The Burning Girl

by Mark Billingham

  Thorne shone his torch around the cab’s interior. There were papers scattered across the seats and in the footwells. Whoever had gone through it hadn’t been too careful. It was unclear whether that was the fault of the officers who had discovered the abandoned vehicle, or those responsible for hijacking and then dumping it.

  ‘What was it carrying?’ Thorne asked, jumping down from the cab. ‘What was it supposed to be carrying?’

  ‘Well, the manifest they found in the cab says DVD players. Full load, top of the range, well worth nicking.’

  ‘Well, whatever was in there, I wouldn’t bet against Billy Ryan already having his hands on it. Looks like he’s decided to hit the Zarifs where it’s really going to hurt them. What about the driver?’

  ‘No sign. Not so much as a Yorkie bar…’

  ‘What d’you reckon?’

  ‘Your guess is as good as mine,’ Holland said. ‘Maybe the hijackers took him…’

  Thorne was on his knees, shining his torch underneath the truck. Oil, dirt and nothing else. ‘Or maybe they just beat the shit out of him and he’s gone running back to the Zarif brothers. Either way, I don’t fancy his chances.’

  A couple of teenage lads who’d obviously seen the torchbeams came wandering down from the direction of the restaurant carrying burgers and Cokes. Thorne shone his torch towards them. They shouted and put their hands up to shield their eyes.

  ‘Go and tell them to piss off, will you, Dave?’ Thorne watched Holland walk towards them, then turned back to the lorry, thinking that, for once, the old cliché about there being ‘nothing to see’ was absolutely spot on. The rear doors were obviously not locked, but had been pushed together. After trying and failing to open one of the huge doors with one hand, Thorne put his torch on the ground, grabbed hold with both hands and pulled.

  The stench of piss hit him immediately. He bent to retrieve his torch and pointed it inside, jumping slightly as Holland stepped around from the side of the truck.

  ‘Fuck…’

  ‘Sorry,’ Holland said, grinning. He added the light from his own torch to Thorne’s, revealing, little by little, the interior of the empty box. ‘Smells lovely, doesn’t it? Tramp’s been in there overnight, I reckon. Kids maybe…’

  Thorne lifted a leg and reached up. ‘Give us a hand, will you?’

  Holland locked his fingers together, making a cradle for Thorne’s foot. Thorne stepped into it and heaved himself up into the back of the lorry. The smell was even worse inside.

  ‘Jesus…’

  ‘Maybe somebody was very pissed,’ Holland suggested. ‘Thought it was a new kind of Portaloo. Makes a change from doing it in phone boxes…’

  Thorne played the torch across the scarred metal floor. The light caught slick trails where the liquid had run, puddles where it had pooled.

  Having seen quite enough, he turned, ready to jump down, when the Maglite caught something. There were markings high up on the side of the box, near the driver’s cab. Thorne trained the beam on the spot and moved slowly towards it.

  ‘Has anybody else been in here?’ he shouted. He knew the answer already. Nobody could have missed this in daylight…

  ‘I’m not sure,’ Holland said. ‘I think they just opened the door, saw that it was empty…’

  The scratches were recent, Thorne was sure of it, the marks bright against the dull, dark metal.

  Holland was leaning into the truck, fixing his torch on Thorne. ‘What’s the matter?’

  It was a single word. The language was unfamiliar. Scored in broken lines deep into the side of the box with a knife. A nail maybe.

  UMIT.

  ‘It wasn’t tramps or kids in here,’ Thorne said. ‘And the Zarifs aren’t smuggling dodgy videos.’ He turned towards the open doors and the figure of Holland standing in the darkness. ‘They’re smuggling people.’

  ‘What? Illegal immigrants?’

  ‘It could be trafficking for prostitution, but I doubt it. I’m guessing these people were perfectly willing. Paid their life savings on the strength of some gangster’s promise…’

  Holland said something else then, but Thorne couldn’t make it out. He spun around slowly on the spot, the circle of light from his torch dancing lazily across the dirty walls. Miserable, remembering…

  The woman on the tube, that first day. A baby and an empty cup.

  Arkan Zarif’s words.

