The Burning Girl

by Mark Billingham

  Some idiot…

  ‘So, Rooker was sorting out a deal with us, and at the same time making sure he had a slightly different kind of protection from Memet Zarif, right? Is that right, Wayne?’

  ‘You came to my house.’ Chamberlain crossed her legs, smoothed down her skirt.

  Thorne glanced at her, imagining for a bizarre moment that the two of them were interviewing Brookhouse for a job.

  ‘You stood in my front garden and looked up at me, didn’t you?’

  Brookhouse stretched out his legs, knocked the toes of his trainers together. ‘This is so fucked up,’ he said. He nodded towards Chamberlain. ‘Look at her. She’s not a copper. She’s like my fucking auntie or something…’

  ‘I’m a copper,’ Thorne said.

  ‘So? You wouldn’t be with her if this was anything official. It’s obvious you aren’t going to arrest me. This is something…private. Right?’

  Thorne shrugged. ‘So what are you going to do, Wayne? You want to call the police?’

  Brookhouse leaned forward, his forearms braced across his knees. ‘I might call a solicitor, yeah.’

  ‘The phone’s by the front door…’

  The man on the sofa held Thorne’s stare for a few seconds, then, slowly, the smile reappeared. ‘You can’t do shit to me.’ He started to laugh softly in short, high-pitched bursts, and Thorne could see that the amusement was real. The little fucker really found the situation funny. He genuinely believed that they could not touch him, that he was protected.

  ‘You’re absolutely right, Wayne. This is private, which means that I won’t lose my job if I come over there and kick your balls up into your throat.’

  Thorne’s threat, or perhaps it was his expression as he made it, was enough to stop the laughter, but no more than that.

  ‘Fine,’ Brookhouse said. ‘It’s probably the only way this can end up, right?’

  ‘That’s up to you…’

  Brookhouse sat up straight. ‘It’s OK with me if it means we can get this shit over with. I’ll take a pasting if I have to, but I’ll hurt you at the same time, man, I swear.’ Another nod towards Chamberlain. ‘She going to have a crack as well, is she? ’Cos I tell you, I’ve got no fucking problems with giving her a slap as well.’

  The confidence vanished for a second as Chamberlain stood suddenly and stepped towards him, shouting: ‘No fucking problems with trying to set fire to a young girl at a bus stop, either, have you?’

  ‘No idea what you’re on about…’

  Thorne knew now that the attack in Swiss Cottage had been made to up the stakes, had been the only option left when it looked like Rooker’s offer had been rejected. It had certainly done the trick, leaving the police no option but to agree to Rooker’s deal.

  ‘That was you, too, wasn’t it, Wayne? At that bus stop?’ Chamberlain stood, red-faced, above him. ‘That’s attempted murder, and you’re looking at the same sentence Rooker got…’

  Brookhouse stared at her, calmly bringing up his hand to wipe her spittle from his cheek.

  ‘Jack of all trades, aren’t you?’ Thorne said. ‘Are you the only one Memet’s got who can do all these things? Or has the family blown all its money on hookers and expensive hitmen?’

  Brookhouse said nothing…

  Thorne leaned forward. This was an important one. ‘Who put the cross on my door, Wayne?’

  The answer came at the back end of a yawn. ‘Piss off…’

  Thorne’s fingers curled into fists at the exact moment that Chamberlain turned to him, suddenly composed again.

  ‘Have you got any handcuffs knocking about?’ she asked.

  Gordon Rooker was shopping.

  He’d spent a lot of money already. He’d splashed out on smart new clothes and several pairs of fashionable shoes. He’d got drinks in for a bar-full of strangers who were now his closest friends. He’d bought the latest mobile phone, a nice radio and a massive flat-screen TV that he’d seen in a magazine and planned to put in the corner of his new living room. He didn’t know where that living room was going to be yet, or how much money he’d have to buy all these things when he really got the chance, but he relished the planning. He savoured the dream of owning again, the joy of the notes passing through his hands.

  Lying on his bunk in the dark, he tried to imagine the future. This was something he’d done countless times before, of course, when there was even a sniff of hope that he might be let out, but this time it was different. He could taste, smell and touch the freedom that was no more than a few days away.

