The Burning Girl

by Mark Billingham

  Thorne found himself wondering if Clarke could possibly know about Ryan’s part in what had happened to his daughter. He dismissed the thought, wondered instead if he should tell him. That idea was sent packing even quicker. If he hadn’t opened his mouth once already, they wouldn’t be standing in a cemetery at all.

  He looked over towards the gatehouse. A gardener was moving slowly around the edge of a flower bed. One hand manoeuvred a strimmer, the other pressed a mobile phone to his ear.

  When Ian Clarke began to speak, it was so quietly, and with such an absence of emotion, that it took Thorne a few seconds before he realised that he wasn’t talking to himself. Once he’d begun to listen, Thorne could tell that he might just as well have been.

  ‘It’s the few days just after the burn that are the worst. Not just…emotionally, but that’s when all the real damage gets done, the peak damage. The progression of the injury can be ten times worse than the burn itself. Did you know that? That’s what really causes the scarring…

  ‘She couldn’t open her eyes or her mouth after it happened. She couldn’t bite. The screaming came out through her teeth, like a sound I’d never heard before. Like a noise that was bleeding out through what was left of her skin. There was a lot of screaming in those first few days.

  ‘She had to wear a mask, a clear mask to keep a steady pressure on the damaged skin. It’s basically to reduce the final height of the scars. To keep them supple. Over a year she wore that hideous bloody thing. Over a year, she wore it and hated it for twenty-three hours a day. Pointless in the end, though, because it hadn’t been fitted properly and the damage had already been done. She had to keep still, you see, utterly still, absolutely fucking motionless while they put Vaseline across her face, and then this jelly stuff. She couldn’t move a muscle while it set…

  ‘I could have let them anaesthetise her. Should have done. I didn’t want her to have another operation, though. You understand? She’d already had six skin grafts and twenty-five blood transfusions by then. Some of the junior doctors used to joke, you know? They used to say she spent more time in the bloody hospital than they did.

  ‘That mask I was talking about, the pressure mask, they do it all with lasers now, you know. They scan the face with these lasers and it’s always a perfect fit. No doctors or parents to mess it up. The treatment of burns is so much better now than it was then. Everything’s moved on. Now they use hyperbaric oxygen therapy to reduce the scarring in the early days. Amazing things, new techniques, new discoveries all the time: microdermabrasion, laser skin resurfacing, chemical peeling, you name it. There are sites I’ve got bookmarked on the computer at home, you know? Medical newsgroups, chatrooms you can join. You can find just about anything on the Internet if you’re interested enough, or nerdy enough, depending on how you want to look at it, and you’ve got the time. I’m quite the expert on all the new developments.

  ‘These are good days to get burned…

  ‘The grafts are amazing now, really amazing. Single-sheet grafts, that’s what’s really made the difference. Back in our day, they only did split-skin grafts. You understand what I’m saying? They took shavings from different areas and it was virtually impossible to stop it contracting. To stop the scar tissue tightening. Now, they’ve got artificial skin which they can use for temporary grafting. It’s amazing stuff, you know? Made from shark skin and silicon. Back then…God, listen to me, talking as if it was a hundred bloody years ago…Back then, they used cadaver grafts. Just the name makes you go a bit funny, doesn’t it? Skin harvested from the dead.

  ‘Skin from corpses. On my girl’s neck. Lying across her face…

  ‘They can even grow skin in labs now. They can grow it. Skin that’s as near as damn it the same as the stuff we were born with. It’s as thick as human skin, that’s the real step forward. They call it “immortal skin”. “Immortal” because the cells never stop growing. Ever. Did you know that there’s only one naturally occurring human cell in which immortality is considered normal? Do you want to guess? It’s the cancer cell…

  ‘Now, they’ve got immortal skin…’

  Finally, he paused.

  Thorne took half a step towards him. ‘Ian…’

  ‘Bad guys have scars. Monsters and murderers in films and on TV. The Phantom of the fucking Opera and the Joker and Freddie Krueger.’

  ‘Maybe we’ve moved on from that kind of rubbish, too,’ Thorne said.