  Bread and work…

  It was well after midnight by the time Thorne turned into Ryland Road and pulled up behind a dark blue VW Golf. He felt wiped out. He was walking past the Golf towards his flat when he noticed a man asleep in the driver’s seat. Thorne slowed his pace and leaned down to take a closer look. There was some light from a lamp-post twenty feet away, but not a great deal. The man in the car opened his eyes, smiled at Thorne and closed them again.

  Thorne continued on towards his door, reached into a pocket for his keys. Perhaps he’d rattled Billy Ryan more than he’d realised…

  Hendricks had already made up the sofa-bed and was lying there reading a paperback with an arty-looking cover.

  Thorne filled him in on the day’s events.

  As far as work on the case went, Hendricks had not been involved practically since the post-mortem on Marcus Moloney, but it was important that he remain part of the team. Besides, Thorne was certain that his particular skills would be required again before it was all over.

  ‘There’s a message on the machine for you,’ Hendricks shouted through to the kitchen. ‘Sounds interesting…’

  Thorne wandered in with his tea, pressed the button, sat on the arm of the sofa-bed to listen. The message was from Alison Kelly. She asked if he was free the following evening and left a phone number.

  Hendricks put down his book. ‘Was that who I think it was?’

  Thorne turned off the living-room light and walked towards his bedroom. ‘Hard to be sure,’ he said. He was smiling as he opened the bedroom door. ‘I don’t know who you think it was, do I…?’

  A few hours later, Thorne padded back into the living room, as awake as he’d been when he’d left it. He moved slowly towards the window. As he edged past the end of the sofa-bed, he banged his foot against the metal rail.

  Hendricks stirred and sat up, woken by the impact, or the swearing.

  ‘It’s four o’clock in the morning…’

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  Though there was no one left in the room to disturb, the darkness dictated that they spoke in whispers.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Hendricks moaned.

  Thorne was feeling irritable, and the throbbing pain in his foot was not helping matters. ‘Right now, I’m thinking that it’s getting a bit bloody crowded in here.’ He stepped across to the window. ‘How long can it possibly take to get rid of a bit of damp anyway?’

  Hendricks said nothing.

  Thorne pulled back the blind and looked out into the street. The Golf had gone.

  18 May 1986

  Ali and I went into town today. We just hung around really. Ali bought a bag and a couple of new tops and I got some LPs. Afterwards we got a burger and sat on a bench outside the library. A couple of lads were messing around and they were both staring. I started joking around with Ali, asking her which one of us she thought they fancied. It’s only the sort of thing I would have said to her before. (Ali was always the one lads fancied, by the way!) She looked uncomfortable and threw her burger away, and I know I should have left it, but I was just trying to make her laugh. I told her that it was obviously true what they say about how good-looking girls always hang around with an ugly mate, and then she started to cry.

  Now I feel guilty that I’ve upset her, but also angry because her feeling sad or guilty or whatever it is she feels seems so fucking trivial when I look into the mirror on the back of the bedroom door, and half my face still looks like the meat in her burger.

  I know I’ll feel differently about today by the morning and Ali and I will be best mates again before the e
nd of school on Monday, but it’s difficult not to feel a bit low when I’m writing this stuff down and it’s my own fault. I always write at night, staring out of the window and listening to the Smiths or something equally miserable. Maybe I should have bought some cheerier music when I was in town. The soundtrack to tomorrow’s entry will be courtesy of Cliff Richard or the Wombles or something…

  Shit Moment of the Day

  The stuff with Ali.

  Magic Moment of the Day

  A comedian on the TV making a joke about burn victims sticking together.

  SIXTEEN

  A single word was written on the whiteboard in red felt-tip pen.

  UMIT.

  ‘It means “hope”,’ Tughan said. ‘In Turkish…’

  Feet were shifted uncomfortably, and awkward looks exchanged. Thorne thought that if the people who’d been taken from the back of that lorry were now being handled by Billy Ryan, hope was something they would almost certainly have run out of.

