The Burning Girl

by Mark Billingham

  I don’t want to have a relationship anyway.

  Reading all that back, it sounds so pathetic. Like I’m some brat and I’m pretending that I want to be on my own because I’m really feeling so sorry for myself. I can’t help how it sounds. I know what I think.

  Shit Moment of the Day

  Decided not to bother with this any more because it’s stupid.

  Magic Moment of the Day

  Ditto.

  TWENTY

  ‘Tell me again about the meeting with Ryan. Tell me what he said that night in Epping Forest…’

  Rooker was wreathed in cigarette smoke. His sigh blew a tunnel of boredom through the fug. ‘Is there nothing else you could be doing?’ he asked. ‘It’s not as though I’m suddenly going to remember something I haven’t already told you, is it?’

  Thorne stared at the tapes in the twin-cassette deck. Watched the red spools spinning. ‘I don’t know…’

  ‘Not after twenty years. Do you not think I’ve had enough time to remember?’

  ‘Or enough time to forget.’

  ‘Oh for fuck’s sake…’

  It had been nearly a month now since the attack on the girl in Swiss Cottage. Nearly a month since the Powers That Be had agreed to take Gordon Rooker up on his offer to give evidence against Billy Ryan. Tughan had told Thorne the day before–the day of the round-table session in Maidenhead–that, all being well, Ryan was likely to be charged within a week or so.

  The case was being carefully built on a number of fronts; many of the people connected with Rooker and Ryan back in 1984 had been sought out and questioned. Some were still in the game. Some had long since sloped off to the suburbs. Others had gone even further, to countries with better weather and more attractive tax systems. A few had talked, but not enough for Tughan and his team to feel confident.

  Omerta, the Mafia called it: the code of silence. The foreign language and associations made it sound honourable, dignified even, but there was no honour or dignity in the lives of these people, hiding out in villas, mock-Spanish and otherwise, shitting themselves. Thorne would have liked to spend some time with a few of these old fuckers, these fossilised hardmen in Braintree and Benidorm. He wanted to slap their stupid, perma-tanned faces and press a picture of Jessica Clarke up close…

  ‘Like I told you before,’ Rooker said, ‘I got the call from Harry Little and drove up to meet Ryan in Epping Forest. A track near Loughton…’

  One way and another, Rooker’s testimony was going to be key, and, as with all evidence from convicted criminals, it would not be hard to discredit. If it was given any credit in the first place.

  Whatever happened, they had to be sure it was nailed down tight…

  ‘You got into his car…’ Thorne said.

  ‘I got into his car.’

  ‘What kind of car was it?’

  Rooker looked up, stared at Thorne like he was mad. ‘How the fuck should I know? It was dark. It was twenty years ago.’

  Thorne sat back, like he’d proved a point. ‘Details are important, Gordon. Ryan’s defence team are going to slaughter you if you give them a chance. If you can’t remember the car, maybe you can’t really remember exactly what Ryan said. Maybe you were confused. Maybe you thought he was asking you to do something when he wasn’t. You with me?’

  ‘It might have been a Merc. One of those old ones with the big radiators.’

  ‘Do you understand what I’m saying? This is why we have to do this.’

  Rooker nodded, reluctantly. ‘I wasn’t confused,’ he said.

  The door opened and Thorne muttered his thanks as a guard stepped in with drinks. Tea for him. A can of cheap cola for Rooker. The guard closed the door behind him. The drinks were taken.

  ‘This is warm,’ Rooker said.

  ‘When you got into his car, did Ryan come straight out and say what he wanted or did you talk about other stuff first?’

  ‘He wasn’t really the type to chat about the weather, you know? We might have talked about this and that for a couple of minutes, I suppose. People we both knew…’

  ‘Harry Little?’

  ‘Yeah, Harry. Other faces, what have you. I don’t remember him beating around the bush for very long, though.’

  ‘So, he asked if you’d be willing to kill Kevin Kelly’s daughter, Alison?’

  Rooker puffed out his cheeks, prepared to trot out the answers one more time. Thorne asked the question again…

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘In exchange for money that he would give you.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How much? How much was he proposing to pay you to kill Alison Kelly?’

