The Burning Girl

by Mark Billingham

  ‘It’s gone very quiet around here,’ Kitson said.

  Thorne had to agree. He knew that she wasn’t just talking about the fact that many of the team had taken lunch early and gone over to the Oak. ‘I think, as far as the Swiss Cottage thing goes, it’s going to get a lot bloody quieter,’ he said. ‘Things might pick up, if somebody makes a decision about Billy Ryan…’

  Since they’d changed their minds about Gordon Rooker, the joint operation had divided itself, somewhat less than perfectly, into two distinct strands. There was, understandably, a major emphasis being placed on catching the man who’d tried to set light to the girl in Swiss Cottage, but that investigation hadn’t turned up anything within the all-important first twenty-four hours. In spite of the time and location of the attack, there wasn’t a single useful description. The man’s face had been hidden beneath the hood of his anorak, while witness accounts of height and build had varied as much as might be expected, bearing in mind the thick, cold-weather clothing and hunched posture of the attacker.

  The girl herself was already back at school, while her mother was cashing in, discussing her daughter’s lucky escape and the shocking ineptitude of the police on any TV or radio show that would have her. Her daughter had been selected, as far as anyone could ascertain, completely at random. Another brick wall. It wasn’t that the leads weren’t going anywhere. There simply weren’t any in the first place.

  Meanwhile, whether he was connected to what had happened in Swiss Cottage or not, there was still Billy Ryan. While a case against him was being built behind prison walls, there was uncertainty about how those on the ground should proceed.

  Nick Tughan was all for the softly-softly approach. There was still the dispute with the Zarif brothers to be dealt with, and Tughan didn’t think there was anything to be gained by confronting Ryan directly about Rooker, or about Jessica Clarke. For once, Thorne had been largely a spectator when things had come to a head in the middle of the previous week.

  ‘We’re working with Rooker,’ Tughan had said. ‘We’re putting the evidence against Ryan together, but while that’s happening there’s still the minor matter of a gang war going on. My first responsibility is to make sure there’s no more killing.’

  Brigstocke had gone in studs-up. ‘Come on, Nick. This is hardly about saving innocent lives, is it?’

  Tughan reacted angrily. ‘Tell me Hanya Izzigil wasn’t innocent. Tell me Marcus Moloney wasn’t.’

  Brigstocke had looked at his feet, then sidelong at Thorne. He hadn’t got off to a very good start…

  ‘We don’t know what Ryan’s going to do next.’ Tughan had wandered to the window then and looked out across the North Circular. ‘He tried to sort Rooker out and he screwed it up. He’s going to have to respond to Moloney’s murder sooner or later. It’s been nearly a fortnight…’ He turned and held up a hand before Thorne could say anything. ‘Even if it was him who had Moloney killed, it’s going to look bloody funny if he doesn’t retaliate, isn’t it?’

  ‘Why don’t we press him on Moloney, then?’ Brigstocke had asked. ‘Why don’t we press the fucker on a lot of things?’

  ‘This isn’t just about Ryan, by the way. Whatever happens, I want the Zarifs as well.’

  ‘Obviously, but we’re talking about Billy Ryan, and right now there’s a lot of sitting about on our arses. We should be trying to disrupt his operations.’

  The commanding view of cars and concrete was obviously too much for Tughan to resist. After a few moments’ thinking, or pretending to think, he turned back to the window. ‘Let’s just wait…’

  Brigstocke had let out a weary sigh. ‘Rooker might not be enough, Nick. I think we should get everything we can.’

  There was only ever going to be one side Thorne was on, and he couldn’t resist chipping in for very long. ‘You were the one who said Rooker was unreliable.’ He had taken a step to his left so that he could at least see the side of Tughan’s face. ‘Don’t you think a jury might agree with you? However good the evidence is, Rooker just might not be a credible witness. Ryan’s legal team are going to be doing their best to make him look anything but credible. It can’t hurt to go after something else to back him up, can it?’

  Brigstocke had held up his hands. ‘I don’t see how it can.’