  It was Saturday morning, the day after the discovery of the abandoned lorry. The SO7 team was back at Becke House to work through this latest development. All that was actually developing was a sense of frustration…

  ‘Customs and Excise are all over this now,’ Tughan said. ‘Not sure what they’ll get out of it, but it’ll probably be a damn sight more than we do…’

  Thorne stood with Russell Brigstocke and the rest of the core team–Kitson, Stone, Holland and their SO7 counterparts–in a corner of the Incident Room. They watched as Tughan wore out a small strip of carpet in front of one of the desks. Weekend or not, there were always those who made no concessions to casual wear, but, despite the sharp and predictably well-pressed suit, Thorne thought that Tughan was starting to look and sound a little tired. Maybe not as tired as Thorne himself, but he was getting there.

  ‘In terms of the Zarif brothers, you mean?’ Thorne asked.

  Holland held up his hands in a gesture of exasperation. ‘Surely there must be something tying them to this? Something that will at least give us an excuse to make their lives difficult…’

  Tughan put down his coffee and began to flick through a hastily assembled report on the hijacking. ‘It’s like six degrees of fucking separation,’ he said. ‘Between this lorry and the Zarifs there are any number of haulage companies, leasing agencies, freight contractors. They own the vehicle, theoretically, but if we spend a lot of time trying to tie them to whatever the vehicle was carrying, we’ll be the ones whose lives are difficult.’

  ‘I bet they’re laughing at us,’ Holland said. ‘Them and the bloody Ryans.’

  Tughan shrugged. ‘Without any bodies, without the people who were inside the lorry, we’ve got sweet FA.’

  ‘I can’t believe they’ve got everything covered.’ Holland looked around for support, found a little in the way of nods and murmurs.

  ‘I’ve had a thought,’ Brigstocke said. All eyes turned to him. ‘Have we checked to see if that lorry’s tax disc is up to date?’

  The joke got a decent, and much needed, response, even if some of the laughter was lost in yawns.

  ‘Do we know what was inside the lorry?’ Kitson said. ‘Specifically, I mean. Are we ever going to know how many?’

  Tughan shook his head. ‘Anywhere between a dozen and, I don’t know…fifty?’

  ‘There were that many found dead in the back of that lorry at Dover, weren’t there?’ Holland said.

  ‘There were more,’ Thorne said. He remembered the smell when he’d stepped up into that box the night before. He wondered what it must have been like for whoever had opened a pair of lorry doors a few years earlier and stared as the sunlight fell across the tangled heaps of crushed and emaciated dead. Fifty-eight Chinese immigrants, crammed like sardines into a sealed lorry, and found suffocated when it was opened on a steaming summer’s afternoon. Their clothes in nice, neat piles. Their bodies in considerably less ordered ones…

  There had, of course, been a major outcry at the time. There were demands for tougher controls, for positive action to curb this barbaric trade. Thorne knew very well that more might have been done had the corpses in the back of that lorry been those of donkeys or puppies or kittens…

  ‘How can that many get through?’ Stone asked. ‘Don’t these lorries get searched?’

  ‘Sometimes,’ Tughan said. ‘They can hide in secret compartments or behind stacks of false cargo…’

  Stone was shaking his head. ‘You’d think they’d check the lorries a bit more thoroughly after all that business at Dover, though.’

  Thorne knew that it wouldn’t have taken a particularly thorough search to have found those Chinese immigrants earlier. To have saved their lives. They’d tried to hide behind a few crates of tomatoes…

  ‘The smugglers aren’t stupid,’ Tughan said. ‘They’ll try to avoid the ports that have got scanners, but even those that do have them are overrun. They can’t possibly check any more than a handful or you’d have queues fifty miles long waiting to board the ferries.’

  Thorne knew Tughan was right. Unable to sleep the night before, he’d booted up his rarely used computer and surfed the Net for a couple of hours. He’d gone to the NCIS site and taken a crash course in Turkish organised crime. He’d looked at the way the gangs and families operated both in the UK and in Turkey, and had followed the link from there to the NCIS pages on people smuggling.

  It had made for grim reading. It hadn’t helped him sleep…

  Customs and Excise were still more concerned with finding illicit alcohol and tobacco than they were with the smuggling of and, worse still, the trade in people. Though a few scanners had been installed, it was simply too big an undertaking to check anything more than a small random sample of vehicles passing through most ports. Seven thousand lorries a day came through Dover; on a good day, 5 per cent of them might be searched. It was little surprise that often no effort at all was made to conceal the people being smuggled. Those doing the smuggling knew full well that they could afford to be brazen.

