The Burning Girl

by Mark Billingham

  When I try to tell them how I feel about this birthday, I know they think it’s just some trauma I’m having, some understandable reaction after everything I’ve been through, and that I don’t really mean it.

  I do really mean it.

  This party, just the thought of it, makes me sweat and makes me ache. Nobody has a clue. Even Ali doesn’t seem to get what I’m talking about. She keeps telling me that it’ll be a laugh, that I’m just being a stroppy cow, and asking me if there’s going to be any tasty men there.

  I know M & D have probably spent a fortune on hiring the hall and the disco and everything, and I love them to death for doing it. If I thought for a second that I could get through it, I wouldn’t be making a fuss. Watching my mates dance and drink and get off with people sounds great, but I know bloody well what would happen.

  I know that, eventually, someone would want to say something.

  I’ve imagined it for weeks now, ever since they told me. Ever since they announced that they wanted to throw a party and looked a bit upset when I told them to throw it as far away from me as possible. Sometimes I imagine it’s Dad and other times it’s one of my friends, usually Ali. The music stops and there’s this howl from the speakers as they grab the DJ’s microphone. They start to make this speech. They say something about bravery and make some crap jokes and people pretend to find them funny. Then there’s that awkward few seconds of silence that you get after a speech. Then they all start to clap and everyone stares.

  Everyone. Stares.

  And the pale half of my face, the smooth half, reddens until the blush becomes the colour of the scar. Both halves matching as I burn all over again.

  Singing ‘Happy Birthday’, and Mum and Dad are hugging each other and a few of my mates are crying, and they’re all watching me standing in a circle of light in the centre of the room, with looks on their faces like I’m six years old.

  Like I’m special…

  Thorne closed the diary, lay back and pressed it to his chest. He opened it again, took out the photograph he’d been using as a bookmark. Pictured her slipping away into the darkness on a bleak November night.

  The music, a Wham track, fading behind her as she walks away from the hall, from the party, moving towards the lights of the town centre.

  Unmissed still. Her friends dancing, shouting to one another above the music while she climbs.

  The smell of exhaust fumes and the sound of her shoes echoing off the grey concrete stairwells.

  A voice of concern, the first few worried looks from her friends as, half a mile from them, she steps out into the cold. Into fresh air. The desperate rush of the black towards her. The night kissing both sides of her face as she tumbles through it…

  Thorne jumped slightly when the phone rang, the sudden movement sending Elvis careering from the end of the bed. Thorne looked at the clock: 4.35.

  Brigstocke wasted no time on pleasantries. ‘We’re getting reports of an incident at an address in Finchley…’

  Thorne was already out of bed. ‘Ryan’s place?’ he said.

  ‘Right. Uniforms are on the scene, but there’s some confusion. At least one person injured, by all accounts, but beyond that we don’t know much.’

  ‘Zarif sent the X-Man after Ryan, you think?’

  ‘You know as much as I do, mate…’

  Thorne was moving quickly around the bedroom, snatching up socks and underpants, grabbing at a shirt. ‘Are you on your way up there?’

  ‘Tughan’s got it,’ Brigstocke said, ‘but you live a lot nearer than he does, so I reckon you’ll probably beat him to it.’

  ‘Cheers, Russell. I’ll call you when I get there…’

  Thorne moved into the living room to find that Hendricks was already sitting up in bed. Thorne told him what was happening.

  ‘Want me to come along?’ Hendricks asked.

  Thorne had gone into the kitchen. He came out shaking his head, gulping down a glass of water.

  ‘You sure? I can be dressed in one minute…’

  Thorne picked up his jacket, felt in the pockets for his keys. ‘No point. We don’t know exactly what’s happened yet,’ he said. ‘But I wouldn’t bother going back to sleep, if I was you…’

  The streets were all but deserted as Thorne drove up towards the Archway roundabout and turned north. He knew he might be over the limit to drive, but he felt clear-headed and focused. He was seeing the tail-lights early, anticipating the few cars that were coming at him from side-streets. Thinking a long way ahead.

