The Burning Girl

by Mark Billingham

  ‘Stephen?’ Thorne suggested.

  ‘Yeah, Stephen,’ Tughan said, ‘and others.’

  Thorne thought about how hard it must have been for DS Marcus Moloney. Once the killings had started, he’d been caught in an impossible position. He’d have wanted to dig around, to try to find out the names of the people Ryan was planning to have killed so that he could tell his colleagues at SO7. He’d also have known full well that if he did go sniffing around after information he wasn’t meant to have, he ran the risk of exposing himself and ruining everything.

  And later–after Muslum and Hanya Izzigil had been killed–had he felt somehow responsible?

  ‘We can still get Ryan,’ Thorne said.

  The other two men in the room looked at him with renewed interest. This was what Thorne had been putting off, but now was the perfect moment. He’d told Chamberlain on the way in that he was going to have to come clean about what they’d been up to. He hadn’t realised it was going to be quite this important.

  ‘How?’ Tughan asked.

  ‘I’ve got a witness.’

  Tughan smiled. It was the perfect moment for him, too. ‘Is this where you tell me about Gordon Rooker?’

  Thorne just about stopped his jaw dropping. ‘What?’

  ‘You must think I’m fucking stupid, Thorne. All that crap when we saw Billy Ryan about “barking up the wrong tree”. You have been, but only by treating me like a mug.’

  ‘Hang on…’

  ‘I did some homework, none of it particularly taxing. I know all about your trips to Park Royal, both alone and with ex-DCI Chamberlain.’

  Thorne glanced at Brigstocke, got a look back that said he’d known about this as well.

  ‘It had nothing to do with this case,’ Thorne said. ‘There was no connection.’

  ‘There is now, though, right?’

  ‘That’s what I’m trying to tell you…’

  ‘Which is why you were hassling Billy Ryan outside one of his arcades last night?’ Tughan seemed to enjoy watching the puzzlement that Thorne knew was spreading across his face. ‘I knew about it while it was happening.’

  Thorne cast his mind back to the previous evening. He remembered Moloney walking away from them, talking angrily on his mobile. Thorne had thought he’d been calling for the car…

  ‘Right, let’s hear it…’

  So Thorne told them the whole story, ancient and modern. He told them about the calls to Carol Chamberlain and about his visits to Gordon Rooker. He told them about Jessica Clarke and about Rooker’s revelation regarding her attacker. He told them about Rooker’s offer…

  ‘Why’s he waited twenty years?’ Brigstocke asked.

  It was the first of many questions–all of the obvious ones which Thorne had asked himself, and Gordon Rooker. He gave the answers he’d been given: tried to explain why Rooker had confessed to such a heinous crime; why a man like him was able to survive better inside than on the street; why he had decided that he had to make sure Billy Ryan would not be waiting for him on the outside.

  ‘So, we get him out, offer him witness protection, and he will testify against Billy Ryan for the attempted murder of Jessica Clarke?’

  ‘Rooker knows all sorts of stuff,’ Thorne said. ‘He’ll tell us everything, and he’ll tell the court everything.’

  Rain was starting to come down outside. The drops were heavy but not yet concentrated. For a few moments the noise of their sporadic tapping against the window was the only sound in the room.

  ‘Who’s making these calls to ex-DCI Chamberlain and getting creative with lighter fuel in her front garden?’ Tughan sounded sceptical. ‘We’re presuming he’s the man who really set fire to the girl, are we?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Thorne admitted.

  ‘It’s a bit bloody coincidental, don’t you think?’

  ‘Rooker denies all knowledge of it.’

  ‘There’s a shock.’ Tughan looked to Brigstocke. ‘Russell?’

  ‘Some crony of Rooker’s? An ex-con, maybe? Someone he’s been in contact with…?’

  Thorne tried not to sound impatient. ‘We’ve got time to check all of this,’ he said. ‘Look, Billy Ryan as good as killed that girl, and we’ve got a chance to nail him for it. Christ knows, he’s done plenty of other things, but we can get him for this. It’s got to be worth considering.’

  Thorne stopped himself adding: We should do it for Marcus Moloney. But only just…

  The rain was falling harder now, beating out a tattoo against the glass.

