The Burning Girl

by Mark Billingham

  The old man raised his hand as Thorne came towards him, brought it up to his mouth. ‘You come inside for coffee? For suklak, maybe…?’

  Thorne slowed his pace, but kept on heading towards his car. ‘I can’t. I’ve got to be somewhere…’

  It was true that he had less than an hour to get home, shower and change, but that wasn’t the only reason why he’d refused the old man’s invitation. Even if he’d had the time, Thorne knew that the coffee would have tasted even more bitter than usual.

  When he thought about the burning girl, he often thought about the others, too. About her friends.

  They’d been the first to see it, of course, to spot the flames. The one who had been standing closest, the one who really was Alison Kelly, screamed like it had been her who was on fire. He’d jumped slightly, perhaps even cried out as the scream had moved through him like a blade. He’d turned his head towards the noise then, and seen the flames reflected in the girl’s eyes. They were dark brown and very wide, and the flames that were growing, that were climbing up the girl who was actually burning, seemed tiny, dancing in her friend’s eyes in that second before he’d turned and run. He still remembered how small they had seemed, flickering against the dark brown. How far away.

  As he’d rushed away down that steep hill, careering towards the car, that scream had followed him. He could feel the echo of it at his back, rolling down the hillside after him, all but knocking him off his feet as he went. Then the screams had grown, of course, louder and more hysterical, pushing him downhill even faster.

  He’d stood still for just a second or two before jumping into the car, and he remembered that moment now vividly. Remembered the shortness of breath and the picture on the backs of his eyelids. He’d closed his eyes and the shape of the flames had still been there, imprinted. Gold and red edges bleeding into the blackness.

  A snapshot of the flames. The ones he’d seen jumping in the eyes of the girl he’d been sent there to kill.

  SEVENTEEN

  ‘How did you get my number, anyway?’ Thorne asked.

  Alison Kelly put down her glass, tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. ‘On your card?’

  Thorne smiled and shook his head. Like everyone else on the job, he had a generic Metropolitan Police business card. It gave the address of Becke House, together with the phone and fax numbers at the office. It bore the legend ‘Working for a safer London’, printed in blue as a jaunty scribble. It left a space to write in mobile, pager or other numbers.

  ‘I never write down my home phone number,’ Thorne said. ‘You didn’t get it out of the phone book, either…’

  She still wasn’t giving anything away.

  ‘You got my number the same way you found out everything else, right?’

  They were sitting in a corner of the Spice of Life at Cambridge Circus. Alison nursed a large gin and tonic. Thorne was on the Guinness, and enjoying it. The lounge contained acres of red velvet, far too many brass rails and, inexplicably, was crammed with annoyingly healthy-looking Scandinavian tourists.

  Thorne tore open a packet of crisps, grabbed a handful. ‘I’m not going to get a straight answer, am I?’

  ‘I was a gangster’s daughter until I was fourteen,’ she said. ‘Then everything changed. Everything. Dad walked away from it all and took us and a great big bag of his tasteless “new” money with him. Spent the rest of his life playing golf and doing crosswords in his conservatory. A couple of years later, Billy and I were together, but once that marriage was over, I was completely out of it. I was out of the life, and that’s how I wanted it. Gangland was just something Mum and I saw on the TV, and I was just a lowly legal secretary with a private-school accent and a pony. Now, I’m a slightly better-paid legal secretary with less of an accent and no pony. And I’m still out of it. But…’

  ‘But?’

  She grinned, picked up her drink. ‘I’ve still got a few friends who are very much in it.’ She drained her glass. ‘We’ll have a girls’ night out a couple of times a year. You know the kind of thing–family-run restaurant, shed-loads of booze on the house, I complain about work and they complain about how long their husbands and boyfriends are getting sent down for.’

  ‘Sounds like a fun evening…’

  ‘One or two of them may or may not know certain police officers pretty well and can call in a favour if they’re asked nicely. Getting a copper’s phone number is hardly rocket science.’