  He chose the route through Highgate, avoiding the road that ran parallel, that would have taken him under Suicide Bridge. The iron footbridge that had long since replaced John Nash’s viaduct–the original ‘Archway’–was the preferred jumping-off point for many of the city’s depressed. Thorne did his best to avoid it when he could, unable to drive beneath it without unconsciously bracing himself for the impact of a body on the roof of the car.

  Tonight, he was in a hurry, but with the pages of a dog-eared diary still dancing in front of his eyes, he would have done almost anything to avoid the bridge.

  His mobile rang again as the car flashed across a red light and on to the North Circular. Thorne checked the display, saw ‘Holland Mob’ flashing…

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I’m on my way to Ryan’s place now.’

  Holland laughed. ‘I’ll see you there…’

  If the Zarifs had hit Ryan, there was no way of knowing how things would pan out. Thorne guessed that Stephen would take up the reins, and he didn’t seem the sort to forgive and forget. Then again, from what Thorne had seen, there might be nothing to Billy’s son and heir except a temper. He might go to pieces, leaving Ryan Properties to implode and the Zarifs with new possibilities for expansion. The whole messy business might have started out as a reaction to Ryan’s firm moving into their territory, but Thorne couldn’t believe that Memet and his brothers would have gone to all the trouble they had without wanting something substantial out of it. Whichever way things went, there were likely to be big changes ahead. Messy changes…

  Thorne reached the Finchley conservation area within fifteen minutes. He swung the BMW hard around the green and recalled his encounter there with Billy Ryan a fortnight before. He didn’t know what he was going to find when he reached Ryan’s house, but something told him that somebody else was going to be walking the dog for a while.

  It was a three-storey detached house at one corner of the green. There were two squad cars parked outside, but no sign of an ambulance. Thorne showed his warrant card to the PC at the door and stepped inside. He was looking at the trail of blood that snaked along the hall carpet when a second uniformed officer appeared in front of him.

  ‘I’m DI Thorne. Where’s the ambulance?’

  ‘It came and went away empty, sir. The victim was already dead when they arrived. Dead when they were called, if you ask me…’

  Thorne wondered if Hendricks had got himself dressed yet. ‘Where?’

  The officer pointed to a doorway down the hall.

  Thorne moved towards it, wishing he’d taken some gloves from his boot. ‘Any ID?’

  ‘Yes, sir. According to Mrs Ryan, the dead man is her husband, William John Ryan.’

  Thorne stepped carefully around the bloodstains that grew bigger as he neared the doorway. The door was ajar. He nudged it all the way open with his shoe.

  Ryan was on the kitchen floor, curled close into a corner, one hairy forearm streaked with red and propped up oddly against a cupboard. His white shirt was sopping–dark patches soaking through the silk at the shoulder and beneath the arm. The good-sized gash in his neck still wept a little blood, the lines of grout running red between the terra-cotta floor-tiles.

  You didn’t need a medical degree…

  Thorne was aware that the uniform had joined him at the door. He glanced at him, then looked back to Billy Ryan. ‘So, what’s the story?’ he asked.

  ‘The story’s a bloody odd one. She just walke
d in and stuck a knife in him, by all accounts. Over and over again.’

  Thorne swung around, stunned. ‘His wife killed him?’

  ‘No, sir. Not his wife.’ The uniform turned, nodded towards the doorway from which he’d first appeared. ‘The other woman…’

  Thorne pushed past him, moved down the corridor without a word. He could feel the breath rushing from his lungs, could hear a noise that grew louder in his head, like wasps trapped beneath a cup. He knew what he was going to see…

  The two officers sitting on the sofa stood up, their faces grim-set, when Thorne entered the living room. The woman, handcuffed to one of them at the wrist, had little choice but to rise with him. A WPC on the other side of her stared at Thorne, waiting, her hand clasped tight around Alison Kelly’s elbow.

  Thorne opened his mouth to speak, then closed it. There was nothing he could think of to say. Alison looked at him for a second or two.