  Rooker looked up quickly, stared at Thorne. A charge ran between them, flashed across the metal tabletop. Thorne realised, shocked, that this had not come up before.

  Rooker seemed equally taken aback. ‘I think it was about twelve grand…’

  ‘You think? About?’

  ‘It was twelve grand. Twelve thousand pounds.’ He said something else, something about what that sort of money might be worth now.

  Thorne had stopped listening. Now he knew what Alison Kelly’s life had been worth. He was wondering whether he would have told her–the exact amount–had he known it on the night he’d started whispering truths to her in the dark. Thinking that he probably shouldn’t have said anything at all…

  ‘Did Ryan say why he wanted you to do this?’

  ‘He was trying to get at Kevin Kelly, wasn’t he?’ Rooker said. ‘He wanted him to take on the other firms. He wanted to take over…’

  ‘I know all that. I’m not talking about that. Did he say why he was trying to do it by killing a child? You said yourself that it was extreme. That it was out of the ordinary.’

  ‘Right. Which is why I walked away. But, beyond what I’ve already told you, I don’t know anything else. Same with all the jobs I did back then. Why was never my business.’

  Thorne took a slurp of tea. He opened his mouth to ask something else, but Rooker cut him off.

  ‘How many more times do we have to do this?’

  ‘This is probably the last time,’ Thorne said. ‘The last time we need to go over it, at any rate. I’m not saying there won’t be further interviews with other officers…’

  ‘Tell me about afterwards.’

  ‘The trial?’

  ‘After the trial. Tell me about what happens to me.’

  It was Thorne’s turn to sigh. This was an area which Rooker seemed keen to keep going over…

  ‘I’ve told you,’ Thorne said. ‘I don’t have any say in what happens, where you end up, any of that. There’s a special department that takes care of that stuff.’

  ‘I know, but you must have some idea. They’ll presumably move me a good way away, right? Don’t you reckon? A whole new identity, all that.’

  ‘There are different…levels of witness protection. I think it’s safe to say you’ll probably be top level. To start with, at least…’

  Rooker seemed pleased with what Thorne had told him. Then he thought of something else. ‘Can I pick the name?’ he asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘My new name, my new identity. Can I choose it?’

  ‘Got something special in mind, have you?’

  ‘Not really.’ He laughed, reached into his tobacco tin. ‘Don’t want to go through all this then end up with some twat’s name, do I?’

  Thorne felt something start to tighten in his chest. The cockiness that he’d first seen in Park Royal was back. Rooker was talking to him as if he were a mate, as if he were someone he liked and trusted. It made Thorne want to reach across the table and squeeze his flabby neck.

  Thorne looked at his watch, bent his head to the recorder. ‘Interview terminated at two-thirty-five p.m.’ He jabbed at the button.

  ‘Are we done, then?’ Rooker asked.

  Thorne nodded towards the recorder. ‘We’re done with that.’ He leaned forward. ‘What did it feel like, Gordon?’

  ‘Come ag
ain…’

  ‘When you killed someone for money. When you carried out a contract. I want you to tell me how it felt.’

  Rooker continued to roll the cigarette, but slower, the yellowed fingers suddenly less dextrous than before. ‘What’s this got to do with anything?’ he asked.

  ‘We already know that why wasn’t your business, so I was just wondering what was. Did you get job satisfaction? Did you take pride in your work?’

  Rooker made no response.

  ‘Did you enjoy it?’

  Rooker looked up then, shook his head firmly. ‘You enjoy getting the job done clean, that’s all. Getting the money. If you start to enjoy the doing, if you start to get some sort of kick out of it, you’re fucked.’

  Thorne had to disagree. The X-Man clearly relished what he did, and he hadn’t made too many mistakes yet.

  ‘So what, then?’ Thorne said. ‘You just turn off? Go on to some sort of automatic pilot…?’

  ‘You focus. Your mind goes blank…No, not blank exactly. It’s like it’s fuzzy, and there, right in the middle, is a point of light. It’s really sharp and clear. Cold. You relax and stay calm and move towards that. That’s the target, and you don’t let anything take you away from it…’

  ‘Like guilt or fear or remorse?’