  If Clarke heard what Thorne had said, he chose to ignore it. ‘It’s like wearing a mask you can never take off,’ he said. ‘Jess wrote that in her diary.’

  ‘I read it…’

  Clarke looked up, his eyes bright, his voice suddenly cracked and raw. ‘What she said about the party? You remember what she wrote that last day, about the speech someone was going to make on her birthday? It was exactly what I was planning to do. Exactly. Even down to the crap jokes…’

  Thorne found it hard to meet the man’s gaze, as he had that day in the house off Wandsworth Common. He dropped his eyes slowly to the ground. Down past the fists that had tightened around the edge of the wreath, the knuckles white as the petals that had fallen at Ian Clarke’s feet.

  TWENTY-THREE

  ‘I think you’re an idiot, Tom.’

  ‘Cheers. Thanks for that…’

  ‘I think you’re a fucking idiot.’

  ‘Jesus, Carol…’

  The shock of hearing Chamberlain swear–not an everyday occurrence–somehow softened the blow of the comment itself.

  Chamberlain’s pithy character assassination simultaneously managed to kill the conversation stone dead; to thicken the space between them. After half a minute spent tearing up beer mats and avoiding eye contact, Thorne held up his empty glass. Without fully shifting her gaze from the back of a stranger’s head, Chamberlain nodded. She slid her empty wineglass across the table.

  Thorne walked across to the bar, ordered a pint of Guinness and a glass of red.

  They were in the Angel on St Giles High Street. The pub, pleasantly tatty and old fashioned, stood on or around the site of a tavern which, several hundred years before, had been on the route from Newgate Prison to the gallows at Tyburn. The condemned man’s final journey, which took him along what was now Oxford Street, involved stopping at the tavern for a last drink. The drink was given free, the joke being that the customer would pay for it ‘on his way back’.

  Thorne handed over his ten-pound note, knowing that he wouldn’t receive a great deal of change. The concept of free drinks certainly belonged in a bygone age, like smallpox or press-gangs. These days, you could crawl into a pub on your hands and knees with two minutes to live and you’d be lucky to find so much as a complimentary bowl of peanuts on the bar.

  Those who knew the history of the pub also knew that the custom for which it had once been famous had spawned the phrase so beloved of publicans and piss-heads alike. Thorne walked back to the table, put down the drinks. ‘One for the road,’ he said.

  Chamberlain understood the reference. Her smile managed indulgence and disapproval at the same time. ‘Right, and we all know who’s likely to be the one swinging, don’t we?’

  Thorne’s face, save for the moustache of froth, was a picture of innocence. ‘Do we? I can’t see why.’

  He could see perfectly well why, but felt like arguing about it. He was less certain about why he’d told Carol Chamberlain what he’d said to Alison Kelly in the first place. He’d actually decided to tell Chamberlain, to confide in her, well before this evening. Well before Alison had killed Billy Ryan even. So he could hardly blame the beer…

  ‘The sex part I understand,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, good…’

  ‘After all, you are a bloke.’

  ‘Right. I’m a mindless brute in helpless thrall to my knob.’

  Chamberlain reddened slightly. ‘You said it.’

  The blush made Thorne smile. ‘I didn’t tell her because I slept with her,’ he said.

  ‘So why, then?�
� She answered the question herself. ‘Because you’re an idiot.’

  ‘Let’s not start that again…’

  She shook her head, exasperated, and took a slug of red wine.

  Thorne wondered if the things she’d seen, that she surely must have heard, had made Chamberlain blush back when she was on the force. Perhaps it was simply a reaction that suppressed itself in certain situations, like a bookmaker’s pity or a whore’s gag reflex. She was certainly a damn sight less worldly than she often pretended.

  ‘You’re pissed off because it wasn’t you,’ Thorne said. ‘Because you had nothing to do with it.’

  ‘I’m pissed off because of a lot of things.’

  It didn’t sound like an invitation to pry, or a willingness to share. Thorne held his tongue and waited to see where she wanted to go.

  ‘You’re right, though,’ she said. ‘I knew I could never play a part in bringing Ryan down. However much you indulged me…’

  ‘Carol, I never…’

  She silenced the protestation with the smallest movement of her hand. ‘Still, knowing I wasn’t going to be involved didn’t stop me imagining certain…scenarios.’