  ‘I should be shocked,’ Thorne said, ‘but I’m too busy thinking about another round.’

  She picked up Thorne’s empty glass and pushed back her chair. ‘Another one of those…?’

  For the next hour or so they talked about the difficulties of doing, or not doing, what was expected of you. It was soon obvious that this was something they both knew a great deal about.

  Thorne told her that if he were the sort to do what was expected, or at the very least encouraged, he wouldn’t be there drinking with her.

  Alison told Thorne about her reluctance to do bugger all and sit on her arse spending her old man’s money. She told him about upsetting her mother by refusing the offer to set her up in a business.

  ‘Sounds like you were trying to distance yourself,’ Thorne said. ‘From the money. From everything that made the money. Like you blamed it for what happened to Jessica.’

  Her pale complexion flushed a little. ‘If my dad hadn’t been who he was, what he was, then it wouldn’t have happened. That’s not a delusion…’

  They both took a drink to fill the short pause that followed. By now, she’d moved on to white wine. Thorne had moved on to his next Guinness.

  ‘Why did you marry Billy Ryan?’ he asked.

  She thought about it for a few seconds. Just rising above the buzz and burble of pub chat, the voices of the latest boy-band drifted through from the jukebox in the bar next door.

  ‘It sounds like I’m joking,’ she said, ‘but it really did seem like a good idea at the time.’

  ‘He must have been…what? Mid-thirties?’

  ‘Older. And I was only eighteen.’

  ‘So who the hell thought that was a “good idea”?’

  She smiled. ‘Not my mum, for a start. She thought the age difference was too big. I mean, Billy’s son was only ten years younger than I was, for God’s sake. But Dad was all for it. I think there were a few people who thought it was a good thing, you know, some of the old boys who’d been around a bit. Even though Dad had been out of it a few years by then, and Billy was running the show, some people thought it was a good way of…building bridges, or something. The old guard and the new guard.’

  ‘You make it sound like it was arranged.’

  She shook her head. ‘I wish I had that as an excuse. I’d like to say I married him to make everybody else happy. And I knew that I was, to some extent. But the simple fact is that I loved him.’ She paused, but looked as if she needed to say something else. She searched for the right words. ‘He was impressive, back then.’

  Thorne thought about the Billy Ryan he’d so recently encountered. There would be some who might still describe him as impressive, but lovable was not a word that sprang to mind. ‘What went wrong?’

  She took a good-sized slurp of wine. ‘Nothing…for a while. I mean, I never really hit it off with Stephen, who was a right little sod even then, but he wasn’t the problem. His old man was. There were two sides to Billy.’

  Thorne nodded. He didn’t know many people without at least a couple…

  ‘There was part of him’, she said, ‘that just wanted to have fun. He liked to have friends over or go out to parties. He used to take me into all the clubs. He wanted to dress up and show off and hang around with actors and pop stars. People writing books. He loved all that…’

  ‘I bet the actors and pop stars loved it as well.’

  ‘When it was just the two of us, though, he could be a whole lot different. If it was just him and me and a bottle of something, he became somebody else, and I was on
the receiving end. Maybe he was still having fun, I don’t know…’

  Thorne saw her eyes darken and knew what she meant. He remembered the feet, dainty inside highly polished shoes, but also Ryan’s shoulders, powerful beneath the expensive blazer.

  Two sides. The dancer and the boxer.

  ‘It’s a pretty good reason to leave someone,’ he said.

  ‘He was the one who left.’

  ‘Right…’

  ‘He said he couldn’t cope with the problems I had. All the stuff with Jess I was still trying to deal with.’

  Thorne had to fight to stop his mouth dropping open. Problems? Stuff? All of them, all of it, the result of what her husband had done.

  Alison saw the look on Thorne’s face, took it as no more than mild surprise. ‘I did have some bloody awful mood swings, I know I did. Billy wasn’t exactly what you’d call supportive, though. He kept saying I was neurotic…that I needed help. He kept telling me that I hated myself, that I was impossible to live with, that I needed to get over what had happened when I was in that playground.’

