.

  ‘Pretty funny, yeah. Like I said, I’m sorry about Miss Manley, or whatever she’s called now, being bothered, but it’s a laugh when you get your own personal nutter, isn’t it? It’s taken him long
enough, mind you, whoever he is…’

  ‘You’re telling me you don’t know who this person is?’

  Rooker turned up his palms, tucked them behind his bib. ‘Not a fucking clue.’

  If he’d been asked at that instant to put money on whether Rooker was telling the truth, Thorne would happily have stumped up a few quid.

  ‘I’ve had plenty of letters over the years,’ Rooker continued, grinning. ‘You know, the ones in green ink where they’ve pressed so hard that the pen’s gone through the paper. People who want me to tell them stuff, so they can have a wank over it or whatever. I’ve had a few mad women and what have you, writing steamy letters, saying they want to marry me…’

  A case the year before–when Thorne had first encountered Carol Chamberlain–had begun with just that sort of letter. It had not been genuine, but plenty were, and Thorne never ceased to be amazed, and sickened, by them. ‘Well, Gordon, you’re obviously quite a catch.’

  ‘But this is different, right? This is sort of like a stalker in reverse. He can’t stalk me, so he’s stalking somebody else, somebody who was involved in it all, and he’s pretending to be me. Pretending he did what I did…’

  Thorne decided it was time to stop pissing about. ‘So he is pretending then, is he? Because that’s basically why I’m here. To make sure.’

  The cockiness, the ease, melted slowly back into the lines of Rooker’s face. The shoulders drooped forward. The voice was low and level. Matter of fact…

  ‘You can be sure. I set fire to that girl. That’s basically why I’m here.’

  For half a minute, Thorne watched Rooker stare down at the tabletop. His scalp was visible, pink and flaking beneath the white hair. ‘Like you said, though. He’s waited a long time, this nutter. Why have you been here so long, Gordon?’

  The animation returned. ‘Ask the fucking judge. Miserable arsehole’s dead by now, if there’s any justice.’ He laughed, humourlessly, at his own joke. ‘Like he’d know justice if it bit him in the bollocks.’

  ‘It was a high-profile case,’ Thorne said. ‘You were always going to get sent down for a long one.’