  ‘You asked me, so I’m telling you,’ Rooker said. ‘It’s the job…’

  ‘You talk about it in the present tense.’

  Rooker put the completed cigarette into the tin. He snapped the lid back on. ‘I’m still living with it.’

  ‘A lot of people are still living with it,’ Thorne said.

  Phil Hendricks was doing some teaching at the Royal Free, and Thorne had arranged to meet him after work. He’d caught the train to Hampstead and they’d eaten at a Chinese place a stone’s throw from the hospital. Afterwards, they’d crossed the road to the nearest pub and sunk a couple of pints each inside fifteen minutes. Neither had said a great deal until the edges had been taken off…

  ‘Don’t let Rooker wind you up,’ Hendricks said. ‘He’s trying to make it sound like some fucking Zen mind-control thing. He just killed people. There’s no more to it than that.’

  ‘I wasn’t in the mood for him, that’s all.’ Thorne smiled, raised his glass. ‘Just one of those days…’

  One of those days that seemed to roll around every month or so. When, for no good reason, Thorne stopped and caught himself. When he saw what he did, looked at the people he was dealing with every hour of his life. When, after ticking along for weeks, doing the job without thinking, he was suddenly struck by the stench and blackness of it all. It was like waking up briefly only to find that real life was far worse than the nightmare.

  Thorne decided that in some ways, when things became extreme, his own life was similar to his father’s. There were times when he heard himself saying things–to killers, and to their victims–that were every bit as bizarre, in their way, as anything that his father ever said.

  ‘Six and nine,’ Thorne said, grinning at Hendricks. ‘Your face or mine?’

  It had become a running joke between them since Thorne had told him about what had happened in Brighton: they had been exchanging filthy bingo calls by phone and text message all week.

  Hendricks got up to fetch another round. He grabbed his crotch, sniffed his hand as he turned towards the bar. ‘All the threes, I smell cheese…’

  Thorne looked around. The place was busy, considering that it was only a Tuesday night. Its proximity to the hospital meant that the place was probably full of medics. Thorne knew very well that many of them would have their own edges to take off…

  He was trying, and failing, to think up another bingo call when a fresh pint was plonked on the table in front of him.

  ‘You know that the body loses weight after death?’ Hendricks said.

  ‘This sounds good…’

  Hendricks sat down, drew his chair closer to the table. ‘Seriously. You weigh a bit less dead than you did when you were alive and kicking.’

  Thorne picked up his glass. ‘It’s a bit drastic, don’t you think? As diets go…’

  ‘Shut up and you might learn something. You can lose anything from a fraction of a gram upwards. Sixteen grams or thereabouts is the average.’ Hendricks shook his head, took a sip of lager. ‘The students I was talking to today looked about as interested as you do.’

  ‘Go on then, what causes it?’

  ‘No one’s a hundred per cent sure. The air in the lungs, probably. But, this is the good bit…’

  ‘Oh, there’s a good bit, is there?’

  ‘People used to think it was the weight of the soul.’

  The phrase rang in Thorne’s head. He nodded. Waited to hear more.

  ‘In the eighteenth century they constructed elaborate scales, designed to weigh terminally ill patients in the moments just before and just after death.’ Hendricks let the words sink in, relishing his tale. ‘It was a big deal back then–trying to measure the soul’s weight as it left the body. Trying to isolate it. They were still doing similar things in America in the early 1900s, and there was a famous experiment in Germany just twenty-five years ago…’

  Thorne was amazed. A century or more ago and it was easy to put such a theory down to lunatics in fancy dress, to mumbo-jumbo masquerading as science. But twenty-five years ago?

  ‘But it’s just the air in the lungs, right?’

  ‘That’s the best guess,’ Hendricks said. ‘Unless you go for the soul theory…’

  Thorne smiled across the head of his beer. ‘Did you start drinking before you finished work, or what?’

  They drank in silence for a minute or more. Thorne was beginning to feel light-headed. He’d only had a couple of drinks and knew it was tiredness more than anything.

