The Burning Girl

by Mark Billingham

  ‘Rooker’s not easy to like, is he?’ Holland said.

  ‘Probably the right reaction, considering you’re one of the Met’s finest and he kills people for a living. Not that I haven’t met plenty of murderers I could sink a pint or two with…and more than a few coppers I’d happily have beaten to death.’

  ‘Right, but Rooker’s an arsehole, whichever way you look at it.’

  ‘You do know that bit about “the Met’s finest” was ironic, don’t you…?’

  Holland opened his window an inch, turned his face towards it. ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘Rooker was a touch more likeable when I had something he wanted,’ Thorne said. ‘And he’d probably say the same thing about me.’

  He pulled across into the middle lane but was still unable to get ahead of the Transit van. It had a sticker on the back that read: ‘How am I driving?’ Thorne thought about calling the phone number that was given and swearing at whoever was at the other end for a while…

  ‘Tell me about some of them,’ Holland said. ‘The murderers you got on with.’

  Thorne glanced into his rear-view mirror. He saw the line of cars snaking away behind him. He saw the tension, real or imagined, around his eyes.

  He thought about a man named Martin Palmer; a man who, in the final analysis, had killed because he was terrified not to. Palmer had strangled and stabbed, and his final, clumsy attempt at something like redemption had been made at a tragic price. He had changed Tom Thorne’s thinking, not to mention his face, for ever. Thorne had not ‘got on’ with Martin Palmer. He had despised and abused him. But there had been pity, too, and sadness at glimpsing the man a murderer could so easily have been. Thorne had been disturbed, was still disturbed, by feelings that had asserted themselves; and by others that had been altogether absent when he’d sat and swapped oxygen with Martin Palmer.

  Then there was last year: the Foley case…

  The murderers you got on with…

  ‘I don’t really know where to start,’ Thorne said. ‘Dennis Nielsen was all right if you got to know him, and Fred West was quite a good laugh, till he topped himself. Talking of which, I remember one night, I was playing darts with Harold Shipman. Harry, I used to call him…’

  Holland let out a loud, long-suffering sigh. ‘If you’re going to try to be funny, can you turn up the music again?’

  They drove on, the car barely getting into top gear for more than a few minutes at a time. The monotony yielded only briefly to drama when Thorne spent too long watching a kestrel hovering above the hard shoulder, and came within inches of rear-ending an Audi.

  ‘How’s Sophie and the baby?’ he asked.

  ‘They’re good.’

  ‘What is she now?’

  ‘Nearly seven months. It feels like we’re getting our lives back a bit, you know?’

  Thorne shook his head. He had no idea at all.

  ‘There’s not so much panic,’ Holland explained. ‘I mean, it’s still bloody scary, and we’re knackered all the time, but we know more or less what we’re doing.’ He paused, glanced across at Thorne. ‘Well, Sophie always did, but now I know, more or less what I’m doing. You should come round and see her…’

  ‘So, you’re fine with it all, then? The dad bit. I know you had some worries.’ Thorne remembered a conversation they’d had the previous summer. Bizarrely, it had been on the very day he’d bought the BMW. Holland had been drunk, had confessed to feeling terrified. He’d told Thorne he was worried that he might resent the baby when it came, that Sophie might make him choose between the baby and the job.

  ‘I was being stupid,’ Holland said. He turned to Thorne, grinning. ‘Chloe’s brilliant. She’s into everything, but she’s fucking brilliant…’

  ‘I’m glad it’s working out,’ Thorne said.

  ‘Tell you the truth, the last couple of weeks have been great. A chance to recharge the batteries, you know? The only problem is that Sophie’s starting to get used to having me around again…’

  The officers on the investigation had all been spending more time with loved ones in the fortnight or so since the Ryan murder. The job had recently involved a lot of paperwork, much of it from other cases, and a good deal of time sitting on arses waiting for somebody–Stephen Ryan in particular–to get off theirs. To make a move. The investigation had wound itself down, or spiralled into chaos, depending on your point of view.

  ‘D’you reckon Stephen Ryan is going to do anything?’ Holland asked.