  ‘Let’s just remind Ryan that we haven’t forgotten him,’ Thorne had suggested. ‘Stir things up a bit…’

  Now, days later, sitting in his office with Yvonne Kitson, Thorne was still smiling about what Tughan had said next: ‘That’s what you’re good at, isn’t it, Tom? Stirring things up. You’re a spoon on legs.’

  Kitson spun her chair around to face him. ‘Is Brigstocke winning the argument, d’you reckon?’

  ‘Russell gives as good as he gets,’ Thorne said, ‘but he needs a prod every now and again. I reminded him that he was a DCI as well, and he got a bit shirty.’ Kitson laughed. ‘I think he might just go over Tughan’s head…’

  Thorne looked across at Kitson and suddenly remembered a moment sitting in the same office with her the year before. He’d been watching her eat her lunch, staring as she took her sandwiches from the Tupperware container and unwrapped the foil. He’d thought she had everything under control…

  Thorne’s stomach growled. Karim was bringing him back a cheese roll from the pub. Surely even the Oak’s culinary wizard couldn’t fuck that up.

  ‘What are you doing for lunch, Yvonne…?’

  Before she could answer, there was a knock, and Holland put his head round the door. He came in, followed by Andy Stone, and together they gave Thorne a rundown on the morning’s session at Park Royal.

  Thorne looked at the pictures–stills from the tape they’d shown Rooker–laid out on his desk in front of him. ‘Well, I think we can safely discount the wife, the daughter and the auntie,’ he said.

  Holland pulled a face. ‘I’m not being funny, but couldn’t any one of them have been passing messages between Rooker and somebody else?’

  Thorne was not known as the belt-and-braces type. In this case, though, it was better to play it safe. ‘Right, sod it,’ he said. ‘With the exception of the old lady, have a word with all of them.’

  As he and Holland were leaving, Stone turned back with a grin. ‘Are you sure you don’t want us to check the old woman out? She looks pretty dodgy to me.’

  Thorne nodded. ‘Right. The gap between perception and reality.’ He looked innocently at Stone. ‘I’m sure some of the great philosophers have got plenty to say on the subject, Andy.’

  Holland fought back a laugh as he quickly stepped out of the room. Stone looked blank as he turned and followed him, leaving Thorne unsure as to whether or not he’d cottoned on.

  ‘What was all that about?’ Kitson asked.

  Thorne was still grinning, highly pleased with himself. ‘Just something Holland told me about Andy Stone and his winning ways with the opposite sex.’

  ‘Right. He’s a bit of a shagger, isn’t he?’

  ‘Apparently. I never seem to meet any, but if some people are to be believed, women are falling over themselves to jump into bed with coppers all of a sudden…’

  It took Thorne a second to realise what he’d said, and who he’d said it to. When he looked across at Kitson, the colour had already reached her face.

  ‘Sorry, Yvonne…’

  ‘Don’t be stupid.’

  He nodded. Stupid was exactly how he felt. ‘How is everything?’

  ‘Oh, you know. Shitty…’ She smiled and spun her chair towards her desk.

  ‘How’re the kids doing?’

  The chair came slowly back around again. She obviously wanted to talk. ‘The eldest’s been playing up a bit at school. It’s hard to know whether it’s anything to do with what’s been happening, but I still manage to convince myself that it is. I try and tell myself not to be so bloody stupid and guilty all the time. Then one of them bangs their head, or twists an ankle playing football, and it feels like it’s my fault…’


  The phone on Thorne’s desk rang, and Kitson stopped talking.

  It was the security officer at the gatehouse. He told Thorne that somebody had driven up to the barrier and was asking to see him.

  In point of fact, the woman–so the duty officer had explained–had not come to see him specifically. He just happened to be the highest-ranking member of Team 3 in the building at the time. It was a piece of luck, both good and bad, that Thorne would reflect on for a long time afterwards.

  The woman stood as he came down the stairs into the small reception area. Thorne nodded to the officer on the desk and walked across to her. She was in her mid-thirties, he guessed, and tallish, certainly as tall as he was. Her hair was the colour of the cork pin-board on the wall behind his desk, her complexion as pale as the wall itself. She wore smart grey trousers with a matching jacket, and, for no good reason, Thorne wondered if she might be a tax inspector.