  ‘Ryan dead, you mean?’

  ‘Not just dead. I thought about killing him myself. I thought about it a lot.’

  Thorne raised an eyebrow. ‘How was it?’

  ‘It was great.’

  ‘The way you killed him or the way it made you feel?’

  ‘Both.’

  ‘And the reality isn’t quite as good as you’d imagined it…’

  She pulled a tissue from her sleeve, dabbed at a ring of wine left on the table. ‘It’s not the right result, Ryan being dead.’

  Thorne had turned the same thing over and over in his head, looked at it from every angle, examined it in every conceivable light. ‘Do you not think he’s paid for what he did?’

  Chamberlain said nothing.

  ‘Look, the law could have taken its course, and Tughan, or somebody like him, might have got lucky and maybe, five years from now, Billy Ryan would have been cock of the walk in Belmarsh or Parkhurst. I’m not necessarily saying that what happened was right or that he got what was coming to him. How the hell could I, knowing…what I had to do with it? I just can’t find it in myself to feel the slightest bit gutted that he’s dead.’

  The flash that had been in Chamberlain’s eyes when she’d talked about killing Billy Ryan had gone. It had been replaced by something warmer, more muted. ‘I’m not exactly heartbroken myself,’ she said.

  Thorne lifted his glass. ‘Let’s not overlook the substantial saving of taxpayers’ money. Of our money. Or the fact that overpaid solicitors might have to wait that bit longer for flash cars and luxury holidays…’

  Chamberlain did not come close to returning his smile. ‘It’s not the right result, because with Ryan dead we’ll never get him, will we? How will we ever know who Ryan gave that money to? How will we ever know who burned Jessica?’

  The beer was suddenly vile in Thorne’s mouth. He swallowed it quickly, tasting it thick and brackish as it moved down his throat. He felt it settle in his stomach, black and heavy, like doubt. Like guilt.

  ‘Why did you tell her, Tom?’ Chamberlain asked. ‘If it wasn’t just a post-coital thing?’

  Thorne shook his head. ‘I honestly have no idea.’ And he honestly didn’t. ‘Not beyond a simple, strong feeling that she needed to know.’

  ‘ “She needed to know”, or you needed to tell her? They might have seemed like the same thing at the time.’

  ‘It felt good to tell her. I won’t pretend it didn’t.’

  ‘What about now?’

  Now felt like a world away from then, though it was less than three weeks since he and Alison Kelly had slept together. Ten days since she’d stuck a blade into Billy Ryan. Now seemed infinitely confused and uncertain. Then, it had all seemed straightforward. Then, there had only been light and shadow, and a simple choice between a hot, hard knowing and an ignorance that looked and sounded anything but blissful.

  Thorne blinked before answering Chamberlain’s question, remembered the inscription on a headstone he’d walked past at Billy Ryan’s funeral a few hours before.

  In life, in death, in dark, in light. We are all in God’s care…

  It was supposed to be simple. Life was light and death was darkness. But for some souls, the situation was always going to be more complex. There could be little doubt that Ryan’s had been a life lived in darkness. Through it and for it. Right now, Thorne was not so certain where he stood…

  ‘Now? I wish to God I’d kept my mouth shut,’ he said. ‘Not for Ryan’s sake…’

  ‘For hers.’

  ‘She’ll spend a long time in prison.’

  ‘There’s a lot for the court to take into account…’

  Thorne shook his head. ‘A long time. And she’s not hard, you know? She must think she is. She made a decision to do what she did. She chose prison.’

  ‘Same as our friend Gordon Rooker,’ Chamberlain said. ‘Maybe we’re not making these places scary enough.’

  ‘Right.’ It was an automatic response, meaning nothing. Alison Kelly would find it tough enough.

  Chamberlain put down her glass, leaned forward. ‘“She chose prison.” You said it yourself. You didn’t put the weapon in her hand, Tom…’

  ‘In a way, I did.’ He took a sip of Guinness. It wasn’t really tasting any better. ‘Didn’t somebody say that knowledge is a dangerous thing?’ Feeling his brain start to fuzz up just a little. Breathing a bit more heavily.