  When a man paid by Billy Ryan had come to her school to kill her. When flames had devoured her best friend in front of her eyes.

  ‘No,’ Thorne said. ‘Not exactly supportive.’

  She swirled around the last of her wine in the bottom of the glass. ‘He was right about me needing help, of course, but I needed a damn sight more after a couple of years with Billy. I got through a bit of that money my mum had been offering then. Pissed a lot of it away paying strangers to listen. Any number of the buggers at fifty quid an hour.’

  Thorne stared at her.

  Her eyes widened when they met his. ‘I’m all right now, though,’ she said.

  ‘That’s good…’

  As she downed her drink, she contorted her face into a series of deliberately comical twitches and tics. It wasn’t particularly funny, but Thorne laughed anyway.

  She put down the glass and reached for her handbag. ‘Let’s go and get something to eat…’

  Rooker stared at a spider on the ceiling, wishing things were noisier. It was always noisy in prison, always. Even asleep, five hundred men could make a shitload of noise. During the day, it could be unbearable. The pounding of feet in corridors and on stairs, the clank of metal–buckets and keys, the slash and smash of voices echoing from cell to cell, from landing to landing. Even a tiny noise–a fork on a plate, a groan in the night–was magnified somehow and charged. It was like the anger floating around the place had done something to the air itself, made it easier for sound to move through it and carry. Distorted, deafening. It was something you got used to. It was something Rooker had got used to.

  Here, though, it was like the bloody grave.

  Even the relative peace of the VP wings he’d been on was like a cacophony compared to this. There, the shuffling nonces made noises all of their own. Same thing went for the old fuckers they got lumbered with. They always stuck the very old fellas on the VP wings. The stroke victims and the doolally ones, and the ones who had problems getting around. They were no trouble, most of them, but, Christ, once the lights went out, the hawking and the coughing would start, and he’d want to put pillows over all their pasty, lopsided faces.

  He missed it now though. The silence was keeping him awake.

  He allowed himself a smile. There would be plenty of noise in a few weeks when he was out–when it was all over and he was home, wherever that would be. There would be silence when he wanted it, and noises he hadn’t heard in a very long time. Traffic, pubs, football crowds.

  When it was all over…

  The sessions with Thorne and the rest were wearing him out. Thorne especially had a way of digging at him, of pushing and pushing, until the effort of remembering and repeating it over and over again was like shovelling shit uphill. He knew it had to be done, that it would be worth it, but he’d forgotten quite how much he hated them. Even when you were supposed to be helping them, when you were supposed to be on the same side, the police were a pack of mongrels.

  He felt a familiar flutter in his gut that was coming often now, whenever he thought about life on the outside. It was like a bubbling panic. He’d imagined being out for so long and now that it was within his reach he realised that it scared the living shit out of him. He’d known plenty of cons who’d done a lot less time than him and couldn’t hack it on the outside. Most were fucked up on booze and drugs within a year. Others all but begged to be sent back to prison, and, eventually, they made sure they got what they wanted.

  It wasn’t going to be easy, he knew that, but at least with Ryan out of the way he would have a chance. He would have the time to adjust.

  If he ever felt a moment’s doubt, wondered about changing his mind and telling Thorne and the rest to stuff it, he just had to remember that night in Epping Forest, one of the last times he’d ever clapped eyes on Ryan. He just had to remember the look on Ryan’s face.

  Getting out scared him, but Billy Ryan scared him more.

  Rooker turned on to his side to face the wall, wincing at the jolt of pain in his belly. It was still sore. On balance, he preferred the pain to the panic, but still, he decided that once he’d got out and away, once he’d let the dust settle, he’d do some ringing round. He’d call in a favour or two and get that shitbag Fisher sorted out.

  Thorne looked across at the clock on his bedside table. 5.10 a.m. Only ten minutes later than the last time he’d looked.

  He turned and watched Alison Kelly sleep.