  Thorne grunted, but only with pleasure as the Transit van finally indicated and moved inside. Thorne swerved back into the fast lane and powered past it, gaining a pointless thirty feet but enjoying it nonetheless.

  He had no idea that, twenty miles ahead of him, uniformed officers were taping off the area around a minicab office on Green Lanes. Others were gathering witnesses and starting to take statements. Phil Hendricks was already on his way to the crime scene, while an ambulance was moving in the opposite direction, its services clearly not required.

  Stephen Ryan had made a move.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Wednesday morning in the Major Incident Room. Two days after the fatal shooting at the Zarifs’ minicab office. A team back on its feet, but yet to get the feeling back in its arse…

  ‘We’ve had word from Immigration,’ Brigstocke said. ‘They think a few more from the lorry might have turned up. I say “think” because the individuals concerned aren’t telling anybody very much.’

  ‘Where?’ Thorne asked.

  Brigstocke glanced at the sheet of paper he was holding. ‘A car wash in Hackney. One of those places where there’s half a dozen of them on your car at once, you know? With sponges and chamois leathers, inside with vacuums…’

  Stone nodded. ‘There’s one near me. Inside and out for a tenner. Plus a tip…’

  ‘The owner’s being questioned,’ Brigstocke said. ‘So far, surprise, surprise, he’s pleading ignorance. There’ll be a connection to the Ryans somewhere down the line, but I don’t think it’ll be much different from the others…’

  A man and a woman, suspected of being from the hijacked lorry, had been detained the previous week in Tottenham, having been discovered working in a restaurant kitchen. Two men had been seized a few days before that from a shopfitting wholesalers in Manor House. In both cases an astonishing bout of amnesia seemed to have struck all concerned. Arrests had been made, but none would lead to anything other than deportation orders for the illegals and fines for their employers. There would be enough red tape to stretch back to where the people in the lorry had originated and nothing to incriminate those who mattered in the Ryan or the Zarif organisations.

  Tughan took over from Brigstocke. ‘Let’s move on to the shooting in Green Lanes. What about the witnesses, Sam? Any luck?’

  Karim shook his head. ‘Hard to believe, I know, but we still can’t find anybody who saw anything that contradicts Memet Zarif’s story. We’ve even got a couple who conveniently noticed a man in a balaclava carrying a gun and running away after the gunshots had finished.’

  ‘Yeah, right,’ Thorne said.

  Holland let out a grunt of laughter. ‘That’s one couple who won’t go short at Christmas, then…’

  According to Memet Zarif and the others in the minicab office at the time, the man in the leathers who had shot and wounded Hassan Zarif had himself been shot dead by a mysterious second gunman who’d followed him inside and fled once he’d killed him. The police knew it was cock and bull. They guessed that the ‘second’ gunman was Memet or Tan Zarif, but with no murder weapon or corroborating witness, there was little anyone could do to prove it.

  ‘We are sure about one thing, though,’ Tughan said. There was a certain amount of laughter, which he acknowledged with uncharacteristic good humour. ‘I know, I’ve already alerted the media. We have a name for the victim: the dead one, that is. He was Donal Jackson, thirty-three. A known associate of Stephen Ryan.’

  This last fact came as no surprise to
anyone.

  ‘Is he the bloke who did the Izzigils, do we think?’ Stone asked. ‘Same gun…?’

  Tughan opened his mouth but Thorne was quicker. ‘No chance,’ he said. ‘It’s the same type of gun, that’s all. Whoever was hired to kill the Izzigils was good. Clinical, you know? This idiot got himself killed and didn’t even manage to take anybody with him…’ He trailed off, his mind focusing suddenly on the failed attempt to kill an innocent fourteen-year-old girl. Now, twenty years later, the son of the man behind that had fucked up a hit of his own.

  ‘DI Thorne’s probably right,’ Tughan said. ‘Word is that Jackson was pretty new to contract stuff. Picked up the job because he was Stephen Ryan’s mate, because Ryan wanted to go a different way from his old man. Also, according to the people we’ve spoken to, Jackson was pretty cheap.’

  Stone snorted. ‘Pay peanuts, you get monkeys.’

  ‘You’d’ve thought shelling out for a decent hitman was pretty basic,’ Kitson said.