  There were pictures forming, dissolving and forming again in Thorne’s head. Bodies and scales. Men in wigs and duster coats loading vast weights on to wooden beams. Monitoring the death throes of the wheezing, whey-faced dying, and scratching figures into notebooks. Eyes wide, raised up from inky calculations and then higher, far beyond their primitive laboratories…

  Thorne looked across at Hendricks. It was clear from the grin, and the faraway expression, that his friend had gone back to thinking about numbers, and rhymes and dirty jokes.

  Hampstead Heath was only a couple of stops on the overground from Kentish Town West. They were walking towards the station when Thorne’s mobile rang.

  ‘Tom…?’

  Thorne looked at Hendricks, raised his eyebrows. ‘Bloody hell, Carol, it’s a bit late for you, isn’t it?’

  ‘I know, sorry. I couldn’t sleep.’

  ‘You haven’t had any more calls, have you?’

  ‘No, nothing like that…’

  A huge lorry roared past and Thorne lost whatever Chamberlain said next. There was a pause while each of them waited for the other to say something.

  ‘I just called to see how you were getting on.’

  ‘I’m OK, Carol…’

  ‘That’s good…’

  ‘Everything’s OK. The case is more or less where it was the last time I spoke to you, but it’s coming together.’ He’d known straight away of course, that this was what she really wanted to know. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I meant to call.’

  ‘Don’t be daft. I know you must be busy. Listen, I’ll leave you to it…’

  ‘How’s Jack?’

  ‘He’s fine. It’s fine, Tom…’

  Hendricks pointed to his watch: the last train was due in a few minutes.

  Thorne nodded, picked up speed. ‘Why don’t we meet up next week?’ he said. ‘Come down and we’ll go for lunch. I’ll whack it on expenses.’

  ‘Sounds great. I’ll speak to you next week, then…’

  ‘Take care, Carol. Phil says hello…’

  She’d already gone.

  At the station, they sat on a bench, waiting for the westbound train. On the other side of the tracks, three teenage boys drifted aimlessl
y up and down the platform.

  ‘Sixteen grams on average, you said?’

  Hendricks looked blank for a moment or two, then nodded. ‘Yeah…’

  ‘That’s for what? A man of medium height and weight?’

  ‘Right. A woman of medium build would be around twelve grams, I suppose.’

  So, a child would be less, Thorne thought. Three quarters as much, maybe eight or nine grams. That didn’t make sense, though, did it? Thorne’s head was starting to spin. Surely the soul of a child would weigh more. It’s only as we grow older that we become corrupted, soulless…

  Eight or nine grams.

  Their train rumbled into the station. Thorne spoke over the noise of it, to himself as much as Hendricks.

  ‘A handful of rice,’ he said. ‘Christ, no…less. A few grains…’

  TWENTY-ONE

  3 November 1986

  If another person leers at me and winks or says something moronic like ‘soon be legal’, I might have to do something drastic. It’s like they’re really saying ‘as soon as you’re sixteen, you can have sex, you know, which is absolutely normal’. I feel like grabbing them by the wrists and saying, ‘Thanks a million, I hadn’t realised that. All I need now is to find someone who’s desperate enough and a big fucking bag to go over my head.’

  Why do people presume I’m interested?

  Why do people always presume?

  I’ve been frantic for days, wondering how to tell M & D that I’d rather die than go to this party they’ve been so busy planning for tomorrow. First birthday since the recovery, since the final op. It’s like it’s such a big deal and I know they just want me to have a good time and do normal things and I can’t make them understand.

  I don’t want a party. I don’t want the attention. The falseness of all that.

  When I get angry they just fucking smile at me. They indulge me all the time and it makes me want to scream and smash something. While Ali and the others would be getting grounded or whatever, I get treated with kid gloves.

  Like all of me’s scarred. Like none of me can be touched.

  I want to be shouted at and punished. I want to tell them to stick their party up their arses just to see them lose their tempers for once and tell me that the whole thing’s off. Whenever I do start being a bitch, they just stare at each other and they have this look that kills me, as if they’re thinking that this behaviour’s acceptable and should be forgiven. You know, black clothes and black moods, like it’s all perfectly normal for your average, horribly disfigured teenage girl.