  Thinking: knowledge is a knife…

  ‘Probably,’ Chamberlain said. ‘Some smart-arse.’

  The dour look on her face, the way her soft Yorkshire accent suited the word so perfectly, made Thorne laugh. A hole was punched through the murk that had been settling about their heads and sucking away the joy that was normally there between them.

  ‘How’s your cold case going, anyway? The case of the punctured publican…’

  ‘It wasn’t a publican, it was in a pub car park and “cold” doesn’t come close. There’s icicles hanging off the bloody thing. Mind you, I’ve not exactly been giving it my undivided attention.’

  ‘Maybe now you’ll be able to focus a bit more.’

  ‘Maybe…’

  Thorne touched his glass to her hand. ‘Billy Ryan. Jessica Clarke. You need to let it go now.’

  Slowly, her eyes widened. ‘ “Let it go”. Right. And the names Bishop, Palmer and Foley mean nothing to you…’

  Thorne’s hand moved to his scrubby beard and his thoughts to the cases Chamberlain was talking about. Cases that had left their mark on him. Carved deep, but never less than fresh, never less than tender. How had one fifteen-year-old put it? ‘Like a mask you could never take off.’

  ‘I think’, he said after a few moments, ‘that I preferred it when you were insulting me…’

  Tottenham Court Road tube station was pretty handy for both of them. Thorne would take the Northern Line up to Kentish Town. Chamberlain could change at Oxford Circus, just two stops away from Victoria Station and the last train back to Worthing.

  They walked past the church of St Giles in the Field. It had been founded at the start of the twelfth century as a leper hospital, and its parish records contained the names of Milton, Marvell and Garrick. The burial grounds that lay behind the spiked metal fence contained many of those who’d met their end at Tyburn tree and whose final taste of alcohol had cost considerably less than Thorne and Chamberlain had just spent.

  They crossed the road at Denmark Street and turned towards the Charing Cross Road. To the north of them, the skyline was dominated by Centre Point. The office block–once thought smart, and even stranger, tall–had stood totally empty for some time after it was first erected, and a charity for the homeless, as an ironic gesture, had taken its name. The building rose above an area that a hundred and fifty years before had been the city’s most notorious and overcrowded slum. Th
e Rookery had been a maze of filthy alleyways, rat-runs and courts where the poor had lived in squalor, and where crime had been as endemic as the disease. A sprawling network of so-called ‘thieves kitchens’ and ‘flash houses’ had made it a virtual no-go area for the police officers of the time.

  Thorne outlined the history of the place as they walked. It had flourished, if that was an appropriate word, for over a century, before being demolished to make way for what was now New Oxford Street some time in the mid-nineteenth century. Thorne couldn’t remember the exact date.

  ‘You and I seem to talk about history a lot,’ Chamberlain said.

  Thorne laughed. ‘Some of it not quite so dim and distant.’

  ‘Why do you think that is?’

  Thorne considered the question for a moment. ‘Maybe because we think we can learn from it.’

  ‘Can we?’

  ‘We can. I’m not sure we have. I’m not convinced anything’s changed very much.’

  Chamberlain said something, but her words were lost beneath the wail of a siren as a police van rushed past them towards Leicester Square. Thorne shook his head. Chamberlain waited for the noise to die down before she repeated herself. ‘Perhaps that’s reassuring.’

  Gazing through the windows of Internet cafés and computer stores, Thorne couldn’t help but picture the gutters running with sewage, families packed into cellars. Men and women driven to prostitution and theft to maintain a standard of living that could only be described as inhuman.

  ‘Have you read Oliver Twist?’ Thorne asked. It was the iniquity of life in the Rookery, and places like it, that Dickens had described, perhaps a touch romantically, in his creation of Bill Sikes, Fagin and his gang of under-age rogues…

  Chamberlain shook her head. ‘I’ve only seen the musical. Shameful, isn’t it?’

  Thorne had taken a few steps before he decided to make his confession. ‘I was in a production of Oliver! at school. I was the Artful Dodger…’