  Tughan talked some more about the hopelessness of trying to curb the growing trade in desperate people. He mentioned the valiant efforts being made by the police, the immigration services, the NCIS and Customs. He described an operation, yet to yield substantial results, involving MI5 and MI6 agents infiltrating the businesses of those responsible…

  Thorne listened, wondering if he should jump in and help. After all, it wasn’t often that he had the facts and figures at his fingertips. He was not usually the one who’d done his homework. He decided not to bother, figuring that it might be a bit early in the morning for some people to handle the shock.

  Yvonne Kitson had brought a flask of Earl Grey in with her. She poured herself a cup. ‘So, until we find these people, find out what Ryan’s done with them, we won’t know who they are or how they got here.’

  Brigstocke pointed to the whiteboard, to the single word, scrawled in red: Hope. The colour of crushed tomatoes…

  ‘Well, we can be pretty sure that at least some of them are Turkish,’ Brigstocke said. ‘Kurds, probably.’

  Thorne knew the most likely route: ‘From Turkey and the Middle East through the Balkans.’ He ignored the look of surprise from Brigstocke, the look of amused horror from Tughan, and carried on, ‘Then across the Adriatic to Italy.’

  Tughan took over. ‘The smugglers have a range of options. They change the routes to keep the immigration services on their toes, but there are a few key places–Moscow, Budapest, Sarajevo are all major nexus points…’

  Thorne smiled. Nexus points! Nick Tughan was not a man to let himself be outdone. Thorne half expected him to march across like a teacher and write it on the whiteboard.

  ‘But Istanbul is the big one. It’s smack on the most direct route to the West from most of the major source countries.’

  ‘Right,’ Brigstocke said. ‘And where the Zarif brothers have got plenty of friends and contacts.’

  Holland rubbed his eyes. ‘What about getting in he
re?’

  ‘I already told you,’ Tughan said, ‘the smugglers aren’t stupid.’

  Neither am I, Thorne thought. ‘They’ve got a few choices at this end as well,’ he said. ‘They can risk a major port or try a back-door route like the one through Ireland. There’s another way in that’s becoming quite popular–via Holland and Denmark, then over to the Faroe Islands, the Shetlands and across into mainland Scotland.’ Thorne wasn’t sure whether the short silence that followed was considered or simply astonished.

  It was Yvonne Kitson who eventually spoke up. ‘All right,’ she said, turning to him, mock-aggressive. ‘What planet are you from, and what have you done with Tom Thorne?’

  DC Richards–the tedious Welshman who had so enjoyed making his ‘concentric circles’ speech–cut off the laughter before it had really begun. ‘What are we actually going to do, sir? About the Zarifs and Billy Ryan?’

  Tughan gave a thin smile, grateful to one of his own for passing the baton back to him. Back where it belonged. ‘It’s tricky, because both sides have got good reason to lie low for a while. The Zarifs know we’re looking at their smuggling operation, and Ryan’s got any number of immigrants to dispose of.’

  ‘I can’t see Memet Zarif and his brothers lying low for very long,’ Thorne said. ‘They’ll want to hit back at Ryan for this. Close to home, maybe…’

  Tughan considered this for a second. ‘Maybe, but I think we’ve got a bit of time to play with. I want a full-on policy of disruption. Let’s make it hard for them to do any business; let’s fuck them both around.’ He pointed at Holland, reminding him of what he’d said earlier. ‘Make their lives difficult…’

  Thorne knew that ‘disruption’ essentially meant arresting, or, at the very least, hassling a variety of low-rank workers in the two organisations: drug dealers, debt collectors–those in DC Richards’ outer circles. It was time-consuming, heavy on manpower and, worst of all, as far as Thorne was concerned, it had little effect on the people they should be really going after. It was a policy that could produce results in the right circumstances, but there were just too many bodies around this time. It made him feel like a glorified VAT-man, and he resented it. He wanted to hurt Billy Ryan and the Zarif boys in more than just their wallets…