  He ate an expensive meal–three courses and a fancy bottle of wine–in a restaurant that was almost certainly no longer in business. He left a large tip and walked out of there feeling like his shit would taste of sugar…

  Money had been mentioned back when Ryan was still alive. It had been part of the deal then, even though they’d been a bit coy about exactly how much. He was likely to cop for a bit less now than he would have done originally, but they still had to give him something, surely. They couldn’t just dump him in a strange town or city, point him towards the nearest dole office and tell him to get on with it, could they?

  He’d tried getting some straight answers out of that bastard Thorne, but it had been like trying to piss up a rope. There was still so much that was unsettled, and it was disconcerting after twenty years of routine, but he could live with it. A release date, in black and white, was all the certainty he needed.

  He bought books, dozens of them: spy thrillers and biographies. He’d learned to lose himself in them and looked forward to choosing his own.

  He bought a season ticket at Upton Park. Wherever he ended up, he’d sneak back now and again to watch his grandson play.

  And he bought himself a woman. Inside, you developed strong wrists, but cash handed over to lie back and watch a tart doing the work could only be money well spent.

  In his cell, Rooker drifted towards sleep thinking about big, soft beds, and about flesh beneath his fingers that was not his own.

  THIRTY-ONE

  Thorne hadn’t known Wayne Brookhouse for long, of course, but this was definitely a look he’d not seen before. The eyes bulged. The face seemed stiff and yellow as old newspaper.

  Thorne knew Chamberlain’s features far better, but they were distorted by an expression that to him was equally as strange.

  ‘This is so…fucking…out of order,’ Brookhouse said. He panted out the words, his head twisting from side to side, the bed shaking as he fought against his restraints.

  One wrist was cuffed to the metal bedstead, the other lashed to it with a black tie which Thorne normally only dug out for funerals. Thorne was sitting across his prisoner’s legs, holding tight to the rail at the foot of the bed to avoid being pitched off as Brookhouse struggled and bucked.

  Chamberlain finished unbuttoning Brookhouse’s shirt and reached towards the bedside table. The appliance she picked up was plugged into a red extension reel, which in turn ran to a socket in the corner of the room. She flicked the cable aside as she took a step towards the head of the bed. ‘It’s funny,’ she said, ‘because, normally, I bloody hate ironing…’

  Brookhouse spat out a string of curses. He was doing his very best to appear unafraid, to make the fear look like rage, and he wasn’t making a bad job of it. Maybe it would have been harder to disguise if Thorne had been holding the iron. Perhaps, much as he was struggling, Brookhouse found the sight of a woman in her mid-fifties playing amateur-hour torturer faintly ridiculous.

  To Thorne, the only ridiculous thing was that Brookhouse wasn’t a damn sight more scared. Thorne could see something in Carol Chamberlain’s eyes that he’d never seen before. Or maybe something that was usually there was missing…

  ‘Tell us about the X-Man,’ Thorne said.

  Brookhouse screwed his eyes shut. ‘I can’t…’

  Chamberlain lowered her arm. The face of the iron was no more than six inches above Brookhouse’s chest. ‘This is heavy,’ she said.


  Thorne stared at Chamberlain. They were busking this. He couldn’t tell whether she meant it, so Brookhouse certainly couldn’t. ‘Come on, Wayne…’

  Brookhouse winced. It was obvious, though the iron was not touching him, that he was starting to feel its heat. ‘He’s gone, he’s gone.’ He began to shout, to gabble his words. ‘He got out of the country. All right?’

  ‘Where?’ Thorne asked.

  ‘I don’t fucking know, I swear. Serbia, maybe. I think he was a Serb…’

  ‘Give me a name.’

  ‘I don’t know his name, I never met him…’ He tensed as the iron dropped another inch. ‘Look, I saw him in the café once, that’s all. He was just sitting on his own in the corner, smiling. Dark hair, you know, same as they all fucking look. Smile like a film star, loads of fucking teeth, I remember that…’

  Thorne remembered the man in the car outside his flat. He remembered that smile. He wondered how close he’d come to feeling a blade against his back; the brightness of its edge, teasing before the blackness of the bullet…

  ‘When did he leave, Wayne?’

  ‘A while ago. A few weeks after he did the last one. After the copper.’