  ‘Did you find a parking space?’ he asked. On second thoughts, he never imagined civil servants to be quite so attractive…

  She nodded and held out a hand, which Thorne took. ‘I’m Alison Kelly,’ she said.

  Perhaps the stunned expression on Thorne’s face looked a lot like ignorance. She repeated her name, then explained exactly who she was. ‘Jessica Clarke was my best friend. I was the one she got mistaken for.’

  Thorne released her hand, slightly embarrassed at having held on to it for so long. She didn’t seem overly bothered. ‘Sorry, I know who you are. I just wasn’t expecting you to walk in, or to…I just wasn’t expecting you.’

  ‘I probably should have called.’

  They looked at each other for a second or two. Thorne could feel the eyes of the duty officer on them.

  ‘Right, then.’ What do you want? This would perhaps have been a little brusque, but it was all Thorne was thinking. Rather than ask the question, though, he looked around, as if searching for a place where they could talk in private. ‘I’m sure I can find us somewhere where we can chat, or whatever.’ He pointed to the exit. ‘Unless you’d rather go for a walk or something…?’

  She shook her head. ‘It’s bloody freezing out there.’

  ‘Spring’s not far away…’

  ‘Thank God.’

  Becke House was an operational HQ, as opposed to a fully functioning station, and, as such, it had no permanent interview suite. There was a small room to the right of the reception desk that was occasionally used in emergencies, or to store booze whenever a party was thrown. A table and chairs, a couple of rickety cupboards. Thorne opened the door, checked that the room was unoccupied and beckoned Alison Kelly inside.

  ‘I’ll see if I can organise some tea,’ he said.

  She moved past him and sat down, then began speaking before he’d closed the door. ‘Here’s what I know,’ she said. Her voice was deep and unaccented. Just the right side of posh. ‘You’re not getting anywhere trying to find the man who squirted lighter fluid all over that girl in Swiss Cottage ten days ago.’ She paused.

  Thorne walked across to the table and sat down. ‘I’m not quite sure what you’re expecting me to say to that…’

  ‘Three days before that happened, somebody tried to kill the man who’s in prison for burning Jess, by stabbing him in the gut with a sharpened paintbrush. It’s pretty obvious that there’s a connection. Something’s going on.’

  ‘Do you mind me asking how you know all these things?’

  She gave a small shake of her head. More as if she couldn’t be bothered to answer than as if she was actually refusing. Then she continued to demonstrate just how much she did know. ‘Even if you weren’t aware that the man who did the stabbing owed Billy Ryan a load of money, you’d have to be an idiot not to work out who was behind it.’ She tucked a few loose strands of hair behind her ear. ‘Ryan was clearly responsible.’

  ‘Clearly,’ echoed Thorne.

  ‘He wanted Rooker killed for the obvious reasons.’

  The obvious reasons. Thorne was relieved to discover that she didn’t know absolutely everything…

  ‘Though why he should choose now to get revenge for what Rooker did twenty years ago is anybody’s guess.’

  Thorne was disturbed and excited by the bizarre and abrupt conversation. He felt oddly afraid of this woman. Her attitude fascinated him, and pissed him off.

  ‘You said, “the man who’s in prison for burning Jess”. That’s a bit odd, don’t you think? You didn’t say, “the man who burned Jess”. It just seems a strange way of putting it.’

  She looked blankly at him.

  ‘Have you got any reason to think that Gordon Rooker isn’t the man responsible?’ Thorne asked.

  She couldn’t conceal the half smile. ‘There is something going on, isn’t there?’

  Thorne felt pretty sure he’d just walked into an elaborate verbal trap. There was clearly even more going on behind Alison Kelly’s green eyes than he’d begun to suspect.

  Now she wasn’t even trying to hide the smile. ‘That’s the other thing I know,’ she said. ‘That you’re not going to tell me anything.’

  The time for politeness had long since passed. ‘What is it you want, Miss Kelly?’ Thorne immediately saw the front for what it was, but only because he noticed it crack and slip a little: there was a softening around the jaw, and in the set of her shoulders.