  ‘Obviously, people a damn sight higher than me are going to be doing the considering,’ Tughan said. ‘A damn sight higher than Jesmond even…’ He took a breath and reached for the phone.

  As he and Brigstocke got up and headed towards the door, Thorne thought about what Brigstocke had known and had chosen not to pass on. He wondered if he should have a chat with him about whose side they were supposed to be on. He decided it was probably not the right time.

  By lunchtime in the Royal Oak, the mood of the team had lightened a little, though it might just have been the power of beer.

  The Oak was the team’s regular, but for no other reason than proximity. No one could remember a time when it hadn’t been full of coppers, so no one could swear that they were the reason for the atmosphere, or the lack of it. It wasn’t that Trevor, the cadaverous landlord, hadn’t made an effort. He’d decorated the front of the lacquered-pine bar with Polaroids of various female regulars, all hoisting up their T-shirts to reveal bras or bare breasts. Elsewhere, he’d gone for a Spanish theme, with a good deal of fake wrought iron, a couple of sombreros gathering dust on a shelf above the bar, and two days a week when he cut up pork pies and Scotch eggs into small pieces and called it a tapas menu.

  There was no Tughan, Kitson or Brigstocke in the pub, but most of the others were there. They raised a glass to Marcus Moloney. His death had eased a little of the tension between the Serious Crime Group mob and their counterparts from SO7. They were understandably united in their resolve to bring to justice those responsible for his death. For all the recent deaths.

  Thorne applauded the sentiment, even if that’s all it was. He hoped that the cracks wouldn’t begin to show again too soon. He pushed away a half-eaten plate of chicken and chips as Holland slid in next to him with a tray of drinks. By now, everyone had moved on to Coke, mineral water or orange juice. Thorne, feeling himself starting to wilt a little, poured out his can of Red Bull. He glanced up at Holland and remembered the invitation he’d turned down. ‘Did you go for that beer last night? Sounded like you were set on a major session?’

  ‘Just had a couple in here with Andy.’ He nodded towards the other side of the bar where Andy Stone, Sam Karim and a female DC from SO7 were deep in conversation. ‘Good job I didn’t, really. Bearing in mind what time we were called out.’

  ‘I wasn’t exactly stone-cold sober myself at four o’clock this morning,’ Thorne said. ‘Given what was down by that canal, it was probably a good thing…’

  ‘Found out something brilliant in here last night, though.’ Holland grinned and inched his chair a little closer to Thorne’s. ‘You know Andy Stone reckons he has quite a bit of success with the women…?’

  Thorne followed Holland’s gaze: Stone and the female DC seemed to be getting on extremely well. ‘Yes…?’ Thorne stretched the word out.

  ‘He told me one of his tricks. He’d had a bit more to drink than me…’

  ‘I’m listening,’ Thorne said.

  ‘He keeps a book on philosophy in his car.’ Holland laughed as Thorne’s eyes widened. ‘Seriously. On the passenger seat, or down by the tapes, or wherever. Girl gets in…“Oh what’s this?”…Picks it up, has a look, she’s convinced Stone’s a deep thinker.’ There was a pause, then Thorne almost snorted Red Bull down his nose. ‘This is the worst bit,’ Holland said, ‘it fucking works.’

  Thorne laughed even harder, wiped the drink from his jacket. He looked up when he heard a familiar Mancunian ac
cent.

  Hendricks was pointing at the can of Red Bull. ‘That stuff won’t wake you up if you apply it externally,’ he said.

  ‘What are you doing up here? I thought you had Moloney’s PM to do.’

  Hendricks glanced at his watch. ‘Starting in a couple of hours. There’s a queue of corpses out the bloody doors down at Westminster Morgue.’

  Holland got up to make room for Hendricks and headed for the Gents’.

  ‘Tughan wanted to see me over the road.’ Hendricks dropped into the chair Holland had vacated. ‘He wanted a preliminary report.’

  ‘Well? Do I get to hear it?’

  Hendricks looked confused. ‘What d’you think I came here for?’

  ‘Go on, then…’

  ‘Moloney died from gunshot wounds to the head. Almost certainly a nine mil. No bullets found in the car, so I’ll have to dig them out to be certain.’

  ‘Same pattern of knife wounds?’