  Others picked up on her sarcasm, mumbled their agreement.

  ‘Haven’t these people heard of a false economy?’

  ‘You just can’t get the staff.’

  ‘He’ll pay for it in the end,’ Thorne said. ‘What he did, what he failed to do, is going to cost him.’

  ‘Think it’s all going to kick off?’ Holland asked.

  ‘I think Ryan should have dug into his pocket and hired a trio of hitmen.’ Thorne was only half joking. ‘One for each brother. He should have done it properly and killed all three of them.’

  ‘This might be a good time to announce that in terms of the joint operation, we’re going to be scaling things down a bit,’ Tughan said.

  Thorne stared at him. Surely he was joking. ‘You what?’

  ‘We’ve had results, some good ones, but the fact is that the Job can’t see us getting too much more out of this. We’re wrapping it up.’

  Thorne looked across at Brigstocke, eyes wide. The look he got back told him that there was nothing worth arguing about. This was for information, not discussion.

  ‘Billy Ryan, one of our main targets, is no longer a worry, even if, sadly, we can’t claim credit for that. In point of fact, from now on, there’s not going to be much in the way of results that we won’t have to share with Immigration or the Customs and Excise mob. There are one or two loose ends that we’ve yet to tie up and there’ll be a few more arrests, but the pro-active end of it just isn’t justified in terms of resources…’

  ‘How can we pull out of this now?’ Thorne asked. ‘After what just happened?’

  Tughan was already putting papers into a briefcase. ‘It was Stephen Ryan’s last hurrah. He messed it up. It’s a war he’s going to lose, and then hopefully things will settle down again…’

  ‘Hopefully?’

  ‘Things will settle down again.’

  ‘Meanwhile, we just look the other way. We do some paperwork and nick a few nobodies and let them kill each other…?’

  Tughan turned to Brigstocke. ‘I want to thank Russell and his team for their cooperation and for their hospitality. We’ve done some good things together. We’ve achieved a lot, really, we have, and I think I’ll be borne out on that in the weeks and months to come. Anyway, I’m sure you’ll be looking forward to getting back to work on your own cases. To getting your offices back, at least.’

  There was a smattering of unenthusiastic laughter.

  ‘We’ll have a pint or two later, of course, and say our goodbyes. Obviously, we won’t be vanishing right away. Like I said, there are a few loose ends…’ And he was moving away towards the door.

  Brigstocke cleared his throat, walked a few paces after Tughan, then turned. He looked to Thorne, Kitson and the rest of his officers. ‘I’ll be getting together with DS Karim later. Re-assigning the casework.’ His parting words were spoken like a third-rate manager trying to gee up a team who were six–nil down at half time. ‘There’s still plenty of disorganised criminals out there who need catching…’

  For a few seconds after Brigstocke had left the room, nobody moved or spoke. One of those uneasy silences that follows a speech. Gradually, the volume increased, though not much, and the bodies changed position, so that in a few subtle turns, half paces and casual shifts of the shoulder, the single team became two very separate ones. The officers from each unit began to huddle and look to their own, their conversations far from secret, but no longer to be shared.

  The members of Team 3 at the Serious Crime Group (West) stayed silent a little longer than their SO7 counterparts. It was Yvonne Kitson who sought to break the silence and change the mood at the same time. ‘How’s the philosophy going, Andy? Nietzsche is it this week, or Jean-Paul Sartre?’

  Stone tried to look blank, but the blush betrayed him. ‘Eh?’

  ‘It’s all right, Andy,’ she said. ‘All blokes have tricks. All women too, come to that.’

  Stone shrugged, the smile spreading. ‘It works…’

  ‘Obviously you have to use whatever you’ve got.’ Holland lounged against a desk. ‘Only some of us prefer to rely on old-fashioned charm and good looks.’

  ‘Money goes down quite well,’ Karim said, grinning. ‘Failing that, begging usually works for me.’

  ‘Begging’s excellent,’ Kitson said.

  Holland looked to Thorne. He was six feet or so distant from them, the incomprehension still smeared across his face like a stain.

  ‘What about you, sir?’ Holland asked. ‘Any tricks you want to share with the group?’