  ‘You aren’t the only one who wasn’t expecting me to walk in here,’ she said. ‘I needed a bloody big glass of wine before I drove up. I’ve been sitting in the pub opposite, surrounded by coppers, getting some Dutch courage.’ The smile suddenly seemed nervous. The voice had lost any pretence at confidence or authority.

  ‘I want to know what that girl did,’ she said. ‘What her friends did at that bus stop that saved her. I want to know what it was that alerted them. What it was that we didn’t see, that we didn’t do.’

  ‘I really don’t think there’s much point…’

  ‘The first thing I knew was when Jess ran at me, and I stepped out of the way. Do you understand that? All I could do was watch it, then.’ Her voice was barely above a murmur, but it seemed to echo off the shiny white walls. ‘I heard the crackle when it reached her hair. Then I smelled it. Have you ever smelled it? I mean, have you ever smelled anything like that?

  ‘I wasn’t actually sick. I felt like I was going to, like I was going to heave, but I didn’t. Not then. Now, just the thought of it…just the smell of a match being struck…’

  She looked, and sounded, disorientated. She was an adult in a playground. A child in a police station.

  ‘That could have been my hair. Should have been my hair…’

  Thorne opened his mouth, but nothing came quickly enough.

  ‘I want to know why Jess wasn’t all right, like that other girl was. Why wasn’t she? I want you to tell me what we could have done to save her.’

  Thorne turned Eastenders up just enough to drown out the noise of Hendricks singing in the bathroom. He pulled Elvis on to his lap, flicked through the sports pages of the Standard folded across the arm of the sofa. He couldn’t stop thinking about what Alison Kelly had said. He wasn’t the only one who couldn’t cope with ignorance…

  Alison Kelly’s need for certainty sprang from something a little deeper seated than his own, though. There’d been plenty of things he would have done differently, given half a chance, but not too many bad things for which he felt responsible. She’d had twenty years of blame and guilt. Each had fed off–yet perversely fattened–the other, until they’d become the twin parasites that defined her.

  Thorne asked himself how much better off Alison Kelly really was, than the girl who’d been mistaken for her.

  Elvis jumped away, grumbling, as Thorne stood up and walked across to the front door. He opened his bag and took out the small black book that had remained unopened since Ian Clarke had handed it to him.

  The dirge from the bathroom seemed, thankfully, to have abated. Thorne carried the diary back across to the sofa. He picked up the remo
te and muted the volume of the TV as he sat down again.

  When the pins and needles started, Chamberlain moved from the edge of the bath to the toilet seat. She turned her head so that she couldn’t see herself in the mirror. It was half an hour since she’d come upstairs, and she wondered how much longer she was going to have to sit there before she stopped feeling like a silly old woman.

  She’d spent the weekend going over the cold case she was supposed to be working on for AMRU: a bookmaker, stabbed to death in a pub car park in 1993. A dead man and a family who deserved justice as much as anybody else, but Chamberlain was in no fit state to help them get it.

  She was finding it hard to care about anything…about anything else…

  The Jessica Clarke case had been one she’d been close to. As close as she had ever been to any case.

  And she’d got it wrong.

  Three nights earlier, on the last train home after the evening round at Tom Thorne’s, she’d almost convinced herself that she was being stupid. What could she have done differently? Rooker had confessed, for heaven’s sake. There was no earthly reason why they should ever have looked for anyone else…

  Sitting on that all-but-deserted train, she’d almost convinced herself, but wrong was wrong, and it still hurt. She felt the pain of professional failure, and another, much worse pain, that comes from knowing you’ve let down someone very important.

  Another train had begun rushing past, and she’d turned to watch. Her reflection had danced across the windows of the train as it flashed by. After it had gone, she’d stared at her face, floating in the darkness on the other side of the glass, and noticed that she was crying.

  The most painful thing, of course, was feeling useless. Being surplus to requirements. It was knowing that she’d got it wrong, and that she would play no part in putting it right again.

  She’d heard the swish of the carriage door as it slid back, and watched the man moving towards her, reflected in the window. Watched as he’d weaved slowly back towards his seat with a bag from the buffet. Watched as he’d stopped at her table…