  ‘Yeah…’

  Thorne had heard Hendricks sound more certain. ‘Not sure?’

  ‘I’m still not convinced I know what sort of blade he’s using. It could be a filleting knife. Also, the cuts weren’t quite as neat as they were on Clayton and the others.’

  ‘Perhaps he had less time.’

  ‘Right. And maybe Moloney struggled a bit more than some of the other victims.’

  ‘This is the first time he’s done it in a car, remember. He had less room to manoeuvre than he did with the others…’

  Hendricks nodded. It all made perfectly good sense.

  ‘You’d say it was the same killer, though,’ Thorne said. ‘The X-Man.’

  It was a few seconds before Hendricks gave a nod that said ‘probably’. Enough time for Thorne to find himself wondering if they hadn’t got things arse about face. They were assuming that the Zarifs had targeted the Ryans again and killed Marcus Moloney, unaware that he was a police officer. But there was an equally plausible possibility…

  ‘What if the killer knew exactly what Moloney was?’

  ‘Sir?’ It was Holland, back from the Gents’.

  The more Thorne articulated it, the more convinced he became. He thought back to the previous night, in the street outside the games arcade: Moloney on the phone, not to Billy Ryan’s driver, as Thorne had thought, but to Nick Tughan. Making the last call he was ever going to make. Unaware that his cover had been blown…

  ‘I think they found out he was a copper,’ Thorne said. ‘With what was going on, with what had happened to the others, they had a perfect way to get rid of him, didn’t they? I think Billy Ryan killed Moloney.’

  Thorne reached for his mobile to make the call to Tughan. Before he could start dialling, it began to ring.

  It was Russell Brigstocke.

  ‘Tom? We’ve just had a call from the Central Middlesex Hospital…’

  Thorne didn’t quite take it all in. He just heard the key word and immediately thought: Dad.

  ‘Up by Park Royal.’

  The initial relief quickly gave way to mild panic. ‘What’s happened?’ Thorne guessed what the answer would be before Brigstocke gave it.

  ‘Somebody tried to kill Gordon Rooker.’

  ELEVEN

  Thorne could think of better places to be on a sunny morning. He hated hospitals for all the obvious reasons, as well as for a few others unique to the job he did–to some of the cases he’d worked…

  He shuffled his chair a little closer to the bed. Holland was sitting next to him. On the other side of the bed, a prison officer relaxed in a tatty brown armchair.

  ‘You’re a lucky bastard, Gordon,’ Thorne said.

  Rooker had been attacked two days earlier, an hour or so after Thorne and Chamberlain had confronted Ryan in the street, and four hours before Marcus Moloney had been murdered. Thorne had presumed it had been the confrontation with Ryan which had prompted him to do something about Rooker, but now he realised that it could not have been organised in the time. It had to have been Thorne’s earlier meeting with Ryan in his office, when he’d first mentioned Rooker’s name, that had sparked things off.

  He’d certainly touched a raw nerve…

  Thorne tried to picture Ryan as he’d stood in the street outside his arcade, the wind whipping across his face. Ryan had stood there and smiled when Thorne had offered the greeting from Rooker, safe in the knowledge that a special greeting of his own had already been arranged. Rooker in the evening; Moloney later that night. Two problems solved within hours of each other.

  What was it Rooker had said? Billy Ryan’s cold…

  Rooker tried to lift himself up the bed a little. He grimaced in pain. ‘Define lucky,’ he said.

  The improvised shiv–actually a sharpened paintbrush–which Alun Fisher had stuck into his belly during an art class had somehow missed every vital organ in Rooker’s body. He’d lost a lot of blood, but the surgery had been about patching him up rather than saving his life.

  Rooker settled back. ‘Lucky that I’m alive, but it’s hardly fortunate that certain parties have got wind of things, is it?’

  Thorne decided that it wouldn’t do Rooker any good to know who was responsible for mentioning his name to Billy Ryan.

  ‘Told you I’d be marked, though, didn’t I?’ Rooker said. ‘Now I’ve got even more reason to make sure the fucker gets put away.’