  Moloney…

  So, Thorne had been wrong about Billy Ryan having Marcus Moloney killed. It had been Memet Zarif who had ordered the killing, without realising he was targeting an undercover officer. The murder of Moloney had, in Thorne’s mind, been one more thing Ryan had paid for with his own death. One more thing that had justified Thorne telling Alison Kelly what he’d told her. Now, Thorne had to take Moloney’s death off that list, but it didn’t make much difference. There were still plenty of things Billy Ryan had needed to pay for…

  ‘If he’s gone,’ Thorne said, ‘who put the “X” on my door?’

  ‘It could have been anyone.’ The sweat left a stain on Thorne’s sheets when Brookhouse turned his head. ‘It was just to put the shits up you a bit, that’s all.’

  ‘Who ordered the killings?’ Chamberlain asked. ‘Was it Memet?’

  Brookhouse shook his head.

  ‘Is that a “no”?’ Chamberlain moved the iron to her left hand, shook out the right for a few seconds, then moved it back. ‘Or a “no comment”…?’

  Thorne steadied himself as Brookhouse’s knees jerked up into his backside. He rode out the struggle, thinking about the dead and about those who had taken money to arrange their deaths. Those for whom knives and guns were the tools of their trade: the butcher who had murdered Mickey Clayton, Marcus Moloney and the others; the man who had shot Muslum and Hanya Izzigil; whoever had gunned down Francis Cullen and the two still unidentified immigrants who had been dragged from the back of his lorry and had tried to run for their lives.

  The men who’d got away with it.

  Like a man whose tools had been a naked flame, and a can of lighter fuel…

  Thorne looked at Brookhouse, wondering just how close he might have got to Gordon Rooker. Rooker probably trusted him a damn sight more than he’d ever trust a police officer. Thorne asked himself how much Rooker might have had to reveal, how much he’d had to give up before his arrangements with Memet Zarif were finalised. It couldn’t hurt to ask.

  ‘Who burned Jessica Clarke, Wayne?’

  Thorne saw something flicker, just for a second, in Brookhouse’s eyes. A spark of something, that he immediately did his best to hide, like a small boy caught stealing and jamming the booty far down into his pocket. Thorne glanced at Chamberlain and knew immediately that she’d seen it, too.

  ‘You know, don’t you?’ she said.

  Thorne watched as Chamberlain let the iron fall a little further. He could see the tendons stretching on the inside of her forearm as she took the weight of it, the concentration on her face as she moved it, as slowly as she could.

  ‘You won’t…’ Brookhouse said.

  Thorne watched, compelled, as Chamberlain reached down and turned the dial on the iron to its highest setting. A drop of water fell from it on to Brookhouse’s chest. He flinched as if it were boiling.

  ‘You’re imagining the pain as something quick,’ Chamberlain said. ‘A moment of agony as I press the iron down and then release it. Just a second or two of hissing and then it’s over, right? OK, I want you to think about how it would be if I let the iron go. If I just left it sitting there on your chest. Sizzling on your chest, Wayne. How long do you think it would take to start sinking in…?’

  When Brookhouse took his eyes from the iron and looked at Chamberlain’s face he started to talk. ‘Jesus, how fucking thick are you people? There was no other man. There was only me, pretending to be him.’

  ‘Pretending to be the man who really burned Jessica…?’

  ‘Him. Rooker. Rooker was the man.’

  And Thorne could see it: bright as a flame and certain as a scar. In the walk and in the fucking wink of him, and in the cunt’s fingers moving through his greasy, yellow hair. In the tongue that slid across a gold tooth and in that sly smile before Gordon Rooker bent to snap the lid from his tobacco tin…

  Thorne had known from the moment he’d recognised Brookhouse that Rooker had been lying. But not about this. It was obvious that Brookhouse couldn’t have burned Jessica, but Thorne had never presumed that the man making the calls–the man on Chamberlain’s front lawn–had been the real attacker. He’d always thought that there was someone else, and that Rooker had probably known who he was…

  ‘Tom…?’

  Everything had been built upon the belief, his belief that Rooker had been innocent. Wasn’t it him that had put the pressure on Rooker in the first place, forced him to admit that he wasn’t the one?