  He was sure she gave him a small nod before she lowered her head.

  April

  Immortal Skin

  TWENTY-TWO

  A couple of years before, while driving to work early one morning, Thorne had been shaken by the sight of a horse-drawn hearse coming at him out of the mist. He’d pulled over and stared as the thing had rattled by. The breath of the horses had hung in front of their soft mouths like smoke before drifting back through the black feathers of their plumes.

  The genuine spookiness of that moment came back to Thorne now as he watched the undertakers slide the coffin from an almost identical glass-sided carriage. If there was one person he would not wish to be haunted by, it was Billy Ryan.

  St Pancras Cemetery was the largest in London. While not as well known as Highgate or Kensal Green, and with fewer grand monuments or famous residents, it was nevertheless an impressive and atmospheric place. Thorne watched as the pall-bearers hefted the coffin on to their shoulders and began to move slowly away from the main avenue. The vast acreage, shared with Islington Cemetery, stood on the site of the notorious Finchley Common, once the killing ground of highwaymen Dick Turpin and Jack Sheppard. It was an appropriate place, too, Thorne decided, for Billy Ryan to go into the ground and rot.

  The hearse could go no further. The beautifully tended beds near the cemetery entrance had given way quickly to overgrown woodland that in places was virtually impenetrable. The elegant displays of daffodils, tulips and pansies had been replaced by nettles, brambles and a jungle of ivy that crept across the doorways of burial chambers and grasped the stone wings of smiling angels.

  ‘Pardon me, sir…’

  Thorne stepped aside to let one of the funeral directors pass. He and three others beside him were hurrying to catch up with their colleagues. They each carried vast floral tributes: crosses, wreaths, arrangements that spelled out ‘DAD’ and ‘BILLY’. Dozens more were already being lined up at the roadside. A great day for Interflora…

  Thorne had glanced at the noticeboard near the entrance as the procession had swung in through the main gates. There were half a dozen other funerals taking place that morning. Three were listed as being for babies, with the words ‘No Mourners’ handwritten beneath their typed entries on the timetable.

  The Ryan bash was definitely the main event.

  Times had certainly changed for the Ryan family and those like them. There was still a profit in vice and gambling, but the big money was in drugs. It was a dirty business in every sense and had only got dirtier since Johnny Foreigner had moved in and dared to stake a claim. The rule-book had been well and truly torn up, but, though the good old gorblimey days when you could leave your door open in the East End and villains ‘only killed their own’ were long gone, some things remained the same.

  They still loved their mums and they still loved an honest-to-goodness, old-fashioned funeral: curly sandwiches and warm beer and well-worn tales of plod, porridge and pulling teeth for fun and profit.

  The brown moss was damp and springy underfoot as the cortège made its way towards the centre of the cemetery. The crowd had thinned out. Only close family, friends and certain police officers would be present at graveside. Thorne looked at these people with whom he had spent the best part of the day: sniffing through the moving tributes in the church; processing slowly through Finchley; muttering about how pleased Billy would have been with the turnout.

  Thorne had watched from inside the dark, unmarked Rover at the back of the line. He’d stared as pedestrians had bowed their heads or tipped their hats, unaware to whom they were showing respect. Thorne had found it funny. Respect was, after all, very important to a certain type of businessman…

  Those carrying Billy Ryan’s body moved awkwardly along the narrow grove, struggling to retain the necessary degrees of dignity and balance as they stepped across gnarled roots and around leaning headstones. One of their number walked two steps ahead of the coffin to push aside overhanging branches. The mourners followed gingerly, in single file.

  Thorne was not the only police officer present. Tughan was a little way ahead of him, and a fair number of SO7 boys were knocking around somewhere. Thorne recognised plenty of other faces, too. These were a little harder, the eyes that bit colder. He wondered how many mourners were carrying weapons; how many years the pall-bearers had done between them. He wondered whether the killer of Muslum and Hanya Izzigil might be the man next to him.