  Rooker’s hair was lank and his skin was the colour of a week-old bruise. The gold tooth still glinted in his mouth, but half of the top set was missing, the bridge sitting in a glass on the bedside cabinet. A drip ran into his left arm and an oxymeter peg was attached to the index finger. His right wrist was connected, rather less delicately, to a prison officer, one of two on a rotating bed-watch. The officer, skull and chin neatly shaved, sat with his head in a paperback.

  Rooker raised the handcuffs, lifting his and the officer’s arm. ‘Fucking ridiculous, isn’t it?’ The prison officer didn’t even look up. ‘Like I’m going to do a runner. Like somebody’s going to spring me. Like who?’

  Holland smiled. ‘Got no friends, Gordon?’

  ‘See any flowers?’

  ‘Friends, acquaintances…we’ll have to check all of that,’ Thorne said. ‘One or two people are still bothered by this bloke turning up out of the blue and claiming responsibility for what happened to Jessica Clarke.’

  ‘Check what you like,’ Rooker said. ‘I can’t help you. I tell you what, though: if it is the bloke who did it, who really did it, we both know who can give you his name.’

  The small room was strangely half lit. The curtains had been drawn against the dazzling sunshine, filtering it through thin, brown and orange nylon. A dirty amber light moved across the pale walls, softening the metallic gleam of the dressing-trolley and the drip-stand.

  ‘Tell me about Alun Fisher,’ Thorne said.

  With what few teeth were left in his upper jaw, Rooker bit down hard on his bottom lip. ‘He’s nothing. A fucking little tosspot…’

  Thorne heard the prison officer chuckle quietly and glanced across. It wasn’t clear whether it was Rooker or his book that he was finding so funny.

  ‘A little tosspot with a smack habit…’

  Thorne could see where it was going. ‘And a drug debt, right?’

  ‘A fucking big one. Three guesses who he owes the money to…’

  ‘So Fisher just walks up to you in the middle of a class?’ Holland said. ‘Stabs you, just like that, while you’re doing your Rolf Harris bit?’

  ‘I thought you could see it coming,’ Thorne said. ‘That’s what you told me last time. If someone was going to have a pop at you, you’d know about it…’

  Rooker sniffed, cast his eyes to the right. ‘Well, somebody looked the other fucking way, didn’t they? Took their eye off the ball. These teachers in the Education Department don’t get paid much, do they? Or maybe a screw fancied a new car, a holiday for the wife and kids…’

  If the prison officer was upset, he wasn’t showing it. Park Royal was already carryi
ng out an inquiry into exactly what had gone wrong, while Alun Fisher sat in a segregation cell waiting to see what they were going to do with him. Having fucked up and left Gordon Rooker breathing, he was probably more worried about what Billy Ryan was going to do. He might suddenly find that his debt had increased in all sorts of ways.

  ‘So are you going to press charges?’ Holland asked.

  ‘Not much point, is there? They’ll move Fisher to another prison. Might as well try to get through the rest of the time without any hassle.’

  ‘Up to you,’ Thorne said.

  Rooker moved his hand and began scratching the top of his leg. The prison officer raised his head, waited a few seconds, then yanked the hand back down to the mattress.

  ‘What you were saying about checking my friends,’ Rooker said. ‘How long is all this going to take? The sooner they get everything sorted out, you know, and arranged, the quicker we can start talking. Right? This has been going on too long already…’

  Thorne knew what Rooker meant, realised that he was reluctant to talk specifically about protection, and evidence, and Ryan, with the prison officer in the room.

  ‘It won’t be a quick decision,’ Thorne said. ‘They’ve only been considering the position seriously for the last couple of days.’

  Rooker shook his head. ‘Right. That’s typical. Maybe, if they’d considered it a bit earlier, I might not have had a fucking paintbrush jammed in my guts…’

  Thorne knew that was probably his fault. He looked at the indignant expression plastered across Rooker’s yellowish chops. He could remember feeling guiltier. From the corner of his eye, he saw the prison officer look up when Holland’s mobile rang. The DC checked the caller ID, stood up and took the phone out of earshot to answer it.

  ‘You’re supposed to turn those off in here,’ Rooker said. ‘They can interfere with medical equipment, you know. Fuck up the machines…’

  The prison officer spoke for the first time: ‘Shame you’re not wired up to a couple then. Might have done us all a favour.’

  Thorne couldn’t help smiling. ‘How long’s he going to be here for?’