  Chamberlain had raised the iron and stood looking at him, waiting for something. Guidance, perhaps.

  The vast, dreadful stone of his own stupidity crashed onto the floor of Thorne’s gut. Its weight exactly equalled the elation of knowing, of finally getting the name. He felt hollow and bloated; cancelled out…

  Almost every single thing that Rooker had told them was true. He’d only changed one, tiny fact. When Billy Ryan had asked him to kill Alison Kelly, he’d said yes.

  ‘He was perfect…’

  Chamberlain still hadn’t got it. ‘What?’

  Rooker had almost certainly been involved in the earlier attempt to get rid of Kevin Kelly. Billy Ryan, as Kelly’s number two, had a very good reason to want Rooker dead. It made him the ideal choice to carry out a contract on Kelly’s daughter…

  ‘Maybe Ryan offered to lift a contract he had out on Rooker,’ Thorne said. ‘In return for Rooker doing him one small favour.’

  Chamberlain looked unconvinced, but it didn’t really matter either way. What was beyond dispute was Rooker’s fear of Billy Ryan, a fear based on the knowledge that Ryan did not forgive those who fucked up. It had driven Rooker to confess, to condemn himself to prison and to a life spent with only the fear itself for company. It grew with every attack, with every beating in the showers, until it dictated everything Rooker did. Fear was what drove him. It was what eventually gave shape to a scheme that might protect him when he finally came to start life again outside prison.

  Which he would be doing just a few days from now…

  Thorne decided that Brookhouse could kick as much as he wanted. He swung his legs around and slid off the bed. ‘What’s Rooker’s arrangement with Memet Zarif?’

  Again something flashed in Brookhouse’s eyes. This time, there was no mistaking genuine terror.

  ‘A lot more scared of Memet than he is of us,’ Chamberlain said.

  Thorne watched Brookhouse’s eyes dart to meet his own. He saw the tears begin. He saw the hope that their meaning might not be understood. Thorne began to suspect that he may have been wrong about which of the Zarif brothers was pulling the strings.

  ‘Not Memet?’ Thorne asked.

  There was a moan which seemed to come from Brookhouse’s belly as he started to thrash around on the bed.

  ‘Hassan…?’

&n
bsp; Thorne repeated the name, raising his voice over the noise Brookhouse was making to blank him out. There was still no response. Thorne nodded to Chamberlain, who moved the iron back into position. ‘Who is it, Wayne?’

  As the iron descended again towards his chest, Brookhouse gradually began to grow still. The sobbing died away, his body stiffened and his eyes closed tight shut. It was clear that he was waiting for the pain, that he was prepared for it.

  Something…someone frightened him a lot more.

  Chamberlain held the iron an inch above his chest. Thorne watched the skin begin to redden, saw the translucent edges of blisters gaining definition.

  ‘Looks like you’re happy to let us get on with this, Wayne,’ Thorne said. ‘Maybe we should just go down to the station. You might be less happy about going to prison for attempted murder…’

  Brookhouse gasped out his words on snatched breaths. ‘The girl at the bus stop was just for show. So the deal would happen. I was never going to do it…’

  ‘It’s not much of a defence…’

  ‘Doesn’t matter, does it?’ Brookhouse opened his eyes. He looked, glassy-eyed, at the edge of the iron, then up at Thorne. ‘We’re not going to the station, are we?’

  Thorne stared back at him. Terrified as he was, Brookhouse knew very well that this was never going to get as far as paperwork.

  ‘You’re right, we’re not.’ Thorne turned to Chamberlain. ‘Burn him…’

  The flippancy with which Thorne had issued the instruction was in stark contrast to the way he felt. It was as if the blood were poised to explode from beneath every inch of his skin. The tendons in his neck felt ready to snap, and things had stirred, and begun to jump and slither in his stomach.

  Burn him…

  The pair of them had struggled to overpower Brookhouse, to drag him through to the bedroom and tie him down. Since that moment, Thorne had stood outside himself, impotent as he’d followed Carol Chamberlain further into the shadows. She’d told him to fetch the iron and he’d done it. He’d watched her weighing up ends and means in an instant of rage, and her decision had taken him with it. He’d been borne along with her, exhilarated and appalled, deferring to something far beyond a rank that had been long since taken from her.