  It occurred to Thorne that, with the exception of the vicar and the blokes in the black hats, there were probably no men there without either a warrant card or a criminal record. Come to think of it, even the vicar looked dodgy…

  They rounded a corner and the track widened out towards a freshly prepared grave. A green cloth lay all around the hole, garish against the clay. It was a decent-sized plot, expensive, with room for a fitting memorial. More flowers were already laid out, waiting. There were a few recently filled graves here, among many that were far older, the gleaming black headstones and brightly coloured marble chippings incongruous next to the weathered stones. The epitaphs were gold-edged and vulgar alongside the faded names that belonged to another age: Maud, Florence, Septimus…

  The vicar spoke to begin the service:

  ‘Oh God…’

  It pretty much summed up the way Thorne felt.

  On the far side of the grave Stephen Ryan was clutching his mother’s arm. His eyes were bloodshot; whether from cocaine or grief, it was hard for Thorne to tell. The eyes flashed Thorne a look, intense and loaded, but impossible to read.

  Thank you for coming…

  What am I supposed to do now…?

  What the fuck do you think you’re doing here…?

  Get ready…

  Thorne looked from the son to the mother. Ryan’s wife stared, unblinking, at the coffin. Thorne had not had the pleasure. He remembered something Tughan had told him, and if the rumours were to be believed, any number of gardeners and personal trainers certainly had. The botox and plastic tits had clearly been doing the trick, and now she’d have much more money to spend on keeping herself desirable. When she raised her eyes towards him and then higher to the trees beyond, Thorne could see that they were dark and dry beneath the heavy make-up.

  The vicar droned on, the occasional word lost to the caw of a crow or the rumble of a passing plane.

  Thorne wondered if Billy Ryan had kept those old boxing skills sharp by practising them on the second wife as well as the first. It was, he decided, highly probable. Either way, the fucker had finally been made to pay for everything he’d done to Alison Kelly.

  But had he really paid for Jessica Clarke?

  Thorne stared at the widow and the heir as the coffin was lowered into the grave. He couldn’t be sure, but Ryan’s wife looked like she just wanted to be certain he was never coming out. Stephen began to sob, and Thorne realised that he’d been holding on to his mother for support, not vice versa.

  When various armed robbers began stepping forward to sprinkle dirt on to the coffin lid, Thorne decided it was about time to move in
the opposite direction. He turned and walked slowly back along the rough, narrow track towards the main avenue. As he did, he read the headstones, in the same way that it was impossible not to look through a lighted window as you wandered along a street. Many of those residents beneath his feet seemed to have ‘fallen asleep’, which struck him now as always as childish and silly. But it was perhaps understandable that there were nearly as many euphemisms here as there were bodies. ‘Passed into rest’ and ‘gone to a better place’ were, even Thorne had to admit, marginally more acceptable than ‘hit by a truck’ or ‘fallen down a lift shaft’. Certainly better than ‘knifed several times in his hallway, then again in his kitchen’.

  Thorne emerged on to the wide road that ran down to the cemetery gates. He stopped by the hearse to rub the muzzle of one of the horses. A shiver ran down the animal’s flank before it whinnied, and released a series of turds which splattered on to the tarmac.

  One bad memory well and truly exorcised…

  Moving along the line of cars, Thorne walked past a number of serious-looking characters in long black coats, many of whom he knew to have written best-selling true-crime memoirs. They were doubtless greatly honoured to be policing Billy’s service. Security, along with a healthy smattering of soap stars and minor sporting figures, was a prerequisite of the traditional gangland funeral.

  Thorne stopped next to a large, metal litter-bin. It was overflowing with plastic bags, plant pots and dead flowers. Leaning against it was someone he hadn’t expected to see. ‘Is there really any point you being here?’ Thorne asked.

  Ian Clarke was clutching a large wreath of white lilies. He was wearing jeans and a dark blue jacket over a brown polo shirt. He clearly found Thorne’s question highly amusing. ‘No point whatsoever,’ he said. ‘I went to Kevin Kelly’s funeral, too. It was the least I could do…’