  She was dead to the world, and had barely stirred since she’d finally drifted off for the second time. Thorne knew he would have no such luck. He had scarcely blinked since being woken nearly three hours before by the sobbing.

  He watched her sleep and thought about what he’d told her…

  For a while, he’d been unable to get a word out of her. Every attempt at speech caught in her throat, was strangled by the heave of her chest that seemed to shake every inch of her. He’d held her until she’d calmed a little, then listened as it began to grow light outside, and the tears and snot dried on his arms and on his neck.

  She’d asked some of the questions he’d already heard, and others he’d seen in her eyes when she’d spoken about her past. The whispers and the sobs had added a desperation he’d heard before only in the voices of the recently bereaved, or from the parents of missing children.

  What could she have done differently?

  Why did Jessica burn?

  When was she ever going to stop feeling like she was burning herself?

  So, Thorne had held on hard to her, and finally given her the only answer he had, hoping that it might serve as the answer for all of her questions.

  The tears had stopped quickly after that, and she’d seemed to grow suddenly so tired that she couldn’t even hold up her head. She’d dropped slowly down on to the pillow, her face turned away from him, and Thorne had no idea how long she’d lain staring at his bedroom wall. He’d known it would be wrong to ask, even in a whisper, if she was still awake…

  Now, staring up at his cheap lampshade, he wasn’t sure why he’d told her. Maybe it was what she’d said in the pub about Ryan. Maybe it was a simple desire in him to give something. Maybe it was a belief in the plain goodness of fact, in its power to smother the flames of doubt and guilt. Whatever the reason, it was done. Thorne knew he’d moved into strange territory and he wasn’t at all sure how he felt about it.

  Knowing that he would not get back to sleep, he eased himself to his feet and moved towards the door. Standing on Alison’s side of the bed, he looked down at her face. He saw half of it, pale in a wedge of milky light bleeding into the room through a crack in the curtains. The other half was in darkness, where shadow lay across it like a scar.

  6 June 1986

  We all drove out to a country pub today. The weather was nice enough to sit outside, which was probably a good idea. It was crowded in the pub anyway and I didn’t want to put anyone off their ploughman’s
lunch. I don’t think I’m ever really going to be great with lots of people around.

  Mum and Dad let me have half a lager, which was another very good reason to be outside!

  There were lots of wasps buzzing around the food, which was pissing everyone off. I kept perfectly still, hoping that one might settle on me, settle on the scar. I wanted to know what it felt like, or even if I could feel it at all. But Dad was flapping his arms around and swearing and none of them came near me.

  Dad had brought his new camera along and insisted on taking loads of pictures. We both smiled like always, like it was perfectly normal and I pretended that I was fine about it so Dad wouldn’t be upset. Afterwards I made a joke about the woman at Boots getting a nasty shock when she developed the photos and Mum went a bit funny for a while.

  Ali rang later to tell me she’s got to dress up and help out at some swanky dinner party her parents are having. She says she’s dreading it. She says there’s probably going to be several hardened criminals sitting around trying to make polite conversation and eating Twiglets. That made me laugh and I wanted to tell someone, but Mum and especially Dad have still got a real problem with Ali and her family. I don’t even tell them when me and Ali are meeting up outside school.

  Shit Moment of the Day

  In the pub garden, there was a family a few feet away from us, on one of those wooden tables with a bench attached on either side. They had a teenage boy with them, and a girl of four or five, and she stared at me for ages. I pulled faces at her. I rolled my eyes and stuck my tongue down behind my bottom lip. I kept trying to make her laugh, but she just looked frightened.

  Magic Moment of the Day

  I was in the kitchen after tea and we had the radio on. Mum was out in the garden having a fag, and Dad was drying up. The new Smiths single came on, and I was singing along. I was waving my arms around like Morrissey, wailing in a stupid high voice and messing around. When I got to the bit about knowing how Joan of Arc felt, Dad looked across at me with a tea towel in his hand. There was a pause and then we both just pissed ourselves laughing.