  Stone was laughing at his joke before he even started speaking. ‘I’m sure Dr Hendricks could get his hands on some Rohypnol if you’re desperate…’

  But Thorne was already moving towards the door.

  ‘Can’t you be predictable just once in your life,’ Tughan said. ‘I thought you’d be glad to see the back of me.’

  Tughan stood in the doorway to his office. Brigstocke was nowhere to be seen.

  ‘Look, we can’t stand each other,’ Thorne said. ‘Fair enough. Neither of us loses a great deal of sleep about that, I’m sure, and once or twice, yes, I’ve said things just to piss you off. Right? But this’–he gestured back towards the Incident Room, towards what Tughan had said in there–‘is seriously stupid. I know you’re not personally responsible for the decision…’

  ‘No, I’m not. But I stand by it.’

  ‘ “Ours is not to reason why”. That it?’

  ‘Not if we want to get anywhere.’

  ‘Career-wise, you mean? Or are we back to results again?’

  ‘Take your pick…’

  Thorne leaned against the door jamb. He and Tughan stood on either side of the doorway, staring across the corridor at the wall opposite. At a pinboard festooned with Police Federation newsletters and dog-eared photocopies of meaningless graphs. At an AIDS-awareness leaflet, a handwritten list of last season’s fixtures for Metropolitan Police rugby teams, a torn-out headline from the Standard that said, ‘Capital gun crime out of control’, at postcards advertising various items for sale: a Paul Smith suit; a scooter; a second-hand PlayStation…

  ‘It’s the timing I don’t understand,’ Thorne said. ‘Now, I mean, after…’

  ‘I think this decision was made before the shooting in the minicab office.’

  ‘And that didn’t cause anybody to rethink it?’

  ‘Apparently not.’

  Richards, the concentric-circles man, came along the corridor with a file that was, by all accounts, terribly important. Tughan took it with barely a word. Thorne waited until the Welshman had gone.

  ‘When we found that lorry driver dead and those two in the woods with bullets in the backs of their heads, you were fired up. “This has got to stop,” you said. You were angry about the Izzigils, about Marcus Moloney. You were up for it. There’s no point pretending you weren’t…’

  Tughan said nothing, clutched the file he was holding that little bit tighter to his chest.

  ‘How do these people
decide what we’re going to do?’ Thorne asked. ‘Who we target and who we ignore? Which lucky punters have a chance when it comes to us catching the men responsible for killing their husband or their father, and which poor sods might just as well ask a traffic warden to sort it out? How do these people formulate policy? Do they roll fucking dice every morning? Pick a card…?’

  Tughan spoke to the pinboard, scratched at a small mark on the lapel of his brown suit. ‘They divvy up the men and they dole out the money as they see fit. It goes where they think it’s most needed, and where they think it might get a return. It’s not rocket science, Thorne…’

  ‘So, which deserving cause came out of the hat this time?’

  ‘We’re shifting direction slightly, looking towards vice. The Job wants to crack down on the foreign gangs moving into the game: Russians, Albanians, Lithuanians. It’s getting nasty, and when one of these gangs wants to hit another operation they tend to go for the soft targets. They kill the girls…’

  Thorne shrugged. ‘So, Memet Zarif and Stephen Ryan just go about their business?’

  ‘Nobody’s giving them “Get out of Jail Free” cards.’

  ‘Talking of which…’

  ‘Gordon Rooker will be released by the beginning of next week.’

  Thorne had figured as much. ‘Right. He’s one of those loose ends you were talking about.’

  ‘Rooker can give us names, a few decent ones, and we’re going to take them.’

  ‘Define “decent”.’

  ‘Look, there’ll be better results, but there’ll be plenty of worse ones. Right now, this is what we’ve decided to settle for.’ Even Thorne’s sarcastic grunt failed to set Tughan off. He’d remained remarkably calm throughout the entire exchange. ‘You’re a footie fan, right? How would you feel if your team played beautiful stuff all bloody season and won fuck all?’

  If Thorne had felt like lightening the atmosphere, he might have asked Tughan if he’d ever seen Spurs play. But he didn’t. ‘You won’t be offended if I don’t hang around for the emotional goodbye later on?’ he said.